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What Makes an American? https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/sunday-review/immigration-assimilation-texas.html

PLEASE READ 📖 AND SHARE this important perspective for our current time. We have a DECISION TO MAKE about WHO WE ARE AS A NATION!!! Do we want this to be Trump's America or the America that is a patchwork quilt of diversity and culture that blends together that makes us uniquely American.

"Trumpism itself may impede assimilation: if you constantly tell immigrants they’re unwanted, they may come to believe it."

What Makes an American?

I took reassurance this past week in a Texas immigration story that suggests America’s powers of assimilation remain formidable.

By Jason DeParle | Published Aug. 9, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 9, 2019 1:00 PM ET |

One man likens immigrants to snakes, frets that they will never “go back to their huts,” and insists that they threaten “jobs, wages, housing, schools, tax bills” and more.

Another sees a “Hispanic invasion,” fears that it will bring the “cultural and ethnic replacement of Americans,” and warns that the foreign influx endangers “our way of life.”

After last weekend’s shooting in El Paso, it was so hard to distinguish President Trump’s views of immigration (paragraph one) from those of the accused killer (paragraph two) that the suspect offered a pre-emptive defense against charges of plagiarism. In a “manifesto” released just before the massacre, he insisted he wasn’t just mouthing “Trump’s rhetoric’’ but offering thoughts of his own.

Posted on a far-right website, the statement never used the word “assimilation.” But it rested on the Trumpian view that immigration was failing and that this failure posed an existential threat. The fear that foreigners refuse to adapt is widespread among immigration critics, and even Americans with more welcoming views sometimes worry that assimilation is proceeding less surely than it once did.

I took reassurance this past week in another Texas immigration story, which suggests that America’s powers of assimilation remain formidable. It involves a third grader with an apt name, Precious Lara Villanueva, who lingered at dinner a year after arriving in the United States and said, “I sort of agree with Rosa Parks.”

This was news. The previous year, Lara’s teacher had called Parks a “hero.” But the idea of a hero in handcuffs made no sense to a girl straight from the Philippines, where children are admonished to respect elders and obey authority. “She didn’t listen to the policeman,” Lara had said. (Besides, she added, heroes wear capes.)

By the following year, her views were in flux. “It wasn’t, like, fair for the black people to sit in the back,” Lara told me at dinner in 2014. Parks’s courage impressed her, but so did her manners: “She said no — but she didn’t use a bad word.” To an immigrant deftly blending cultures, Rosa Parks became “The Civil Rights Hero Who Didn’t Curse.”

I’ve followed Lara’s family for 32 years, as they completed a remarkable rise from a Manila shantytown to the Houston suburbs. As a young journalist, I moved into her grandparents’ hovel, to better understand the country’s vast poverty, and I’ve been reporting on the family’s migrations ever since. Lara’s grandfather worked abroad for years at a time, cleaning pools in Saudi Arabia, and her grandmother raised their five children on the money he sent — 10 times his Manila pay.

All five children grew up to become overseas workers, too, and the one I know best — Lara’s mother, Rosalie — used her father’s remittances to get through nursing school. She worked in the Persian Gulf for nearly two decades, then got her big break in 2012 when a short-staffed hospital in Galveston, Tex., offered her a nursing job. Her husband and three children soon followed.

While opponents of immigration insist (ever more loudly) that assimilation has failed, the Villanuevas’ experience offers a retort. With a house in the suburbs and kids on the honor roll, they achieved in three years a degree of assimilation that used to take three generations.

They did so, moreover, in metro Houston, a pro-immigrant corner of Red State America where nearly a quarter of the work force is foreign-born. Once synonymous with honky-tonks and rodeos, Houston now sells itself as a hub of diversity, with Hindu temples and Viet-Cajun cuisine.

In a country of 44 million immigrants, no family stands for the whole. The Villanuevas merely stand for the substantial immigrant success missing from the Trump Twitter feed.

