Napoleon never did have any right to sell two thirds of Mexico to the gringos.

The time has come
a fact's a fact
it belongs to them
let's give it back Midnight Oil

This part.

Typically immigrants have settled in big cities, then later generations have moved to smaller towns. Mexicans are different.

I don't have figures at hand to measure the relative numbers of these groups against say the Chinese, Irish, Italian, Polish model you are using but 'typically' way overstates the case here. In each case there are cultural, historical and economic reasons that explain why Norwegians ended up on wheat farms in North Dakota, Irish as day workers in Boston and Italians in Baltimore. Suggesting that the sequence is always Inner City to City to Small Town is simplistic and ahistorical reductionism. Ole Jonson and Rolf Hansen will not be amused.

Good point. Again, I see in these blogs I have to leave room to consider everything that might possibly occur to people...

The point I'm making is that none of those groups come close to the numbers that Mexican immigrants are achieving. 100K Japanese immigrants max on the US West Coast?

When it comes to immigration, numbers matter.

Sam

They are the first group of immigrants to spread throughout America in such numbers.

No, that would be the British and their descendents.

But the second largest immigrant group in American history -- but the least talked about -- were Germans. In fact, when I was doing research for a paper in graduate school several years ago, I found one town in Kansas at the turn of the century -- can't remember whether it was Holcomb or Holton or something else -- where the largest circulation daily newspaper was a German language one. And in fact, when you go anywhere in Kansas you run into people whose names indicate their German heritage.

But German immigration is little talked about precisely because it wasn't concentrated in one area of the country. It was everywhere and because of World War I and II, Germans significantly downplayed their heritage and became highly assimilated into the culture.

The real difference between Mexican immigration and past immigration is that the source of immigration is so close. Mexican immigrants are therefore not nearly as cut off from their original cultural and linguistic roots and this means that assimilation doesn't occur at the same rate or in the same way, if at all.

For decades, parts of the Midwest in some ways resembled the Third World.

Excuse me!?? Being from Kansas I find this a little offensive and also not true. Slaughter and meat packing operations have existed here a very long time. They've merely consolidated into the hands of basically three companies. And the fact that those companies have placed their operations in western Kansas has kept those communities from the massive population loss that has occurred in so much of the rest of rural Kansas and I think they've even made some gains. It's stabalized things in other words, but that it's made things more prosperous than before I think is debateable.

And I would point out that at least 1/3 of the immigrant population of Garden City -- which at this point is I believe over half the entire population of the city -- is Asian not Mexican.

You make an especially interesting point about German immigration having unique qualities. Perhaps it is more because they came over a greater extended period, from the 1840's on, rather than in one big bang culture shock, like Irish from the potato famine?

The following are all half-baked thoughts, inspired by yours, coming from someone who lived from birth to age 29 in "little Munich" (Milwaukee) but who only has 1/4 German heritage. The rest of me is Polish. I grew up thinking Lutheran was a bigger church than Roman Catholicism (if you asked another kid their religion, they would say "Lutheran" even if they had never been in a church,) Now and then I would hear some sterotypes like "Polish women are great housekeepers," from German women who scrubbed their closet floors with toothbrushes. :-) But beyond that kind of thing, there really wasn't much too much culture shock between the German immigrants of the earlier mid-19th century period to the Eastern European influx of the late 19th and early 20th-century BECAUSE many of the latter were citizens of the Austro-Hugarian Empire? Those coming already knew how to try to get along with "Germans"?

It is also interesting that I never got the sense that Poles, although very devout, got as much racist reaction for being Catholic "papist breeders" from the WASP elite as did Irish and Italians. They instead got labeled with the "dumb-as-an-ox working class/peasant "ski" thing. That brings it back in favor of your point that maybe some cultures are able to assimilate better than others?

