The Great Immigration Debate

Immigration and assimilation are again central to America's cultural debates. Indeed, Democracy Project, Inc., was founded in part to address these problems. Tamar Jacoby of the Manhattan Institute reviewed four recent works on American immigration history in Sunday's Los Angeles Times. As Ms. Jacoby notes, many elements of today's debates come straight from similar arguments of the 1920s forward: nativists vs. proponents of more open borders; and those fearful of foreign cultures vs. those who argued that, as a nation of immigrants, America is strengthened by fresh blood.

One important difference between today's immigration problems and those of earlier decades has been illuminated by Victor Davis Hanson in his book Mexifornia. Namely, the ongoing efforts of multiculturalists and proponents of bilingual education to convince Latino immigrants that they needn't adopt American culture. Combined with a fluid border and their status as permanent low-wage laborers, these intellectually fraudulent policies lock millions of immigrants into lives of poverty and despair.

Ms. Jacoby's remarks are on target: "Instead of trusting to America's time-tested assimilative power, we have let in millions of illegal immigrants to do the work we need done but kept them on the margins, hoping they would eventually return home or, if need be, we could deport them. Ugly as it was, this stratagem worked for much of the 20th century; but it works far less well today, in large part because values are catching up with unsavory practices and exposing our hypocrisy."

It's time to launch proactive efforts to ensure that assimilation once again becomes official American policy. Our values demand it.