White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller wants to shut down immigration because he believes many immigrants refuse to “assimilate.” But what does assimilation mean to immigrants themselves?
Guests
Nancy Foner, distinguished emerita professor of sociology at Hunter College, City University of New York. Author of “Immigration: How the Past Shapes the Present.”
Also Featured
Phuc Tran, author and tattoo artist
Ilan Stavans, author and professor of humanities and Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College
The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:
Part I
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Dr. David Glosser’s American story begins in the late 1800s in the village of Antopol, in what is now Belarus. It was there where David’s great-grandfather, Wolfe Lieb Glosser, his wife, and their eight children scraped by to survive.
DAVID GLOSSER [TAPE]: My great-grandfather was a combination of subsistence farming and food market operating, in the town square and so forth, just struggling to get along. Desperately poor family, living in what was basically a hovel.
CHAKRABARTI: In the late 19th century, Antopol was within the Russian Empire, and surging Russian nationalism led to anti-Jewish pogroms that swept across Imperial Russia.
GLOSSER: Times were difficult in the Russian Empire. And scapegoating of minority populations was one of the classic ways that that besieged governments have of distracting their population, of finding somebody to blame for the problems of the country.
Scapegoating of minority populations was one of the classic ways that that besieged governments have of distracting their population.
David Glosser
CHAKRABARTI: David says it’s really no different from the anti-immigrant scapegoating he sees going on right now in the United States, led by White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller.
STEPHEN MILLER [TAPE]: Who’s gonna stand up and say, “The cartels are gone. The criminal migrants are gone. The gangs are gone. America is for Americans and Americans only”?
CHAKRABARTI: That was Miller in 2025. Miller is the chief architect of the Trump administration’s shutdown of immigration to this country, both illegal and legal. And it was a Miller-style rhetoric more than a century ago that led to years of anti-Jewish rioting in Russia. By 1903, seeing no future for himself or his family in Antopol, Wolfe-Lieb Glosser, like millions of other Jews, was forced to flee.
GLOSSER [TAPE]: My great-grandfather decided to leave, and he was able to cobble together enough rubles to be able to go, along with many thousands of other people from all different nationalities, to find their way to America.
CHAKRABARTI: Wolfe-Lieb Glosser set foot on Ellis Island on January 7th, 1903.
GLOSSER: When he came in, of course he didn’t speak any English, and I think he had the equivalent of about $7 in his pocket.
CHAKRABARTI: Again, David says the echoes are strong. Wolfe Lieb Glosser was poor. He had no formal education, couldn’t speak a word of English, exactly the kind of immigrant that Stephen Miller these days says are incapable of assimilating into American life.
GLOSSER: Yes, and even worse than that, you end up with what our Founding Fathers feared the most, which is that you have foreign immigrants who become advocates, not for this country, but the country that they left. So the further away in culture you go, and the larger in number you go, by definition the greater challenge it poses to assimilation.
CHAKRABARTI: Assimilation. What a fascinating and fraught word in American history. You hear Miller there saying that fusing into American life becomes even harder for immigrants when they come from far away and in great numbers.
And how do those numbers swell? By one of the policies that Miller hates the most, what he calls chain migration.
MILLER [TAPE]: Individuals right now who are receiving green cards, they can bring in, say, an elderly relative who can immediately go onto public assistance if they become unable to support themselves financially, and then that person can bring in a relative, who can bring in a relative, who can bring in a relative, and that’s why they call it chain migration.
CHAKRABARTI: Chain migration is more commonly known as family-based migration. Now, Stephen Miller might view the Glossers as an example or a part of this massive destabilizing throng because, you guessed it, Wolf Lieb Glosser came to this country in 1903 via chain migration. David Glosser says that Wolf Lieb’s brother was already in the United States before 1903 and told him to come, and then Wolf Lieb turned around and brought his family.
GLOSSER [TAPE]: Anyway, then one by one, my great-grandfather started bringing over the family, and one by one, the boys came over, and it was a chain migration.
CHAKRABARTI: The Glossers eventually moved to Johnstown, Pennsylvania. There, one side of the family went into the junk business, the other into retail, starting off with a push-cart. Eventually, they opened Glosser Brothers Incorporated, a large chain of supermarkets and discount department stores that flourished in Johnstown for 70 years. That’s where David Glosser grew up.
