These new Americans cleaned our houses, took care of our children, and picked the fruit and vegetables we put on our tables. And they got paid less for doing more.
In other words, immigrants were the victims of institutionalized greed. Most began in poverty and improved their condition gradually by buying and selling among themselves in their ghettos. Eventually, a few began to accumulate wealth. They became the ghetto leaders. Then they broke out of the ghettos and became entrepreneurs.
And, for many, although they still clung to some old customs, always remembered the music, and spoke some of the old country's languages, their principal aspiration was always to be 110 per cent Americans. Baseball. Apple pie. The Whole Nine Yards. This evolution took generations.
So it is and will be for future generations of immigrants. You can see the full metamorphosis if you visit the Muslim neighborhoods of places like Dearborn, Michigan.
People who live there part of the several million Muslims who are proud to
call themselves Americans remember where they came from. The elders may even remember the discrimination and the second-class citizenship they experienced some of which lingers to this day, thanks to the Islamophobia that followed 9/11.
But, by and large, these people have become the kinds of fully assimilated Americans who would warm the cockles even of fear-mongering nativists like Tom Tancredo and Steve King.
Could this happen in Europe? Well, I guess anything's possible. But on the Continent, it faces a major obstacle: Europe does not honor diversity; it honors a homogeneity that can't be achieved in the 21st Century.
At the core of Americans, I still find that most people buy into the narrative we invented of improving ourselves and our country by celebrating the differences among and between our people.
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