In the month of January, I have had both my manager meeting and my liaison meeting. It was my first time meeting with my liaison, and we talked about my project with enthusiasm together.
Here is a little debrief about what we have talked about:
First, we talked a little bit about my signature project, and I updated him on my current progress, and what my next steps will be. I wanted to learn more about the history of immigrants and refugees coming to the United States in the early years. I wanted to learn how positively they impacted the U.S economy throughout history, and I also wanted to figure out when and why people started to think negatively about immigrants and refugees. By doing this research and understanding why people might have negatively thought of specific groups, it could be helpful to find contradicting information: that immigrants and refugees bring benefits into the U.S economy.
We first talked about how the United States has so much diversity, and that is what makes the U.S as a whole. My liaison provided me with a vocabulary: Nativism. According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, Nativism means: a policy of favoring native inhabitants as opposed to immigrants.
Nativism was a political factor in the 1790s and in the 1830s through 1850s. According to my research, it said that Nativism was created due to the competition for jobs only made the discontent towards the immigrants worse. Decades leading up to the 1920s, nativism has targeted against southern and eastern European, Asian, and Mexican migrants. Which eventually had led to the legislative restriction on immigration.
During the 1882s, the Chinese Exclusion act was the first notable law that restricted Chinese immigration to the United States. Americans who lived in the West Coast have imputed economic ills and wage reductions towards the Chinese workers, even though there were only 0.002% of their population.
Here is a link to the website:
https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/chinese-exclusion-act-1882#:~:text=Meant%20to%20curb%20the%20influx,law%20on%20May%206%2C%201882.
Through this month's research, I have learned that in the beginning of 1882, the U.S economy had declined 25% due to a lot of factors like wars. When the economy is doing bad in the U.S it seemed like immigrants were taking the blame for the bad economy. They are not a factor of a bad economy, they actually benefit the economies by providing more labor forces, and more.