The Americanization Challenge Is Real

As if to confirm the problem Andrew Beck identified in “Assimilation and Its Discontents,” U.S. Representative Delia Ramirez just days after publication of his piece declared (in Spanish) at a leftist gathering in Mexico City, “I’m a proud Guatemalan before I’m an American.” The Chicago-born Democratic congresswoman—more than the Hindu idol in Texas Beck decries—defines the problem we face in creating an unum out of the plures of people, states, and regions that make up our sprawling continental nation.

Representative Ramirez deserves all the obloquy heaped on her for being America Second (at best). But the core assimilation problem we face is not that some immigrants and their children are insufficiently committed to America—it’s that America is insufficiently committed to assimilation.

Immigrants are going to take their cues from Americans about what we expect of them regarding assimilation. As an old boss of mine used to say, you teach people how to treat you—and we’ve been teaching newcomers that it’s okay to, as Beck puts it, “come to America, live in America—but…not become an American.”

Before addressing the post-Americanism of our leadership class and institutions, it’s important to consider the radically transformed technological environment within which immigration and assimilation take place today. Cheap air travel and cell service have made it easier not only to come here initially, but also to maintain ties with the old country. Immigrants can travel back and forth frequently and call/FaceTime/Zoom daily with family and friends.

There’s nothing sinister in this. It is a natural human impulse to want to maintain your connection to the past and stay connected with the familiar. This is why ethnic enclaves develop. Newcomers in a strange new land naturally want to stick together and be comforted by familiar sights, sounds, and smells.

But successful assimilation—Americanization—requires the diminution over time of such attachments to the old country and the old ways. One’s emotional connections aren’t reordered overnight. Becoming an American not just on paper but in one’s heart is an organic process, one that takes time as the meaning of “home” slowly changes from there to here.

The Swedish writer Vilhelm Moberg wrote an epic tetralogy tracing the experiences of a fictional family that left his country in the 19th century for Minnesota. The English translation of the final volume in the series, titled The Last Letter Home, traces how the grown children marry Americans and move away while the aged patriarch of the family loses the last tie with his relatives in the old country.

Modern technology means there no longer has to be a Last Letter Home, and this fact must be the starting point of any discussion of immigration policy and the assimilation of newcomers.

All this would be true even if our institutions were well-ordered and focused on the Americanization of newcomers. But they aren’t.

Readers of The American Mind hardly need to be alerted to the problems inherent in Representative Ramirez’s statement in defense of her Guatemala-First commitment. Remember, she is a member of the U.S. House of Representatives who said—in a foreign country, in a foreign language, to loud applause—that she is a Guatemalan before she’s an American.

Her defense of these comments ignored the core issue of primary loyalty and instead regurgitated the “diversity is our strength” pablum that still reigns in our institutions. The statement said the criticism represented “attacks on diverse Americans,” and that she was merely “showing pride in her multicultural, multiracial heritage,” “honoring her roots,” and upholding “the idea of America—a place where multicultural, multiracial democracy can prosper.”

Immigrants didn’t come up with any of this drivel—Americans did. When her illegal-alien mother took her to public school in Chicago, she didn’t demand young Delia be taught the Howard Zinn distortions of American history—it was already there.

Reorienting our institutions toward cultural self-confidence and insistence on Americanization will be a herculean task. Gallup reports that pride in being an American has collapsed among Democrats, causing the share of the whole population that is “extremely” or “very” proud to be American to fall to an historic low of 58%.

Government policy has a role in correcting our course—but that can only happen through broader cultural change. Under the best of circumstances, it will take time and likely be incomplete. Rooting out post-Americanism from every government office, university, school, corporate suite, church, etc., will be the work of generations.

In the meantime, we admit around one million new legal immigrants each year, and hundreds of thousands of earlier immigrants become citizens.

The number of immigrants living here is larger than ever, but given our larger population, that’s not a surprise, though quantity has a quality all its own.

But that the share of immigrants in the total population has also broken previous records, exceeding even those during the Ellis Island period, reaching some 16%, is an urgent cause for concern.

And that record-high share is doubly relevant given that our birthrate is dramatically lower than during prior immigration waves. Immigration into a high-birthrate society can serve to supplement the native population; immigration into a low-birthrate one serves to replace it. As a result, close to 30% of school-age kids are from immigrant families. What are they supposed to assimilate into if fewer and fewer of their classmates have roots in America?

This is why our first task in fixing the assimilation crisis must be to reduce immigration across the board.

We are already seeing the illegal population shrink due to a resumption in enforcing immigration law under the Trump Administration, and this is a great start, though much work remains to be done.

But most immigration is legal. And even if we were to quickly restore cultural self-confidence so that we are again, as Beck writes, “reasserting a distinctly American identity and setting the conditions for acceptance into its culture,” the reality of a shrinking world due to technological change remains.

Legal immigration must therefore be reduced. Only Congress can do this, though the administration can reduce new arrivals modestly simply by enforcing the laws more carefully.

It is fanciful to imagine that we can have high immigration but successfully select, in Beck’s words, “specific individuals from elsewhere in the world who wish to become unhyphenated Americans.” We have a hard enough time vetting visa applicants for criminality and support for terrorism—there’s simply no way to open a window into men’s souls to determine their assimilative intentions.

This doesn’t necessarily mean zero immigration, but minimalist immigration. A continent-spanning nation with a third of a billion people that invented the modern world doesn’t actually need any immigration at all.

But there will be specific categories of people whom we will want to admit regardless. Under minimalist immigration most newcomers would be the spouses of U.S. citizens (plus those spouses’ minor children from earlier relationships). No one seriously proposes to prohibit Americans from bringing genuine foreign spouses here to live, and immigrating directly into an American nuclear family is more likely to yield Americanization than any other category of immigration.

Add in a handful of genuine Einsteins, plus some refugees in need of emergency resettlement (the U.N. maintains a list, and it’s not long), and we would end up with cutting new immigration by perhaps 60-70% from its current level. This would be comparable in magnitude to the drop in immigration from pre-World War I highs to 1925, when the Ellis Island wave was brought to an end.

But even more modest reductions in immigration would facilitate the Americanization of our huge foreign-born population. Reducing inflows would mean immigrant communities would not be constantly refreshed with new arrivals, allowing for their gradual digestion by the American body politic.

Is this a greater challenge with regard to the Hindu Indians outside Dallas that Beck writes about than with, say, Sicilian Catholics a century ago? Maybe, though there are forces in our time that did not exist then, namely a broadly available mass culture.

If we can reduce the inflows and turn up the heat on assimilation, there’s reason for hope. Even now, intermarriage rates are high, and would only go higher with cuts in future immigration.

The Americanization challenge is real. But unlike the spent nations of Europe, the United States can overcome it and realize George Washington’s goal for immigrants, which was that “by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, manners and laws: in a word, soon become one people.”

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