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Refugee and America

Refugees are the people who are forced to leave their homeland for reasons such as war, violence or persecution. Immigrants on the other hand take a conscious decision of leaving their country in search of better work opportunities for themselves and are not forced to leave by any means. This brings its own set of differences for the ones who have to rush out. The refugees who came to US from Vietnam did not have time to learn the language or the culture of the US as opposed to the immigrants who came through the Immigration act of 1975. Moreover, settling the refugees in a common place would take too much toll on the economy as they were not suitable for the American market. Having too many unskilled labors in a state would mean more funds in aid for the helpless burden on the society. Therefore, the people were distributed over 821 postal codes. In America, things were a bit better for the refugees but not all of them. For instance, many refugees were from Vietnam and therefore w...

Globalization and Orientalism

Orientalism” was used to create a divide between the “west” and the “east” and sparked the notions of “racial othering” in America. Popular understanding of Asian Americans has changed historically, but for many centuries maintained the same general trajectory; Prashad explains that “Americans shared the European view in which the Orient and Occident were separate worlds,” but differed from the European view as they “hoped for some transfer of values to benefit their new republic and prevents its decline into the morass of materialism.” The American idea of “Orientalism” was based on the belief that Western Civilization (Europe and America) are the center of “progress, civilization, and rationality,”  while the tales of Mandeville and Marco Polo depicted the “East” as a “filthy and barbaric” place, illustrated women of Asia as having “boars’ tusks and oxen’s tails growing out of their loins” and reinforced standards of European “Occidentalism” by emphasizing their “bizarre physic...