On assimilation by force

[winter]

A few people on my f-list have already linked to Elizabeth Moon's diatribe on why immigrants should shut up and change to be just like everyone else. I didn't comment on it, because I literally couldn't find the words.

Shweta Narayan says it more eloquently than I ever could.

I have the luck of spending most of my childhood in a country where others are like me, and of a multi-cultural education from the cradle. But I was also a Slav travelling in Western Europe just after communism ended. I was nine years old, in a supermarket in Paris, and I talked to my mother in halting, broken French, because I knew that if I spoke Polish, everyone in the shop would stare and follow us to make sure we didn't steal anything.

Comments

[winter]

The point here is that in order to accept large numbers of immigrants, and maintain any social cohesion, acceptance by the receiving population is not the only requirement: immigrants must be willing and able to change, to merge with the receiving population. The new place isn't the old place; the new customs aren't the old customs.

There is a difference between breaking the law (obvious), and actually daring to have one's own culture. From the place she's coming from - with America's imperial history - to say this, is somewhat unbelievable for me.

(It might help for you to know that my country went through a total of 160+ years in the last 220 of various degrees of non-independence and at times attempts at forced assimilation, together with, natch, not letting kids speak Polish in schools at one point. I have context here.)