Melting Pot Mayhem

In 1782, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur wrote the following in his “Letters from an American Farmer”…

"What then is the American, this new man?" that the American is one who "leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.”

Subsequent authors (Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry James), historians (Frederick Jackson Turner), and playwrights (Israel Zangwill) used derivations of de Crevecoeur’s “melting pot” analogy until it became a universally accepted description of American society.

Until it wasn’t…

For the first 200 years of our nation’s history, immigrants came to America for one reason: to become Americans. Yes, they were also driven by economic hardships elsewhere and economic opportunities – real or imagined – in the United States. Others sought refuge from religious persecution. However, the common denominator that united them was that the strangers who landed on our shores wanted to be strangers no more. Instead, they wanted to learn American ways and adopt American ideals while pursuing the American dream.

To them, that meant learning English as soon as possible if it wasn’t their native tongue and becoming Americanized through and through. In other words, they came to the United States not to change their adopted homeland to resemble their place of origin, but to change themselves in an effort to blend in and become part of something greater than themselves. Call it humility or simple decency, but it never occurred to these first- and second-generation Americans to criticize let alone attempt to undermine their new home. After all, they thought, if the place from which they emigrated was so wonderful, they never would have left.

I am not sure when all of this changed. Maybe it began with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished national-origin admission quotas; or with the creation of a formal refugee resettlement program with the Refugee Act of 1980. Or perhaps it started with the Mariel boatlift that same year when Fidel Castro outfoxed Jimmy Carter by exporting thousands of criminals and mentally ill persons from Cuba to the U.S. Regardless of the timetable, I think we can all agree that America’s current immigration policies are broken and badly in need of repair.

According to the Migration Policy Institute, nearly 46.2 million immigrants lived in the United States in 2022, the most in U.S. history. That year, immigrants comprised 13.9 percent of the total U.S. population, a figure that remains short of the record high of 14.8 percent set in 1890 but slightly higher than the 13.7 percent share they comprised in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Today, the United States is home to more international migrants than any other country, and more than the next four countries – Germany, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United Kingdom – combined, according to the most recent U.N. Population Division data, from mid-2020. While the U.S. population represents about 5 percent of the total world population, close to 20 percent of all global migrants reside in the United States.

Being the great-grandson of immigrants from England, Germany, Scotland, and Ireland as well as the father-in-law of a beautiful Nigerian daughter and “Papa” to six precious Latino grandchildren, I have absolutely no problem with legal immigration. However, I vigorously oppose illegal immigration, undocumented and unscreened immigration, and out-of-control immigration levels.

Most of all, I oppose the mindset that has crept into our culture and threatens to destroy who we are as Americans. No, I am not talking about race or ethnicity, which are mere accidents of birth, but rather the watering down and actual rejection of the collective values that we hold dear – and which hold us together as Americans – such as personal freedom, personal responsibility, a strong work ethic, and a respect for the rule of law. Simply put, I miss the American melting pot, which is being increasingly replaced by tribalism and territorialism.

As Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne wrote in "A Frenchman in Lincoln’s America" in 1864…

“These good people are future 'Yankees.' By next year they will be wearing the clothes of their new country, and by the following year they will be speaking its language. Their children will grow up and will no longer even remember the mother country. America is the melting pot in which all the nations of the world come to be fused into a single mass and cast in a uniform mold.”

Folks, let’s retain our different cultural heritages and customs while uniting around the core values that have sustained our country throughout its long and storied history.