Gonzalez:
Assimilation has finally become a part of the national debate about immigration. This is to be welcomed, as the subject has too often been swept under the rug, where it lies unsettling all that is above.
There
are, however, a few myths floating around the discussion of assimilation. Let
me enumerate—then dispel—three of them.
One is
that immigrants today are ethnic or racial “minorities,” who are such unique
victims of discrimination and ill treatment that they require remedial benefits
to overcome these hardships.
A
second is that today’s immigrants are assimilating in the same manner as
immigrants before them. Curiously, immigration enthusiasts who make argument
number one often make this argument, too. The irony is that, while many
immigrants have, indeed, achieved economic integration, patriotic assimilation has been inhibited by government actions
taken as a result of Myth #1.
The
third is that the nation-state, and all the freedoms and individual rights
associated with it, can survive the end of assimilation into one national
culture tied by bonds of affection and shared experience. Curiously again, this
argument is made by some of the people who make arguments one and two.
It’s
always best not to assume moral turpitude among our opponents. Their glaring
logical inconsistency is, however, a legitimate target. In a recent special report for the Heritage Foundation, I take aim at all these shibboleths.
Myth #1
It
would be hard to find a time when immigrants—here or in any other
country—didn’t find they had a very high mountain to climb to get to those
“streets of gold.” Certainly it was the case during the first two major surges
of immigration in the colonial era. The Germans who fled religious persecution
and the Ulstermen who came to find a better living seldom found a welcome wagon
parked outside their doors.
Benjamin
Franklin echoed the sentiment of many “native” colonists as he worried about
both the Germans’ refusal to speak the native tongue (English) and their impact
on politics. In a 1753 letter to the botanist Peter Collinson, Franklin wrote:
And that was Franklin being nice! Two years earlier, he went even further: “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them….”I remember when they modestly declined intermeddling in our Elections, but now they come in droves, and carry all before them, except in one or two Counties; Few of their children in the Country learn English; they import many Books from Germany; and of the six printing houses in the Province, two are entirely German, two half German half English, and but two entirely English; They have one German News-paper, and one half German. Advertisements intended to be general are now printed in Dutch and English; the Signs in our Streets have inscriptions in both languages, and in some places only German: They begin of late to make all their Bonds and other legal Writings in their own Language, which (though I think it ought not to be) are allowed good in our Courts, where the German Business so encreases that there is continual need of Interpreters; and I suppose in a few years they will be also necessary in the Assembly, to tell one half of our Legislators what the other half say.
The
Scots-Irish of Ulster fared no better. In 1720 the city of Boston passed an
ordinance that directed “certain families recently arriving from Ireland to
move off.” When they did just that, and moved off to Worcester, a mob torched
their church. Bostonians become no more “open-minded” or “politically correct”
as the decade wore on. In 1729, they rioted to prevent ships carrying
Scots-Irish immigrants from docking in Boston Harbor.
The
“pacifist” Quakers of Pennsylvania didn’t like them any better. As Former Sen.
Jim Webb described in his very good book on his ancestral people, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, Provincial Secretary James Logan griped that “a settlement of five
families from the North of Ireland gives me more trouble than fifty of any
other people!” Eventually, most of the Northern Irish headed south and west
toward the mountains of Appalachia, where their descendants live to this day.
Succeeding
surges of immigrants—the Catholic Irish and Germany’s “economic” immigrants of
the mid-1800s, and the Jewish, southern and eastern European and Middle Eastern
immigrants who came through Ellis Island after 1890—also received a rough
welcome.
The
Founders, and the leaders who followed them, never considered intervening to “remedy”
prejudicial behavior by giving the newcomers special privileges or benefits, by
attempting to apportion their participation in society through quotas or by
creating a culture of victimhood that rewarded victim status. The Scots-Irish
of Andrew Jackson’s day likely would have shot anyone who called them
“victims.” It should still not be tried today.
Myth # 2
Many
good people interpret complaints that immigrants are not assimilating as a
knock on immigrants. (It’s not always. Here, it’s a knock against the elites
who have set up the present ethno-racial, multicultural structure and enforce
it.) Dumbfoundingly, they then go to great lengths to prove that assimilation
is taking place.
Thus, a
long study by the National Academy of Sciences affirms that employment,
earnings, occupational and residential “integration” is proceeding apace,
though in fits and starts and unequally for different groups. This may well be
true. Still, it misses the point.
