I know people who are strict assimilationists. To them, if you are going to be in their America, coming from somewhere else, you better quickly get yourself to be just like them. White, Christian, speak perfect English (so they can understand you) employed, healthy and on the path to citizenship. I’m guessing that they are proud of our indigenous people for not having those rules for those who crossed the ocean blue and landed in America. The term “assimilation” began to be used at that time and referred to the process of monitoring indigenous lives using non-indigenous benchmarks. The forced assimilation of native people to European-American values caused the degradation and isolation of the Native American cultures.
Merriam-Webster defines assimilation as “the process through which individuals and groups of differing heritages acquire the basic habits, attitudes and mode of life of an embracing culture.” Our culture often has not been embracing of those who came to America. Many found that coming to America was not all the thought it would be. The Irish immigrants come to mind – never mind that the Irish came to escape horrific famine – and were persecuted because of remnants of English ideas as to who should be in what was then their America.
Everyone knows of Ellis Island located east of the Island of Manhattan. But, as immigrants arrived at five major ports in the 18th and 19th centuries, New York, Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia and New Orleans, what is not commonly known is that there were more than seventy federal immigrant entry stations in the United States at the same time.
Blacklash to immigration today comes from a rise of nationalistic populism proponnets who want no part of anyone not like themselves. Those vulnerable to believe the deception that immigrants are just plain bad people who come here to take jobs (thereby displacing Americans), bring their hoodlum gangs, rapists and thieves and want to replace Christianity need to immerse themselves in the history of our country, research their own genealogy and embrace what they will find by doing so.
…and research Emma Lazarus.