Assimilation

 

My receive updates from The Atlas Society on my phone, and the one from 8/24/2023 in the Takeover Spotlight video piece, showed Atlas Senior Scholar Stephen Hicks answering the question: Do you believe it is an immigrant’s obligation to assimilate. It is written there before he answers the posed question: “ . . . answers this question by laying out the basic principles of liberty in a free country and what that means for immigrants’ obligation to their new country.”

 

Hicks—I am paraphrasing his response says: “Yes and no. If one is immigrating to a basically decent country, then, yes, one has an obligation to abide by the basic principles that made that country a decent country. Beyond that, no, a basic principle of a decent country is liberty, the right to adopt the lifestyle that one favors in language, dress and in a hundred other choices. One does not have to assimilate to live like others, even the majority.

 

The immigrant does need to assimilate to the principle of individual rights and live by them.”

 

My response: Hicks is basically correct. If the immigrant is coming to America, a good, and basically decent country built on liberty and individual and constitutional rights, and the free market economy, here the immigrant has a chance for liberty, property, affluence and happiness if he works hard and applies himself as most immigrant do. So, he should assimilate as best he can.

 

That immigrant is privileged to be here, and he can show some gratitude, and be loyal, patriotic, appreciative and heap praise upon this blessed country that has given him so much. He should learn the language, and his primary culture is to be the American culture that he is to assimilate too, and that is what I believe Hicks is referring too when he describes America as decent, offering liberty and individual rights.

 

No, the immigrant does not need to assimilate in terms of the language he uses at home, or the God he worships, the clothes he wears, how he raises his family and whom he associates with. His secondary cultural and lifestyle preferences are his private business, and no need to assimilate there is his personal taste and preference.

 

His secondary cultural selection or selections are where reasonable multiculturalism and liberty merge.

 

If he came from a collectivist, totalitarian or religious state very different from America, and he, from the first hour of landing here, sneers at American law, culture and ethos, then he is refusing to assimilate when he should, and he should not be allowed to become a citizen here. He can go back home where he belongs and feels more comfortable.

 

Herbert Marcuse came from Germany as a Jew and lived off the fat of the land for decades, but he hated America and never assimilated, and his treachery created the critical race theory that has damn near toppled the wondrous culture and legal system here that gives us that liberty and protection of individual rights. That kind of ungrateful, traitorous, hostile immigrant out to fundamentally remake America is the non-assimilator that we need to deny citizenship to, and send him home with a one-way ticket.