I got to see the process of becoming American through the eyes of Lara and her older sister, Kristine, who assimilated rapidly, in surprising and contrasting ways.

When they arrived in late 2012, it was obvious who had been the first-grade beauty queen. Kristine reigned as if she still wore the tiara. She was saucy, bossy, purposeful and proud, with a toughness that belied her nine years. Proud of the English she had learned back home, she spoke it with a syntax that conveyed exuberance. She was “so very, very excited” to see America and “so very, very proud” of her visa that she taped it to the wall.

But her move was very complex. In coming to the States, she had gained her “mommy” (Rosalie), but lost her “mama” (Rosalie’s sister, Rowena), who had raised her on a Philippine farm while Rosalie and her husband, Chris, worked in Abu Dhabi. “I didn’t want to leave Mama Wena, but I also couldn’t leave my parents — either way it’s sad,” she told me. Mama Wena called in tears and needed money. When Kristine bought a Barbie, “Mama” chided her for not sending the cash.

Kristine’s English, good for a foreign child, was weaker than it seemed. Whenever her teacher said “keep your book out,” Kristine put hers in her desk. It took a Filipino teacher to explain that itago, Tagalog for “to keep,” means to hide away. Asked to describe a “pet peeve,” Kristine wrote about her dog. Losing confidence, she hid behind a frozen smile.

In fifth grade, a new persona appeared. Tired of being the meek foreign girl, Kristine reinvented herself as a wisecracking diva of the sort she saw on TV. She described herself in diaries as “honest” and “joyful,” but also “mean” — a boast. “My classmates say, ‘Kristine, it’s not like you!’” she said. “Now I’m a Kristine who will fight for herself!”

Kristine snapped selfies by the thousand and posted them on Instagram accounts like “kristinecute” and “swelfwe.queen.” She practiced poses: Fish Mouth required an exaggerated pucker, Duck Face protruding lips. She touted them as sophisticated American looks her Philippine cousins wouldn’t know.

Kristine’s Barbies, like Kristine, straddled contrasting worlds. Her stories revolved around a family named the Fashion Fashionistas, who lived in a Manila trash dump but used their private plane to shop in America. For Kristine, poor Filipinos becoming rich Americans needed no explanation. It simply felt true.

Mostly the straddling went smoothly, but occasionally the Fashionistas’ daughter, Stacy, felt burdened by those left behind. When she caught someone back home wearing her shoes, Stacy beat her — as Kristine dramatized by whacking the doll’s head on the floor. Freed from obligations to the needy, Stacy flew back to the rich country and decorated her room in Hello Kitty.

As her frustration mounted and her school progress stalled, Kristine indulged in a series of minor rebellions — ignoring assignments, disrupting class, and affecting a scatterbrained personality in a bid for popularity. Her teacher affectionately groaned, “She’s becoming Americanized.”

Once, that would have been a compliment. The classic version of Americanization is called straight-line assimilation. It’s a three-generation tale as central to America’s mythology as the Boston Tea Party: The immigrants struggle amid poverty and bias; their children awkwardly juggle two cultures; the third generation completes the rise, with a white-collar job and a house in the suburbs. The story imparts two lessons: The descendants of immigrants advance and do so by blending in.

Straight-line assimilation was the reigning narrative of the mid-20th century. Half a century had passed since immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe had poured through Ellis Island. Learned men had warned that they would never adapt, but they did so decisively. A unified country had beaten the Nazis, with Mayflower descendants sharing foxholes with Kowalskis and Mancinis. Groups that warred abroad lived as neighbors in New York and Chicago. A Catholic became president.

Sometime in the 1960s, this assimilation story fell from favor. It overstated the acceptance that immigrants had won and understated the hardships they had faced. It idealized WASP culture and slighted the satisfactions of the ethnic community. It overlooked race — the lengths to which the country had gone to prevent the assimilation of blacks.

