Michele Kearney's Snuffysmith's Blog

Mass Migration: Uninvited Guests

by Philip Carl Salzman  •  December 31, 2017 at 5:00 am

• Refugees and immigrants bring their own cultures, their own assumptions, beliefs, values, fears and hopes from their homelands. One cannot just assume that they wish to integrate or assimilate into the Western culture. Willingness to assimilate might well vary from individual to individual, and from culture to culture.
• A society can only function smoothly if there is a large degree of agreement and commonality regarding to what language people shall speak, what rules they should follow in dealing with one another, and how government is to be established. Where is it written that all cultures are necessarily compatible with one another?
• The success of immigrants in North America is a result of immigrants assimilating to Western culture and society, not due to immigrants clinging to the laws and practices of the lands they have left behind. We welcome them to become Americans and Canadians; we welcome to them to the West.

Immigrants built Canada and the United States by joining in with others to build a common culture, a unified government and legal system, and a vibrant economy. Pictured: Newly naturalized U.S. citizens recite the Pledge of Allegiance during a naturalization ceremony November 23, 2016, on Andersen Air Force Base, Guam. (U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Benjamin Gonsier)

In our desire to insure an inclusive, humane, and tolerant society, we seem to have constructed a simplistic and inadequate picture of refugees and illegal immigrants.

Perhaps the majority of Americans and Canadians do not approach the question of refugees and immigrants with an open mind, but with a set of "progressive" assumptions:

• The idea that all cultures are equally good and equally valuable, sometimes known as "cultural relativism." When faced with an uninvited influx of outsiders, we do not worry about what culture the incomers are bringing, because, whatever it is, it supposedly must be fine.
• That multiculturalism, the coexistence of a variety of cultures, is desirable. The more cultures in a multicultural society, the more cultural diversity, the better.
  Continue Reading Articlehttps://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11625/mass-migration-uninvited-guests