GLOSSER: The business grew, and over the decades employed thousands of people in Johnstown. Put a lot of bread on the table in a lot of families. Put a lot of kids through college. Built a lot of charitable works in the city. It was good times. And in turn, us, we, and all the other millions of immigrants like us, we built America.
CHAKRABARTI: David’s story is a familiar one, the story of immigrants who become part of the American fabric, who bring multi-generational success to this country. And yet, Stephen Miller insists on believing that immigrants bring problems that stay with their unassimilated children, grandchildren, and beyond.
MILLER [TAPE]: Not only is the first generation unsuccessful, but persistent issues in every subsequent generation. So you see consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate. But this shouldn’t be a surprise, Will. It’s just common sense.
CHAKRABARTI: But is it really, Mr. Miller? Is it really common sense? Because if that were truly the case, then Stephen Miller himself should be one of those welfare-wasting, unassimilated subsequent generations. Because you see, Stephen Miller’s mother, Miriam, was born Miriam Glosser.
Dr. David Glosser is her brother, and he’s Stephen Miller’s uncle, meaning that Wolf-Lieb Glosser’s story of fleeing Interpol for refuge in the United States is Stephen Miller’s story, too. David Glosser first wrote about this in Politico back in 2018, and he wrote about his dismay that his nephew is, quote, “The architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.”
He also calls Miller a hypocrite, because recall, his great-grandfather Wolf-Lieb got out of Antopol. A few decades later, the Einsatzgruppen stormed the village. They were the Nazi paramilitary death squads, and when they arrived in Antopol, they killed all the Jews there. David told CNN Everybody else who didn’t make it, they were all swept away in the Holocaust and dead.
GLOSSER [TAPE]: Everybody else who didn’t make it, they were all swept away in the Holocaust and dead. A- and so the- So-
HOST: You’re saying the, the, the hypocrisy-
GLOSSER: Well, let’s put it simply. Had we not been able to enter America when we did, Stephen Miller would never exist.
CHAKRABARTI: America is a nation of immigrants. That makes immigration the basis of what this country is, and a battleground over who we wish to be.
Conflict has always been part of that picture. So today, I want to focus on a resurgent part of that conflict, that question of assimilation. Stephen Miller and others on the far right insist that many immigrants just refuse to assimilate. But on the far left, assimilation is summarily rejected as cultural erasure.
Real life, of course, and immigrants’ real views, span the broad spectum, span the broad spectrum in between. So let’s talk about that. And in order to do Nancy Foner joins us. She’s a distinguished emerita professor of sociology at Hunter College, and also author of books on immigration, including “Immigration: How the Past Shapes the Present.”
Professor Foner, welcome to On Point.
NANCY FONER: Oh, delighted to be here, and thank you very much.
CHAKRABARTI: So tell me, first of all this word assimilation for you in, in the course of your scholarship, like what has that meant to you? What do you think it actually means in the American context?
FONER: Broadly speaking, it’s usually referred to as a process by which immigrants and their descendants integrate into the dominant culture of the US.
There are other definitions, but I think that’s a widely understood one. But there are aspects, I don’t know if you want me to talk about that now, I think that laying out how we think about assimilation, it’s important to make a number of points. So one is that assimilation is not an all or nothing situation.
You can assimilate in many ways while also holding on to many home country cultural beliefs and practices.
Nancy Foner
You can assimilate in many ways while also holding on to many home country cultural beliefs and practices. It’s, in fact, not realistic to expect immigrants to abandon their former cultural patterns altogether if they’ve come as adults, which many do, right? To come in your 20s and your 30s, and they hold on to some of their cultural beliefs and values and practices. Plus, home country cultural practices and beliefs inevitably change in many ways as immigrants make their lives in the U.S., and I think it’s a nice way of putting it that assimilation is what happens when you’re doing other things.
You don’t consciously say, “I want to assimilate.” It’s because you’re living your life in the U.S., you’re working, you’re meeting people from other groups in the case of you’re often going to school. And so in the process of doing those things, you adopt or become familiar with American culture in the U.S.
