St. Louis CofCC Blog

I glossed over this story last week, about a study, authored by Duke Prof. Jacob Vigdor, and released by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a supposedly conservative think tank, that Mexican and Latin American arrivals aren’t assimilating into the American culture.

When I first read the story, I knew that the definition of “assimilation” has been dumbed down over the decades, and that if Mexicans and other Latin Americans aren’t “assimilating” even under the new diluted definition, it is because Mexicans come here to find Mexico already, so they already have here where they came from there. The future challenge will be for white Americans to assimilate into Mexico.

There is another reason why assimilation isn’t happening these days. The Bard, from the March 1990 issue of Chronicles:

It is especially complicated when, as today, there are major obstacles to assimilation. Sociologist Nathan Glazer, a supporter of immigration, points out that the discrimination and prejudice that in earlier eras helped accelerate the acculturation of new immigrants is today largely illegal. Civil rights legislation, equal opportunity codes, and court decisions have weakened the power of private and social institutions, no less than that of public authorities, to induce immigrants to conform to American norms. Today’s “cultural authorities” legitimize and instigate “alternative life styles,” eschew stereotypes, scorn WASP ethnocentrism, and indulge every known form of deviation and idiosyncrasy from the religious exotica of Santeria to the perversions of the National Man-Boy Love Association. Restaurants where once only the coated and tied dared enter now beg their customers to wear shirts and shoes. “Popular opinion,” writes Mr. Glazer, “now questions the legitimacy and desirability of forcefully imposing a common identity on immigrants and members of minority groups.”

In other words, “back then,” immigrants (who were mostly white) were forced to assimilate (genuinely) because the natives then were able to get away with what are now termed as “Federal civil rights violations” and force the newcomers to behave like the Romans do while in Rome.  Today’s largely non-white arrivals, combined with the full force and weight of the Federal government prohibiting white natives from “discriminating” and being “prejudiced,” means that the newcomers can turn the new country into the old country, even as the “assimilation” bar is far lower than it used to be.

Prof. Vigdor was a guest on the Laura Ingraham radio show this morning. He reiterated his findings about Mexican and Latin American arrivals. But then the “conservative” Ingraham then bragged that the daughter she just adopted, a Guatemalan native, was assimilating into the American culture very well thank you, because she liked Dora the Explorer and Spongebob Squarepants. Wow, cartoons, one of which speaks Spanish half the time (Dora) — what a whiz-bang, profound definition of the American culture, Laura. Proving the point that not only does “assimilation” not mean what it used to, but so doesn’t “conservative.”

Then Prof. Vigdor, seeming to debate with Ingraham, said that the reason Mexicans and Latin Americans weren’t “assimilating” into Dora, Spongebob and shopping malls is that they were here illegally, and thus were living in the shadows, and afraid to participate in the American culture (i.e. turn the TV on). So, the obvious solution is hard or soft amnesty for illegal aliens. That way, this will speed up the process of the USA becoming Mexico, and the process of white Americans assimilating into Mexican culture. He didn’t really say that last sentence, but that’s what will happen.

Thankfully, Ingraham had the sense to press him on that point, but the kind of “conservatism” that is supposed to debate the even less conservative conservatism of the Manhattan Institute can’t be trusted with American immigration policy, if you expect America to remain American, beyond the scope of cartoons and malls.