The Immigrant Advantage by Kolker

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Claudia Kolker “The Immigrant Advantage: What we can learn from Newcomers to America about Health, Happiness and Hope” examines eight behaviors and cultural concepts brought to the USA by immigrants. Kolker wrote the book to show the academic, social, financial and health advantages immigrants teach us as she states “It is about the immigrants who are already here, and what they can teach us”. She focus on the individuals and communities from diverse backgrounds and alternatively compared with the American culture. Kolker is honest with her feelings and trepidations about customs. She does an outstanding job with a clear argument and engaged prose providing an insight into the various aspects of immigrant life and depicted the qualities and ideals immigrants had that could truly benefit America “Adapting the best habits of first-generation immigrants, I think, can help us recall our own”. Claudia Kolker having been raised by parents who were immigrants her mother from Mexico and her father from Ukraine spark a curiosity about immigrant lives “My fascination with immigrants’ lives also stemmed from my own family experience”. Kolker narrates her research of eight varied cultural ideas: The Vietnamese money club, where Vietnamese help people to save by each month contributing an amount of money into a common pool which is distributed along the year to each member all at once. This loan clubs as Kolker states“I was witnessing a hui.....though everyone calls them different names ....rotating loans exist in nearly every traditional culture”. This loans help business to open with the pooled cash of a loan club “Japanese and Chinese immigrants relied on them heavily to build business in the nineteenth century in 1988”. The Mexican Cuarentena to nourish the new mothers for forty days in which family helps through the process, as is believe among immigrants to be beneficial

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