Later, in January 2018, during the president’s State of the Union Address, Trump expanded on his immigration policy and laid out a Republican framework for immigration, which Democrats should have accepted.
The framework calls for offering a legal status and an eventual pathway to citizenship that’s based on merit to more than 1.8 million people who were brought to the United States illegally as children. It also calls for fully funding border security—including the southern border wall. The framework would also replace the current, aimless, lottery system for granting visas with one that is based on an immigrant’s skills, education, and ability to make a living. Finally, it would place limitations on the family members which immigrants can sponsor to follow them to the United States to include only nuclear family members.
The anti-Trump coalition’s refusal to accept this deal, at least at the time I am writing this book, shows just how hollow their rhetoric is. They claim they are sticking up for the well-being of people here illegally who are otherwise law-abiding and have been in America for a long time. So, they should have welcomed this framework. It would help three times the number of so-called dreamers that President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program did, and it would promote merit-based immigration, for which Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, and even Barack Obama have advocated in the past.2 However, every single Democrat and several Republicans voted against his proposal in the Senate, attacking the idea of prioritizing immigrants that will integrate and succeed as un-American.
THE MELTING POT
It is true that a key component of American exceptionalism is the idea that anyone of any ethnicity can become an American. But the anti-Trump coalition forgets that the American model puts the obligation on the immigrant to do what it takes to succeed.
Most societies in history have been relatively homogenous ethnically. Diversity was considered a weakness because it led to division, causing societies to come apart.
By contrast, while our country started ethnically homogenous, we developed a way of thinking which was unique about what it meant to be an American.
Americans came to be defined by their common values, not by their country of origin.
We opened our country to talent from anywhere under one condition: that immigrants abandon their old identity in favor of a new American one. In other words, they had to assimilate to become American.
Assimilation meant, among other things, learning English, participating in civil society, and being self-sufficient. Meanwhile, other aspects of the immigrant’s native culture—art, music, food—would enrich American society.
Because of the success of this historically unique approach, America became known as the “melting pot.” As our country grew increasingly multiethnic throughout its first two centuries thanks to immigration, we still maintained a common culture around which to identify. This allowed America to enjoy the advantages of the entrepreneurial drive and energy of immigrants while avoiding the ethnic strife we have seen in other countries throughout history.
Throughout those centuries, the melting pot has been the cultural system that produced luminism, abstract expressionism, jazz, the blues, rock and roll, baseball, American football, objective news, Broadway, Hollywood, worldwide television broadcasting, hamburgers, hot dogs, macaroni and cheese, and many other inventions, which have roots in other cultures yet are uniquely American.
On a far more serious note, the notions that all men are created equal, that government should answer to its people, and that humans have natural, inalienable rights endowed by God rather than government were not born in America. They came from other parts of the world, were absorbed by our forefathers, enshrined in our founding documents, and became the core American principles that unite us.
It is also worth noting that our nation’s civil rights movements succeeded thanks to the same principles. Civil rights leaders insisted that African Americans have the right to join the common American civic culture rather than be separated from it through segregation and racism.
If we are all children of God, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. argued, then we are all endowed by our Creator with the same rights, and it is a violation of the meaning of America to deny people those rights.
Earlier, Susan B. Anthony had made similar arguments to help women gain the right to vote.
Sadly, many in the anti-Trump coalition have rejected this historic American approach.
Because its members reject American exceptionalism, the anti-Trump coalition doesn’t think immigrants should assimilate to America; they think America should devolve into segments defined by immigrants and intellectuals.
Because they reject assimilation, many in the anti-Trump coalition do not believe immigrants should be required to learn English; they insist on multilingual public education, ballots, and government accommodations.
Because they favor wealth redistribution and big government instead of personal responsibility and economic growth, many in the anti-Trump coalition are eager to expand welfare and other government benefits. So, its adherents favor visa lotteries and extended family ties over skills and education as the determining factor for who can immigrate. And they are eager to encourage more illegal immigration, creating sanctuary cities and states even if it means protecting dangerous criminals from deportation. The poorer neighborhoods, where gangs like MS-13 run rampant, may suffer but the elites feel self-righteous in their gated communities.
Because many in the anti-Trump coalition see unchecked immigration as a vehicle for political power, they don’t care about the impact of adding millions of unskilled laborers to the workforce has on wages. In fact, some in corporate America benefit from it.
Because many in the anti-Trump coalition think that American society is inherently racist, they don’t think that different ethnic groups should be expected to embrace a common, American culture. They view the melting pot as a form of arrogant cultural supremacy and prefer America to be “multicultural.”
