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EPGAH -> Non-Assimilating Immigrants Threaten US Way of Life (8/15/2007 10:19:53 PM)
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This is quoted VERBATIM from the local newspaper:
http://www.news-leader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007708140318
Since they only keep their old stories 7 days, I copy and paste the full text here:
Although I think he understates foreign arrogance nowadays, look for the point:
IF YOU INTEND TO STAY, LEARN THE LANGUAGE!
Non-assimilating immigrants threaten U.S. way of life
[image]http://www.news-leader.com/graphics/pixelclear.gif[/image]
One of the hottest of the hot-button, PC topics is foreign languages, unless you are advertising beer. In that case, it is apparently hilarious. Otherwise, it easily elicits excessive anger among both liberals and conservatives. It even makes moderates moderately mad. Why?
It is one of the most obvious indicators of problems among immigrants who have difficulty with change, or are absolutely refusing to assimilate. It is the cause celebre among many diversity-to-divisiveness immigrants (read La Raza).
Legal and illegal immigrants who resist assimilation tend to evidence it in the most glaringly obvious way — by refusing to learn the basic element of communication, the national language.
President Theodore Roosevelt said, "We have one language here, and that is the English language, and we intend to see that the (assimilation) crucible turns our people out as Americans."
Why do statements like his fail the PC test? What is wrong with being identified as an American? And identified by speaking the American language, English?
"Language is perhaps the strongest, perhaps most enduring link which unites men." - Alexis de Tocqueville
Why is it so hard to impress upon people something so elementary? It defies reason to imagine that someone would move to France and not learn French or to Mexico and not learn Spanish. Why would someone move to the U.S. and not learn English?
Reasonable people try to learn their host country's language as quickly as possible for very obvious reasons — especially relative to commerce, law and socialization. That is, unless their goal is to change the country to fit them, not vice versa.
Perhaps the most notable illustration of the benefit of assimilating culture and language was Henry Ford, who employed social workers to help wives of his factory workers integrate into American society. The factory workers themselves, immigrants from Poland, Ireland, Italy and other European nations attended mandatory classes, learning American history and, more importantly, to speak English.
Graduates entered a large auditorium under their homeland's flags, wearing their nation's apparel. When they walked across the platform it was under the American flag and their national apparel had been replaced with American-type attire as a symbolic gesture of being, now, Americans.
Critics say that he did it for the money, as workers who spoke the same language and adopted, more or less, the same value systems were more productive, increasing his profit margin significantly. No kidding?
At the same time his workers and their families were also benefiting tremendously, receiving double the average national salary and finding their standard of living vastly improved. The ripple effect also raised factory workers' wages across the nation.
The fact is that we have had a more-or-less amalgamating (Thomas Jefferson's term) country for most of our history. And it is true that we have never been 100 percent "Americanized." The term defies definition and desirability, creating images of a cookie cutter culture which we aren't.
However, we have remained enough alike to remain viable as a one-people nation, as Americans, without losing our unique identifiers. Some wit has said, "Coming over in different boats, we are all in the same boat now."
Ancestry is an important part of our identity, an integral part. We hear people say, "My great-grandfather came from Ireland? my grandmother was German? my grandfather was born in Italy?" And that is more than all right also. We are proud of our ancestry, even the horse thieves and pirates' descendants among us.
Our dissimilar origins, while identifying us, should not keep us from working and walking and talking and living together. Assimilating.
Now, however, with the increase in communities of non-assimilating immigrants springing up across the country (such as La Villita in Chicago and East Los Angeles) and the impetus of society's thought-shaping social elitists' idealistic, impractical ideal world view where diversity, even if divisive, is more important than unity, we are moving toward a crisis caused by cultural callousness masquerading as merely disparate ethos.
Jesus, speaking of the end times said, "For nation (Gk. ethnos, people) shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom..." (Matthew 24:7)
"?nation shall rise against nation?" Isn't that like WW II, U.S. and its allies fighting the Axis powers? Yes. It is also like Bosnian against Bosnian and like Somalian against Somalian. And it could be us against us also, more than just in the angry rhetoric that flies across the Internet daily.
The growing failure, the refusal to assimilate — maintaining, in an absolutistic manner, variegated nation-of-origin customs and languages — may easily, in due time, find us fighting and killing one another like the antagonistic counter-cultures in other nations where internecine conflict is the norm.
Maintaining a common language is one way to curtail this disastrous drift.
From the Right
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