Looking over Stacy’s
post, I clicked through to Kathy Shaidle’s page, and found
myself confronted by my own ambiguity on immigration. I don’t
think the skeptical position is a bad one, and I certainly think
that characterizing immigration skeptics as racist is a
ridiculous venture (see also my review
of Geraldo Rivera’s
HisPanic). But there’s a simplicity of argument in
the paragraphs below I found jarring.
The well-documented (if largely ignored) phenomenon of
present-day Hispanic aliens’ disinclination to assimilate is
something patriotic Americans should condemn, not embrace.
Karl Rove’s ill-fated strategy of courting the Latino vote
didn’t help Republicans much in the last two elections. For
every illegal alien cum “future GOP donor/voter”, there are
dozens of non-Latino, law-abiding, tax paying citizens sick of
having to “press ONE for English.”
Does this mean ignoring the Latino vote? They are generally
socially conservative, and become small business owners given the
opportunity. There’s something wrong with offering government aid
to those who circumvent the law, certainly, but that has more to
do with the way government aid is distributed (if you offer it,
they will come).
I haven’t read Shaidle, and I’m sure her opinions on this are
well-documented (and probably well-substantiated). I don’t much
care to refer to Hispanic immigrants as “aliens,” if only because
“immigrants” is the more common word for legal immigrants, and
“aliens” is a legal status. As for whether they’re disinclined to
assimilate, I do see this as different from the
Italians, whose home country was not as close to their new
home as their old one. Living in ethnic neighborhoods and
cloistering, though, was entirely common, and just as much a
result of the negativity they faced from nativists as it was a
desire to be around their own.
When I hear “assimilation,” and then I hear that old Andy Rooney
bit about pressing one for English, it seems more like people are
annoyed that people are coming to this country with a bad grasp
of English. That’s not what immigration skeptics are
concerned about though — it can’t be, because of the way that
people have historically assimilated in the U.S. and that first
generations always have trouble leaning the language. (See also
my kind Vietnamese barber.) Pressing “one” is not
driving people to the voting booths.
What is, I think, is a concern that America is being redefined as
having a trill on the “r” and an accent on the “i.” That the
following generations will remain within their own groups,
leading to severe cultural segregation rather than blending.
Arguments that fall short of making this case tend to sound
simplistic, and worse, racist, when they’re handed down from a
time that the language needn’t have been so scrutinized.
I guess I’m saying that I’d like to hear someone argue about
immigration without sounding contemptuous of hispanics writ
large, or sounding like an undue burden has been placed on white
people whose calls are handled by machines. I don’t think they
are racists, but they’re using a lexicon that worked better in
the 80s or 90s.
