How to turn immigrants into full-blooded Americans

July 22, 2018



What does it mean to be an American — and can an immigrant arriving to this country today ever achieve that?

Michael Anton, a lecturer and research fellow at Hillsdale College and a former national-security official in the Trump administration, argued in The Washington Post last week that the US should end birthright citizenship. His idea is noxious — and unconstitutional, as the 14th amendment grants birthright citizenship.

But it raises the question of when and how someone can become an American and what exactly that means.

In Anton’s estimation, the child of someone here illegally, or temporarily, shouldn’t be granted immediate US citizenship upon their birth. But it’s that unique quirk of our law that does so much toward promoting an American culture. It doesn’t matter your background or who your parents were; you’re one of us, simply by being born here.

Following France winning the FIFA World Cup final in Russia, “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah congratulated the team by saying “Africa won the World Cup.” “I get it, they have to say it’s the French team,” Noah said. “But look at those guys. You don’t get that tan by hanging out in the south of France, my friends.”

Noah’s joke was understandably poorly received in France. The French ambassador to the United States, Gérard Araud, wrote Noah a letter saying “they were educated in France; they learned to play soccer in France; they are French citizens.”

“Why can’t they be both?” Noah asked during the episode that followed Araud’s letter. “In order to be French, you have to erase everything that is African?”

Well, no, but the implication that Africa won the World Cup does, actually, erase the Frenchness of the players. The ambassador noted that 21 of the 23 were born in France. They are not at all “African.”

In the Broadway show “Hamilton,” a famous line has Alexander Hamilton and Marquis de Lafayette high-five and say “immigrants, we get the job done.” The line is popular, and gets a round of applause during the performances. It was pointedly sung to Mike Pence when he attended the show, and it’s used frequently in the immigration debate to celebrate the contributions of immigrants.

But the very next line has Hamilton asking Lafayette, “So what happens if we win?” To which Lafayette answers: “I go back to France. I bring freedom to my people if I’m given the chance.”

The exchange, then, makes no sense — Lafayette, by his own consideration, isn’t an immigrant at all. To Lafayette, “his people” aren’t the Americans but the French. To Trevor Noah, the right to call yourself “French” depends not on your nation of birth or citizenship but your skin color.

What’s going on?

The answer has a lot to do with a key sticking point in the immigration debate — liberals’ distaste for what used to be a basic expectation of immigrants: assimilation.

In a piece for Slate in February, Silpa Kovvali called assimilation “a racist code word.” In The Atlantic in 2015, Tom Gjelten asked whether immigration should require assimilation and highlighted that “the term ‘assimilation’ was resisted by some immigrant advocates because it suggested that people arriving from other lands were obliged to give up their distinctive histories and embrace the dominant culture in their new homeland.”

But that’s a false choice: There’s no reason immigrants should have to give up their distinctive histories in order to also embrace the dominant culture.

My own identity, my distinctive history, is tied up in being an immigrant. Last week was the 40th anniversary of my arrival in America. I was a year old when we arrived from the Soviet Union, and my upbringing in Brooklyn had all the hallmarks of the immigrant experience.

But the whole point of moving here was to be American. My parents bristle at being called Russian-Americans. They consider themselves just Americans with unfortunate accents. I always wished that, like my brother, I had been born here so there was no question what I was.

Discouraging full participation in American life, as Americans, does no favors to immigrants. Neither does Anton’s call to exclude and stigmatize those who are unquestionably American.

Both the right and the left are doing their part to dilute the Americanness of new arrivals and their children. And, in the process, they are diluting what really makes America great.

https://nypost.com/2018/07/22/how-to...ded-americans/