Without a proper system of immigration and assimilation, America will not remain the same country.
When I was growing up in North Carolina in the 1980s, a Chinese restaurant in town had its walls covered with photos of Marines and always gave a discount to any Marine who walked through its doors. The story behind the restaurant is remarkable.
It was founded by an immigrant who, as an impoverished child in China at the end of World War II, had been befriended by a company of Marines. They essentially “adopted” him and gave him his own bunk in a barracks and a Marine uniform, taught him English and basic drills, and sent him to a Christian religious school in China, which they paid for. When the Marines left when the Communists took over, “Charlie Two Shoes” as the Marines called him (“two shoes” being their best approximation of Tsui, his last name) was persecuted by the Communist government due to his friendship with the Americans. The government imprisoned him for years and then sentenced him to house arrest upon his release.
After a series of challenges, Charlie was miraculously able to get in touch with his old Marine buddies. As China was opening up in 1983, they arranged for him to immigrate to America, where he settled in North Carolina, started a Chinese restaurant, and eventually became a U.S. citizen. His various children generally thrived in America. Some ran the restaurant while others became doctors and pharmacists. In 2013, Charlie became the 18th honorary United States Marine. That same year, he accompanied some of his old Marine buddies on a trip back to China, his first visit since leaving 30 years prior.
My point is not to recount Charlie’s life story (already the subject of a book) but to use it as an extreme example of patriotic assimilation. He became loyal to America and its traditions even while living in a foreign country. He never forgot that loyalty even after years of punishment by the hand of the Communists. Charlie then moved to an American town (rather than an ethnic enclave), became an American citizen, embraced America’s predominantly Christian religion, and never forgot the people who brought him here.
I thought of Charlie’s story immediately when reading Andrew Beck’s essay, “Assimilation and Its Discontents.” Charlie’s devotion to America presents a striking contrast to the Indian immigrants who built the very large statue to Hanuman that Beck finds so troubling. This doesn’t so much tell us about Chinese vs. Indian immigration, as it describes two very different cultural moments in America.
The example of Charlie belies the contention that there are some groups of immigrants that can’t or won’t assimilate, though some will assimilate more easily than others (and we should prioritize immigrants from these groups to the extent we admit anyone). The inability or unwillingness of those who built the giant Hanuman statue to assimilate suggests there is something different about contemporary circumstances that was not true even 40 years ago that makes assimilation more difficult.
When Charlie arrived in North Carolina, the state was only about 0.4% Asian American—and this percentage had almost quadrupled from a decade earlier. It was a very new community that was very much finding its way. The noted comic actor Ken Jeong grew up in North Carolina at that time, living a stereotypically American childhood which he has recalled fondly in interviews.
A friend of mine who lived down the street when I was growing up was also a member of this small Asian American minority. In a town with very few Asian Americans—there wasn’t a choice of whether to fit in with the majority—she wholeheartedly adopted Southern culture, was a star student and a star athlete, and generally fit in exceptionally well in the community. She still lives in North Carolina today.
When I look at my closest American friends whose families are originally from the Indian subcontinent, it is largely a similar story to these Chinese immigrants. They grew up in small-town Wisconsin, eastern Oregon, rural Pennsylvania, or the (then overwhelmingly white) Seattle exurbs. Harmeet Dhillon, who is doing an outstanding job as the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, was probably the only Indian American family in her town in rural North Carolina.
These immigrants were immersed in the culture of traditional America and embraced our cultural touchstones, tastes, mores, and values. While of course they presumably kept some of the culture and even religious views of their parents’ birthplaces at home, the most “Indian” thing about them was their skin color. They are generally more conservative and more patriotic than the vast majority of striver academic white Americans I grew up with. So it’s not a question of whether certain groups of people can assimilate—it’s whether we are creating an environment that encourages them to do so.
Assimilation Nation
As Beck notes, the story of assimilation is as old as the story of America. I still remember a dinner party when I was a kid when my parents (who grew up in Ohio and Arizona but have now lived in North Carolina for almost half a century) remarked to a friend that it took a long time of living in the state to be fully accepted by the locals. I responded with something like, “Yeah, like you might have to live here TEN years,” leading to gales of laughter from the adults in the room who understood that the Civil War was still very much a live issue in the region. My high school history teacher grew up in rural NC and was taught that Abraham Lincoln was “the Devil” (his words), though he presented a far more positive view of Lincoln in class!
So as a Midwestern outsider, I too had to assimilate—to try to fit in and embrace the Southern culture around me even though it had not been the culture of my parents. Anyone who has ever done that will tell you there are times when you are uncomfortable or feel left out, maybe even the butt of an occasional joke. But in the end it is worth it. As the Book of Ruth says, “Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” This also perfectly describes the end goal of patriotic assimilation.
