Over the last few days we've seen plenty of coverage of immigrants, both legal and not, protesting the recant increase in enforcement of immigration law. What I've seen and wondered about is why the protesters are flying the flags of the countries that are so dangerous and inhospitable that they claim they were compelled to leave and enter the US without following US law. Beyond that, they're also burning the US flag. What in the world is this? You'd think that at some point, even the most hardcore open borders fanatics would be annoyed at the optics of these protests.
Why this hits me is that it emphasizes a point I've been making about immigrants assimilating. For decades the goal of immigrants was to assimilate into US culture. The US is fairly unique in that our culture is not defined by a specific race or ethnic group. The US has always been about assimilation and building a culture that is more than the sum of it's parts. Yet rallying under the flags of the places that people have left, to protest US immigration laws, seems to suggest that assimilation is the furthest things from their minds.
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My mother is first generation Polish American. Her parents, who immigrated legally about 100 years ago, didn't speak much English (if any at all) and at their ages were unlikely to ever get good at it. But they lived in a mostly Polish neighborhood in Chicago (who until recently if not still, has one of the highest Polish American populations). While we ate Polish meals at gatherings, or meals where Polish dishes and delicacies almost always were on the table, assimilation was a given. I'm not sure about all my cousins, but while my mother and her sisters would converse in Polish (hacked me off to hear my name mentioned in the midst of it without knowing what they were saying about me), Mom never spoke Polish to us, and we never learned the language. I don't even know what the Polish national flag looks like and never thought to look it up. There was never any concerted effort to "keep our Polish culture alive". We ate Polish food because we liked it (I hated the Polish version of sauerkraut), danced Polkas at weddings and where one could, spoke Polish to each other. But that wasn't necessarily intended to "keep our Polish culture alive", but simply how life was lived among the Polish community. As for our family, we were Americans...not "Polish" Americans.
With the law breakers we're seeing the left defend now, there is little which suggests a desire to be Americans among them. This is not true of people from the same countries who came here legally and went through the process of becoming actual citizens, and such are now as American as I am. They are my fellow Americans. The illegals are not.
That's the point. Earlier generations of immigrants wanted their children and grandchildren to assimilate into American society, not segregate themselves in national enclaves. I'd argue that "keeping X culture alive" is not necessarily a bad thing in the context of groups that wanted to assimilate. I have no problem with people keeping parts of their historic, old world, culture alive. As long as it's secondary.
I agree that the illegal aliens seem to have no desire to assimilate into American culture as much as they want to stay segregated and engage just enough to get what they want for themselves.
It certainly seems to be the case.
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