What Obama says about the rejection of immigrants from the very beginning was true of the Dutch. My mother repeated a song she heard as a child:
"There's the highland Dutch and the lowland Dutch,
The Rotterdam Dutch and the goddamned Dutch."
She used it to show how -in their time- Dutch immigrants were rejected. It was supposedly sung by Germans, an earlier immigrant wave.
You can find anything at all on Internet these days; a link to the whole song is at the end of this posting..
I learned it as a kid; we sang it on the bus on school excursions. I was 4th generation Dutch and it didn't affect me. But my mother didn't like it at all. Neither she nor I spoke Dutch which is a sign of cultural assimilation in the States. My grandmother spoke it, and she would say some phrases that we grandchildren learned as curiosities. We learned to count to ten with her for example. My brother’s first wife was from the Netherlands, and probably some sort of cultural undertow had something to do with that.
We were all very proud of our Dutch origins; I still am.
Link: http://www.horntip.com/…/songs_sorted_b…/goddamned_dutch.htm
