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There's been a ton of bashing of immigrants and the idea of assimilation here recently. Lots of doom, not a lot of hope or true attempts at understanding. I'd like to briefly outline a positive case for immigration and assimilation, looking at three major groups throughout history.
First we have Rome. Famously Rome is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, empires an lights of civilization in the Western world. In many ways the Pax Romana and the heights the Romans achieved paved the way for the modern Western order. The United States' governmental system is in large part explicitly modeled on the Roman system.. How did Rome achieve so much success? Many scholars believe it was their ability to assimilate new peoples into their culture, and make them productive members of society. There's even a word for it: Romanization. (Or if you prefer, the less politically correct 'civilizing of barbarians.')
Going from their example, we have the many great and powerful Islamic empires. Now before everyone spouts off about how intolerent Muslims are, I agree. For many historic reasons Islamic states nowadays are the opposite of an immigrant loving place that's open to assimilation. Ironically, some scholars claim that:
From this perspective, Muslim Empires were tolerant, while modern-day Muslim states lack toleration. The past tolerance expressed itself in the regulation of the local religious diversity under the purview of the Islamic judges (qadis).
There's a lot of definitional games here, but Muslim empires were certainly notable for assimilated other 'People of the Book', i.e. Christians and Jews, which even their contemporary Christian states thought was insane. Many Muslim empires were much stronger than European nations at times, especially during the so-called Dark Ages.
Finally, we have America. I won't rehash this too much, as I think it's practically inarguable that America is a nation founded on the principle of immigration, religious freedom, and has levered it's ability to assimilate masses of immigrants to become the greatest nation in the history of the world.
The point of all these examples is to say that yes, immigration is difficult. And yes, modern Western nations may not be in a perfect spot to assimilate immigrants, there are many flaws with social programs and how immigration works currently. I'll concede all those points.
However, I think the reason immigration and assimilation is so attractive to so many intellectuals lies in the potential! If your culture can figure out a way to bridge gaps between different cultures, ethnicities, and groups, if you can truly make disparate peoples unite under one flag, one cause, one set of ideals, you can rule the world. The tail benefits of successful immigration policies are massive.
It's a major mistake to sneer at modern issues with immigration and say it's a doomed project when so much of our culture exists because of cultural plurality.
It seems odd to me to talk about immigration in America without talking about, you know, immigration in America. "A nation of immigrants" is a cliche but America's current population pretty much all arrived in the past 400 years from other places. And in that time it went from being a handful of starving colonies to the most powerful nation in world history (as well as one of the richest). At times the Italians, Irish, and other Catholic nationalities were considered to be a mean, mongrel group who could never be trusted. Now a white nativist probably couldn't tell them apart from any other American. The Chinese were also once believed to be uncivilized barbarians; now they along with other Asian-Americans are literally too successful to avoid being discriminated against by college admissions. (Yes, recent immigrants are not a contiguous group with most of the ones who migrated in the 1800s to work in California--but neither genetics nor culture is going to change that much in 150 years. Modern immigrants are richer, but almost all the European immigrants were poor too. If they had been allowed to, the Chinese immigrants of the 1800s could have assimilated trivially easily).
All through these times recent immigrants and their families often provided large amounts of cheap labor, settled new frontiers, and gradually improved their lot--the American dream. When they arrived, they often formed immigrant enclaves, but gradually assimilated over a few generations--other commenters seem to sneer at this possibility, but as far as I can tell it's literally exactly what has been happening for many years. The first generation that moves as adults is mostly the old culture, their kids are a mix, and the grandkids are just like other Americans. Sometimes it happens faster than this, but even if it does take this long it doesn't seem to matter.
In light of all of this history, most of the fears proposed by modern anti-immigration activists seem to ring hollow.
The difference is that then, nobody was proclaiming diversity is our strength. No, they were actively proclaiming for assimilation and suppression of foreign cultures and foreign tongues, if not explicitly foreign people. You're also discounting a huge difference in scope. There were never as many Italians or Irish then as there are Mexicans and assorted CA hispanics now. There has never been as much immigration as there has been in the last 60 years. Things have changed, and those changes have destroyed the mechanism for the assimilation that you take for granted. Hence the sneering. That machine's broken, it's not going to be rebuilt, and anyone who wants to do so is pilloried.
In an ideal world, the spanish language speaking hispanics would meet the same fate as the german language speaking germanics from the 20th century: complete replacement of their language and wholesale assimilation into the dominant culture. This won't happen, because that goose is cooked.
Some people certainly wanted this, but did it actually happen? Or rather, did it actually happen any faster than it does now, or would have happened anyway? German was actually a very popular language in the US, with German newspapers in many towns, until the world wars. Lots of other diaspora communities persisted as well, like Celtish in the Carolina lowlands. My impression is actually that a lot of nativists did the opposite, and wanted the immigrants to remain separate in their own enclaves indefinitely--"No Irish need apply" doesn't seem like it encourages assimilation.
Do you have data to support this claim? Raw immigration numbers peaked in 1990, with the second peak being 1900-1920:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_immigration_to_the_United_States#/media/File:Immigration_to_the_United_States_over_time.svg
Adjusting for population, it's clear that we're in a pretty low spot historically (excepting the Depression and WW2)--adjusted for the 4.3x population difference, even the low point in 1900 is equivalent to well over 800,000 today. In fact, even going purely by raw numbers, "the last 60 years" is largely not that high!
I don't see much in the way of evidence for any these things. I think people who say this don't sufficiently grapple with the history of assimilation, which I only know a little bit about, but I know enough to know that it's complicated.
Well, this is a testable prediction, at least. I think it's rather early to conclude it won't happen, when large-scale hispanic immigration is, what, 30 or 40 years old? German language newspapers existed as far back as the Revolution and was quite popular throughout the 1800s, only really declining because of WW1. Do you think that, say, the grandchildren of early hispanic immigrants (so, the children of people born in the US) don't speak substantially more English than their grandparents?
That is not true. Ignoring the outlier year of 1991 (possibly a result of the Reagan amnesty?), the trend line of legal immigration is up and to the right from 1930 all the way until 2016.
This says nothing of illegal immigration, nor what the situation looks like now in 2023. Trump did (by jawboning) manage to reduce immigration.
Neverthless, foreign-born as a percent of the overall population keeps going up and will soon eclipse the all-time record set in the early 1900s.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/20/key-findings-about-u-s-immigrants/
So we might set a new record soon, but it's only recently (last 10 years) gotten close to the level that was maintained pretty consistently from 1870 to 1920 (although this is also affected by the native reproduction rate--I think "we have more immigrants" may be less useful than "existing residents are having fewer kids"). So it's still not really accurate to say "There were never as many Italians or Irish then as there are Mexicans and assorted CA hispanics now." If this trend continues it might be true at some point in the future.
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