Assimilation?

Source: Lonewacko

...at the Gaithersburg City Council meeting last night, one citizen refused to recite the Pledge. Casa De Maryland Executive Director Gustavo Torres, an immigrant from Colombia, stood in defiance while substantially everyone else present recited the Pledge of Allegiance.

Even the day laborers at the meeting, many of whom have previously admitted that they are in the USA illegally, stood up in respect for the US flag and recited the Pledge as best as they could.

As we have the current debate over immigration many are quick to point out the lessons that history will supposedly teach us if only we would look. These lessons appear to be that "earlier immigration worked out, hence, this immigration must work out."

But what if that isn't true?

As I read the comments on this blog and others I'm struck by a willful, obstinate blindness that seems to grip people on the subject of immigration like none other. Yet these very same folks jump up and down railing against the danger of groups like the ACLU for the rot they introduce into the very sinews of our country. But these very same people will completely ignore the dangers of groups like La Raza; MALDEF; PRLDEF; LULAC; Casa De Maryland; ICIRR; et al.

These far left groups are legion and they work against immigrants, whether legal or illegal, assimilating into this country in any meaningful way and more often than not they do their dirty work with your tax dollars.

La Raza, who disseminated a memo during the McCain/Kennedy debates with this numbered point --

"while it doesn't overtly mention assimilation, it is very strong on the patriotism and traditional American values language in a way which is potentially dangerous to our communities."

Gosh, and to imagine I was concerned about these groups.

This is the facet of this debate that leaves me puzzled, most especially with my brethren on the right. Do you really feel that the alphabet soup of acronyms above seek good things for this country? What makes you believe that? Is it something other than a good solid "because?"

The lessons of history are clear and unambiguous, immigration has always come with costs and benefits. Though our liberal indoctrination systems have beaten the truth out of textbooks and the classrooms until we believe that immigration can never be anything but an unalloyed good. Which is patent nonsense on it's face.

A reminder (this are details neglected by modern history texts, try not to be scared)...

By the 1920s, the overwhelming majority of Americans feared the new wave of immigrants. After the Haymarket bombing by foreign-born anarchists in Chicago in 1886, the rise of violent, radical and even revolutionary labor movements; the assassination of President McKinley in 1901 by a Polish anarchist; the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917; the rise of the Communist Party in the United States; the dramatic increase in the number of Polish, Slavic, Greeks and Italian Catholics, Chinese, Jews and others whose politics, culture, religion, dress, language and behavior were alien and troublesome to the majority of Americans, the electorate demanded that Congress dramatically curtail immigration. Anti-alien hysteria reached a peak in the "Red Scare" of 1919-1920. Bombings all over the country by terrorists led to the rounding up and deportation of Communists, radicals and revolutionaries.

Not an entirely pretty picture, no?

For those who consider themselves conservatives the lesson really should be clear, the importation of self identified leftists posed a danger then and poses a danger to the republic now. Yet conservatives become offended if you suggest that every individual looking to break into this country isn't a flag waving fan of Ronald Reagan. No matter how many foreign flags are flown by the hundreds of thousands at threatening protests in our streets. There are those who no matter the evidence will pooh-pooh it citing the "lessons of history" and that any restrictionist impulse is the work of 'nativism.'

Noted historian Otis Graham speaks to that in the earlier debate over immigration..."...take the restrictionist impulse of the 1890s-1920s. It cannot simply be stigmatized as racist and alarmist, though there was far too much of that. Restrictionism attracted some of the best minds in America, including many liberal clergymen, spokesmen for organized labor and the black community, and socialists. The case for restrictionism had a Leftist heritage as well as a Rightist one, which was unsurprising, since the impact of unlimited immigration fell most heavily upon America's working classes."

Yet today the hard left and the right are joined at the hip, without a whiskers difference between them. Labor has decided that it will represent those who have no business even being here, let alone working here.

Mr. Graham looks at these 'lessons.'

A distorted version of history also underlay the interpretation of what immigration had meant to American society in the decades prior to restriction. History was said to reveal a simple story, that mass immigration produced unalloyed benefits-economic growth and creative, lawabiding people like your grandparents and mine. 'there is truth in such statements, which are a part of a larger reality. Costs came with the benefits. Immigration displaced blacks from jobs and entire communities where they had established a foothold." It sharpened ethnic and racial conflict, and produced new interest groups whose influences on American foreign policy discussions were not always helpful in charting the best path ahead. Immigration on a virtually unlimited scale had skewed income distribution its a regressive direction, and restricting it in the 1920s permitted a trend the other way."

By all means let's have the debate. If you feel your great aunt Fannie's story is the curative for our modern immigration ills, fine, but don't be surprised or shocked when I mention the other side of the story.

The costs.

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