You change because you’re moving to a new society, you’re faced with new constraints, new barriers, new opportunities. It’s not a conscious process.
Nancy Foner
And you change because you’re moving to a new society, you’re faced with new constraints, new barriers, new opportunities. It’s not a conscious process. The other thing about assimilation that I think it’s important to emphasize is that largely it’s a second-generation experience. That is, the children of immigrants born in the US.
Because they are born here, they have birthright citizenship. They are literally American citizens from the day that they were born, and they live their whole lives here. At least, they go to school here. They live in neighborhoods increasingly that have people other than those from their parents’ country of origin.
And it’s among the second generation who are most likely to m- more fully assimilate, unlike what Stephen Miller said, right? Which it persists across the generations. That’s simply not true, okay? Because among the second and increasingly third generation, they’re fully Americans.
They may be hyphenated Americans because they do often still face barriers on the basis of their ethnic origins or their race. But culturally, they become more American, more committed to America. Another point I just want to make,
CHAKRABARTI: Professor. Actually, Professor Foner, I’m gonna let you make that point when we come back from the break because we’ve just got about 20 seconds here before I’ve got to get us to that break.
Part II
CHAKRABARTI: We reached out to On Point listeners, and you definitely responded with your views. Here’s Luke Percheck, who’s an immigrant, and Luke says there are parts of American culture that have been more easy to adopt than others.
LUKE PERCHECK [TAPE]: As a child, I immigrated along with my parents, and assimilation played a big role in school. However, as an adult I still have not adapted to all things American. Football or fast food or even tipping is something that I grapple with. But what I did pick up is a sense of good-heartedness that Americans are known for. They’re open to all, accepting, and being genuine. You can always adapt and shape existing norms into something new, and that’s what Americans are known for. Culture is always changing for immigrants or the established Americans.
CHAKRABARTI: And here’s On Point listener Peggy Gwi-Seok Hong. Peggy says that sometimes after immigrating to the U.S., it can actually take time to realize what she says are the costs of assimilation.
I’ve spent the first half of my life trying to assimilate, and then I’ve been spending the second half of my life trying to reclaim my heritage that I lost.
Peggy Gwi-Seok Hong
PEGGY GWI-SEOK HONG [TAPE]: My family immigrated to Hawaii in 1968, and I was four years old, almost five, and I feel like I’ve spent the first half of my life trying to assimilate, and then I’ve been spending the second half of my life, I’m 62 years old now decolonizing and trying to reclaim my heritage that I lost. I lost my mother tongue. I lost access to my grandparents because I couldn’t speak with them. I lost access to a lot of the culture and history that me and my ancestors come from.
CHAKRABARTI: We’ll hear more from On Point listeners throughout the show. Professor Foner, you were saying that there are basically three aspects of assimilation that are important to recognize, and you were just about to get to the third one. What is it?
Assimilation is a two-way process. Immigrants change and enrich American culture.
Nancy Foner
FONER: Oh, yeah, I just want to emphasize that assimilation is a two-way process, that immigrants change and enrich American culture. It’s not just that being in America changes immigrants and their children, but that immigrants and their children change the culture of the U.S. Most, we can think about food.
In the past, immigrants brought us bagels and pizza. Now, there are more Chinese restaurants than McDonald’s, Burger Kings, and Kentucky Fried Chickens combined. Salsa sells more than ketchup. Immigrants have brought music, Latin rhythms to American popular music. They brought new businesses like nail salons that have affected how people live their daily lives.
They’ve also, I think that came up in some of the comments, that assimilation is not an unalloyed good, as we’ve heard from the last speaker. And I could add to that, that immigrant assimilation, sorry, assimilation can be bad for your health in terms of adopting American dietary patterns and also lack of exercise. You can adopt bad American habits. Interestingly, the literature shows that although immigrants commit fewer crimes than the native-born, fewer violent crimes than the native-born, by the second generation, the crime rates among the second generation are similar to the native-born.
CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS) So another form of assimilation yeah.
FONER: So we have to consider that, too.