People from all backgrounds can become good Americans. Indians can become good Americans, Chinese can become good Americans, Mexicans can become good Americans. Non-Christians can become good Americans. Some of those on the further Right may bristle at that statement, pointing out that under the original 1790 Naturalization Act, this was not true—citizenship was restricted to whites, and America was almost universally Christian.
But that hasn’t been true for more than a century (Mexican Americans could become citizens with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, for example). The median Japanese American family came to the U.S. 125 years ago. They have shared in our culture and have fought in our wars (the all-Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team was the most decorated in World War II). Almost two-thirds of Japanese Americans are intermarried—overwhelmingly to white Americans. Even in less diverse states like Montana, where I live now, in 1870 the population was 10% Chinese, a higher percentage than in California at the time. Certainly whites were by far the predominant group in the historic American story, but to write immigrant groups like this out of America’s story is simply wrong as a matter of history.
This is not to say that race or ethnicity are irrelevant to American identity. Historically, we were both a nation that subscribed to certain creeds and was overwhelmingly of European origin. And to the extent we are a creedal nation, our Christian culture—including the secularized version of that culture—is part of that creed.
But the conservative writer and Blaze host Auron MacIntyre has rightly said that “there is play in the joints” of the definition of Americanness. Yet for those who insist America is just a creedal nation, what are those creeds? And do we deport those who don’t subscribe to them or understand them in the approved way? That the obvious answer to the latter question is no suggests the notion of America as a purely “creedal nation” is farcical.
MacIntyre has compared America to the mythical Greek ship of Theseus. If every rotting board is eventually replaced, is it still the same ship? For most people, the answer would depend on the percentage of original boards replaced and the rate at which they were replaced. How similar to the original boards are the replacement boards? And does the ship have the same design it originally had? Thinking about American identity in this way gives us a better sense of what real assimilation looks like.
Unfortunately, we haven’t had that level of healthy assimilation in recent decades. The number of new immigrants is far too high to assimilate effectively, and our public culture is too attenuated to even try. This leads us to an America with 52-foot statues of Hanuman multiplied many times over. Should that be illegal? While the most hardcore Christian nationalists will not agree, clearly the answer is no. People have a First Amendment right to express their views, especially religious ones. But what message does it send about assimilating to American norms?
The Spirit Behind the Law
President Washington favored limited immigration in which, “by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants get assimilated to our customs measures and laws. In a word soon become one people.” James Madison argued we should “exclude those” who “would not incorporate themselves” into our society. Jefferson and Hamilton likewise demanded absolute patriotic assimilation of all immigrants. Though the giant Hanuman statue does not violate America’s laws, it certainly would seem to violate the Founders’ spirit.
As Beck observes,
[P]luralism is not an end in itself. It is the fruit of a Christian order that’s confident enough to tolerate minority views, because it assumes its own cultural hegemony. If that majority is disregarded and that confidence eroded, pluralism becomes its opposite: a Babel of conflicting gods and moralities, doomed to be abandoned and fall.
What he does not state is that such a process unfortunately is likely to involve a great deal of violence, as the nature of American identity is bitterly contested. This isn’t even the fault of the immigrants themselves, but it points to the failure of our immigration and assimilation strategy.
There are over 5.1 million immigrants in Texas, including over 450,000 Indian immigrants. In 1940 there were a little more than 2,000 Indians in all of America. In 1980, there were fewer Indian Americans in America (native-born or immigrant) than there are Indian immigrants in Texas alone today. The pace of the uncontrolled demographic transformation of America—even just within my lifetime—has been breathtaking. One does not need to be hostile to Indian Americans or even India (a country in which I have lived and traveled extensively!) to observe that this presents difficult challenges.
America can survive—and even thrive—as a multiethnic country, though it should always be working toward building a stable supermajority ethnos that defines the nation. This ethnos, like the Ship of Theseus, can change to some degree over many years while still remaining American. But it cannot change infinitely.
When it comes to immigration, we can be a country of limited, orderly legal immigration that demands that newcomers assimilate to American norms. Or we can be a country of an immigration free-for-all, with legal and illegal immigrants flooding our borders by the millions, hotly contesting—and ultimately overthrowing—our sense of American identity and culture.
We can be a country of a limited number of Charlie Two Shoes who wholly embrace American identity. Or we can be a country that imports millions of people from all over the world who embrace neither America’s traditional God nor America’s traditional culture. Neither path is forbidden by law—but only one vision of immigration can fit with America’s customs and traditions as the Founders envisioned them.
