Mickey Kaus is calling for a “real debate, not the surface debate,” over immigration, a call that is seconded on InstaPundit, who writes: “My own sense is that immigration is a good thing, so long as immigrants want to buy into the American Dream. Assimilation is good.” Instapundit then quotes a powerful comment from a reader:
If people want to become just plain ordinary Americans, come on over. If they want to be hyphenated Americans and make little enclaves of where they came from, stay home.
Diversity is in the melting pot. Lots of good ingredients blending together make a mighty fine stew.
America has had a recurrent, even continuous, debate over whether our society is, or should be, a melting pot (assimilation, with some distinctive unique spices added to the mix) or a salad bowl (essentially multiculturalism), and I have no desire to add to it here.
What I would like to say is that all those folks who now bow down to the new idol of “diversity” should be leading the charge (if they want to be consistent) to limit immigration from Mexico. Since Sandra and her fellow Supremes have now sanctified the principle that discrimination in the service of “diversity” is acceptable, there should be no problem passing legislation to restrict immigration from Mexico until we build up the number of immigrants from Iceland and other “underrepresented” societies.
Is immigration a GOP wedge issue? Maybe.
Immigration is a form of recruitment, and it would follow from diversity-valuation that Mexicans and Spanish-speakers are lower diversity-value, on such premisses. If assimilation is good, though, why is not pre-assimilation better still? If balkanization is not our goal, everyone who even pretends to believe in assimilation should want English language and literacy to rank all such applicants, from the top down. This would be international merit also; not just merit for a particular country with a particular national language. If school or employment applicants are not made eternal clan enemies of, by being told that they are lacking in merit in comparison to someone else; how is it that ethnics should be expected to be thus lastingly antagonized, whose people would tend to be classed as undesirable aliens on a merit system?