CHAKRABARTI: So Professor. Yeah, if, so if I may, I’m thinking about the specific a definition of assimilation that Stephen Miller seems to hold, right? Because he keeps harping on things like not learning the English language, and he talks about immigrants as coming into these very isolated enclaves as if they form these hermetically sealed bubbles in different parts of the country and refuse to step outside those bubbles.
And he talks about cultural norms and and this, that, and the other. And it just seems to me that, first of all there may be varying degrees of these thing, truth in these things. But the sort of flaming concerns that he has also sound really familiar. I’m thinking about wasn’t there a time in American history where Italian immigrants forming Little Italy, right? Or Chinese immigrants congregating in Chinatowns in various parts of the country, that they were, too, seen as, unassimilating or refusing to assimilate in this country.
FONER: They certainly were. They were in fact not only felt to be refusing to assimilate, they were often felt to be unassimilable, that they never would assimilate, that they were mongrel races who would ruin America and would never become American.
I think we forget that actually, a lot of Americans forget that when they look back to the past, and there’s a tendency, in fact, to romanticize immigrants in the early, in the turn of the 20th century. And English is one of the places where this comes. I’m giving talks on my books. I often hear from the audience, these are people who are second or third generation and often older, and they’ll say today’s immigrants don’t want to speak English. And, “That’s not like my relatives. They came here and they learned English right away.” But in fact, the studies show that immigrants today are more likely to speak English and learn it more quickly than immigrants a century ago. And this three model of linguistic assimilation still holds, that immigrants arriving as adults make progress, but not surprisingly, they’re more fluent in their native tongue.
The second U.S.-born generation, the majority are proficient in English, though they’re often bilingual to speak usually with their parents or other relatives. By the third generation this is the grandchildren of immigrants, they’re by and large monolingual. They only speak English, and this fear that Spanish will challenge the predominance of English is really unfounded.
Some social scientists talk about America or the U.S. as being the graveyard of languages.
Nancy Foner
In fact, some social scientists talk about America or the U.S. as being the graveyard of languages. And I think the misconceptions come because people, we’ve had replenishment, we’ve had new immigrants coming all the time, and people see someone on the street speaking Spanish, for example, or another language, and they think, “Oh, that person hasn’t learned English.”
But that person may have come three years ago. Yeah, so it’s really, you have to really look at this over the generations.
CHAKRABARTI: If I may, I’m glad you focused on language because actually a while ago we did a show specifically about, about language uptake amongst immigrants.
And that show mirrored exactly what you’re saying, that within one generation there’s almost complete English language uptake and bilingualism, and then the second generation like the native tongue has been completely forgotten. What’s interesting to me is that you said that people say their immigrant ancestors learned English faster. In this case we’re talking about, and you’ve written a book about this in particular, we’re talking about European immigrant ancestry, right?
FONER: Yes.
CHAKRABARTI: Like Irish, Italian, et cetera. And I think that’s quite important to note. There’s this presumption that because people had lighter skin, that they somehow assimilated more quickly, which history says is not true.
FONER: Yes, exactly. Yeah, and of course, in the past, if we’re talking about around the turn of the 20th century, the overwhelming majority of immigrants were from Europe. But we should also note that they were not seen the same way that we see them today. The Jews and Italians were seen as racially, they were legally white, but they were seen as racially inferior whites, and that they would never become the equal of the white Protestant establishment. That there would be stigma … That they were bringing these racial inferiors were mongrelizing America, really.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. One of the, one of the things I hope to achieve with this hour is to show that there’s a great variety of opinions and views from immigrants who are, second generation- third generation folks in this country, about what assimilation actually is, and where they fall on the spectrum of their desires to rapidly, quote, unquote, “become American.” Because some, some families are very much into placing themselves in the United States and becoming almost instantly as integrated as they can.
For example, let me give you another example here. Phuc Tran, his family came to the U.S. as refugees of the Vietnam War. That was through a U.S.-led resettlement and the passage of the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1975. Phuc is now a writer and a tattoo artist. He used to actually teach Latin, and growing up in the U.S. in the 1980s, he told us there was no question in his family on how to assimilate.
PHUC TRAN [TAPE]: In the ’80s we got our marching orders, and it was like, get with the program, celebrate the Fourth of July, learn about Halloween, and that was it. There wasn’t space culturally for anybody to bring, their heritage culture to the table.
