The Role Of Immigrants In The History Of The USA
What words come to your mind when you see or hear the word Immigrant. Illegal is a common response, and such is the terms poor, and desperate. The migration observatory at the University of Oxford studied the coverage of immigrants in the British press from 2006 to 2015, and they found that “illegal” was the most common term used to describe immigrants. It’s really notable that there are no words like smart, creative, pioneering, enterprising, brave etc. words that could’ve been used to describe Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, who was the first female doctor in the United States, or environmentalist John Muir, whose ideas helped create our national parks.
Elizabeth Blackwell came from England, and John Muir came from Scotland. They both came into the United States as children, when it was impossible to know their skill or potential, but yet, they did go ahead to shape the United States of America. Immigrants like Sergey Brin co-founder of Google who came from Russia at the age of six at the height of the cold war when we distrusted anything Russian or Elon Musk founder of Space X and co-founder of XCOM which became paypal, CEO of Tesla, associated with so many ventures, he came from South Africa to the united states as an undergraduate student. These visionary immigrants used their abilities and the opportunities they had here to create companies that has not only shaped the United States, but the whole world. We call ourselves a land of immigrants.
Native Americans came here tens of thousands of years ago in the 1500s, they were first the French, and the Spanish, followed by the British, the Dutch, the Germans, and then people from many other countries. Most Europeans migrated to the United States as free people but some were indentured servants. For centuries, the United States also bought and transported Africans as slaves, who had no other choice, and when the United States annexed the northern part of Mexico after the US-Mexico war, the people who lived in lands that later became California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, became Americans not by crossing the border, but because the border crossed them.
All these people and their descendants shaped the United States, but as they did that they took land away from the original inhabitants(Native Americans), causing their numbers to shrink, and changing their way of life forever. Today, a million people come to the United States legally every year, immigrants are 14% of the population which amounts to 43 million people.
