Following up on my last post, I was reminded of an engineering meeting I participated in at a client’s site. The client was a large, Fortune 500 company and the meeting was a status meeting about a new product they were introducing. The product had been installed in a number of beta sites and, frankly, the results had been pretty disastrous. With various modifications and many sleepless nights we had remedied all of the problems as they arose but it was a grueling process.
The Director of Engineering summed up the situation like this: “What worries me is that these are the easy cases. Will the next installations be harder?”
Over the last century and a half or so, the U. S. has had several waves of immigrants. Prior to the American Civil War the wave was composed of the Irish and Germans, particularly Germans from the West Rhine and Westphalia. After the Civil War the wave was composed of more Germans and Scandinavians. Around the turn of the last century the wave of immigrants was composed of Eastern and Southern Europeans.
Our most recent wave of immigrants has mostly been composed of Mexicans, with some people from Central America and the Caribbean.
What I think should trouble us is the likelihood that the people who’ve come here over the last 150 years have been the easy cases—those who would fit in the best, who would be happiest here, who would accept the United States and be assimilated to it and us.
Unlike some I don’t think we should ban immigration or even immigration by Muslims or people from the Middle East or North Africa. I think there are plenty of likely candidates among those groups but we should limit ourselves to accepting the candidates most likely to prosper here. That would mean people with educations, people who are literate, people who speak English, and, especially, people who’ve helped us in the past.
Something to think about is that so far in the investigations of the Boston Marathon bombing something like 10% to 20% of the Chechen refugees who’ve settled here have been implicated in it in one way or another. They either perpetrated, participated in, or were accessories to it before or after the fact. That’s something that should really make us think.
I do not think that assimilation is the problem. Identity politics deliberately segregates people conceptually. One can either be a member of a larger group, or one can be a member of a smaller group.
The American solution has been to have parts of the individual culture added to the larger culture, but today, this is cultural appropriation. There is no way to assimilate. Instead, one has to submit to a foreign culture.
Minister Farrakhan is a segregationist, but he is part of American culture. He may be on the fringe, but his ideas on discrimination are echoed. While there may be no or few direct influences on American culture, he has been influential.
(Once you have a little knowledge of him and the Nation of Islam’s allowance of weapons, his “call-to-arms” is rather nonsensical. He often states “not so much as a pen knife”.)
One positive outcome is that identity politics is contributing to “burning the place to the ground”.