Aliens and Immigration

No, not those kinds of aliens. We're not talking AlienNation here.

I'm talking about human immigrants moving from one place to another. I came across this posting at Unknown Country (SOAPBOX WARNING! I always take stories from Unknown Country with a pinch of salt because they don't always reference any online links to their stories so I can't always verify for myself what was said. I love visiting them, but often their stories only have links to items in their online bookstore. I guess Whitley and Anne Streiber still read stuff on paper. How old school! But it's vexing sometimes when they come across something really interesting and I can't read up on it. Thankfully they do have a link this time. END SOAPBOX.)

On reading it, a couple of thoughts ran through my head, including the following in no particular order:
1) "Duh!"
2) "Why must studies be done to show something so obvious?"

As the child of immigrants I saw this everyday, whether it was in my own family or just walking through the neighborhoods of New York City. It didn't matter if the people were from Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Palestine, India, China, Mexico, Italy, Argentina, Puerto Rico or Germany, they still spoke with each other in their native language. Grandparents often spoke the language of their homeland and rarely spoke English. It'd often take a couple of generations for the kids to speak English only. Usually it comes from trying hard to fit in and not come across as different.

At least that's why I stopped speaking Spanish.

I guess I could go on and on, talking about my experiences and other boring stuff like that but the Internet is full of stuff like that. I forget sometimes that a study like this is often used to point out the flaws in someone's half-baked assumptions, so for that I am grateful.

Let's move on, shall we?