December 13, 2007

Ellis Island game

From this:

After closely examining the immunization records and marriage and birth certificates of the eighth-grade "immigrant" with a magnifying glass, Brent Lueck asked him the important question.

"You're from Ireland," he said. "Are you a Catholic?"

Lueck said he was worried that the "immigrant" might try to subvert America in the name of the pope. "I've got some issues with you, some loyalty issues."

It was just one example of the mock prejudice faced by about 120 eighth-grade students Friday at Cary Junior High [Illinois] taking part in a simulation of immigrant arrivals and experiences at Ellis Island...

While the Irish and other groups certainly faced a great deal of prejudice, that doesn't mean that worries about what impact importing millions of Catholics into what was then an almost competely Protestant country would have was itself prejudice. This apparently far-left event was the culmination of a three-week class and I don't know what was in the class. However, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it engaged in the logical fallacy of implying that today's immigration is the same as yesterday's, despite the conditions changing.

Note also that he's been doing this for three years, and in 2004 I noted another example of the same thing from a town in Iowa. In that case, the logical fallacies were at least noted in the "news" report:

Students also learned how the lives of present-day immigrants mirror the struggles of new Americans from 100 years ago...

Posted to Immigration2007b at December 13, 2007 01:16 PM

Lonewacko

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