Fri Feb 10 2012
By JOSE de la ISLA | Hispanic Link News Service
In anticipation of the 2012 Olympics, VisitBritain, the UK's government-funded tourism agency, is providing tips on how to greet people from abroad.
For instance, they are told Indians may seem noisy and impatient, the behaviors of living in chaotic cities. Avoid winking at a Hong Kong visitor. And never call a Canadian an American.
With Mexicans, don't bring up the 1840s U.S.-Mexico war or undocumented immigrants. They prefer to talk about history, culture and museums.
Dan Pak recently wrote in the Korea Times some words of advice. Because Asian cultures discourage showing emotion in daily life, Americans consider them too stiff and formal. He said that although the custom is changing, Korean brides are prohibited from smiling at their own weddings.
U.S. folks are easygoing, he says. They even smile at people they don't know.
One reason is because it's all right to strike up a conversation with anyone virtually anywhere, even strangers, to establish a new harmony. Of all the people in the world, U.S. dwellers are probably the easiest to converse with, and they don't care when one has limited language skills. Even pantomime, broken and accented English win sympathetic gestures.
But even an advanced student of kinesics can get befuddled through mixed messages. For example, by now everyone knows there's a rhetorical flu that associates undocumented immigrants with what unfortunately are called anchor babies. An imagery has begun to spread that undocumented immigrants are having babies in the United States and using them like a hall pass, to serve as the basis for parents and relatives to gain citizenship after the anchor infant reaches 18.
It's a long wait, but those disposed to believe it are not much interested in sociological and demographic explanations, or that most babies are products of romance, not policy strategies. Some Washington lawmakers claim it's all part of a conspiracy to crawl through green card and restrictive immigration loopholes. That perspective gained momentum in August.
That's when Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., referred to human birthing as "drop and leave." Latino groups, especially women, responded energetically to what they perceived as a wrong-headed willingness to change the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment to deny citizenship to some perceived as less desirable newcomers. A brilliant essay by Gebe Martinez, Ann Garc and Jessica Arons, from the Center for American Progress, recounts a dismal history concerning making chattel of slave/owner children and sterilizing Chinese and Native American women and Latinas.
GeekyAsianGuy.com posted on Aug. 13 six exceptionally common-sense strong arguments for maintaining birthright citizenship. He cited the case of San Franciscan Wong Kim Ark, who in 1890 went to visit China, his parents' birthplace. U.S. authorities refused to let him back in the country. Many children of deported parents could encounter a similar prohibition one day in the near future. Fortunately, in 1898 the Supreme Court confirmed, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark , the man's birthright.
If the subject comes up again soon and you see a lot of people smiling, it is because they are embarrassed that, in the current atmosphere, a birthright has trouble staying a birthright.
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