That tradition has made our country richly diverse in its culture. It has also contributed to our prosperity by bringing us the most bold and ambitious people in the countries of the world. Even today, many of the immigrants who come here are those willing to brave the shark-infested waters of the Caribbean or the deserts of the southwest, to escape the oppression and poverty of Cuban or Mexican socialism.
Immigration can continue to inject new, robust blood into our population. Uncontrolled, it can also spell the end of everything that makes people want to come to America: liberty and prosperity.
People who come to America bring their cultures with them. Historically, they have sought out their "own kind" and formed communities where they could be comfortable in familiar surroundings. Eventually, they or their children learned English. More importantly, they learned the principles of limited government that are the foundation of the liberty and prosperity that drew them to America. Those people could be said to have been "assimilated" into our culture. To varying degrees they retained their own cultures, but nevertheless they became fully American.
Today there are several forces subverting this healthy immigration and assimilation process. First there is the sheer volume of immigration, especially from Mexico. The resulting huge Spanish speaking immigrant communities make it much more difficult and less compelling for newcomers to learn English, or to gain an understanding of our heritage of liberty.
Another problem is that most native-born Americans know so little about our own heritage that there isn't much understanding available to rub off on immigrants with whom we associate. If we rely on government programs to pass on this understanding, all we can expect immigrants to learn about is their "rights" to obtain welfare benefits and to become citizens without learning the English language.
This brings us to the proliferation of groups working to subvert the immigration and assimilation process. Today we have people instructing foreigners in ways to bypass the limitations we have placed on the number of immigrants. Others propagate the ideas that immigration is a right; that everyone has a right to do business with government offices in his own language; that illegal immigrants have all the same rights as legal immigrants and citizens. Even the Clinton administration got into the act, rushing hundreds of thousands through the naturalization process without the required criminal background checks, to help elect Al Gore to the presidency.
Immigration today is a complex problem with no simple solution. Some of the parts of a solution do seem obvious to me, though. We need to slow down the rate of immigration to allow for assimilation of those we already have. This includes enforcing the existing laws: Congress shouldn't go along with the president's current attempt to grant amnesty to two million illegal aliens; and should provide funds to fully protect our borders.
Conservatives shouldn't concede the hearts and minds of immigrants to leftist agitators. Maybe some of us should learn Spanish so we can improve our ability to pass on constitutional principles to our new neighbors. We need to do something to counteract the active work of the left to enlist new immigrants in their liberty destroying agenda.
This all reminds me of an Aesop's Fable I learned as a boy: The Goose