CHAKRABARTI: But Phuc’s parents didn’t see that as claustrophobic cultural pressure. For them, instead, it was actually an opportunity.
TRAN: They wanted me and my brother to speak perfect English. They wanted us to sit in the other room, and if they heard us talking, they wouldn’t be able to tell if it was American kids or Vietnamese American kids or Vietnamese kids, and it was really important to them. ‘Cause I, I think for my father especially he thought that the reason that he wasn’t getting further ahead or didn’t have opportunities was because his mastery of English and his sort of a cultural assimilation wasn’t complete, or let he was missing things, and that, and he wanted us to have sort of all those opportunities.
CHAKRABARTI: But later, his parents viewed, views softened when they noticed that Phuc couldn’t speak Vietnamese as well as he did when he was a child. And they had their own I guess I should say they only had their own experiences to guide them in the cultural minefield known as teenaged dating.
TRAN: And then the other thing was when I was in high school, my parents set me up on a blind date with a, another Vietnamese American girl. And then all of a sudden there was this expectation that I was gonna date and marry another Vietnamese girl, and I was like, “Wait, what?” I don’t e- I don’t even know any other… we had to drive a half hour away to Harrisburg to find another Vietnamese girl. They’re like, “Okay, here you go. Why don’t you guys just hit it off?” And I was just like, “Hell no,” ’cause I’m this ’80s punk rock teenager, and I was like, “This is so weird.” I talked to her. She was very nice. We sat in the car, and we just made fun of our parents, which is the most Gen X, Vietnamese American thing to do. We both we’re sitting in the car, arms crossed, staring at each other, being like, “Our parents suck.”
CHAKRABARTI: Phuc’s parents’ approach to assimilation, I would say it’s a sum of specificities, being war refugees grateful to be alive, arriving in the 1970s at the relative beginning of a large wave of Asian immigration, and a drive to succeed. But for Phuc, that didn’t mean navigating multiple cultures was always easy.
TRAN: I think the process of assimilation is fraught because it’s not it’s completely unwritten in terms of, like, when you’ve done enough, and also you don’t know who’s in charge. Like, when do you get the certificate that says that you’re assimilated? Because I just remember being in high school just jumping through all these hoops and doing all these things, and it’s like, in, in the back of my mind, I’m like, “Okay when am I American enough?”
CHAKRABARTI: Phuc has come to see his assimilation though as a strength, binding together the strongest aspects of multiple cultures that create his own identity.
TRAN: I feel like I, I have access to two amazing all you can eat buffets, and I can go back and forth between the two, and I can leave behind the things that I don’t want, and then I can take all the things that, fulfill or enrich my life from both American and Vietnamese culture as it was presented to me, from, by my parents and my family.
CHAKRABARTI: That was Phuc Tran author of the memoir “Sigh, Gone.” He’s also a tattoo artist currently living in Maine. Professor Foner, this gets me thinking about were, are the tensions or are the tensions over assimilation, are they different now since the types of immigrants who began coming in 1965 to this country were just from different parts of the country than were at the turn of the century?
FONER: There are lots of differences and lots of similarities. I guess picking up on the Vietnamese experience that we just heard, and today at least yes, there’s always been conflicts or tensions between immigrants and their second generation children over certain aspects of child-rearing, for example, that parents are too strict.
That happened in the past, and it happens today. Very common that children feel that their parents bring with them values and they expect a level of respect and deference, for example. A big issue in many immigrant groups is this issue of discipline that parents feel, immigrant parents feel that sparing the rod is ruining the child.
And they believe in using physical, corporal punishment and are actually upset when the teachers and the schools don’t use it. And this is a tension for the children and the parents. But what’s interesting is that many of the parents, they’re not most are not these, inflexible traditionalists.
They begin to change too often in kind of small and maybe subtle ways, and many will tell you that they try to speak to their children and talk to them rather than hitting them, for example. And so I think and the children themselves also begin to learn new ways. Although interestingly, in the the tale that we just heard, it’s interesting that among West Indians who I’ve studied from Jamaica the second generation when they grow up, even though they resented their parents using corporal punishment when they were children, say that when they grow up, they want to incorporate the best of both possible worlds.
