One of the big issues many have with immigration reform is the fear that a subset of individuals to whom we've granted the right to vote will use that right to recreate in the US the circumstances that caused them to leave their former homes. Of course they wouldn't do it intentionally, but the politicians will tempt them with promises. And the temptation may be too hard to resist.
In the old days school kids were taught that the US was a melting pot and that immigrants blended with those already here. Eventually they were all Americans. Now it seems less of a melting pot than a school cafeteria plate with dividers to keep the foods from mixing.
There are groups around who encourage immigrants to resist assimilation. Witness the foreign flags waved at various demonstrations. Here, for example.
That leads us to the reason for today's post, Senator Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) recently made a speech on the Senate floor in Spanish to help people who speak Spanish but not English to understand the proposed immigration bill. AmericanThinker.com makes this observation:
If Sen. Kaine is speaking Spanish on the Senate floor, then why aren't all DMVs, courthouses, classrooms, or even private businesses required to provide Spanish-language instruction or services? Many localities do. Anyone who knows a single thing about identity politics and the welfare state should understand that pandering begets more demands, and eventually an expanded welfare state.
This won't stop with Hispanics. Note that Sen. Kaine didn't speak Farsi, Japanese, Hindi, or Mandarin Chinese. But surely other minority groups won't sit by while Hispanics benefit from government services and the intangible benefits of being pandered to.
The lesson:
America is rapidly losing its identity as a nation and instead becoming an administrative entity for welfare provision. This awful process is sped along by the balkanization incited by Sen. Kaine, and every similar act of pandering, great and small.
Whose fault is it? John Fonte has an answer:
It is our fault, not theirs. For about 40 years since the 1970s, we have been sending the wrong message to newcomers. American elites (in universities, schools, the media, philanthropic organizations, corporations, government, and law) have promoted multiculturalism and ethnic-gender-linguistic group consciousness at the expense of Americanization, patriotic integration, and individual citizenship.
And he has a solution, however dreamy it might sound:
This would mean, first and foremost, removing federal barriers to patriotic assimilation by cutting off all government funding for multicultural and bilingual education and diversity training, and the like, before determining whether the we should embark on a new low-skilled guest-worker program.
We should promote a truly welcoming system of patriotic integration, based on equality of individual citizenship (not group rights), that would seize the moral high ground by removing all federal government barriers to full Americanization — and do so now, while immigration policy has captured national attention.
Will politicians go along with that? We can hope.
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