Thursday, May 15, 2008
Editorial: Immigration and assimilation
Modern America stands in the way of immigrants who would embrace our way of life.
From the RoundTable blog
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A new report on immigrant assimilation offers some reassurance to Americans who are as worried about the cultural impact of immigrants, legal and illegal, as about the number who have come to the United States illegally in the past quarter century.
Overall, the new immigrants are assimilating at a faster rate than immigrants of previous generations. This is good. With all due respect to multiculturalism, newcomers benefit from becoming Americanized and from becoming full participants in the civic life of a country whose identity is rooted not in religion or ethnicity but in laws and common principles.
Still, the study found that the gap these new immigrants have to close is wider than in earlier generations in terms of their English-speaking ability and earning power. And, worse, the largest foreign-born segment of the population -- Mexicans -- has been slow to assimilate.
That's bad news, indeed. The study's author theorized it might be due in large part to the high percentage of Mexican immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally. As Duke University economist Jacob Vigdor explained in The Washington Post: "If you're in the country illegally, a lot of the avenues of assimilation are cut off to you. There are a lot of jobs you can't get, and you can't become a citizen."
The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank in New York, sponsored the study and drew from it a curious conclusion. The institute's vice president for policy research, Howard Husock, argued in a commentary Tuesday in The New York Sun that the country can't "discount the possibility that immigrant assimilation is lagging because, unlike our predecessors, we have not made it a conscious national policy."
During the immigration wave of the 1890s, he points out, the nation's "cultural elite" led a pro-assimilation movement that included establishing settlement houses that as part of their mission helped new arrivals become Americanized.
"Lately," he asserts, "discussing immigrant assimilation has become less than acceptable in polite company out of a concern that assimilation imposes Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture on others."
Maybe that's all the talk wherever that cultural elite meets. But as Husock notes, average Americans still overwhelmingly embrace the idea of a melting pot. And as he must not have noticed, average Americans -- not any cultural elite -- for years have been dominating the national conversation about immigration.
That conversation has focused on keeping low-skilled, undocumented workers out of the U.S. -- oh, and making English the official language.
Sadly lacking has been talk about how the absence of rational immigration policy traps so many Mexicans and other Latinos in an illegal underground workforce that bars full integration into society and easy assimilation. The result is a parallel, unequal economy that does, indeed, eat at the nation's foundations.
