The melting pot as a crock pot

If Mr. Pat Buchanan is summarizing the work of Dr. Robert Putnam accurately, then we have a valuable clue to how our cultural "melting pot" has worked in the past.1 According to this summary, the major effects of massive immigration are mostly negative, more mistrust, less civic virtue, less hope and less trust. How then can we say that immigration has benefited us? How, from this morass of distrust did we (re)develop a unified American culture?

The answer, according to this summary, is that the wave of massive immigration was followed by a long period of very low immigration. It is over this period that the diversity settled out, melted and flowed together. The action then is much like a crock pot, which takes hours to cook something.

From this example, I can infer how previous waves of immigration must have worked. For while we have had significant bursts of this population or that population, bursts from Ireland, from Italy, from Norway, from Germany, or Poland, they did not all come at once. They grew, they peaked, they fell off. And so you see a growth of distrust against a group, followed by a period of simmering, melting together, as the two groups face some third group.

Immigrants are an important part of this country. I do not know that we need to cut back on it, nor am I confident that doing so would be good for this country. We must assimilate them though. We must forge bonds of unity with them, and this process will not work by accentuating our differences, celebrating them as a people distinct from ourselves. We cannot preserve their culture and ours, we must merge the two. There must be give and take.

This will not be easy. My fear though is that it will not even be possible, because they will not give, and will be encouraged in that intransigence by our own elite.

Note that I have not mentioned race once in this thought processes until now. I do not think it belongs, because I believe that there is much that separates the protestant from the Catholic, the German from the Pollack, the Italian from the Irish. I do not buy the idea that there is this "anglo-saxon" majority that is all the same inherently. If we are (IF!!), then it is because we have experienced a melting pot effect that other cultures present here in the United States have experienced less fully, if at all.