Leftist scholars condemned “the blight of assimilationist ideology” and celebrated ethnic struggle. Ozzie and Harriet gave way to Kojak and Columbo, heritage travel and klezmer bands. Assimilation seemed wrong as an explanation of what did happen and offensive as an explanation of what should happen.

The resurgence of ethnic identity was heartfelt but no sign that assimilation had failed. On the contrary, as scholars like Herbert Gans and Mary Waters argued, Americans could celebrate their heritage precisely because it meant so little. It did not affect where they could live, whom they could marry or what jobs they could get. “Symbolic ethnicity” flourished, but divisions faded: intermarriage rose, discrimination fell and residential enclaves dispersed.

Given the difficulties that immigrants and their descendants faced, Gans rightly called their assimilation “bumpy line” rather than straight. But bumps and all, assimilation prevailed.

It’s possible that Kristine’s generation will find assimilation harder. Economic mobility has waned, a quarter of the foreign-born lack legal status, and most of today’s immigrants are racial minorities, which could attract more enduring bigotry. Mass media once encouraged common identity. In today’s narrowcast world, pluribus triumphs over unum.

Trumpism itself may impede assimilation: if you constantly tell immigrants they’re unwanted, they may come to believe it.

But other differences between the eras could ease assimilation. Immigrants have civil rights their predecessors lacked. (Sicilians did not have affirmative action.) Many arrive like Rosalie, already middle-class. And mainstream culture is much more diverse, making it easier to fit in.

Two academic camps have shaped debate about the children of immigrants. Both see the majority succeeding — advancing in school, securing jobs and integrating. Intermarriage is high, and English is near universal. “Today’s immigrants are actually learning English faster than their predecessors,” the National Academy of Sciences concluded in 2015.

But some scholars warn that Americanization carries risks, especially for the poor. The longer newcomers are in the United States, the more likely they are to smoke, grow obese or commit crimes. Two prominent scholars, Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut, have warned that the children of the most disadvantaged immigrants may assimilate downward, joining the native poor in a “rainbow underclass.”

Kristine’s teacher wasn’t thinking about that when she fretted about Americanization. But even her mild concerns turned straight-line assimilation on its head: She saw Americanization as the problem, not the solution.

A rival group is more optimistic. They found that children of immigrants not only outperformed children of natives (of similar races) but did so despite having parents with less income and education. How could that be? Philip Kasinitz and three colleagues argue that children of immigrants often enjoy a “second-generation advantage” over native peers.

Two parts of the argument are familiar — immigrants, self-selected for ambition, pass along their drive, and the intensity of ethnic networks provides support that natives lack. But the researchers also argue that children of immigrants benefit intellectually from living at a cultural crossroads. (They note it took a Russian-born Jew, Irving Berlin, to write “White Christmas.”) Children of immigrants, they wrote, often “combine the best of both worlds” — their parents’ and their peers’ — or innovate in ways that “can be highly conducive to success.’’

In the Villanueva family, each theory offers a guide to a different daughter. (A son, Dominique, was too young to share his thoughts in equal depth.) Kristine’s experience provided a small reminder that Americanization isn’t always beneficial: She assimilated energetically, but to the distractions of middle school. Lara blended her Filipino and American selves in ways that supplied an edge. She was second-generation advantage personified.

While Kristine experienced migration as division (English vs. Tagalog, her mother vs. her aunt), Lara found it addition — Rosa Parks’s protests plus her politeness, parents beside her and grandparents on Skype.

Lara’s Filipino traits included her manners, her long dinnertime prayers and an immigrant’s belief in opportunity. They also included the benefits of a two-parent family, which social science finds considerable. (“American families are a mess!” her teacher complained.)

From the United States, Lara got a reduced sense of class and gender constraints, a school full of books and a classroom with just 24 students, instead of 70 in the Philippines. Above all, she got a license to ask questions.