They don’t want to be as strict as their parents. But they also don’t want to be like American parents. So they want to create a new, maybe a create a mixture, which actually is something that many children of immigrants do.
CHAKRABARTI: This just to me seems the most American thing possible though, right? Creating something new.
FONER: Something new, exactly.
CHAKRABARTI: But can I just ask a, a quick follow-up? We’ve got about two minutes here before we have to take our next break. To me, it’s quite obvious that if a family emphasizes the let’s call it the superficial things required for quote-unquote “assimilation,” language, maybe being more familiar with, as is noted, the dominant culture. But is there evidence that for families who are less inclined to say “you’re gonna speak English at home,” or whatnot, or “You’re going to understand what St. Patrick’s Day means,” if there’s any delay in that immigration, and does that have any impact on that family and their progress either, like socioeconomically in this country?
Immigrants bring this tremendous desire for their children to do better. That’s a great strength of the immigrant experience.
Nancy Foner
FONER: Yeah, I haven’t seen anything as like that. But I do, we should emphasize, though, that immigrants bring this tremendous desire for their children to do better. That’s a, a great strength of the immigrant experience. That I think has come out from the people that we’ve heard. They leave their, in some cases they’re forced to leave their home countries in the case of refugees, but many voluntarily because they want a better life for their children in the U.S. They’re very ambitious, they’re motivated to work hard, and that is something that is a, a strength of the immigrant experience.
Part III
CHAKRABARTI: And let’s listen to a little bit more of our On Point listeners who shared their stories or what their views are of assimilation. So this is Caterina. She’s been living in the U.S. for more than 20 years, and she loves American culture and is happy to adopt some of it, but this word assimilation to her can often mean something more sinister.
CATERINA [TAPE]: Assimilation often it comes to my ear as a dog whistle when times are becoming very conservative, and so it becomes more a narrow view of one slither, a very small and tiny sliver of American culture, which is like pushing this whiteness or this Christian nationalism or of conservatism or this capitalist view. But it’s tiny it’s very narrow, and it’s not vibrant. So for me, wanting to learn the American culture for me, that is wonderful and vibrant, I find this diversity is what is exciting, and we should be honoring that.
CHAKRABARTI: So here’s another one. This is Mawuko Gbeddy. He says that as a child of African immigrants and as an African-American in this country, he’s able to see multiple perspectives.
MAWUKO GBEDDY [TAPE]: People look at me and obviously see just primarily a Black man. I often see the various stereotypes associated with that, but also I see stereotypes associated with Africans and things put on them throughout their lives as immigrants. I’m not fluent in my dad’s native language, and trying to learn that has always been difficult for me, especially since he has moved back to Ghana as of recently. But as African-American person, you see a mixture. African-Americans have their own particular culture steeped in their, steeped in oppression and such. Meanwhile, Africans have to assimilate, change up their names, speak, speak more fluent English, et cetera. And so someone like me and having my own name is a privilege.
CHAKRABARTI: So Professor Foner, we keep saying this, I’ve been saying this word assimilation all hour, and then also assimilating into American culture, but I want to be honest. I’m the child of immigrants, I was born in this country, I’m an American through and through, first and foremost, but I can’t even say I know what American culture is because it, I think it highly depends on what part of the country you live in, even, what your socioeconomic status is.
So is there any, I guess among sociologists like you, any common agreement as to what we mean when we say American culture?
FONER: Gosh, probably not. (LAUGHS)
CHAKRABARTI: Because I’m just wondering how an immigrant’s supposed to know what they’re supposed to assimilate into, right?
FONER: I guess English is one of the things that we would say, right? Speaking English, for those who come not from cultures where English is not the common language or the official language. That would be one thing, right? Learning English. Assimilation often refers to economic assimilation, moving up the job ladder and the job hierarchy, so it’s not just a cultural term.
So it really it varies with really with how social scientists in their work use it, and how every day, what’s interesting is how Caterina sees it as a stigmatized word, and I think it, that many do believe, think that. It means, you have to force to be somehow American, and it doesn’t recognize your diverse cultural experiences in this country.
