News Guest Writer
One of the most controversial and debated issues in Choate’s online political forums has been President Bush’s immigration policies. Sadly, politicians and students defending anti-immigration legislation alike seem to base many of their arguments on racism, nativism, and paranoia.
One of the reasons for a ban on immigration is the false belief that a growing immigrant population will weaken a sense of American identity within the country. Yet what the architects of these arguments fail to appreciate is that America itself was forged out of an extremely rich immigrant culture. Most of the citizens living in America today are the offspring or relatives of past immigrants; the immigrants of today are the patriotic Americans of tomorrow. Immigrants have been coming to the United States for hundreds of years and have contributed in countless positive ways. It was immigrants, for example, who built the great railroads of the late 1800’s, improving the American economy tenfold. What makes Americans American is not an ancestry dating back to the Revolutionary War but an appreciation for the American values of liberty and equality of opportunity, and a shared sense of having overcome oppression—be it on the part of the 1776 parliament, Hitler, a dictator still in power, or poverty.
President George W. Bush was recently quoted as saying that he thinks that people who want to live and work in this country should learn to sing the national anthem in English. His comments came as a reaction to the release of a Spanish version of the national anthem. What President Bush and many of the people who echo his sentiments don’t acknowledge is that Columbus—a man revered by primary schools as a historical hero—and the European settlers were the original illegal immigrants. The colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony or the Jamestown settlement never learned to speak the Algonquian or Iroquois languages, nor did they make any effort to embrace the culture of the Native Americans, yet conservatives are outraged that the “illegal” immigrants opt to speak in their own language.
Radical anti-immigration militia groups like “the Minuteman Project” are far more dangerous to American ideals of hard work and self-determination than the immigrants who are willing to perform our country’s hardest work and dirtiest jobs. Some argue that immigrants would not be loyal citizens; yet how would they be any less committed to this country than the Caucasian immigrants from Europe who move into the United States annually? If anything, immigrants would be unduly grateful for the opportunity to lead a less-impoverished lives and even support relatives still living in Third-World countries. Immigrants would be extremely loyal to the United States; why else would they hoist a sea of American flags at the recent Immigration Reform protests in Los Angeles and Washington?
Immigrants have been here for a long time and I can’t imagine the foundations of American society crumbling any time soon.
