Immigration Threat? Maybe.

The following is a note I wrote in reply to a friend's sending me an article warning of the perils of multiculturalism and multilingualism in the U.S.

Thank you also forwarding this article. I am sympathetic to much of what I read. I too believe that the strength of this country, the most vibrant and successful country in the world, is our culture – the melting pot, not the salad bowl. I am appalled by what is happening in England, France, and some other parts of Europe because of their anti-assimilation policies. I have three observations to make, though.

First, having led ESL classes of immigrants (legal and illegal – we never ask) for over eleven years now, I find that the vast majority are eager, sometimes desperate, to assimilate. Their children quite often learn to understand the parents’ native language, but many do not ever learn to speak it fluently. The grandchildren are usually mono-lingual, and that one language is English.

As a caveat, there are places in the US – Miami, L.A., the Texas border, Chinatowns in many large cities, Boston’s Italian North End and Irish South Boston & Dorchester – where immigrants live in ghettos and perpetuate their native cultures and languages. It’s sad. Many of them do not want to assimilate, it’s true. Those people are inevitably poor. The business owners among them are always bilingual, and I’ve seen plenty of cases (especially among the Chinese) where these leaders exploit their countrymen and discourage assimilation of any kind. Then there is the slave trade, alive and well in pockets such as Immokalee and in alll big U.S. cities.

So there are exceptions. But I am certain that the vast majority of immigrants are dying to learn our language and blend into our culture. My friend Jose Tarrio and brother-in-law Ingo Zacher are no less American than my wife Jane McEleney Coiné. The first two are immigrants; Jane is the daughter of immigrants, and grew up in Dorchester, where even fifth-generation Americans still call themselves Irish, not American.

Second, my company works with numerous corporations, both in Boston and across the country. With a few exceptions such as financial services, there is no industry that is not dependant on immigrant labor – including illegal immigrant labor. So long as those illegals are able to provide legal-seeming documents, even the most law-abiding companies end up employing them by accident. I’m not claiming that companies like or prefer these workers (though the do!); I’m saying that they would have to shut their doors immediately were their immigrant labor pool to vanish. I can guarantee you that the farms, landscaping services, and construction services in Florida, and the entire state of Massachusetts, would simply cease to function without these workers. Americans don’t want menial and factory jobs, and that’s a great thing! It means that our native workers are getting better jobs.

My third observation is that we will never rid ourselves of the press of desperate immigrants trying to get into our country any way they can until those countries rid themselves of corruption and begin to develop their own free societies and thriving economies. If I were poor in Latin America, or even distant Ghana, I would do all in my power to get to this wonderful country, and worry about my legal status later. I don’t think we’re doing enough, both governmentally and privately, to help these countries turn around.

Thank you for indulging me. Warm regards, Ted