Response to the article “The shifting debate over illegal immigration”

10/06/2006

Anti-multiculturalist Victor Davis Hanson, author of the book “Mexifornia” and senior fellow/historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University recently wrote about why he feels assimilation of immigrants should be an essential component of American Immigration.

“Because the United States is
increasingly less a majority of whites of European ancestry and more a
mixture of dozens of races and ethnicities, the need for a common
unifying language and culture has never been more important. When
Americans look abroad at the violent messes in the Balkans, Rwanda,
Darfur and Iraq, the notion of emphasizing separation here at home by
race, tribe, language or religion makes absolutely no sense. But the
idea of letting only enough legal immigrants in who can be easily
assimilated surely does.”

I don’t believe Mr. Hanson has ever considered our neighbor to the north for inclusion into his research on the  negative effects of multiculturalism.  Canada doesn’t seem to suffer much [those pesky referendums aside] from the multicultural chaos theory that he so vividly describes.  I assume that his purpose, position, and paper are better served by instead singling out “the Balkans, Rwanda,
Darfur and Iraq” as examples of “When-Multiculturalism-Goes-Wild”, though I’m almost positive there are a few other, more rational explanations for why these countries are in their present state.

Getting back to my point; it is my belief that there is absolutely nothing wrong with retaining ones’ cultural identity and language in the US as long as one has a working knowledge of the English language.  I also believe that the anti-immigrationists who recently attempted to legislate English as the ‘official language’ of the US would do better to increase funding for and accessibility to ESL programs rather than politicizing a non-issue and fostering a false sense of cultural superiority.