Leon Hadar on Immigration and American Identity

What Does It Mean to Be an American?
Why the immigration debate should be about language and culture more than jobs—and not just race.

Yet it sounds to me like a lot of wishful thinking on the part of some pro-immigration advocates to dismiss the concerns raised by critics about the difficulties in integrating Mexican and other Hispanic illegal and legal immigrants into the national-cultural fabric of American life. You have to be deaf (“For English press 1″) or a bit deluded to dismiss the growing signs of an evolving bilingual America—represented by a split between “Anglos” and “Latinos”—by arguing that, well, it wasn’t so different with the early waves of Italian immigrants.

But there were not millions of Italians living across our border, and the immigrants from Italy were not exposed to 24/7 Italian-language cable television channels and other means of communication that would have helped create or strengthen a sense of cultural separatism. And unlike in the multicultural America of the early 21st century, America during the early 20th century still maintained a strong sense of a national identity that helped assimilate foreign immigrants into the American cultural milieu to which they ended up making their own contributions.

It’s therefore too bad that much of the criticism of immigration on the political right has been dominated by the never-ending preoccupation with building a fence, as well as derogatory remarks about immigrants and foreigners. The discourse has taken a somewhat xenophobic flavor that has antagonized even members of the Asian-American community who, as I argued in another post, are natural political allies of the Republican Party. It has helped create the impression that conservatives are racists and Republicans are nativists who don’t like immigrants who don’t look like them.