The one thing relevant here that distinguishes the United States from all of the European nations, as well as Britain, is this: The United States of America is a nation founded upon ideas. Not ethnicity. Not language. Ideas. And this is why immigration has from the beginning been the strength of this nation.
Immigrants came here because of those ideas, my ancestors, your ancestors, all of us, because yes, we are a nation of immigrants. And the reason this has always been our strength is that those immigrants came here for those ideas upon which the nation was founded. Those immigrants had something to assimilate to: the ideas.
Because, you see, assimilation here really has little to do with whether or not you eat pierogis every Sunday or wear a sari. Assmilation is not a cultural or ethnic concept. Assimilation is coming here and adopting the ideas enshrined in our founding documents:
Our ancestors, immigrants all, came here for liberty and opportunity. The came to find a nation very different from their own, an imperfect nation to be sure, but one in which they could flourish, if they worked hard to improve themselves. Our ancestors had ideas to which they could assimilate; being an American meant believing in those ideas and working for them in their lives. It did not mean belonging to a specific class, or family, or ethnic or racial group.
Yet, there are those who fight to dismantle this, the multiculturalism warriors, who do not believe in those founding ideas themselves, and twist assimilation into some kind of ethnic mold. But they don’t concern me here. I don’t believe they will succeeed, because in order to do so, they have to destroy everything upon which this nation is based.
But they, and the US, are not my concern here. Europe, Britain, and Britain’s liberated colonies are.
If I put myself mentally in the place of an immigrant to Britain (or Canada, or Australia, or wherever), I find that I have no goal. To what do I assimilate?
That’s the crucial question these nations must address, now that free, multiculti non-assimilative immigration is proving to be (obviously) a serious problem. What do these immigrants have to hold on to, what do they reach for?
The question exists because all of the nations are founded on ethnicity, language, or common history. Language is easy enough, but the other two are insurmountable barriers. I, as an immigrant to London, do not share either the ethnicity or the common history of the English, and I never can have them. I am an ausländer, whether I want to be or not. It makes no difference whether I am from Bangladesh or the United States. I will never be British, even if I live there for the rest of my life, because I have no idea what it means to be British.
This is the problem these nations must face, now that they are becoming hotbeds of terrorist training grounds because of their laissez-faire “live just like you did wherever you came from” approach to immigration.
I was following comment and trackback links from my Flight 93 article, and found myself on Crittermusings, a Canadian blog. One of the comments started me thinking about what it means to be an American, and I ended up here. And this is what I want to ask.
What does it mean to be Canadian? Or British? Or Australian?
These are not rhetorical; I mean these questions honestly.
Here in the States, conservatism is by no means monolithic, but is rather the true big tent. George Will, in his column Goldwater would be proud, discusses this, and defines as the central tenets of conservatism, “muscular foreign policy backing unapologetic nationalism.” But that nationalism in turn springs from those fundamental ideas upon which our nation is founded.
It seems that all these other nations need to finally address this question. What does it mean to be a citizen of our nation? Obviously from all the columns written after the London bombings, endlessly asking the same questions, liking cricket or rugby or being schooled in the UK are superficial. These sorts of things do not underlie and create a community. Shared values and ideals create a community.
What, then, are the shared values and ideals in Britain, or Candada, or Australia? When you expect your immigrants to assimilate, what exactly are they assimilating to?
And we come back to the essential poison of multiculturalism, which does not create, but rather destroys communities, because it encourages immigrants to share no values, no ideas, nothing with their hosts.
It’s all about ideas. And even though we have serious problems with immigration, it will always be worse elsewhere, until other nations confront the question our Founding Fathers confronted two centuries ago.
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