02/02/2019
Not that long ago, assimilation was expected of immigrants. It seemed a fair deal that when foreigners came here to live permanently, they should learn English, be loyal to America and adopt our values of liberty and equality.
But now, tribalism has risen to such a fever pitch among leftists that such basics are now considered an affront to foreigners who expect to live here with no attitude adjustment from say, hostile Mexico or jihadist Pakistan. In fact, we citizens are expected to receive diverse unfriendlies with no complaint — like Obama’s wholesale import of unscreened Syrian muslims — otherwise we are meanie racists.
Leftists expect America to be a passive welfare office for the poor billions of the planet — and how can depressed poverty-stricken people be expected to assimilate??
Tucker Carlson had some remarks about the media smackdown of Tom Brokaw a couple days back.
Interestingly, one sub-topic of assimilation is the place of English in this country, and it polls strongly: a Rasmussen/ProEnglish survey from last April determined that 81 percent of Americans believe that English should be the official language of the United States. A Frank Luntz poll from July found that nearly two-thirds of respondents believe immigrants should be able to hold a basic conversation in English.
Of course, immigrants who don’t speak English are crippling their potential for economic success.
A 2017 Rasmussen poll found most voters still think immigrants should adopt American culture.
Here’s Tucker discussing the general issue of assimilation with Federalist writer John Daniel Davidson:
TUCKER CARLSON: Tom Brokaw was long one of the most respected men in America. He anchored the “NBC Nightly News” for 22 years. He’s 78 years old now. He ought to be enjoying a happy retirement, fly-fishing every morning. Instead, Tom Brokaw just made a terrible mistake. He expressed an unauthorized opinion in public. Can’t do that.
During a live television show, Brokaw said that assimilation is good and that immigrants should try to learn English.
TOM BROKAW: I also happen to believe that the Hispanics should work harder at assimilation. That’s one of the things I’ve been saying for a long time. You know, that they ought not to be just codified in their communities, but make sure that all of their kids are learning to speak English and that they feel comfortable in their communities.
CARLSON: Well, not so long ago, those words would have passed pretty much unnoticed. Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barbara Jordan said it all the time and if you don’t believe it, go to Google right now and look up Barbara Jordan on immigration. Whoa.
And they said it for a pretty simple reason, English unites the country, obviously, and now around the world, it is also the language of business and science and culture. It’s clearly a good thing for everyone in America — immigrant or not — to learn English as quickly as possible, but no, you’re not allowed to have that opinion anymore even if you’re Tom Brokaw.
So the activist group Latino Victory, whatever that is, accused Brokaw of quote unquote “white supremacist ideology.” An NYU journalism professor called Carolina Moreno announced that actually, it’s Americans job to quote “try harder to assimilate into a global society.” And then some kid at Vox called Dylan Matthews suggested that Brokaw with sympathetic to quote “pure racial animus.”
Even after Brokaw apologize profusely, the cowards on his old show over at NBC denounced him for his thought crime. Watch this.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A former long-time anchor of this broadcast is in the news tonight for comments he made Sunday on “Meet The Press.” The criticism was widespread and almost immediate.
NBC NEWS ANCHOR STEPHANIE GOST: Lester, tonight an NBC News spokesman tells me quote, “Tom’s comments were inaccurate and inappropriate. And we’re glad he apologized.”
CARLSON: Well, he’ll be getting paid a lot at NBC to say stuff like this. John Daniel Davidson is a senior correspondent at “The Federalist,” and he joins us tonight. So John, look, my bottom line hope is that you could live in a country where you could have a conversation about assimilation and English and whether or not they’re important.
The response to Tom Brokaw makes it absolutely impossible for any decent person to have any opinion on this at all, and it makes it impossible to solve our problems if we can’t have a conversation about it.
JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON: Well, exactly. It’s like you say, it used to be an unremarkable thing to talk about the melting pot as an American ideal. The idea that from many, we are one and we come together from all different countries, all different backgrounds and we become Americans.
And of course, language is one of the things that binds us together as Americans. But there are other things that bind us together as Americans, too. And that’s not to say that because we have a melting pot that you have to abandon all aspects of your own culture. Those cultural aspects feed into the American life and the American culture that we have and make it richer and make it better and that shouldn’t be controversial, and it shouldn’t be scandalous to suggest that learning English is part of assimilating and it’s part of what immigrants should strive for.
There’s nothing controversial about that and there should have been nothing controversial about what Tom Brokaw said.
CARLSON: Of course not and you’d think Brokaw out who is a liberal by the way would be given the benefit of the doubt, but he was ceremonially slayed instead. But I wonder if the people pushing this — and by the way, nobody is pushing for anyone to give up their own culture or their identity. That’s insane. Only to participate in a common identity, which is not a racial category. It’s a culture that binds us together as Americans from different backgrounds and races and religions. But what do we have in common is the question. Why is there such an organized caucus against having anything in common? What is that?
DAVIDSON: Well, for the left, the whole idea of assimilation cuts against the idea of identity politics. Identity politics necessitates that everybody’s kind of stay in their lane and keep their racial or ethnic identity as the number one most important thing about them.
And to the extent that you view assimilation as a positive thing, as a good thing, as something that helps immigrant communities get ahead economically or achieve more in terms of education, it’s to be viewed as a negative thing. They want to hold on to discrete identities and not assimilate and this is the opposite for example of what we see in Europe, where you have massive numbers of unassimilated immigrant communities, especially Muslim communities that have fared very poorly in European countries partly because they don’t adopt the cultural norms, they don’t adopt languages. They don’t achieve highly in education and in business in Europe, and they stay in these sort of segregated enclaves.
That is the opposite of what we want for this country, but that seems to be what the left would like in terms of what their identity politics dictates for us.
CARLSON: Maybe keeping people poor and helpless and atomized helps them rule more efficiently. Just a thought, just kind of throwing that out there, John.
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