Professor claims assimilation is a RESULT of mass immigration

If this were true, of course, then we'd already be "assimilated" into one worldwide culture.

This cannot go unFisked. Peter D. Salins, an academic from SUNY, deposited a load in the New York Times today; if this sort of stuff is what passes for well-reasoned, intellectual newspaper Op-Eds these days, subscription rates cannot fall fast enough for my taste. Hopefully, Salins will not convince anyone who has shed the collar and leash of the multicult. Based on my review of his past work, he earnestly believes his own drivel, and that is indeed a shame.

Assimilation Nation - New York Times

In the debate over the redesign of this country's immigration policies, Americans often lose sight of the project's overriding objective. Immigration reform is urgently needed not to fill gaps in our labor force, or to accommodate pro- or anti-immigrant voters, but to ensure that all immigrants, present and future, are integrated into American civic and social life - or, to use an unfashionable phrase, assimilated.

Lose sight assimilation as the overriding objective? What planet does this guy live on? Let's take a bit of an objective look his thesis. I personally can recall almost zero discussion of assimilation by any of our politicians, save Tancredo and Sensenbrenner. This statement is so audacious, I had to do a bit of poking around. My first thought was to do a Google News search another likely candidate term regarding this immigration mess we're in: "amnesty." Most of the search results were for US MSM articles posted within the last two days.

Here are the results:
Amnesty - "about 8,100"
Assimilation - "about 748"

If assimilation were your ECG, you'd be dead.

My second thought was to look at the same two terms over time. So I visited Google Trends and came up with the following graph, which tracks back to early 2004:

Amnesty is not only more of a popular search term than assimilation, it is more volatile. I don't know exactly what inferences to draw into this, and I will have to study and think about this more. I'd say that we're getting close to proving that Professor Salins is out of his gourd in thinking that the Senate's objective is assimilation.

But there's more. Beneath the graphs in Google Trends are aggregate rankings of cities represented in the search:

There's something strange about what folks are thinking about in the beltway, I think. Amnesty rules the roost in Washington...no surprises here.

While I think I've revealed that Salins bill of goods is a no sale, I'll press on. After all, this is a Fisking, right?

The failure to absorb immigrants is the bane of most nations with large immigrant populations, as exemplified by France's recent turmoil. The key to assimilation in the United States has been our openness to large-scale immigration and tolerance of ethnic and religious differences. But it has also depended heavily on laws and policies that have allowed legal immigrants to become American in every sense.

I don't know whay, but this professor seems to want you to remain ignorant to the fact that there have been important pauses and lulls in our immigration flow, most notably - thanks to the Johnson-Reed Act - between 1924 and 1965. America has never really been "tolerant" of immigrants either; I suspect that on some level, Teddy Kennedy's career-long immigration reform fixation is rooted in animosity for the way in which his Irish immigrant ancestors were treated. The professor is either ignorant (which I doubt), or wants YOU to remain ignorant, to the treatment of Catholics in early America. Professor Salins employs the logical fallacy of "appeal to belief." The man may have some severe delusions about this issue.

Clearly, the 11 million to 12 million undocumented immigrants now here can never assimilate, whether they want to or not. Their illegal status will keep them from being accepted by their American neighbors, regardless of their virtue or utility. Thus, legalizing their status is essential.

If the current crop of criminal interlopers is made legal, the skids have already been greased by "diversityphiles" and the multicult to assure that a group this big, speaking mostly the same alien language, posessing knowledge only of socialist and oppressive systems, will remain ensconced within its diaspora to be milked by unethical businessmen and the kleptocratic leaders of the countries where their families and alligiances still reside. Salins is a cheerleader for assimilation, which is laudable, but he has no grasp of how America, historically, has acheived it. I don't care if he writes 100 books on the subject, mass immigration will never lead to assimilation, history strongly suggests it can only lead to the downfall of nations.

The more problematic issue is the status of future immigrants, and that is where several proposals for immigration reform go awry. The most troublesome of these ideas, heavily promoted by immigration proponents, would allow in a large cohort of guest workers. Guest workers (a group that would soon grow into the millions), by definition, will never become Americans. Like the Turks in Germany and guest workers in other European nations, many will not return to their native countries once their work permits are up, thus inevitably becoming the next generation of illegal aliens. Yet, the favored solution of immigration hard-liners, sealing the border, is untenable unless we also expand legal immigration pathways.

