http://www.washingtontimes.com/commentary/20060823-084118-3160r.htm
Immigration's new ingredients
By Arnold Beichman
August 24, 2006
One of the great miracles that is America has been the 19th and 20th century
achievement of accepting, even welcoming, millions of immigrants from all
corners of the globe and leaving them alone as they and their children
acclimated themselves to the joys of opportunity in our democracy. What
other country would have accepted as a symbol of its unquestioning
hospitality the deserved implantation of the Statue of Liberty in New York's
spacious harbor?
Maurice Cranston, the late British philosopher, once described "the
almost miraculous achievement in the United States [of] a community of near
equals out of an immigrant stock of enormous diversity." The achievement, he
said, "was not the work of America's political institutions; it was the work
of American social institutions, schools, churches, neighborhood
associations and such like."
And these social institutions worked in harmony with the political
institutions. Between 1890 and 1914, several million Jews came to this
country from Eastern Europe, and from czarist Russia. Many more newcomers
migrated from China, Mexico, Italy and everywhere else. We used to call it
the "melting pot." Today we call this phenomenon ethnic pluralism.
The migration of Jews from Europe continued into 1940 as they sought to
escape from the spread of Nazism from Germany into the rest of Europe.
Professor Deborah Dash Moore in her book "At Home in America" wrote that it
was the second-generation New York Jews who provided all of American Jewry
with the model for a "type of ethnicity consonant with middle-class American
values." And that model was adopted by other immigrants, as it had been by
the earlier generations of Irish Catholic immigrants.
The reason I cite these findings is that none of these immigrant
generations to the U.S. produced in perilous quantities bomb throwers,
terrorists, saboteurs, vandals, whatever. Yes, there were vicious gangsters,
from Al Capone, Italian-American, to Lepke Buchalter, Jewish-American, but
they and their fellow gangsters either committed mayhem against each other
or against recalcitrant saloonkeepers. Ordinary citizens were safe except,
say, for the occasional storekeeper who demurred at paying the mobs'
"protection" money.
What these immigrant generations produced in great numbers were men and
women who had never known patriotism in lands of their birth but found it
easy to respect if not love the country in which they had settled. My
father, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, went to night school after working all
day so he could learn how to pass the naturalization test and become an
American citizen. And it was a proud father who went into an election booth
in 1932 to cast his first vote ever for Franklin D. Roosevelt. He paid no
attention to my youthful plea that he should vote for Socialist Norman
Thomas.
All this is in sharp contrast to the yakking about "alienation,"
"dominant social pressures," "ethnic discrimination," and other sociological
jargon. My father, and millions of other immigrants like him, wouldn't have
known what today's apologists for terror were talking about.
All that was long ago. Today we have a new kind of would-be immigrant,
one whose assigned priority is utter destruction of four democratic states,
America, Britain, Canada and Spain, as representatives of Western
civilization.
Many of these new Middle East immigrants, prepared to destroy our
Judeo-Christian value system, are unassimilatable. And we have not found a
way, if there is one, to eliminate this threat. The truth is that so long as
we remain a democracy there is no way to eradicate this peril.
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