Immigrants from way back when
Michael Linn Jones wrote an interesting article at the Gun Toting Liberal about assimilation:
Assimilating; the act of blending into, is reversed in a bizarre mirroring of what normally accompanies large influxes of people. Instead of learning the native language and culure, it’s the other way around. The native population, which includes those born here as well as those who have endured the legal nightmare of becoming citizens, is to accomodate newcomers.
You cannot fit assimilation and accommodation within the same sentence, so to speak. They are incompatible when it comes to blending an existing society to mature into a stronger bond than it was before. In fact, it weakens it.
It is natural to perceive a foreign land at first glance much like a cartoon. The money is weird, the people dress funny; they speak in exotic languages or accents. Part of the mind wrongly tells us that we will return to reality when we return home. Hence the phrase, “fool on a holiday.�
[…]
Sad to say, Americans like to say we are a nation of laws, not men. But that is changing too. And eventually, if not already, the image of “the ugly American� is being supplanted by that of “the ugly immigrant.�
Read the whole thing at the Gun Toting Liberal.
This issue is quite black and white, at least for me. As I see it, every immigrant’s motto should be (slight adaption from the original): “ask not what your new country can do for you, ask what you can do for your new country”. The ‘new’ motherland of an immigrant, doesn’t owe that immigrant anything. Instead, one could argue, the immigrant owes his new motherland (a lot): his new motherland provides him with security and, at least in the West, with more opportunities than one – perhaps – could ever dream of (compared to one’s ex-country).
If one moves to another country, it is completely logical for one to adapt as much as possible to the culture of that other country, no matter how ‘painful’ it might be.
Those who do so, deserve respect and support, those who refuse to… might consider going back to where they came from.
