Assimilationist Expectations: A Conversation at Far Rockaway Beach

A group of my friends and I were spending the last day of summer at Far Rockaway Beach. We were in the section of the Rockway Peninsula where most neighbors are white, middle-class, Irish-American, often Catholic: friendly and kind folk. Some of my friends, who now live in Brooklyn, grew up there. Others still live in Rockaway. Their blocks have the feel of an affluent beach town, much different from the poorer blocks to the east, where black and brown people live in “the projects.”  

Somehow our conversation turned to the question of what to do about immigration in the United States. I, one of two immigrants in the group, decided to listen rather than speak. In the course of the conversation, one of my friends turned to me and said about those of his conservative neighbors in Rockaway who have anti-immigration beliefs and want to shut the borders: “They shouldn’t worry. Let people come. Within a generation they will be assimilated. They’ll speak English and learn our values.” He said it kindly and earnestly, with a tone of voice that intimated that I would obviously agree. After all, he was not one of his exclusionary neighbors, but rather a welcoming guy who says: “Everyone is welcome here. So long as they become like ‘us.’ Quick.”  

This is an example of the assimilationist expectations that some seemingly open people place on immigrants, who are “different” in their language, moral values, political ideals, economic behavior, religion, and so on. “Come. Learn English. Forget, say, the Spanish, Mandarin, or Arabic. Or maybe speak it at home to your parents, that’s fine, but not to your children when you have them. Learn the ways we interact with each other, what we say and what we don’t, how we say it, when we say it. Learn our racial, economic, and political codes. Adopt our mores. Above all, contribute to our labor force, to our economic competitiveness.”

Though this seems like an open attitude, it is in the end monist rather than pluralist. It says: “Our way of life is the best way, and the only acceptable one here.” 

In this sense, it is closer to the exclusionary than to the pluralist attitude that McKenna and Pratt find in the American philosophical tradition. Let me turn to that tradition next.