What this all got me thinking about, the next day, was . . . immigration. I know that seems a lurch, but there's a part of the debate that isn't sufficiently noted. There are a variety of things driving American anxiety about illegal immigration and we all know them--economic arguments, the danger of porous borders in the age of terrorism, with anyone able to come in.But there's another thing. And it's not fear about "them." It's anxiety about us.
It's the broad public knowledge, or intuition, in America, that we are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically. And if you don't do that, you'll lose it all.
We used to do it. We loved our country with full-throated love, we had no ambivalence. We had pride and appreciation. We were a free country. We communicated our pride and delight in this in a million ways--in our schools, our movies, our popular songs, our newspapers. It was just there, in the air. Immigrants breathed it in. That's how the last great wave of immigrants, the European wave of 1880-1920, was turned into a great wave of Americans.
We are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically now. We are assimilating them culturally. Within a generation their children speak Valley Girl on cell phones. "So I'm like 'no," and he's all 'yeah,' and I'm like, 'In your dreams.' " Whether their parents are from Trinidad, Bosnia, Lebanon or Chile, their children, once Americans, know the same music, the same references, watch the same shows. And to a degree and in a way it will hold them together. But not forever and not in a crunch.
Well said--I myself am a product of people who both immigrated to this country and assimilated. I believe that there really is a core of American experience and values at the center of this country, that make us who we are, in spite of what some radical multi-culturalists argue.
It has nothing to do with racism, or cultural imperialism--it has everything to do with a wider shared identity that should bind all Americans together, regardless of whether they are Norwegian Americans, or Mexican Americans.
This cultural assimilation is hit and miss--it's pop culture, which changes at a frightening speed, and is mass-produced and transmitted commercially. This isn't America, although those things are American. There is a formal, "taught" America that seems to have been dropped out of schools in favor of political correctness, or an attempt to balance actual and perceived injustices of our shared past.
But that just severs the link that should bind us all together, and makes us into tribes (or victims and oppressors, or the priveleged and exploited). If there is no "us" for people coming to this country to join, then we remain fragmented, and E Pluribus Unum means nothing anymore. We don't ask them to give up lutefisk, or fish tacos, but we invite them to learn about our common history, warts and all, and take their place in it.
To do otherwise is to stand outside, yet be inside, and we can't afford for that to happen.
