The Distance Between Us Artifact #1

This article is about the general attitude that white Americans have towards immigrants (especially Mexicans).

Everyone has different feelings on immigration. Some people approve of lots of immigrants coming into the country, and others think it isn't okay. Some think that immigrants from certain countries are better than immigrants from other countries. Despite the problem, the group who usually does the judging and the deciding are white people. So what do white people think about immigration?

A study conducted by Ted Brader and Elizabeth Suhay, white Americans were given news stories about increasing immigration. Half of the articles were negative (immigration is bad), and half of them were positive (immigration is good!). Naturally, the people with the negative stories were less supportive of immigration.

However, that wasn't the only thing that the researchers were studying. The articles, along with being positive or negative, would focus on either a Mexican immigrant named Jose Sanchez, or Nikolai Vandinsky from Russia. The study showed that anyone with the article about Jose Sanchez, despite being positive or negative, were less supportive of immigration. They found the same results when they replaced Nikolai with a Dutch man.

What if Reyna had been Chinese rather than Mexican? Would she have been respected more in school? Would her life have been any easier? What if she had been South African, or German, or Egyptian? What about the people of other races that were in Reyna's life?, She had Asian friends, an Italian sitter, and a Greek teacher. They probably had very different experiences than Reyna because of their nationalities and races. Race and nationality play an important part in anyone's life, even though nobody wants it to.

Though I understand these people's thinking, I don't agree with it. I'm pretty sure that these people's attitudes are based on misinformation, stereotypes, and plain old bias. Where immigrants are from shouldn't make a difference of how we treat them. However, I understand that racism and this sort of prejudice won't be fixed so easily. The best thing we can do is accept people for who they are and treat them the same as anyone else.