Is America becoming a nation of strangers?
“Why can't we have a home?” asked Ann Coulter, in a recent BBC interview.
It might be more accurate to say that because of immigration, America no longer feels like home to Ann Coulter. Coulter's opposition to immigration is based less on hostility to Mexicans and more on an attachment to the America she grew up in – the America that no longer feels like home to her.
Too many people on the right and the left dismiss views like Coulter's without serious consideration. To them, these views smack of xenophobia, or worse, racism. Out of an understandable desire not to offend, or make anyone feel unwelcome, our political elites failed to consider the ramifications of mass immigration.
A nation's laws and cultural norms are a direct reflection of her people. There is no way to alter the underlying demographics of a country without changing its culture, and by extension its politics. If you are purely an economic conservative, you can live with mass immigration, but if you are a social conservative, it's more difficult.
More important is the visceral effect mass immigration has on the native-born. Sociologist Robert Putnam described it as follows: “[t]he short run effect of being around people who are different from us is to make all of us uncertain – to hunker down, to pull in, to trust everybody less. Like a turtle in the presence of some feared threat, we pull in.”
When we no longer share a language or culture with our neighbors, we feel alienated. Ultimately, people like Ann Coulter are motivated by a feeling of alienation, not outright racial prejudice. On a positive note, Robert Putnam found reason for optimism that our current wave of immigrants will eventually assimilate.
Some people who are worried about immigration in America for some reason believe that this new wave of immigrants doesn’t want to speak English, but the level of language acquisition by this current wave of immigration is just about what it was 100 years ago when people were coming here from Russia, Poland, Italy or Germany. Then, we had a lot of concern about whether the country was going to become German-speaking. Most people who lived in St. Louis, Cincinnati or Milwaukee in those years spoke German, not English. But of course their kids learned to speak English and the grandchildren of those immigrants spoke only English.
A dramatic reduction in the total number of immigrants arriving, along with an emphasis on the English language, will restore our sense of community and help integrate this current crop of immigrants into American society. If we take prudent steps to aid the process, ultimately Hispanics will become part of mainstream American society, and anti-Hispanic sentiment will be as strange to us as anti-German sentiment.
Ad Free / Commenting Login
FOLLOW US ON
Recent Articles
- Trump’s Incredibly High Stakes
- It’s Not Too Late to Boot Biden
- The Sinking of the USS Agility
- Culture and the Perils of Ideology
- Is Rachel Maddow Just Plain Stupid?
- Is Artificial Intelligence Behind Our Unexplained Digital Encounters?
- The Necessity of Heroes
- The Demise of the Mainstream Media
- Lessons From Germany's Economic Contraction
- The X-Men vs the Swamp Creatures
Blog Posts
- A few suggestions for California Republicans
- Maybe California politicians should listen to Trump instead of seeking to Trump-proof the state
- As Los Angeles burns
- Biden’s good news and bad news
- British government horrified at Elon Musk’s language, O.K. with the gang rape of young girls
- The man who spotted Castro
- The center of our belief
- Statehood for Canada is not a great idea
- Minneapolis helps Biden sabotage Minneapolis
- More veiled threats against those asking the government what it really knew about the migrant rape gangs
- Joe Biden reveals that he warned Trump not to use the government to settle political scores
- Biden’s terror hypocrisy
- What was different this time?
- Leftists scatter: How to frame the incoming Trump admin?
- Greasy Gavin shows up for his fire pictures, not mentioning why there's no water