Because they think that America is a source of evil in this world, members of the anti-Trump coalition view immigration and race relations not as vehicles to make America strong, but instead as fault lines of potential division to make America weaker and therefore less dangerous.
In fact, the anti-Trump coalition is attacking the very idea that the United States is one, indivisible nation.
While this effort to partition our country helps some people get elected to public office or earn acclaim and tenure in Ivy League circles, it threatens our unity and weakens us as a nation.
REASSERTING THE TRADITIONAL AMERICAN MODEL
Contrary to the elite media narrative, Donald Trump has never been anti-immigrant. His mother came from Scotland. He has been married twice to first-generation immigrants. He has employed many immigrants in his various properties around the world.
However, Trump does believe the American immigration system should be designed to strengthen America. He believes in assimilation, in learning English, and in self-sufficiency. He does not believe we owe the world open borders and a massive transfer of wealth for anyone who shows up.
So, while Trump does support growing and expanding our American culture through immigration, he wants to do so in a measured, intelligent way. That means reinstating policies based on melting-pot assimilation that promotes American ideals.
Over the past one and a half years, President Trump has put the full weight of his administration behind a series of reforms aimed at reasserting the traditional American model of the melting pot in our immigration system.
The merit-based system of the previously mentioned RAISE Act would prioritize immigrants based on their ability to assimilate and contribute to the economy.
While nuclear family members would still be given the same status they have today, the bill would then introduce a point system based on several factors, including education, job prospects, and proficiency in English.
First, prioritizing those with needed skills is a long-ove
rdue reform in an age of increasing automation, where the number of jobs available for those without effective learning is dwindling.
It is perfectly in keeping with American history that our immigration levels adjust with economic reality. The Brookings Institute (a liberal think tank) noted in May 2012 that the ability to change our immigration policy in response to our national economic needs “remains an important economic policy issue, both in the short term and for our country’s long-term growth strategy.”3
Brookings also noted that there was enormous debate over how immigration impacts wages for low-skilled workers and cited a 2008 study that showed “the influx of immigrant workers from 1990 to 2006 reduced the wages of low-skilled workers by 4.7 percent.”
The elite, highly educated, well-paid members of the anti-Trump coalition may roll their eyes at a 4.7 percent wage reduction. However, for relatively poor workers with only a high school education, that’s a big deal. For someone who makes $20,000 per year, a 4.7 percent salary increase would be almost an additional $1,000 in their pocket. That extra $83 per month might be the difference between being able to pay rent, buy food, or get treatment for an illness or injury.
Workers like the one in this example, who have had their wages reduced (or have been laid off) due to unchecked immigration, fall squarely into the category of “forgotten Americans,” who Donald Trump pledged to help during his campaign. As president, he is working to deliver on that promise.
ASSIMILATION IS NECESSARY
In addition to the prioritization of immigrants with needed skills, the insistence on assimilation is an explicit corrective to the anti-Trump coalition’s rejection of the traditional American model over the past 30 years.
Consider these statements from historic American leaders and how closely they track with what Donald Trump is doing.
On January 12, 1802, Founding Father Alexander Hamilton (himself an immigrant) wrote an essay in the New York Evening Post in support of strong naturalization requirements. In the essay, Hamilton wrote:
The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common National sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias, and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education and family.… Some reasonable term ought to be allowed to enable aliens to get rid of foreign and acquire American attachments; to learn the principles and imbibe the spirit of our government; and to admit of at least a probability of their feeling a real interest in our affairs.4
In the essay, Hamilton was proposing a five-year residency requirement for naturalization to replace the 14-year requirement under the Naturalization Act of 1798 (and in opposition to an open-border approach being proposed in the newspaper—some things never change). It’s important to note that Hamilton’s purpose for this requirement was for the incoming immigrant to “get rid of foreign and acquire American attachments.” Hamilton went on to warn:
To admit foreigners indiscriminately to the rights of citizens, the moment they put foot in our country, as recommended in the Message, would be nothing less, than to admit the Grecian Horse into the Citadel of our Liberty and Sovereignty.
After reading Hamilton’s warning, President Trump’s calls to thoroughly vet refugees and immigrants coming from war-torn countries and to end widely abused chain migration policies seem rather uncontroversial, don’t they?
We see evidence of this conscious effort to preserve the melting pot more than 90 years after Hamilton’s essay, when future president Teddy Roosevelt gave his “True Americanism” speech in 1894. In it, Roosevelt said:
We freely extend the hand of welcome and of good-fellowship to every man, no matter what his creed or birthplace, who comes here honestly intent on becoming a good United States citizen like the rest of us; but we have a right, and it is our duty, to demand that he shall indeed become so and shall not confuse the issues with which we are struggling by introducing among us Old World quarrels and prejudices.
