Teaching Immigrants to Love America
Bookworm at Bookworm Room on Mar 31 2006 at 10:21 am | Filed under: Culture Watch, Feature Article, Illegal Immigration
In a rather stumbling way, I asked why immigrants don’t love America, and said that I wished our schools would be required to teach students what’s great about America. Ironically, one day later, the Wall Street Journal published Peggy Noonan’s elegant, lyrical reflection on the same point. She begins by speaking of Medal of Freedom winners, those extraordinary men (and one woman, I think), who without thought were willing to sacrifice themselves to preserve American freedoms. From there, she transitions to the conundrum of modern American immigrants, who want what we offer but hate what we are:
There are a variety of things driving American anxiety about illegal immigration and we all know them–economic arguments, the danger of porous borders in the age of terrorism, with anyone able to come in.
But there’s another thing. And it’s not fear about “them.” It’s anxiety about us.
It’s the broad public knowledge, or intuition, in America, that we are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically. And if you don’t do that, you’ll lose it all.
We used to do it. We loved our country with full-throated love, we had no ambivalence. We had pride and appreciation. We were a free country. We communicated our pride and delight in this in a million ways–in our schools, our movies, our popular songs, our newspapers. It was just there, in the air. Immigrants breathed it in. That’s how the last great wave of immigrants, the European wave of 1880-1920, was turned into a great wave of Americans.
What’s so sad is that it’s no longer fringies dirtying our history. We’ve raised a whole generation that has internalized the fringies message and is passing it on to the next generation, both native-born and immigrant.
America, Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan, Medal of Freedom, immigrants, illegal immigration, borders, our country
