The large influx of undocumented immigrants into the USA and European countries by corporation bought governments came about as an effort to hold down wages such as a large influx of Mexicans into the USA started with Reagan and continued for a quarter century. Efforts by President Obama and the recession has finally started to curb immigrants to the USA.
Americans forget that the Farm Workers leader, Caesar Chavez, strongly objected to Reagan’s policy because the former knew that it was an effort to lower wages. Reagan also paid for half the cost of building auto plants in Canada and Mexico to increase the profits of Auto Companies based here and lower the wages of American workers.
Germany did the same thing with mainly Turkish workers. But what Germany and other European countries did not do is allow the immigrants to integrate into the economy of the country by granting citizenship to their children. Even formerly liberal Sweden and Denmark have clamped down on foreign immigration. What Germany does and we do not is teach skills to all students whether academic or not.
We should also do this in a gradual manner while at the same upgrading our mismanaged our educational system by believing that knowing facts was not as important as being able to think. Unfortunately our brain cannot think without some facts in our brains!
Good teachers make learning facts fun and important by explaining what students can do with their learning efforts. Yes, it takes work to learn. The reason Asian and Jewish students have almost a majority in the Ivy League colleges is because their parents emphasize effort and hard work and even make learning fun as far as Jewish children are concerned by having conversations over the dining room table. With intermarriage this is not happening as much.
The emphasis on intelligence in students has undermined our learning process. The so called Intelligence Test as a criteria for which students to favor or not has undermined the teaching of minorities who may have both cultural and language difficulties. However, the teacher, principal, and superintendent affects positively on student achievement as we learned from the efforts of Michelle Rhee in Washington, DC.
Also individual efforts in Black Ghettos have shined, but largely ignored except when the test scores meet or exceed those in the affluent White suburbs. An outcry of student or teaching cheating has occurred in many cases. No, Harlem, Englewood (Los Angeles), and other ghettos are getting these “anomalous” results by better teachers and principals. In Englewood, the principle foregoes phonetics and teaches by repetition and is the only school in Englewood where the students do well!
Jim Kawakami, Oct 18, 2010, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com
* Big Oil Goes to College: BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell Fund & Influence Research at Major Universities *
Over the past five years, ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and ConocoPhillips have given millions of dollars to support energy research at top US universities. The private funds might fill a gap left by declining public investment, but a new report from the Center for American Progress warns that they also pose the risk of hijacking the universities' research agenda and compromising academic independence. In the largest deal, British oil giant BP has a $500 million collaboration with three major publicly financed research institutions: the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
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http://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/18/big_oil_goes_to_college_bp
* Slavoj Zizek: Far Right and Anti-Immigrant Politicians on the Rise in Europe *
We turn now to Europe, where many are concerned about the growing acceptability of anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies. Far from just being expressed by the extreme right wing, the anti-immigrant trend has entered the mainstream. German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a gathering of young members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union party this weekend that multiculturalism has utterly failed. A recent German poll found 13 percent of Germans would welcome the arrival of a new "Führer," and more than a third of Germans feel the country is "overrun by foreigners." We speak to the world-renowned philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who has the been called "the Elvis of cultural theory."
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http://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/18/slavoj_zizek_far_right_and_anti
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