"the message was assimilate or fail"
And it's a damn good message, too. Not because Chinese or Spanish is inferior, but because assimilation is the entire backbone of accepting immigrants into the construct called "the American people".
You know what happens when you don't treat the cohesive language and culture of a people as the goal? When you allow pockets of non-assimilated peoples to justify their continued separateness, to define themselves as parallel to the larger outside culture? When you point to a non-ethnic nation and define your separateness by race?
That larger, non-ethnic culture
starts to define itself by its dominant ethnicity. You get the alt-right and the European chauvinists in America. The stupidest accomplishment of the woke left is taking an ideologically constructed people, forcibly re-defining it by racial lines, and then complaining that we need an ideologically constructed nation instead of a racial one.
When my family came over to America, the parents spoke almost no English. They made
damn sure the children spoke it perfectly. And the next generation only knew some of the old language... but by that point they were middle class, and could afford to take some fun weekend classes to learn it in their spare time.
"Assimilate or fail", complains the
successful offspring of immigrants who
did assimilate. You'll find quite a lot of poverty and failure in the places where they refuse to assimilate. But that failure makes for good Democratic voters, doesn't it, John?
Software engineer