And and the the last speaker also raised the problem of, by becoming American for those who are seen as Black, it means becoming a Black-American, right? So that has its other a hyphenated American, right? Which is sometimes presented as being a good because that acknowledges diversity.
But for other groups, it may also be a stigma, particularly for for Black immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean often feel that they don’t have the option that they’re by, when people see them, they don’t see where they came from. This is the second generation who’d have no accent to indicate where they’re from, or in some cases, their name doesn’t indicate it either.
And so they feel that they are just labeled as Black and their ethnic background or their immigrant background is not recognized. So it’s complicated in the US because of racial and economic inequalities, right?
CHAKRABARTI: It got me thinking to this other question I wanted to ask you about, which is, in the past have these concerns over immigrants and they’re assimilated, then they’re not assimilating, when have they reached the kind of feverish pitch we’re hearing now? Because, I was looking at some interviews that Stephen Miller has given, and there was one in particular, interestingly, where he talked about what he saw as a golden age in America- between 1924 and 1965. And these are two really important dates in immigration history. I was wondering if you wanted to talk about that a little bit, and whether they map to this sort of assimilation fear as well in American history.
FONER: They do in the fact that what led to the 1924 act, and the 1924 act, we should say, is an act that highly restricted immigration after to the United States after decades of very enormous immigration, particularly from Eastern and Southern Europe.
And the 1924 act established national origin quotas, and favored, heavily favored people from Northern and Western Europe, and cut the numbers down enormously. So that between the ’20s and then 1965 was the Immigration Act that really opened up the United States to immigration literally from all over the world by abolishing the national origin quotas and creating a new immigration system.
Yes, I know Stephen Miller talks about this “pause,” he calls it, right? This pause between the ’20s and the ’60s allowed for assimilation. Although, actually, in what the, the quote earlier, he seems to have seen it as being persistent throughout the generations. But I think immigration was not dependent on that pause.
And we should remember that during that pause, there was World War II and the Great Depression, which also discouraged immigration. But immigration, as I’ve said earlier, is a second-generation phenomenon. It’s a generational phenomenon. And just having a pause, during the pause, yes, the numbers of new immigrants were small, but there were second and third generation were growing up in America.
There was still a lot of diversity. That’s his justification for why we need a pause. And I think that comes up against, re- acknowledging and discussing how important immigration is for American society. Quite apart from assimilation issues, we have population issues in the country now.
We have the aging of the baby boomers who were born right in the post-World War II period, enormous cohort, mostly white. By 2030, they’re going to, all of them will be 65 or older. Who is going to fill the jobs that they’re leaving, both low skilled and high skilled? In the country, fertility is well below replacement levels, and then we’re gonna have this aging population.
Who’s gonna care for them? At the moment, immigrants are heavily involved in these caring professions. Who’s gonna pay into the Social Security system to provide benefits for this huge aging population? Yes, we’re, it’s import- interesting that, assimilation is focused on some of the time, but this is an important…We need immigrants in the United States now. Now, if we go back again to the past there were hard-edged Americanization programs at that time in the early 20th century, which we haven’t spoken about. Immigrants were seen as they had to completely shed their old customs and ethnic identities.
In schools on the Lower East Side, you weren’t allowed even to speak Yiddish in the schoolyard, and the teachers were told to wash out with soap anybody who used Yiddish. Teddy Roosevelt the president in 1915, beginning of World War I, he said, “There’s no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American.”
So, they were against hyphenation. You had to be a 100% American. So actually it was more intolerant then than now. Yeah. Because hyphenated identities have become accepted in America. We do live in a post-civil rights America despite the attempts of the Trump administration to undo that. And so,
CHAKRABARTI: Can I just jump in here? Yeah, sure. And Professor, you’ll just have to forgive me. Please do, because I’m just mindful of the time. And I wanted to give voice to one more person because this person, he’s Ilan Stavans, and he is part of America’s largest immigrant group by far. Stavans is a professor of humanities and Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College.
It’s as if you are born again, and in that you have options that you didn’t have originally as a child in your original culture.
