Really, left-wing insistence that immigrants don't have to assimilate and that we should help them avoid it is the anti-immigrant stance, isn't it? Doesn't keeping immigrants separate just mean that they can continue to be gardeners and nannies for the upper middle classes?
Isn't it pro-immigrant to be pro-assimilation? After all, this stance assumes that anybody can be an American if you just join us.
America is a nation of ideas and not of blood and soil as most of the world is. In the rest of the world, if you weren't born there of people who were born there (and likely if your distant ancestors weren't born there), you are still an alien. Here, all you have to do is assimilate and over time, you and your children will be as American as anybody here.
And assimilation really is the path to prosperity:
Some argue that today’s immigrants aren’t the same as the immigrants of previous generations. That’s incorrect. It isn’t so much that “new” immigrants are so different from immigrants in the past. It’s that Americans have become so squeamish about offending anyone that we now openly tell immigrants they don’t have to fit in with American culture — that in fact, there’s no such thing as American culture.
Immigrants don’t come to America to hear there’s nothing special about their new home. Jacobson quotes Uzbeks who get permission to come to America as saying they “hit the lottery.” That’s what so many immigrants feel about coming to America until they get here and are told, by Americans lucky enough to be born here, that it’s really not that great.
The phrase “American dream” is more than a cliché to immigrants fleeing oppression and poverty. Minimizing that or encouraging immigrants to remain in isolation among their own people doesn’t do anyone any favors.
We just remembered our veterans, so try to remember that a country worthy of dying to defend (or simply giving up chunks of your life to defend) is also a country worth learning English for.
How on Earth did the anti-assimilation crowd get anointed as the pro-immigrant side?
