As a Big Fan of Immigration, I Recognize the Utility of Assimilation

liberals are disarmed in their defenses of immigration because they cannot admit that past examples of successful immigration have involved migrants conforming to their new culture

Last fall there was something of a local controversy in my town regarding drive-thru workers with limited English skills. Apparently, a number of my neighbors had taken to Facebook and NextDoor to complain that local fast food restaurants employed recent immigrants whose English skills were so bad, they were incapable of doing their jobs. A particular McDonald’s location drew special ire. As a good progressive defender of immigration, I dismissed this talk as simple xenophobia, and indeed there was no doubt a lot of that. What I read about on a local blog certainly involved language that was, at least, unkind. But in the months since then, I’ve gone through that McDonald’s drive-thru window probably a half-dozen times, and I have to tell you…. I often genuinely can’t understand what the women (all women) working the drive-thru are saying. I honestly can’t, and I spent years teaching English language skills at the college and graduate school level. Most visits are an exercise in frustration. And I have to admit that a job where your primary responsibility is to talk to customers is a job that requires you to speak the native language of the country you’re in with at least a certain minimum of fluency. Whether that’s good or bad, progressive or reactionary isn’t the point; it just is necessary.

Assimilation is a big word, and a fraught one. Using it on a college campus or on Blueskey can certainly invite a lot of vitriol. But perhaps we can lower the heat by recognizing that a little gentle melting into the melting pot doesn’t have to be a big deal. As the authors of a paper considering the relationship between immigration and assimilation say

We can imagine that after many years in the U.S., immigrants, like natives, become baseball fans, eat hamburgers, and watch fireworks on the Fourth of July. To be sure, their connections with their countries of origin are not obliterated. Instead, they may come to see themselves as hyphenated Americans, but Americans nonetheless.

Language skills are a sticking point for many, particularly because learning any language is hard and English is a notoriously tricky language to learn. (Better community resources in that regard would certainly help.) And it also depends on context; if some Pakistani grandmother moves to Floral Park and only speaks Punjabi within her enclave, do a I give a shit? I do not. But these fast food workers are a good example of where customers genuinely have a legitimate expectation that employees speak comprehensible English and where the workers themselves would be enriched by gaining that skill. I don’t want anyone fired. I don’t want anyone harassed. I recognize that this scenario is complicated and that most of those workers would embrace more language education if they could get it. But if some harried working mom just wants to pick up some Happy Meals for her kids and get home after a long shift, and she’s feeling put out because the person on the other side of the intercom simply cannot communicate effectively, her feelings aren’t inherently xenophobic or racist.

Being that we’re in Connecticut, and in particular in New Haven county, there was of course a liberal backlash to the backlash. Some of it was necessary correctives against racist language, some of it was thoughtful. Much of it however suggested that there was no problem at all - if you can’t understand a low-wage worker’s English, that’s your problem. Only MAGA types complain about immigrants and their accents. Enlightened people celebrate diversity. (I’m willing to guess that these pediatricians and hedge fundies and Yale professors don’t eat at McDonald’s very often.)

It’s not like those liberals don’t ever make legitimate points. It’s unfortunately true that legitimate frustrations about language skills or cultural barriers have a tendency to devolve into ugly “Go back home!” sentiments. But I simply don’t think that it’s constructive to suggest that my job, as an enlightened person, is only to nod along and do everything I can to accommodate the workers. The thinking, and it’s often very explicit, is that any personal inconvenience I and others might face in this scenario is far less important than my obligation to defer to the recent immigrants, thanks to mumble mumble power differentials mumble mumble the Global South. Others would correctly point out that these workers likely are in that position precisely because they will work for lower wages than American natives with perfect English skills. Would I be willing to pay more for my McChicken in exchange for a more pleasant drive-thru experience? Personally, yes, but many people would likely say no. We can, at least, disabuse ourselves of any notion that the managers at McDonald’s are hiring this way out of pro-immigrant sentiment, rather than concern for the bottom line; they’re the ones who are ultimately responsible for these frustrating exchanges. But there is, at the root of it, the simple practical reality that the drive-thru system breaks down when people cannot understand each other.

I would also like to pose a simple thought experiment: if I moved to France and lived there for however many years, and I came back home on a visit complaining that the French refuse to speak English, what would those same liberals say? They would, of course, accuse me of being a typical uncouth American, egocentric and clueless, rudely assuming that the rest of the world has a responsibility to conform to my language preferences. Only an American would think to assume that people from another culture are obligated to conform to him, rather than for him to conform to that culture. It’s no different than going to Japan and refusing to take off your shoes when you walk into someone’s house; you are the recent arrival, and so you don’t get to dictate terms. I will never forget being in the UK, as part of a European study abroad program in college, and watching several of my peers react in shock when the McDonald’s at Heathrow didn’t take American dollars. Well, McDonald’s in New York doesn’t take GBP, either. These dynamics are symmetrical. And to suggest that an immigrant to America has less obligation to honor the customs and mores of this country than an American immigrant has to do the same in another country can only reflect a powerful condescension towards those immigrants.

