My Antonia Character Analysis

I believe that Kathleen Norris is correct when she says that "in many ways the world of My Ántonia is still with us, a neglected but significant part of America,” because we still have people coming into our country hoping to fulfill the American dream and having the country fall short of their expectations. The first similarity that strikes me between the world of My Ántonia and our modern day world is before Jim even meets Antonia he is talking with a local boy about his new neighbors, the Shimerdas, and the local boy warns him to avoid them because “you were likely to get diseases from foreigners.” (Cather, 9) This is similar to how, in our world, people will avoid foreigners, or people who are different from them because they are scared they will catch something from them. This takes different forms through out the years, a fear of diseases from immigrants in the 1800’s turns into a fear of AIDs in the 1970’s or just a fear of immigrants in 2016*. The only thing that stays the same is that it is caused by a fear of the unknown and a fear of things and people that are different.
Even after Jim meets the Shimerdas he treats them differently and notices that they are treated differently because they cannot speak English except for Antonia and they are immigrants. This is very similar to how immigrants who come to the country to make
People no longer move to the country to make a living, instead they move to a large city, however a lot of things have not, immigrants still get swindled by untrustworthy people, they still live in inferior conditions, and they still get discriminated against daily because of where they are from. To me this shows that we don’t learn from our mistakes and instead we repeat cycles because we aren’t taught any differently. If this book was written today it could easily have been read as a story about the problems immigrants