Too few people understand the broader picture regarding the world of immigration…and this is the fault of conservatives. Here is Bruce Walker writing at American Thinker:
There is a grand mythology about how the flood of immigrants from oppressed lands to America has benefited the world. The poem written by Emma Lazarus for our Statute of Liberty creates the impression that providing a new homeland for those who in their native lands lacked liberty, economic opportunity, and security from pogroms and related violence created America.
This is not true. America would have been just as successful without the immigrants from Europe and East Asia as with these immigrants. That is not to say that the Germans, Irish, Jews, Poles, Italians, and others who came to America beginning with German immigration in the early 19th century did not become good and productive Americans. They did, but America did not need them, and they did not need America.
There is a fundamental difference between these immigrants and the immigrants from the Islamic and Hispanic worlds to America during the last decades. The Germans, Irish, Jews, Poles, Italians, and others who came to America did so to embrace the values of our country (and also the values of other homelands to migrants like Canada and Australia).
Moreover, these immigrants recognized the need to turn their old homelands into nations like America. So, for example, Italians became Americans, but many of these immigrants also moved back to Italy to help transform the peninsula into a unified nation with liberty and democracy.
When the Irish and the Jewish peoples of Europe acquired their own self-governing nation – in Ireland and Israel – many families who had come impoverished to America returned to the culture and the faith of a homeland in the Old World with affluence and success. Over time, the one-sided flow of immigration to America became bilateral because the political, economic, and moral values of America had permeated the original homeland of immigrant groups.
Read more: American Thinker
Image credit: Wikipedia Commons.
