Wednesday, September 05, 2012

Republicans and Democrats on the Immigrant Story

Both the Republican and Democratic conventions have been full of immigrant stories, or "up-from-nothing" stories.

I have noticed, though, an important difference in what they emphasize.

The Republican versions emphasize how hard the immigrant (family, usually) worked to build up their business on their own. This is in keeping with the convention's theme, "We Built It."

The Democratic versions emphasize how hard the immigrant (family, usually) worked to succeed in this country, with the help of the public schools, college loans, GI Bill, small business loans, and now health insurance - not to mention the larger structure of honest government that did not take arbitrarily in the first place.  The "land of opportunity" has that opportunity because it is guaranteed by the people's institutions, and the entire infrastructure of opportunity to which we all contribute. This version is in keeping the less formal convention theme of equal opportunity "for all."

8 comments:

flinn said...

Do you have a bird house?

Gruntled said...

Flinn: What?

flinn said...

It's an analogy about greed.

Gruntled said...

Could you explain the analogy? If that is a literary reference, I confess to ignorance.

flinn said...

It's sort of long for this venue,a quick google search will bring up the story. In fact there are many versions.

flinn said...

Sorry, my bad. Do you have a bird feeder.Not bird house.

Gruntled said...

All my Google searches yield are literal articles about feeding birds. Same if I add "parable" or "greed" to the question.

Anonymous said...

I think he meant "Take down the bird feeder." You want a behavior to increase, subsidize it.