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Sacramento Bee Columnist Daniel Weintraub

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April 09, 2006

On assimilaton

Why Jane Galt favors immigration:

About immigration: basically, I'm for it. Though there's (allegedly) a smidgen of native American blood in me, most of my ancestors were carpetbaggers who came here for the same reason as the Korean guy who sells you your coffee in the morning: to excape desperate poverty at home. They were greeted by pretty much the same nativist paranoia now directed at Latin American immigrants (though I haven't heard anyone suggest that Mexicans are part of a Papist conspiracy to rule America), and for the same reasons.

The three-quarters of my forebears who were Irish probably didn't speak English when they got here, and showed no particular interest in learning how to do so. Cramming themselves into tenements ten or more to a room, they were willing to work longer hours for lower pay than native-born Americans. Having brought a rich, and very foreign, culture with them, they clustered in urban areas so that they could preserve it, including a drinking culture that horrified the Protestants then flocking to temperance reform. None of them showed much propensity for assimilating; they established their own churches, schools, social organizations, and businesses, allowing their descendants to live in a little parallel Irish world that kept them out of the mainstream. More than 100 years after they landed in North America, my father's family was still living in an Irish neighbourhood in Boston (though by then they had learned how to speak English). Then, as soon as there were enough of them, they took over the political apparatus of the cities they lived in, and began running it for the benefit of the immigrant communities swelling the tenements, instead of the native-born. This separatism was so complete, so pervasive, so stubborn that America is still riven by the threat of . . . gay Irishmen marching in the St. Patrick's Day Parade.

This makes Pat Buchanan's anti-immigrant ranting look just a tiny bit thick. And frankly, if the main contributions your ancestors made to the great American melting pot are bleary renditions of "Danny Boy" and the fine old tradition of getting blind drunk and sleeping in the gutter every March 17th, you should think thrice before complaining that "our culture" is under assault. If American culture could be assaulted, Irish-Americans would be doing 5-10 at Sing-Sing for attempted murder.

Most of the rest of my ancestors fled England so that they could puritanize in peace, and distinguished themselves largely by squatting on the same hunks of farmland for the next four hundred years. Somehow this is supposed to be more illustrious than walking the thousand or so miles from Honduras to pick fruit so you can afford to feed and educate your kids.

Having ancestors who got in early, while the rules were lax, I just can't see how I could, with a straight face, agitate to close off the borders to newer arrivals.

Read the whole thing.