I agree with you about having trouble completely understanding this book when I am reading it. What I do when I read this book is try focus on the most important information it is trying to give to me. Similar to what you said about how you try to focus on the important and interesting information in the book. One reason I believe that this book is a little hard to read is because of the amount of information it is trying to get across to its readers. Sometimes when you are presented with too much information, it gets hard to put all of that information in your mind, so you have to try to get the main information and store it in your brain.
I believe you mentioned a good point about immigration. I think your right when you say that when we think of immigration, we mainly focus on Mexican immigrants. There are so many different immigrants in the United States that it important to focus on the history of each one of those significant immigrant population. I think this book does a good job of presenting those immigration problems with the Filipinos. I don’t know if the immigration problems of the Filipinos were as bad as the Mexican immigration, but one thing is sure that it was pretty bad. Sometimes it is important to highlight the problems of the minorities, because everyone knows that problems of the majority. So it is often that the minority population suffer more because there problems are not known by many people.
I think it is very nice of you to volunteer in an organization that works to help immigration populations. I personally know some immigrants, and I know that there life is not easy at all. They go through a lot of hardships that some even eventually give up. So I think it is important to have such organization in which they can find some kind of support in order to make their lives a little easier. Personally, I get really mad when someone says that immigrants are taking their jobs away from them. It just makes no sense to make that statement at all because if you are better qualified for a particular job, then no matter what you will get that job whether it is over a citizen or an immigrant. So I’m not quite sure about on what stance people make the statement of immigrants taking their jobs. I was also quite surprised about how California wasn’t too liberal at all. I never knew that Texas was divided into three parts. I was quite surprised about the different types of economies in Texas. I mean think about it, it is one state with different types of environments that support different economies. Immigration to me has been confusing as well. Sometimes US makes laws that support immigrants while other times they make laws that are against them. So it is quite hard to understand what the government is trying to do with immigration which is why it is confusing to me. (513)