Now, compare Roosevelt’s words with President Trump’s weekly address from December 2017:
It is time to create a merit-based immigration system that makes sense for a modern economy—selecting new arrivals based on their ability to support themselves financially and to make positive contributions to U.S. society. Base it on love of our country. We want people that come in, that can love our country.
Clearly, Trump’s positions on immigration policy are not some radical new take—as media and the Washington elite assert. President Trump is working to return the United States to the system that was supported by Hamilton, Roosevelt, and many other eminent American leaders.
THE SALAD BOWL
Ultimately, the melting pot helped make America the “shining city upon a hill” that Ronald Reagan spoke of throughout his presidency. We became this shining city because we have successfully attracted tens of millions of people who believed in American exceptionalism and wanted to join our culture.
However, for many Americans today—many of whom are Trump supporters—it has been a generation since our nation fit the romantic symbol of the shining city. This is in part because, around the 1970s, we began to move away from the core American idea that we are—and must be—one nation.
Despite warnings from our past leaders and more than two centuries of success as a nation, in the 1960s academic and political elites started working to replace the melting pot with what they call “the salad bowl” of multiculturalism. By the 1970s they had made progress.
The idea of the salad bowl is that various racial, ethnic, or religious groups in America represent various distinct ingredients, which provide their individual, unique flavors. We are all Americans because we are all in the same bowl, covered by the same dressing. That’s the concept.
On its face, this theory seems guided by an innocent motive—to celebrate everyone’s unique heritage and respect the cultures from which we came. However, it actually presents a radically different model for America—the opposite of E Pluribus Unum. As liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. said in a 1992 article titled “The Disuniting of America” (which shared a title with a book he wrote the previous year), multiculturalism “belittles unum and glorifies pluribus.”5
Schlesinger, who was a lifelong Democrat and an advisor to President John F. Kennedy, warned that multiculturalism engendered a philosophy that “America is not a nation of individuals at all but a nation of groups.” The diminishing of individual rights in favor of group rights creates a tribal system of factions constantly vying for power. It is the opposite of the individual-focused rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights and Constitution.
Even back in 1992, Schlesinger predicted the current cultural strife in America:
What happens when people of different ethnic origins, speaking different languages and professing different religions, settle in the same geographical locality and live under the same political sovereignty? Unless a common purpose binds them together, tribal hostilities will drive them apart. Ethnic and racial conflict, it seems evident, will now replace the conflict of ideologies as the explosive issue of our times.
Bruce Thornton, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, echoed Schlesinger’s concerns 20 years later in an essay on the necessity of assimilation in the American immigration system.
The melting pot, Thornton said, “communicated the historically exceptional notion of American identity as one formed not by the accidents of blood, sect, or race, but by the unifying beliefs and political ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: the notion of individual, inalienable human rights that transcend group identity.”6
Also noting that, as a country, we have failed numerous times throughout history to respect the inalienable rights of many of our people, Thornton points out that over time the American legislative and judicial systems have worked to correct past wrongs. He also acknowledged that assimilation can be painful fo
r immigrants who necessarily must abandon some old customs to fully join American society. However, Thornton wrote, “No matter the costs, assimilation was the only way to forge an unum from so many pluribus.”
Understanding this shift from melting-pot assimilation to salad bowl multiculturalism helps explain the wide divide in our politics over immigration—and the rising tide of cultural disunity in America today.
POST-MELTING-POT IMMIGRATION
The emergence of multiculturalism and the erosion of the melting pot combined with a rapid uptick in immigration to the United States over the last several decades (much of it illegal) to make immigration the most explosive political issue in America today.
Millions of Americans came to believe that their government had abandoned them in favor of foreigners who broke the law. Initially people were silenced by the elite’s overwhelming condemnation of any effort to discuss immigration, but gradually the growing awareness of American culture being submerged by multiple identities led to a backlash.
This is exactly the feeling candidate Trump identified and gave a voice to during the campaign. It is also the feeling guiding his immigration policies in the White House.
The members of the anti-Trump coalition claim these feelings are simply errant, knee-jerk reactions that have no basis in fact. They are either ignorant, lying, or both.
Consider this: According to the Migration Policy Institute, in 2015, immigrants made up 13.5 percent of the U.S. population. This is not much higher than the statistic in 1930, when immigrants made up 11.6 percent of the population. It is also short of the 1890 high of 14.8 percent. So, in the long view, the relative population of immigrants in the United States has remained flat.7
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