One thing for sure is images like this, courtesy Michelle Malkin, are not helping the immigration discourse:
Americans are rightly concerned that there are a large number of people in our country illegally who claim allegiance to another country and express the desire to reclaim land for that country. The problems with immigrants in Europe should warn us against the danger of non-assimilation. The unwillingness to make Americans out of our immigrants is a sign of a civilization unwilling to defend itself. I mean, in this case, intellectually defending its principles and its way of life.
Most people in our part of the country are only two or three generations "off the boat." For example, my great-grandparents were Germans from Russia and I have a great-grandmother from Denmark. Americans often have had a visceral reaction to mass immigration of people who are "different" from what we consider "normal" Americans. Thus the unease about Germans who spoke a funny language, or Italians who looked a little swarthy and practiced an "un-American" religion (Arthur Schlessinger, Sr. once remarked that anti-Catholicism was the deepest prejudice in American, the anti-Semitism of America's elite). The anger directed against these immigrants was, to say the least, unfortunate. But there was also great social pressure for these immigrants to assimilate themselves to American habits and ideals, particularly by learning the language. Thus, as I have been told by family members, within two generations in America my family no longer spoke any German. A colleague today told me of his grandfather, an immigrant from Russia, who had to go special classes to get "Americanized."
There is a danger of a backlash against Hispanics in general and Mexicans in specific. That would be an unfortunate return to a nativism that we should have extinguished long ago. No doubt the Hispanic/Mexican population has already given valuable things to our culture, just as previous immigrant groups had. But at the same time there is a claim from the cultural left (or, more accurately, the multi-cultural left) that assimilation is racism. In my discussion with my colleague today he told of his immigrant wife having to affirm that she forswore all allegiance to other nations when she took her oath of citizenship. This does not seem to be happening in some immigrant quarters. The militant espousal of land claims for Mexico, or, as Prof. Blanchard noted, the placing of one's loyalties to another land above that to the United States, cannot be tolerated by a nation which seeks to have any kind of sense of who it is. The arrogant claim to the right to be in the United States, legally or illegally, and to have all the imcumbent privileges while rejecting any attempt to adopt American mores will only alienate those who would otherwise be sympathetic to the immigrant's plight.
I should note the "strange bedfellows" aspect of this debate. How odd that American business, which lives off of illegal immigrants in some areas, has made alliance with the multi-cultural left that simply hates America. One loves illegals because they are cheap labor. The other loves them because they represent a blow against the racist, sexist, capitalist and thoroughly unjust American system. How odd indeed.
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