P.S. On the empire thing, it's interesting that if you ever had the chance to look at the Ellis Island log books from late 19th/early 20th century, available online as scans of the actual pages, you will see that they are asked two questions about where they come from (besides the actual town.) The first is citizenship or residency, the second is ethnicity, they phrased it as something like: "your race or people?" This allowed someone like my grandfather to say he was Polish, which I am sure he would claim as his country, even though he was actually a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Wiki "Between 1825 and 1925, more than 800,000 Norwegians immigrated to North America—about one-third of Norway's population with the majority immigrating to the USA, and lesser numbers immigrating to the Dominion of Canada. With the exception of Ireland, no single country contributed a larger percentage of its population to the United States than Norway.

There are more than 4.5 million people of Norwegian ancestry in the United States today.[1] Of these, approximately three million claim 'Norwegian' as their sole or primary ancestry"
____

Northwest North Dakota has been their special area of interest. This area was the last space in America to be settled by first- and second-generation European immigrants, many of them Norwegian. Indeed, some of the towns in that corner of the state are nearly 90 percent Norwegian. They created an immigrant culture in their new home, with its own social fabric and ethics, ethnic food and traditions, rules of behavior and ways of looking at the outside world, a culture based on strict moral values brought over from the Old Country.

It is a culture that may now be on the verge of extinction, The 2000 US Census indicates that many of the North Dakota counties with the highest number of Norwegian-Americans are also the counties with the highest out migration, especially of young people. Thus, the part of America that was the last to be settled by Europeans is now among the first parts to empty.
__________
Norwegians are clustered in Minnesota, North Dakota and Washington perhaps because the weather would be familiar to them, but largely for the reasons most immigrant populations cluster, people write home and other people follow.
__________
Numbers do matter and I think we would have to agree that 800,000 immigrants in context was a pretty big one.

That's why I love Kuchinich so much; on his website it says Cleveland is the Polka capital of the world.  Not to play onupmanship, but Mexico had done even better: the Tezcatlipolka capital of the world.

Seriously, my old boss, a Mexican refugee from the student uprisings in 1968 Mexico DF, pointed out to me that Mexicans love German marching music - Sousa et al.  I had never thought of it.  But it's true - Mexican popular music is almost always pitched to the Oompah Oompah Ohmpah beat.  Autos with sub-woofer systems around here bear this out - somethimes that's all you can hear: oompah, oompah, oompah. 

Neoboho

No offense intended. I was simply making the point that a lot of the raw materials that those areas created -- corn and cattle -- were shipped elsewhere, out of the region.

Specifically, you said that today beef is packaged as various products like boxed beef allowing more of the money to stay in Kansas than what you posit to be the past situation where the cattle and corn were shipped out to be processed elsewhere.

But as you admit those meat factories have existed in their current state since the 60s, packaging meat products into various products before shipping them out. That's been going on since long before the recent wave of Mexican immigrants in the last couple of decades.

And frankly I think the processing of cattle and other meat products here rather than shipping them live elsewhere probably has more to do with the invention of refrigerated rail cars and trucks than it has to do with immigration, and it's not a very new development.

My point about the consolidation, is that before that happened there were just MORE and smaller plants doing the same thing. I don't have evidence handy to back this up but I do believe that those kind of operations did exist in Kansas before the big companies took it over.

As to the Asian population of Garden City, it has been a long time since I was out there. But the US Census in 2000 put the Asian population at 2 percent and the hispanic population at 8.3 percent. Here's the data

Clearly I was wrong about how much of the population is recent immigrant or their descendents. I thought it was much higher than it is.

Yes, in Sonora in the 60s I met two good friends, Roberto Plas and Roberto Frazier.  Both as Mexican as apple pie.

Neoboho

Ja ja ja ... the rest of the story is that the Toltec xenophobes in Tula couldn't stand the newcomers, and ran away to Yucatan to found Chichen Itza.  Very much like the Republicans who moved away from Orange County cities after the Mexicans colonized the area in the 70s and 80s.

Neoboho