Ilan Stavans
ILAN STAVANS [TAPE]: I am myself an immigrant from Mexico. I came in the mid-’80s to this country. I came with different languages. My original languages were Yiddish and Spanish. In adopting the English language, I started to realize that I move my body differently in each of the languages, that my facial gestures are differently when I speak one or I speak the other, and I found it absolutely absorbing but also daunting to occupy a new language, to steal from the culture the words that were property of that culture and to make them my own. I felt like an imposter, and I think all immigrants have that element of impostership, of a, of passing, of not being quite the themselves, or at least their old self.
CHAKRABARTI: But Stavans says that being a chimera can have its benefits.
STAVANS: Then it’s also extraordinarily liberating as well. You become somebody new. It’s as if you are born again, and in that you have options that you didn’t have originally as a child in your original culture. So I think that immigration is an invitation to start anew. Assimilation is this wrestling between the old and the newly acquired.
Assimilation is this wrestling between the old and the newly acquired.
Ilan Stavans
CHAKRABARTI: Stavans says that new identity, though, doesn’t come immediately, and it doesn’t come without friction.
STAVANS: That culture into which one arrives establishes that the, the doors are closed or that things are already in shape and that our arrival makes others uncomfortable or at least makes them aware that there’s an outsider that might be watching or might be stealing certain elements. And that no, you are here, you are taking somebody else’s bed, you’re taking somebody else’s desk in a school or job in a factory or in a whatever labor dimension that is, makes us feel as if we are unwelcome.
CHAKRABARTI: But overall, Ilan Stavans says that being an immigrant is being part of the human story, and it’s a story he sees that’s ripe with constant change, both for individuals and the broader culture.
STAVANS: The immigrant is not only transformed by the society into which they arrive, but transforms that society radically and essentially. The presence of the outsider makes the insider feel different automatically, even when that insider is rejecting that, that immigrant, or on the other side, when that insider is fully embracing it.
The immigrant is not only transformed by the society into which they arrive, but transforms that society radically and essentially.
Ilan Stavans
CHAKRABARTI: So that’s Ilan Stavans, professor of humanities and Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College.
And Professor Foner, if I may, there’s one more voice I want to play here, because, what we’re talking about is the debate or the tensions over assimilation in this country. And recently I heard what I think is the simplest, most straightforward, and most sensible definition of sort of the duties that immigrants have in coming to a new nation, and the duty that new nation has to those immigrants.
And it comes from a speech that Pope Leo gave just last month in Tenerife on a trip to Spain. And in it, he starts by saying, “To integrate does not mean erasing the history of those who arrive, nor demanding that they leave behind everything that forms part of their memory.” And then he continues like this.
POPE LEO [TAPE, ITALIAN]: Integrar es un camino reciproco. Quien llega aprende a habitar una tierra nueva, y quien recibe aprende a ensanchar-
CHAKRABARTI: Pope Leo says, “Integration is a reciprocal path. Those who arrive learn to inhabit a new land, and those who rec- who receive learn to expand their own home without diluting their identity or closing their hearts to an encounter.”
He talks about how he says that new immigrants should do things like learn the language, and the receiving country should do things like be open to adopting new cultural norms. And to me, it’s so straightforward because, as you said, that is actually what happens in America. So I just wonder, is there any other reason beyond racism that this debate keeps coming up in American history?
FONER: You’re asking me? I think that it’s because there are tensions over immigration that often politicians deepen and use to base their support. I think that’s also an element in, in this. And I think that we’ve seen that in the past in nativist movements that have popped up repeatedly in American history.
You can adopt many American values and cultural patterns at the same time as maintaining some from the old country.
Nancy Foner
So this is not something, this is not something new. But I think the points that Ilan Stavans and the Pope made are really important ones to remember. I think this notion that immigrants transform American society at the same point as they are transformed in coming here that assimilation’s not an all or nothing proposition, that you can adopt many American values and cultural patterns at the same time as maintain some from the old country. And I think maybe a way to think of it, too, I interestingly in studies of the second generation, I’ve found that when members of the second generation go back to their parents’ home country, what emerges is one of the things that strikes them the most is that they feel highly American.
They don’t, they have never felt as American as before, when they realize how different they are from those in their parents’ home country. And I think this notion of change, it shouldn’t be a rigid, an all or nothing proposition.
The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.
