Why Ferdinandov isn't Ferguson

26.11.2014 - EB

America has made essentially three major immigration decisions in the past 400 years. The first was the decision of the European settlers to wipe out the Indians. The second was the importation of slaves from Africa. The third was the abolition in 1965 of the immigration-quota system that ended the preference for European reinforcements and speeded up the browning of America. Most inter-racial disputes can be traced to one of these three decisions. The major immigration decisions of the Czechs were concentrated in the 20th century. They ran out the Germans after World War II, redistributed the Roma across Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, invited Vietnamese workers into the country in the 1950s and relaxed their immigration policies after joining Europe in 1990 and the EU in 2004. If there is no Ferguson in Bohemia or Moravia, it's partly because the Czechs have only been a member of the modern transatlantic community for 25 years.

Glossary of difficult words

Ferdinandov - a small village in the Liberec region of northern Bohemia, used here only because it is the Czech town with the closest-sounding name to "Ferguson";

to wipe someone out - to kill a large number of people.



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