I'm actually in agreement with his thoughts on "guest workers." But his claim about a need for coupling enforcement with expansion of legal immigration is not backed by anything he wrote. He threw this out there as if it is a given, which isn't even a means of making a point, it's a symptom of being so enamored by his own words that nothing else matters.

Thus, a successful immigration reform package must consist of three components. First, as the bill stalled in the Senate envisions, we must put the illegal immigrants already here on a secure path to legal residency and ultimate citizenship. Second, we must enlarge the quota of legal new entrants, but not through the kind of guest worker program being proposed. Instead, we should allow an equivalent number of immigrants (300,000 to 400,000) to enter annually with permanent resident visas, but under a different set of rules.

I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry here. This guy is the freaking provost and vice-chancellor of a major university and he cannot avail himself with even the most rudimentary tools of persuasion! What has he written that would lead any thinking person to be led to his three-point conclusion? I guarantee you that right this minute there are thousands of 13-year-old girls across America writing more convincing arguments in their diaries. And this guy got column inches in the New York Times? I guess it pays to have a stack of sheepskin.

As it stands, there are only four major eligibility criteria for immigrants: family ties, sponsored employment in a few skill areas, documented persecution or selection in a visa lottery. But the majority of those wanting to come here do not have close American relatives, the right skills or proof of persecution. And the lottery offers slim odds.

And two of those criteria, family ties and the visa lottery, are not related in any way to creating a better America. We should do away with them. I'll buy-in to the notion that America should help the persecuted, to a certain extent. But we should never again allow ourselves to be made a safety valve for the Fidel Castros of the world.

A fairer approach, and one that offers future immigrants enough hope of success to discourage border-jumping, would award entry on a first-come basis, placing all potential immigrants (with clean records) on a waiting list, possibly giving favorable weighting to applicants from the Western Hemisphere, or those with desirable characteristics like proficiency in English.

Fairer to whom? Certainly not to America's blacks, low-skilled and to the those who are making strides toward the middle class. Further, what's this garbage about favorable weighting to applicants from the Western Hemisphere? Why not the Northern Hemisphere? Is there some kind of ethnic preference being masked in pretty words here? I think so.

Opening up a better pathway for legal immigrants that paves the way for their full acceptance and citizenship would allow us to deal more forcefully with the third component of a reformed immigration policy: stanching illegal immigration. The logistical challenges to border control will remain formidable, but with an enlarged quota in place and more effective enforcement (including deportation and employer sanctions), the motivation for immigrants to enter illegally and for American employers to hire them should lessen considerably.

He admits it will be formidable, but still wants to go full-steam-ahead with a vast expansion of legal immigration and leave it to government to administer? Give me a break. I keep getting the feeling Salins covertly doesn't like the core culture that founded this nation.

This three-pronged approach will allow the United States to remain both a beacon for immigrants and a unified society, all of whose residents eventually become Americans in self-conception as well as legal fact. Advocates of liberalization are wrong to justify immigration primarily as a way to recruit workers for our most difficult or poorly paid occupations; labor unions and other restrictionists are wrong to oppose it primarily because it might depress wages or raise social welfare costs. Not only are these arguments empirically dubious, they are also beside the point.

"Beacon for immigrants." That's the kicker. He's tranformed Winthrop's "city on a hill" from an example for the world into the Statue of Liberty's torch as a bug lamp.

Any immigration policy that focuses on the labor market or national and state budgets can generate only transitory benefits, if any, while its failure to assure the assimilation of the millions of immigrants among us will surely cause permanent harm.

It took him a whole article to write a complete sentence with which I agree strongly. But his means for reaching it will not get him, or us, from point A to point B without disaster befalling us first.

Peter D. Salins, the provost and vice chancellor of the State University of New York, is the author of "Assimilation, American Style."

Peter may be well-intended, but his assumption that more immigration improves the chances of assimilation makes no sense. It is dangerous when anyone with his credentials (perhaps Peter Principled) is given a forum to spread dangerous and unsubstantiatable ideas. I'd love for assimilation to be front and center in this debate, but it just isn't. It remains locked away by monied interests that just don't care about America's long-term future. I'm sure that Salins knows this as well as anyone, so it is a damn shame that he appears to be so unwittingly helpful to them. It is a bigger shame that he is not advocating an enforcement first and before anything else.

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