Melting Pot or Salad Bowl?
– By Howard Sierer –
The United States has long been known as a “melting pot” as immigrants from countries around the world have arrived on our shores. The “melting” occurred spontaneously as these newcomers adopted the language and culture of those around them.
America is a nation of immigrants, with over 98 percent of our citizens tracing their roots to ancestors who arrived here in the last 400 years. No other country has succeeded in welcoming and assimilating immigrants on such a scale.
We have much in common: political and religious freedom, economic opportunity and a vibrant culture influenced and enriched by the wide variety of immigrants arriving on our shores. American television, movies, music, and clothing styles appear around the globe.
Sadly, the progressive left increasingly rejects the concept of a melting pot. Instead, leftist media and academia extoll the virtues of a “salad bowl” where people mix but remain culturally distinct.
A “salad bowl” society is just another name for the progressive left’s use of identity politics to divide the U.S. into racial, sexual and ethnic groups, telling each group that it has been victimized and then offering special treatment and programs to help its members overcome what the left calls the “systemic discrimination” that has held them back.
“Separate is not equal” said the U.S. Supreme Court in its landmark 1953 Brown v Board of Education decision. I agree and given the racial and ethnic strife in salad bowl societies around the world, I’ll take a melting pot any day.
In the U.S., controversy rages over the degree to which the massive influx of recent Hispanic immigrants intends to assimilate into American culture. While we have large numbers of American citizens with Hispanic forebears, recent arrivals tend to cluster in neighborhoods where cultural norms and food are familiar and, most importantly, Spanish is the everyday language.
Spanish fluency can be an asset in this country when combined with the ability to speak, read and understand English. English proficiency is fundamental to assimilating into the melting pot or even as a salad bowl ingredient since they are unable to mix.
A Pew Research study found that 61% of “immigrant Latino adults who have been in the U.S.” for more than 20 years cannot “speak English proficiently.” They are trapped in Spanish-speaking neighborhoods, unable to understand the country they have entered and relegated to manual labor jobs with bilingual supervisors, out of society’s mainstream.
English proficiency is declining even further among more recent immigrants and hence they are failing to increase their wages like earlier generations. Hispanic immigrants who arrived in the U.S. during 1965–69 started out earning an average of 24% less than native-born workers of the same age, but they rapidly advanced and forty years later, they were earning 18% more than native-born workers.
Later generations of immigrants have done progressively worse in this regard. Hispanic immigrants who arrived during 1995-1999 started out being paid over 25% less than average and were still being paid 25% less than average in 2010.
Those who cater to Spanish-only-speaking immigrants do them no favor. New languages are learned best by a combination of classroom or peer instruction and then by wading into society to learn by doing. That “wading in” will allow immigrants to assimilate with the rest of our citizens.
Assimilating does not necessarily mean abandoning important aspects of an immigrant’s cultural heritage. One can be proud of, or committed to, previous cultural norms while functioning smoothly in our country’s melting pot. Jewish yarmulkes, Muslim hajibs and polygamist clothing norms come to mind.
English is – and will almost certainly continue to be – a fundamental common denominator in this country’s melting pot. Immigrants should expect to learn English. I believe that government at all levels should conduct its business only in English (with the obvious exception of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency). The extent to which government caters to Spanish speakers will only hinder their assimilation and keep them isolated in their country of choice.
