Jon sez

Parts of Kansas are, in the current day, emptying out. It's not a stretch to say that if this continues, in a few decades immigrants will be re-homesteading the state's rural ghost towns because of abundant cheap land.

The line about immigrant parents wanting to give their children a "normal" American childhood isn't something pulled out of a hat. Part of my family heritage is Italian, and when I took an Italian class in high school I was told that the first generation out of the Old Country (my great-grandparents) didn't want to teach their children to speak Italian because it would make them somehow "less American." Of course, this was in an era when being Italian was a disadvantage in getting a job, so there was a certain logic in my great-grandparents' decision. In the fictional case of Liraz, it's because the place her immigrant parents came from was a failed state, and therefore was not something to emulate.

No insult is, of course, intended to the real people of Romania, who are by all accounts quite nice folks with a stable government. However, Liraz's family had to be from somewhere in Europe, and wherever the family was from was going to wind up being a failed state...and in the end, Romania kind of drew the short straw.