The Virtues of Immigrant Assimilation

The primary issue that Donald Trump rode to victory on in the 2016 election was immigration. 

It worked against old-school conservatives of the Bush school in the primaries first, who had quietly embraced large-scale immigration as providing cheap labor necessary for our economy. It worked against the Obama Democrats who had chosen to cast off the white working class’s concerns about the issue in favor of importing a whole new underclass whose vote they could purchase for generations as dependent clients of the welfare state. 

(No, this is not some paranoid right-wing fantasy — we have not thrown our copy of The Emerging Democratic Majority (“Demography is Destiny!”) down the memory hole just yet. We’re still down for the count.)

Among all the issues that immigration raises, perhaps the most important one is assimilation. This is an issue worldwide, where it has, in many places, dwarfed all other issues, at least to many of the native-born who feel that the very core of their purpose as a nation is not shared. They believe that the new immigrants are repaying their welcome with contempt for them and their culture. They see a not-so-concealed agenda to replace the welcoming culture with the immigrants’ culture against the will of the erstwhile welcomers.

Assimilation as Moral Necessity

Assimilation has been an issue for me as a Jew since we debated it in my high school Sunday School class. It’s been an issue in Jewish life ever since the destruction of King Solomon’s Temple and the forced exile of almost all the Jews to Babylonia.

There was a mass exile when the Assyrians conquered the northern Kingdom of Israel, uprooted the 10 tribes who had resided there, and scattered them across the Assyrian lands. That had been Assyria’s way of dealing with conquered nations: Scatter them about so that they lose all cohesion and identity. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: The Gollum Possibility at the DNC)

More than assimilation, it was a way of wiping out the original identity entirely. It succeeded — those Jews who were exiled are known as the 10 Lost Tribes because, wherever they may be, their identity as part of the people of Israel is lost, at least for the last two-plus millennia.

When the remaining Jewish kingdom, Judah, was conquered, the Babylonians exiled them but allowed them to stay together. Among the Jews, there was a divine prophecy that struck a balance between the need of the larger sovereignty to be sovereign and the need of the Jews to maintain their relationship with God. Jeremiah delivered these words to the people in exile in God’s name:

Build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat their fruit. Take wives and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands that they may bear sons and daughters.… And seek the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its prosperity, you shall prosper.

This does not mean that the people are to lose their identity — Jeremiah will later condemn the exiles in Egypt for doing just that — they are to remain distinct and identifiable, as their faith requires. 

What it does mean is that they are commanded by their religion itself to act loyally and positively with the kingdom that is their host. They are to engage in reciprocal altruism, by divine command. God is instructing them not only in what to do but in the why — you will yourself prosper along with the nation to which you devote yourself.

Most important is that this is communicated as a divine imperative: God requires this cooperation of you. God is not asking you to make a show of cooperation but to be sincere in it, to the point that you will pray on its behalf. 

In the Jewish law tradition, with its millennia-spanning continuity, this principle of recognizing the legitimate authority of a host country is encoded today in the principle of dina demalchuta dina — the law of the kingdom is law. What this means is that laws propagated by any sovereignty are binding on Jews by Jewish law as well as the power of the state. The only exceptions are laws that persecute Jews or that serve no legitimate aim in furthering the commonwealth when the government acts more as a gang of bandits than as a proper sovereignty. 

Assimilation Is Not Annihilation 

When the Constitution had finally been ratified by all 13 original states, President Washington visited the last ratifying state, Rhode Island, to celebrate. When he was there, he was approached by the Jewish community of Newport to clarify the terms under which Jews would be living in this new country.

Washington’s answer, in letter form, set out terms that embrace the idea of Jeremiah’s prophecy, seen from the other side. In the key paragraph, he wrote: 

All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship … Happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

In other words: We do not require you to change your religion; you are only required to be an effectually supportive citizen, the same as anyone else. And the Jews responded to this declaration and, as Jeremiah foretold, America and its Jews have prospered together. (READ MORE: Will Jews Stay With Feckless Dems in 2024?)

Though America has known bigotry and has even seen, briefly, an official expulsion of Jews from certain areas, those have proven to be aberrations from the American trajectory. The greatest threat to American Jews has been the kind of assimilation that had nothing to do with what Jeremiah and Washington outlined. The country has never required assimilation that throws away ancient commitments set by God. But some have thought freedom was to be found by leaving responsibilities behind. 

Reject the Nihilism of the Democrat Party

As we approach the issue of immigration, we would do well to bear in mind the lessons of Jeremiah and George Washington. It is legitimate to expect of any people coming to live in another land that they are committed to it — that they pray for its welfare and seek their prosperity as part of the prosperity of the country in which they will now live.

They must always give their adopted home their effectual support. We must expect this of them, and we need not be ashamed to require it, even as we require it of ourselves. There will be one law for you and the stranger that comes to dwell.

A false duality has been presented to us by our dysfunctional political culture: One can either give up one’s former identity or forfeit one’s place as a full citizen in the United States. There is a place for the gifts of identity and history that each immigrant brings, the light of their own journey and story in all the particulars that make it unique, focused, and powerful.

The past is not a burden to be thrown off and only thus are we free, contrary to the oft-repeated musings of a would-be philosopher queen. Our country does not rise as a freakish test-tube monster, absent parents.

On the contrary: e pluribus unum, our unity is a confluence of many lives and the gifts each one brings. They come here for a reason, and inasmuch as that reason is positive and respectful of our national purpose and sovereignty, each one enriches us. America is a great tree fed by many, many strong roots.

All this requires that America not adopt the jahr null nihilism of Kamala Harris’ party, in which the past is severed from our lives, and all we have at any one moment is what we will be told by those who control the story — or think they do. It is people who know where they have been that know where they now need to go. “Freeing” ourselves of the past makes us the slaves of the ruling class’s propagandists and the pawns of their power.

The real story can never be controlled by those who care for narratives only because of the power they bestow. As Genesis declares: This is the book of the history of Adam’s kind. The medieval Spanish mystic, Nachmanides, commented that the book here means all of God’s instruction, and it is written in the lives of all of Adam’s descendants. We each have our part of the larger story which is ours to live and tell and will outlive the manufactured, self-serving narratives of those who must destroy history to establish the place they imagine is theirs.

We have a culture that is true to the oldest memory of humankind. It is what made this country a place worth coming to, and which forms a part of the story of every true immigrant. When we cure ourselves of our cultural sickness, this affliction of the mind and the spirit that we have no story to tell and no purpose playing out in our national story, then we will welcome gladly those immigrants who bring their gifts and their story with respect and with devotion to a cause they are willing to make their own.

It is, first of all, our upholding freedom of conscience that makes us worthy of that respect. For in that, we uphold the ancient condition that nations owe their sovereignty to God in the first place — not to whoever takes the reins of governmental power. This is America at its best, as Washington memorably summarized it in his letter, a place where all our duties align with each citizen’s duty to God. 

Long after the deniers of history and the pursuers of unlimited power are gone, may this America, the true America, thrive and prosper, body and soul.

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