Immigrants
today find it harder to assimilate the same way their forerunners did, because
today we put them into boxes and reward them with racial preferences if they
don’t try to break free. Elites in the 1970s created five ethnicities, which
some have referred to as the “ethno-racial pentagon,” comprising whites,
African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics and Asians.
The
last two groups were made up mostly of immigrants. As they entered the United
States in greater numbers following the Immigration Act of 1965, they were
told—by the schools, the movies, the television shows and the “community
organizers” who started wandering into the neighborhoods where they lived—that
they were victims of a history of discrimination.
Of
course, they couldn’t have been, because of their very status as immigrants.
These individuals had immigrated into this country on their own volition and
had no history here at all. That they faced hardship there is no doubt. But so
did all the other waves that came before them (point number one).
Immigrants
from China and Japan in the late nineteenth century and in the first half of
the twentieth century faced incredible hardship. The Chinese Exclusion Act of
the late nineteenth century actually prevented the immigration of people from
those countries.
Likewise,
the descendants of Mexican Americans who were in the Southwest when the United
States took over those territories after the Mexican War in 1848 faced
discrimination, though not on the same par as Asians or black Americans.
Indeed, Mexican Americans were elected to statewide office in western states.
Today,
the vast majority of Asians and Hispanics are not descendants of those earlier
immigrants or settlers, however. But because we have set up bureaucratic boxes
labeled “Asians” and “Hispanics,” we toss many of today’s immigrants and their
children into those boxes, even though the former group lacks a single,
unifying language, and the latter a single race or culture. More importantly,
the nationalities inside these two bureaucratic groups evince very different
cultural indicators. But once immigrants are placed in those boxes, we all but
ensure that they stay there in the way they are seen by others and the way they
see themselves—if not permanently, at least longer than past immigrants cleaved
to their national groups.
The
National Academy of Sciences report itself acknowledges this point by
recognizing that “the well-being of immigrants and their descendants is highly
dependent on immigrant starting points and on the segment of American society
... into which they integrate.”
Indeed, among the “causes for concern” identified by the panel that compiled
the report are “racial patterns in immigration integration and the resulting
racial stratification in the U.S. population.”
No
kidding. Set up a stratified, racialized group system, and these problems are
bound to develop.
The
report also judges “integration” rather than “assimilation” (the first term is
found on 443 pages, the second on just forty-eight)—a dog whistle to those
attuned to these matters. Occupational, residential and earnings wealth
integration are all economic markers that say little about joining a single
patriotic national culture.
Again,
if the message is to constantly hew to their ethnic group rather than to a
single shared culture, how can we expect otherwise? Yes, we can expect that
ethnic attrition (intermarriage) will, over time, blur these distinctions. That
would show the Census folks! But that could take a long time, and there are
signs that members of the largest group of immigrants, those with Mexican
ancestry, are marrying outside their groups at lower rates.
To take
examples from overseas, Catalonians and Scots, too, have very similar economic
markers as the rest of the peoples of Spain and the United Kingdom,
respectively. And yet we find very strong separatist tendencies in both regions
because elites, for political reasons, have worked assiduously for years to
create separate identities.
Myth #3
Which
brings us to the last myth: the notion that a democratic nation-state can
continue to exist without the cultural, patriotic and affectional accoutrements
that we have come to expect of a single national culture; that a
“multicultural” society where differences are celebrated and perpetuated can
coexist with equal rights for all individuals. Are we sure?
Those
who think long and hard on the subject believe two things: the first is that,
for all its imperfections, the nation-state is still the best polity man has ever
devised to defend individual liberty and representative government. The second
is that such a formula cannot long survive in a country made up of separate
groups having different conversations and dispersed experiences.
Britain’s
John Stuart Mill spent a good chunk of the nineteenth century pondering the
question. His conclusion, in Considerations
on Representative Government, was that “free institutions are next to
impossible in a country made up of different nationalities.” As Mill explained:
It is good that we’re finally debating assimilation, national identity and what they mean for representative government. But a serious discussion requires that we first clear the myths out of the way. We don’t have to go down the multicultural path of the past three decades.Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist. ... A portion of mankind may be said to constitute a Nationality if they are united by common sympathies which do not exist between them and other others — which make them cooperate with each other more willingly than with other people.
