Tucker Carlson has a point as does President Donald Trump — here is John Daniel Davidson:
We’re not very good at instilling American values in immigrants because we’re not very good about instilling them among the native-born.
Tucker Carlson’s monologue Tuesday night going after Rep. Ilhan Omar for her anti-American statements provoked predictable accusations of racism, in particular against his contention that Omar is “living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country.”
But as my colleague David Harsanyi noted, Carlson wasn’t criticizing Omar because of her race or religious background, but because of her radical ideas, “because she doesn’t believe in the traditional ideas that define American life.”
Harsanyi disagrees with Carlson about immigration as a whole, though. He says, contra Carlson, that liberal immigration policies are good, and add much to American society. In general, this is correct. Or at least it has been the case throughout most of our history.
Where Carlson has a point, however, is in his assertion that, “No country can import large numbers of people who hate it, and expect to survive.” That’s true of both immigrants and the native born, and indeed Carlson has also noted recently that no country can be governed by people who hate it—like the crowded field of Democratic candidates scrambling to denounce America—and expect to survive.
The question, then, is whether we’re doing enough to ensure that both immigrants and the native-born don’t end up hating America the way Omar, who has every reason notto hate America, obviously does. We arguably ask too little of our immigrants and don’t do a good job of assimilating them—and by assimilating, I mean instilling in them traditional American values.
But the reason we don’t do a very good job of that anymore is because we don’t do a very good job of creating Americans from the native-born population in general.
Read more: The Federalist
Image credit: www.thefederalist.com.
