The New Republic (Opinion)
By Jeet Heer
August 7, 2015
It
doesn’t take much under the best of circumstances to get Donald Trump
boasting, so it’s no surprise that the Republican frontrunner used
Thursday night’s debate in
Cleveland to do some chest-thumping about his impact on the debate over
immigration. When the topic was raised by moderator Chris Wallace,
Trump was quick to trumpet his achievement. “So, if it weren't for me,
you wouldn't even be talking about illegal immigration,
Chris,” Trump exulted. “You wouldn't even be talking about it.”
Trump
is exactly right. Immigration is a wedge issue Republicans hoped to
avoid because it divides the party’s conservative base (who are leery of
immigration reform)
from its wealthy donor class (who are the big backers of reform). But
Trump’s impact goes beyond the fact that immigration is a hot-button
topic that took center stage during the two Republican presidential
primary debates on Thursday. Trump’s lurid language
of Mexican “rapists” entering America has polarized the GOP field.
While candidates like Jeb Bush still defend immigration reform,
conservative rivals hoping to stir up the base have adopted a much
harsher language.
Trump’s
impact is most clearly seen in Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who
during the earlier “undercard” debate among low-polling candidates made
this startling pronouncement:
“We must insist on assimilation—immigration without assimilation is an
invasion…. They need to learn English, adopt our values, roll up their
sleeves and get to work. I'm tired of the hyphenated Americans and the
division.”
Jindal’s
comments are startling because they go against the grain of most of the
last century, when ethnic diversity was seen as perfectly compatible
with membership in
American society.
It’s
true that a hundred years ago, during a Columbus Day speech in 1915,
Theodore Roosevelt railed against “hyphenated Americans” declaring that
there is “no such thing
as a hyphenated American who is a good American.” Coming at the cusp of
America’s entry into the First World War, his strident words were a
forerunner to the wartime nativism that led to sauerkraut to be renamed
the liberty cabbage and, more seriously, to
mob violence against German-Americans. But Roosevelt's rhetoric was at
odds with the already flourishing multiculturalism of an America where
St. Patrick’s Day was a longstanding day of festivity, where newspaper
columnists liberally sprinkled Yiddish in their
prose, and where chop suey and pizza were part of the national diet.
Contra Roosevelt, millions of loyal citizens had no problem thinking of
themselves as Irish-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Chinese-Americans,
African-Americans, among many other groups. A negative
“assimilation” was sometimes forced upon these groups by state policies
that forced a conformity to the dominant norms of white Anglo-Saxon
society. But there was also the more positive assimilation of people
from diverse backgrounds voluntarily coming together
to create a shared culture. Much of American popular culture, ranging
from Vaudeville to rock music, derives from this uncoerced fusion of
ethnic traditions.
With
his talk about the need to “insist on assimilation,” Jindal harkens
back to the older and more negative form of assimilation, the one that
involves assuming that
immigrants are potential traitors unless bullied into accepting the
cultural norms of their host country. The sinister implications of
Jindal’s version of assimilation can be seen in his own life story. His
parents were immigrants from India, but he’s gone
out of his way to make common cause with white xenophobes. He’s one of
the most stridently Islamophobic voices in the Republican Party. It’s
possible that Jindal sees his status as a non-white son of immigrants as
giving him a wider license to speak on these
issues and to talk about immigrants in a way that would be dismissed as
bigoted if it came from a white politician.
But
Trump and Jindal are evidence that the arguments over immigration
aren’t just based on economics or law enforcement, but also cultural
anxiety about the changing demographic
makeup of America. Trump keeps talking about the crimes committed by
undocumented immigrants, a community that, according to the scholarly
consensus, commits crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans. In
any case, the crime rate as a whole has been
in steep decline for more than 20 years, so the success of Trump’s
anti-immigrant rhetoric must have other sources. Jindal’s calls for a
more assertive policy of forced assimilation is a window into what is
really driving the immigration debate: worries about
the displacement of the dominant white culture.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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