1/22/2016 Blog

When I was a little girl, I still am a little girl, but when I was old enough to learn about the United States and everything in it, I always wondered why people told me this was the place to be. I did not think the United States was anything unique or special for everyone to come here. I am from South Bend, Indiana, and in the neighborhood I lived in there was a fair amount of what looked like immigrants that came here for work. Because my grandmother had to work so early, I would have to get up early to go down the street to my Uncle or best friends house to wait for school to start. At around five o'clock in the morning, there would be white vans to pick up around 30–35 Hispanic looking people out of this house. My grandmother explained to me that some people come here for better lives, and to support their families back home. My best friends were from Mexico, and as I got older their family taught me what immigration was and why people come to the United States. Reading the article, The Changing Demographics of America, some things that stood out to me where that 15 of the Fortune 100 CEO’s were Immigrants. This to me means a lot, because I was taught that Immigration was a bad thing, and mainly immigrants came here to take our jobs. Learning more outside of what my family has talked about and taught me, I believe immigrants need a better place to go, and the United States is that for them. I really like that 15 of the Fortune 100 are immigrants, because this teaches me that immigrants are not just skillful and are only able to work with their hands. I like that they can come here and share their knowledge and culture to make the United States a better place. I also liked when they said whites will no longer be the majority. I believe eventually we’ll all be one race, but I like to here that their will be more minorities. Lastly, reading this article made me realize how fortunate I am to be apart of this country. I always thought the United States was so boring and there was no culture here in the States, but growing and traveling around the U.S. I’ve seen a lot of culture and diversity. I am happy that in the article Kotkin stated that there is no other country that will witness this type of diversity coming from a net population.

In the school system I grew up in, the term America and American was always easily used. I always wondered why we called ourselves American, but people from Mexico, Mexican or people from Canada, Canadian. Learning geographic, I realized that we are all American because we all live on the continents North and South America. What was important to me in this article was when Martine Rousseau and Olivier Houdart wrote a post saying Should U.S. Americans Instead Call Themselves ‘United Statesians’. I think we should have a term for people of the United States, to lower confusion and to have a unique name. We are all apart of America, but it is not fair for us to be called American when we are all apart of the same thing. United Statesians is a common ground term to not confuse people of these terms and to categorize people determined by their locations.