07/05/2010
Presumably the Washington Post’s diversity-loving editors imagined a pairing of liberal academic Robert Putnam and (nominal) Republican Jeb Bush would be a dandy show of the bipartisan propaganda for maintaining vast numbers of immigrants and illegal aliens.
Robert Putnam is a well known social scientist whose work indicated that diversity decreases trust and lessens social capital. He famously held back on publishing those findings because they violated his liberal belief that diversity is the highest good.
Jeb Bush is of course the former Governor of Florida and brother of the recent Mexichurian President.
According to this dynamic duo, Americans ungrateful gripers who are not sufficiently welcoming to the overpopulation tsunami of millions of job grabbers. The two recite a litany of immigration complaints from centuries past to discount the concerns of today’s citizens that there are too many immigrants, even when citizen unemployment is so high.
However one in six workers is foreign born nation-wide (one in three in California); how many will be enough for liberals?
Plus, the Post thought it appropriate to tie its immigration guilt trip to Independence Day, as if extreme diversity were the defining characteristic of the nation instead of our western-civilization-based traditions. It’s very tiresome when immigration mongers try to hijack our holidays, particularly the patriotic ones, for their nefarious globalist purpose.
A better welcome for our nation’s immigrants, Washington Post, July 3, 2010
On our national birthday, and amid an angry debate about immigration, Americans should reflect on the lessons of our shared immigrant past. We must recall that the challenges facing our nation today were felt as far back as the Founders’ time. Immigrant assimilation has always been slow and contentious, with progress measured not in years but in decades. Yet there are steps communities and government should take to form a more cohesive, successful union.
Consider what one leader wrote in 1753: “Few of their children in the country learn English. The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages … . Unless the stream of their importation could be turned … they will soon so outnumber us that we will not preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.” Thus Ben Franklin referred to German Americans, still the largest ethnic group in America. A century later, Midwestern cities such as Cincinnati and St. Louis were mostly German-speaking. So worried were their native-born neighbors that Iowa outlawed speaking German in public and even in private conversation. […]
One important difference, however, that separates immigration then and now: We native-born Americans are doing less than our great-grandparents did to welcome immigrants.
A century ago, religious, civic and business groups and government provided classes in English and citizenship. Historian Thomas P. Vadasz found that in Bethlehem, Pa., a thriving town of about 20,000, roughly two-thirds of whom were immigrants, the biggest employer, Bethlehem Steel, and the local YMCA offered free English instruction to thousands of immigrants in the early 20th century, even paying them to take classes. Today, immigrants face long waiting lists for English classes, even ones they pay for.
Americans would prefer to have less immigration overall, but these upper crusters who have never worried about money believe that we must make it easier for still more foreigners to take disappearing US jobs. Elites see speaking English as a vital to economic assimilation, while cultural adjustment is given short shrift in comparison to the newbies becoming good worker bees.
Bush and Putnam apparently believe that endless millions more immigrants must be added despite the many social, financial, environmental and national security indications to the contrary, not to mention the much expressed desire of the citizens for the cultural chaos to end. The majority of Americans prefer our traditional values to diversity, something elites should remember as they devise further propaganda.
Below, amnesty demanders protest American law enforcement in Arizona.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.