"You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German or a Turk or a Japanese. But anyone from any corner of the earth can come to live in America and become an American."
Video here.
As I have said, I am willing to debate the practicalities of immigration, what number and what sort of people we should accept, but fundamentally I love this about my country.
Like many things Reagan said, this is total nonsense.
ReplyDeleteWorse, it's the classic Reagan-esque kind of total nonsense where you can't be sure whether he was saying it out of an earnest myopic naïveté rooted in absurd notions of American Exceptionalism, or whether it was a wholly cynical comment shrewdly made in order to appeal to the kind of naïve people who embrace absurd notions of American Exceptionalism, whose votes he sought.
John, haven't you yourself noted that 1st generation immigrants never truly assimilate? It's only their children and grandchildren who really become true Americans (or Turks, or Frenchman, or whatever else) because they are born here and are steeped in American culture and society all their lives, allowing it to become second nature.
America is not exceptional. For one thing, other countries are just as willing to accept immigrants as we are. And for another thing, we Americans are not actually as accepting as we like to imagine we are.
In both cases, the key factor is assimilation. The French, Germans, Japanese, etc, are perfectly accepting of people who learn their languages, apply for and receive citizenship, and conform to the expected social norms of the dominant culture. At the exact same time, we Americans are wildly unaccepting of people who don't assimilate in every regard we expect - we hate people who are here illegally; and we also hate people who are here legally, yet don't speak the language; and we likewise hate legal arrivals who speak English, but who don't conform to our cultural expectations regarding dress, religious practice, primary cultural values, etc.
And you might argue that such hatred is not universal, and mostly comes from one end of the political spectrum - but that argument is equally true of other countries as well.