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Putting aside the fact that there was far more intense pressure to assimilate in centuries past than in the current historical moment [1] [2], I don’t think that we can conclude that the immigration of these groups (which have indeed assimilated) has not had a huge impact on the American republic. One good piece of evidence that I’ve seen for this is a blogpost that analyzed voting patterns and political affiliation among different demographic groups and found distinct differences in political alignment among the present-day descendants of these 19th-century immigrants. Something along the lines of “the rightmost Italian-American Republicans have views on fiscal policy to the left of the median American Democrat.” Assuming that these conclusions are true [3], if immigration really does significantly impact the long-term political fabric of America, then it’s hard to just brush off the effects of immigration as changes to mere “superficial elements” of the culture, as you put it.
Beyond those specifics, I think you’re being too dismissive of the desire to not see drastic changes in the political and cultural makeup of one’s country. I’ll ask you: in the absence of assimilationist pressure, would you be happy if America instantly imported 10 million of the most hardcore traditionalist Afghanis? A way more extreme way of putting it: would you be happy if the number of red-tribe MAGA lunatics [insert further epithets here] suddenly tripled?
I would be surprised if you answered “yeah I’d be cool with that.” Now, if your argument is rather something like “those numbers are too large to be reasonable; realistically, we would be better able to assimilate the number of immigrants that are actually on the table in the real world”, then that makes more sense, but at this point, we’re just “haggling over the price”, as the old joke goes.
[1] For example, check out the political cartoon at the top of the Wikipedia page for “Hyphenated American”, calling American immigrants who retained their ancestral identities “freaks” and implying that they shouldn’t vote. In modern times, this sentiment would be relegated to the loony wingnut cartoons your grandma would send you, but at the time, that cartoon was published in Puck, a respected New York political cartoon magazine (ironically founded by an immigrant).
[2] Notably, Germans were assimilated in a mass ethnolysis in the 1910s and 1940s, for obvious reasons.
[3] And I sadly can’t seem to find this blogpost despite throwing all the search terms I can think of at Google. If anyone reading this can remind me of it, even if to debunk it (or especially if!), then I’d be really grateful.
I don't think that's actually true. The central group of contemporary concern, Hispanics/Latinos, are assimilating extremely quickly. The major difference I perceive between 1900 and 2025 is the acceptability of explicitly racism - everybody is still more than a little bit racist, but almost everyone agrees, on paper, that racism is bad and feels the need to launder racist claims through other paradigms.
Assuming this is substantively correct, it doesn't meant much on its own. Different immigrant groups were not uniformly distributed around the country. Germans were heavily concentrated in the Midwest, Italians on the East coast, etc... These places have their own regional politics that will confound efforts to trace an ideological lineage through immigrant populations.
I think this hypothetical is nonsense. It's not far off asking, "in the absence of air, would you be happy taking a plane from NYC to London?"
The pressure to assimilate doesn't come from having people lecture you about the importance of assimilating. It comes from being immersed in the host society, from unavoidably picking up the norms and values of that society, from the countless petty conveniences of conforming to that society's expectations, from having your children grow up in that society. To a large degree it comes from being allowed to assimilate.
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