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Ethnic Minorities In The United States

Decent Essays

The article started off by defining an ethnic minority as a group of people differing in race, nationality, religion, or culture from the dominant group of the country in which they live. The differing identity of the minority may be displayed in several different ways ranging from distinctive customs, lifestyles, language, accent, dress, food preference, attitudes, moral values, or political beliefs to name a few.
Harris Chaiklin described the United States as being perceived throughout the world as a successful experiment in ethnic mixing. Many people think of this as the great melting pot, meaning that we are a heterogeneous or diverse society. He goes on to say that another successful example of a multiethnic country is Switzerland, where French, German, and Italian speakers divided between …show more content…

Ethnic minorities tend to be disadvantaged in many situations, most often because they are associated as being different from the norm. Race and religion are more likely than anything else to provoke prejudice and can be long lasting.
The rate of assimilation of these new arrivals has depended on several factors. The article stated that first and foremost, different skin color has tended to be exclusionary and older people tend to assimilate less than younger people, and men less than women.
Chaiklin believes that in the United States the greatest hostility toward ethnic minorities comes from those Americans most threatened by the newcomers. Those threatened most have included a majority of working men and women, and the government has usually responded by enacting stiff and restrictive immigration laws. At the end of World War II a technological revolution in agriculture aided and encouraged U.S. employers to hire cheap illegal aliens, and forced millions of farm workers off the land and into cities that were ill prepared to take care of

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