Melting Pot Bubbling Along

Immigrants from the British Isles and Northern Europe, some argue, gave America its core values, its laws, its manners and customs. As for later immigrants, they were stereotyped as eternal foreigners, unwilling to assimilate and endlessly posing a threat to American culture. Such was said of Italian, Asian and Afro-Caribbean immigrants, even of the Mexicans who had long populated large stretches of the Southwest. Yet all these people assimilated and brought something fresh to the culture.

But the suspicions about immigrant “foreignness” have never entirely disappeared. An outbreak of anti-immigrant hysteria in California, in the midst of the polarized gubernatorial election of 1994, left the state with the divisive Proposition 187. Now that California is under new leadership, and buoyed by a prosperous economy, nativist hostility has subsided. And it turns out that the latest immigrants behave just as their predecessors did.

That news comes from research by Gregory Rodriguez, a scholar associated with Pepperdine University, in a report for the National Immigration Forum. Using information from the 1990 census and annual updates, Rodriguez demonstrates that today’s immigrants “slowly, often painfully, but quite assuredly, embrace the cultural norms that are part of life in the United States.”

Rodriguez came to that conclusion by studying four decisions considered key measures of an immigrant’s commitment to his adopted country: acquiring citizenship, learning English, buying a home and marrying a member of another ethnic group.

Becoming a citizen is in many ways the most difficult decision an immigrant can make, but in 1990 more than three-quarters of all immigrants who had been in the United States for at least 40 years had been naturalized.

What about learning English? The study found that three out of four immigrants spoke English well or very well within 10 years of their arrival. Almost 61% of immigrants owned homes within 20 years of coming to America, and intermarriage among various ethnicities was broad and growing.

These findings deal a blow to stereotypes promoted by both radical nativists and multiculturalists who advise immigrants not to assimilate but rather to accentuate their differences with mainstream America. Rodriguez and the National Immigration Forum see the melting pot for what it is, the strength of America.