The importance of assimilation in America The Courier,July 17 Posted:07/22/08
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Amnesty is dead, according to Michelle Malkin, an Asian columnist who specializes on immigration.
A couple of years ago, hundreds of thousands of illegal alien demonstrators took to the streets lobbying for amnesty. Marchers waved “Amenstia Abora!” placards in one hand, the flags of their native countries in the other.
Open-borders strategists quickly replaced the foreign flags with Old Glory after militant activists cause a public backlash last year.
National newspapers played the dutiful propagandists and splashed patriotic photo-ops of the “undocumented” masses wrapped in red, white and blue to drum up sympathy.
“But now that they’ve lost their amnesty fight, will they still embrace American symbols and traditions?” Malkin raises the question in her weekly syndicated column.
Or was it all for show?
And what of all that talk of illegal aliens being willing to study citizenship and civics. And take English classes?
“Why must they be bribed with the promise of temporary guest worker visa and mass governmental pardon in order to adapt to our way of life?” Malkin asks. “When did assimilation become the means and not an end in itself?”
The inflection point can perhaps be traced to the moment when politicians were permitted to invoke the “America is a nation of immigrants” platitude as a mindless justification for open borders, Malkin pointed out.
The fact is: We are not a “nation of immigrants.” This is both a factual error and a warm-and fuzzy non sequitur, according to Malkin. Eighty-five percent of the residents currently in the United States were born here, she reported. “Sure, we are almost all descendants of immigrants. But we are not a ‘nation of immigrants.’”
Isn’t it funny, she says, how the politically correct multiculturalists who claim we are a “nation of immigrants” are so sensitive toward Native American Indians, Native Alaskans, Native Hawaiians and descents of black slaves who did not “immigrate” here in any common sense of the word.
Even if we were a “nation of immigrants,” it does not explain why we should be against sensible immigration control. And if the open-border advocates would actually read American history, instead of revising it, they would see that the founding fathers were emphatically insistent on protecting the country against indiscriminate mass immigration. They insisted on assimilation as a pre-condition, not an afterthought. Historian John Fonte assembled their wisdom:
• George Washington, in a letter to John Adams (his vice president and next president), stated that immigrants should be absorbed into American life so that “by an inter-mixture with our people, they, or their descendents, get assimilated to our customs, measures, laws – in a word, soon become one people.”
• In a 1790 speech to Congress on the naturalization of immigrants, James Madison (our fourth president) stated that America should welcome the immigrant who could assimilate, but exclude the immigrant who could not readily “incorporate himself into our society.”
• Alexander Hamilton (America’s first Treasurer) wrote in 1802: “The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment: on a uniformity of principles habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education and family.”
• Hamilton further warned that “The United States have already felt the evils of incorporating a large number of foreigners into their national mass; by promoting in different predilections in favor of particular foreign nations, and antipathies against others, it has served very much to provide the community and to distract our councils. It has been often likely to compromise the interests of our own country in favor of another. The permanent effect of such a policy will be that in times of great public danger there will be always a numerous body of men, of whom there may be just grounds of distrust; the suspicion alone will weaken the strength of t he nation, but their force may be actually employed in assistant an invader.”
Malkin noted that the perils of ignoring the founding father’s advice was the nation’s first attack by ideological terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center’s twin towers, the nation’s Pentagon military headquarters, and the crash of a commercial air plane in the fields of Pennsylvania, killing some 3,000 innocent civilians and costing the nation’s economy trillions of dollars.
Yes, “The safety of the public” is indeed at stake.
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