immigrant assimilation Quotes
This is a complaint similar to that made by anti-immigrant Americans. France, like most other countries of the world, has never had the large scale immigration of today, nor have they had such a large proportion of the same ethnicity at once—in this case, Muslim North Africans. There were never, before the last decades, enough immigrants of any ethnicity in France to have a choice of maintaining their traditional languages and culture and not learning French or otherwise assimilating. America, in contrast, had large immigrations of different ethnicities, and despite the erroneous beliefs of immigration opponents, these blocs of immigrants have wherever there was sufficient density—usually cities, they maintained their old language and other customs. However, their children and the next generation in almost all cases have abandoned the language and many of the customs of the old country. This was true of the Germans, the Irish, the Italians, the European Jews, the Russian Jews, the Scandinavians’, and the Hispanics with their different cultures.
Most immigration reformers want to open immigration more widely. Ward wanted immigration restricted to certain ethnicities and limited. He wanted a uniformity of assimilation and not diversity.
Although generally a supporter of immigration, he began to oppose it when the very large numbers of immigrants who were ethnically and culturally different began to enter the United States. Northern Italians were OK but the Southern Italians were from a different social class. German Jews had made great contributions to America but the Russian Jews were peasants and serfs. Polish immigrants also. Walker was worried that for the first time in America there would be a social class division as the historical difference between rich and poor in America he believed was within ethnic groups and not between them.
