Is PH a ‘shithole’ country?
was nursing, they will gladly accept nursing jobs. Teachers with advanced degrees will gladly take up jobs such as cleaning hotel rooms and vacuuming up toilets right after settling down in the US.
Top engineers end up working as janitors and accountants, and doing the boring, killing job of punching the cash registers of the supermarket chains. The professional downgrade does not rein in their unmitigated love for the new country.
To outsiders, the “American Dream” of most Filipinos is a mystifying, hard- to- explain dream, defying reason and logic. My own mother, a former Huk fighter, moved to the US in her 70s as a newly minted immigrant, only to come home after two weeks because of the loneliness and the cold weather. Her two-week mis- adventure as an immigrant made her love our Lubao barrio more. She is an exception; 99 percent of immigrants stay for good and returning home is a non-option.
In 2011, the US State Department said there were more than 4 million Filipinos in the US, the second largest Asian immigrant group after the Chinese. The truth is there are more and the illegal immigrants there, now called undocumented, have been living their own version of the Dream, only with more caution and mostly in the US states that welcome and offer protection to the undocumented.
the other ethnicities.
While the US population has been shrinking, I don’t think this is the case with the immigrants to the US who are predominantly Catholic and who regard hav of their faith. With a caveat. The Filipino-American families, like most of the striving immigrants from Asia, want their second and third generations to overachieve.
Right across my farm in the barrio, is the gate of a house owned by a couple who left for the US to work as a construction worker and caregiver. Their grandkids have done well, as the screaming tarpaulins that adorn their gate proudly announce. One graduated from Brown University on a full scholarship and the other one recently graduated magna cum laude from UCIrvine, one of the best schools in the UC university system.
Between immigrants from Norway and immigrants from the has generally fared better and with a faster assimilation rate into the American mainstream? Evidence would prove that the Fil- Ams have done better. Norwegians who emigrated to the US, according to a study, did not assimilate very well and they have preferred to do farm and forestry work. It is also a fact that Norwegians, thanks to the discovery of oil in their country, are no longer interested in going to the US to permanently settle