A Question of Assimilation
In America, immigration has always been linked to the needs of the economy--Mexicans were recruited through the ambitious Bracero program (1942-1964), when World War II required a more abundant labor supply. The 1965 Hart-Cellar Act began the largest flow of immigration into the United States in history and put in place the principle of "family reunification" as the philosophical bedrock of U.S. immigration policy. Today, hardly a day goes by when the political class, the news media, and the elites are not involved, often loudly and sometimes demagogically, in debating the pros and cons of immigration. In Europe, by contrast, when the subject was broached during the past two decades, you could safely bet it was by the racist, Holocaust-denying fanatics of the fringe political parties. The mainstream remained silent--paralyzed and, therefore, irrelevant.
Third, diversity matters. In the United States, diversity defines the new immigration. By any measure, immigrants to America today are more varied than ever. They are racially and religiously diverse, economically diverse, linguistically diverse, and highly diverse in terms of education and job skills. Immigrants and their children are overrepresented among winners of the Nobel Prize, recent secretaries of state (both Republican and Democratic: Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell), and tenured professors at Harvard. (Will the next president of Harvard be of immigrant origin?) But immigrants are also well represented among workers in the service sector of the economy--a sector now totally addicted to immigrant workers. In New York City schools, the children of immigrants are now half of the total student population. What's new today, though, is the fact that they hail from the entire world, with over 190 nationalities represented. In countries like Germany and France, by contrast, there is a hyperconcentration of immigrants from a handful of countries. In Germany, they are mostly Turks. In France, North Africans predominate.
In the United States, diversity has become the high octane of acculturation. With the spectacular linguistic diversity in schools, places of work, and places of worship, English emerged as the undisputed lingua franca, especially among the children of immigrants. The fact that English is a world language has resulted in its rapid acquisition by new immigrants. The same cannot be said of languages like Swedish or Danish. I was recently visiting a school in Stockholm where over 90 percent of the students were the children of asylum seekers and refugees. The students in the science class I visited, overwhelmingly from the Middle East and Central Asia, seemed much more animated speaking English than Swedish. When I asked for a show of hands to the question "How many of you would like to go to New York?" the entire class responded. That's bad news for Sweden's efforts to integrate these youth.
What about those like Harvard's Samuel Huntington who assert that Spanish-speaking immigrants are a threat to American culture because they tend to keep their customs and language? Well, they're wrong. Spanish-language immigrants today learn English faster and better than immigrants before them. Indeed, the American experience is one of rapid linguistic acculturation and native language loss. As one of my former colleagues at Harvard once observed, America is a graveyard for foreign languages.
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