Assimilation, American Culture, and Johnny

Over at Redstate (to which this is cross-posted) Absentee’s excellent post on why the anti-illegal immigration movement needs to expel the racists and bigots from within its ranks and engendered a healthy debate and discussion.

One of the things I found most interesting is the oft-expressed view that we, as a nation, must focus on assimilating immigrants. English as a national language is a common theme, and many opine that legal employment, citizenship, and various benefits be contingent on a showing that the immigrant want to learn, absorb, and assimilate American culture.

I’ve been engaged in past debates on the issue, but I’ve realized there’s an aspect to this that hasn’t been much discussed.

I believe that if we put into place a set of requirements for assimilation — which, by the way, we absolutely should, including English language as a required skill — then it is quite likely that within a short period of time, the immigrant will be more American than the citizen.

There is little doubt that the state of civics education in American is abysmal. According to one study, less than half of college seniors know that the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” comes from the Declaration of Independence. Only 42.7% of college seniors know that NATO was founded to resist Soviet aggression. These are college seniors, at some of our top institutions like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. They’re not high school dropouts, or drug addicted homeless people.

If you went out into the streets of any major city, randomly stopped passersby and asked them to name:

1. Their two senators

2. The four main characters in Sex and the City

I have no doubt that you would find the result shocking.

The number of American citizens who believe that a tax refund is the government giving them money is simply unbelievable. Those who believe that they have a constitutional right to education is frightening.

American citizens, born and bred, speak and write English as if it were not their first language. If a literacy test were to become a requirement for employment, I wonder how many citizens would be able to pass it.

None of these observations are meant to suggest that we do not need enforcement of our borders. Nor are they meant to suggest that we need not focus on efforts to assimilate those who come to the United States looking for opportunity.

They are, however, meant to suggest that we not have a double standard as it comes to the citizen vs. the immigrant.

Knowledge of basic American history, American system of laws, our federal form of government, our rights and duties under the Constitution, basic economics of the free market capitalist system we toil in, are these things unimportant to the citizen?

I know that amongst conservative circles, I am preaching to the choir. I know that conservatives for the most part fully support the idea of increased civics education for our youth, and bemoan the state of ignorance run rampant in our citizenry that cares more about American Idol than the American Presidential Elections.

But such is not necessarily the case in the body politic. Whether it’s through laziness, through indoctrination, through being too busy, or what, fact is that the American citizen is busy debasing his own heritage and culture. To demand that the newcomer then learn all those things that he himself doesn’t know is the height of hypocrisy, and could not withstand scrutiny along the lines of darker motives.

I believe now that any effort towards assimilating immigrants to American society and culture must be tightly coupled with efforts towards greater civic education throughout the population. That government schools should absolutely require civics goes without saying. That American people themselves undertake a renewed interest in their own nation’s history, institutions, and culture is imperative. For who is the immigrant to assimilate to if not the citizen? And who better to teach an immigrant the values of our country, if not his citizen neighbors and coworkers and peers?

Today, those values are all about People magazine, Entertainment Tonight, and the NFL. Let’s not kid ourselves here.

And as long as that remains the case, any effort at forcing immigrants to learn the history and culture of their newly adopted country is doomed to failure. Or worse, the citizen will find that their nation will be redefined by immigrants, who after all, know more about it than they do. Then whose country is it really?

I don’t know that greater civic education and engagement by citizens is a prior condition to assimilation requirements — I am a fan of greater requirements for immigrants myself. And I’m an immigrant, with immigrant parents and family members. But it is a condition.

Let’s get to work, conservatives.

-TS