Obviously, an example of me moving to France and of an Venezuelan moving to Oklahoma City have certain differences, serious ones, but at the heart of each is a simple non-normative recognition that cultures we travel to aren’t going to fall over themselves to accommodate us; this is a practical observation, not a moral one. There are always tortured responses to this, typically consisting of cultural hegemony mumble mumble historical oppression mumble mumble colonialism mumble mumble. But ultimately the basic logic seems pretty clear: when you move somewhere, it’s polite to learn the language, as well as self-interested.

I say that it’s polite because I don’t believe in making English the official or default language of the United States or in draconian language requirements for legal immigration etc. In all of this, my preference is not that immigrants face a lot of new heavy-handed formal legal policies and requirements, but that we recognize that a social expectation of linguistic assimilation and cultural assimilation ultimately benefits recent immigrants the most, and makes the political environment most amenable to immigration. I’m not looking to do anything coercive from the standpoint of government. But I’m quite confident that immigrants who are armed with the ability to effectively assimilate in certain ways are immigrants who are most likely to find America a place of financial prosperity and social success. And they can embrace those abilities while still maintaining all manner of ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious elements of their home cultures. The spirit of Ellis Island gets invoked a lot in these debates, but it’s worth looking at it as a particular story: mass legal immigration by immigrants who were eager to learn the language and to embrace certain values of their new country. The point, ultimately, is that whether we like it or not, a degree of assimilation has always been a part of successful mass migration efforts.

And, for the record, I’m deeply uncomfortable with all of this. I’m not saying this in a triumphalist way, at all. I myself reject patriotism and think, in general, that all of these various classifications - race and gender and sexual identity, but also country and kin and church - are the ultimate progenitors of all human instability and violence. I have said many times that I feel extraordinarily fortunate that, as a white dude with a generally unmarked northern European heritage, I don’t carry the baggage of identity around with me, at least from my own perspective. I don’t have a culture and I have zero interest in discovering my roots. For what? To buy some wooden shoes and display them on the wall? To finally experience representation when I watch Midsommar? People find this offensive, but I’m convinced that if humanity has a harmonious future, it entails leaving behind precisely the human groupings that have been so lustily embraced by the left in the identity politics era - but also America, God, and apple pie. In other words, my own bias is not for Muslim women to feel pressure to give up the hijab (they shouldn’t) or for Haitian immigrants to feel like they have an obligation to hang a flag from their porch (they don’t). But the basic reality is that this country has a certain conception of itself, whether I like it or not, and if you want the best for people coming here you need to grapple with that fact.

The debate about Haitian immigrants in Ohio provoked a ton of racist and xenophobic commentary; I think there were also some legitimate gripes from residents, most importantly the driving down of pay in the low-wage job market. And yet I think we can also recognize that scenario as a failure for the Haitians as well. Can it really be considered humane to airdrop 15,000 Haitian migrants into an alien culture with minimal assistance in finding housing, learning English, getting jobs, and otherwise integrating into the local community? I very much believe that it can not. Too many on the left who support more legal immigration, as I do, refuse to engage with mass immigration as a challenging effort in social engineering, rather than simply as a benevolent opening of doors.

There’s a whole other macro dimension to this, which I will develop in another piece - the simple fact that, on a long enough timeline, “All of the poor people move to the rich countries” simply can’t be the solution, and that’s especially true because of how badly those outflows can hurt poorer countries. (I thought that this Lydia Polgreen piece looking at mass migration from 10,000 feet failed to really consider this dimension, but it’s the first in a series and there may be more explanation to come.) This points to a dimension of the immigration debate that restrictionists often ignore: if you really want fewer undocumented immigrants in the United States, you should work to improve international institutions and help to tear down the structural walls that keep a lot of countries unstable and poor. Ultimately, I have very banal views on all of this: I don’t feel any greater moral obligation to someone who lives a mile south of the border with Mexico than I do to someone who lives a mile north of it, I think immigration makes us strong, and I think we are a graying nation with real structural problems with our social safety net that immigration could ease. But none of that erases just how difficult mass immigration can be, and I think too many immigration proponents have hidden behind accusations of bigotry rather than confronting this difficulty. I love New York and hearing all the languages and smelling the exotic foods and seeing people go by in the clothes from their home cultures. But that’s the easy part. The rest of it is complicated and often hard.

I grew up with a kid whose parents had immigrated from China a few years before he was born. Our childhoods were in the 1980s, and as with most Chinese families I knew his parents were very enthusiastic assimilationists. They bought Western clothes for him and his sister, took them to a white Protestant church, urged them to do Girl Scouts and Little League, often cooked American food, and even had a rule against speaking Cantonese in front of the children. And it worked; he has always been a profoundly American guy. When he got to college, he eventually grew angry over all the assimilation. He felt that he didn’t have roots, that he was disconnected from his people, that he had been denied a rich cultural heritage that some other Chinese-American students had enjoyed. Eventually he threw himself into a Chinese cultural education, learned to speak Cantonese quite well, lived in China for a couple years, and tried his best to reconnect with what he thought had been unfairly denied to him. He would sheepishly tell me, years later, that though he was happy to have gone through that linguistic and cultural education, living in China was ultimately an alienating experience. Because, you see, people in China always immediately clocked what he had assumed they wouldn’t be able to see: that he was an American.