Nothing about the Philippines had encouraged her to probe. On the contrary, a classroom so crowded had little time for raised hands, and children were taught to respect their elders, not interrogate them. American teachers loved questions.

“Do fish sleep?” Lara asked.

“Is the Leaning Tower of Pisa ever going to collapse?”

“Do nurses have to be caring? Maybe I’ll just be a doctor.”

Curious about how she had grown curious, Lara formed her own assimilation theory: America had scared her into asking questions. Confused when she arrived and afraid of repeating second grade, “I told myself I should be interested right now.” Being interested became a habit. Put differently, blending cultures produced new thinking — Lara was simply repeating what the Kasinitz camp argues about the cultural crossroads.

In her second school year in America, Lara flourished. Her teacher first noticed her gift when the class read a book about a bully. Asked what a story is “about,” most third graders summarize the plot. Lara extracted a lesson: “The theme of this book is not to be rude. We should show good character.”

Lara liked to debate, largely with herself, which of the heroines she studied was greatest. Rosa Parks didn’t swear and Helen Keller didn’t quit, but Harriet Tubman rescued others, “even though they weren’t her relatives!” Every Filipino understands sacrifice for family, but selflessness toward strangers opened a new moral universe. “She did the really, really right thing.”

One day when we stopped for an after-school snack, Lara sprang a sneaky question. “Do you know how to infer?”

I frowned as if trying to remember. “I’m going to teach you how!”

She paused to dip her fry in her milkshake and increase the suspense. “It’s like when you say, ‘Oh, it’s cold — it’s really snow outside.’ I didn’t tell you what season it is. But you can infer it’s winter.”

She stabbed the air in triumph with a milky fry. “You see? It works!’’

By the end of their third year in America, Kristine and Lara had each become an exaggerated version of herself, with Lara reveling in grade-school epiphanies and Kristine deep into middle-school intrigue. Her 15 closest sixth grade friends were arrayed in a fluid hierarchy, with “sisters” at the top, followed by “best friends for life,” then “baes for life” and “ride or dies.”“Your ride or dies are like your best friends but not your best-est friends.”

While Lara’s new word was “onomatopoeia,” Kristine’s was “stuffy-fluffy.” Her science teacher said she “wants to be one of the popular girls” who “act like they don’t have a clue. Her English teacher blamed the “ditsy’’ pose on “Americanization” but said, “I don’t think that’s really her.”

It wasn’t. With a little more time her English strengthened, her conflict about leaving Mama Wena waned, and the awkwardness of middle school passed. In tenth grade she sent me a matter-of-fact text that read,

“My current grades:

History: 91

Chemistry: 99

Geometry: 100

English: 100”

Two texts followed:

“Yes!” “Yesssss!”

When the family bought a new suburban house, Rosalie reminded her Americanized children how far they had come. “Mommy grew up a shanty,” she said.

“What’s a shanty, Mommy?” Kristine asked.

Lara spent our last ride to school talking about the difference between mean, median, and mode, then pumped her fist when she heard there was a test. She had studied Harriet Tubman again (“she saved people, even though they weren’t her relatives!”) and made the A-honor roll.

I offered to mark the occasion with a trip to the toy store, but Lara chose Office Depot and wrote her first book — an enigmatic study of a girl who asks questions.

“Why would I be excited for a TEST? Just why?!”

“Why do I have emotions just why — please tell me? Would you?”

“Why am I so curiouse (cq), just why?”

I thought back to second grade, when her first experience of America was a classroom of especially disruptive kids. Lara spoke little English but was so well behaved that her teacher exclaimed, “I need a few more like her!”

Fresh from the Philippines, Lara was the most foreign student in the class and in a Norman Rockwell way the most classically American — the earnest girl in a dainty sweater with an apple on her desk. She didn’t replace an American, she became one.

Jason DeParle is a reporter for The Times and the author of the forthcoming, “A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves: One Family and Migration in the 21st Century,” from which this essay is adapted.

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