What About "Patriotic Assimilation"?

This issue is not a subject of debate on Capitol Hill by either side in the immigration divide, but it should be. Nearly three years ago, John Fonte, the director of the Hudson Institute's Center for American Common Culture, wrote an interesting article on the "need for a patriotic assimilation policy" in the U.S. "It makes no sense to discuss immigration without talking about assimilation," Fonte wrote, "nor does it make sense to develop an immigration policy without an assimilation policy."

But today on Capitol Hill [and in the White House for that matter] that is exactly what is happening. You hardly hear a peep about it. The House-passed immigration bill ignores the topic, while Senate Majority Leader Frist will likely sponsor a similar enforcement-only bill in the Senate. Sen. Specter's Judiciary Committee-passed bill will likely have nothing on "patriotic assimilation" and even Sen. McCain's "earned citizenship" bill says little on the issue. The same holds for the bill sponsored by Sens. Kyl and Cornyn.

It's a fairly good bet that a bill will get through the Senate. What the final legislation will look like when [and IF] it emerges from the House-Senate conference committee is anyone's guess. Though, what is certain is that most immigrants will continue to come to the U.S. because of the opportunity our nation offers for a better life. Agree or disagree with him, Fonte makes some points worthy of debate and consideration by our elected representatives.

From Fonte's May 14, 2004 piece, "We Need a Patriotic Assimilation Policy":

For more than two hundred years, immigrants to America and their children have been successfully assimilated into what has been called the American way of life. This civic or patriotic assimilation of immigrants into the American constitutional regime did not happen naturally. Patriotic assimilation was the end result of a sometimes explicit (and other times implicit) long-range vision formulated by America's leaders. From the days of George Washington continuing through the era of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and supported in the past decade by such public figures as Barbara Jordan, this strategic vision has helped to define immigration-assimilation policy by articulating two interconnected ideas: (1) welcoming immigrants and (2) assimilating those immigrants into the mainstream of American civic life....

Closer to our own time, in a 1995 New York Times oped entitled "The Americanization Ideal," the late Texas Democratic congresswoman Barbara Jordan wrote, "Immigration imposes mutual obligations. Those who choose to come here must embrace the common core of American civic culture," but the native-born must "assist them" in learning about America, and, at the same time, must oppose prejudice and "vigorously enforce" laws against discrimination.

In different ways, Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, and Jordan all advocated what I have called patriotic assimilation....

Patriotic assimilation occurs when a newcomer essentially adopts American civic values and the American heritage as his or her own. It occurs, for example, when newcomers and their children begin to think of American history as "our" history, not "their" history. To give a hypothetical example, imagine an eighth-grade Korean-American female student studying the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Does she think of those events in terms of "they" or "we"? Does she envision the creation of the Constitution in Philadelphia as something that "they" (white males of European descent) were involved in two hundred years before her ancestors came to America, or does she imagine the Constitutional Convention as something that "we" Americans did as part of "our" history?

"We" implies successful patriotic assimilation. If she thinks in terms of "we," she has done what millions of immigrants and immigrant children have done in the past. She has adopted America's story as her story, and she has adopted America's Founders-Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, Washington, et al.-as her ancestors. (This does not mean that she, like other Americans, will not continue to argue about our history and our heritage, nor that she will ignore the times that America has acted ignobly.)

... A successful patriotic assimilation project would have two phases: (1) setting the terms of the debate by shaping the national conversation on immigrant assimilation in American life and (2) offering concrete programs to assist the project. Strategically, the Bush administration could do, in broad terms, what the Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson administrations did in the early twentieth century.