Kerby Anderson

Debate about the ongoing effort of deportation has surfaced a fundamental question concerning immigration. Who should stay, and who should go? At one extreme are American citizens who reject the idea that the country should have borders. But a country without borders isn’t a country.

The rest of us would like to have a country that encourages immigration that is controlled and allows for people who arrive to become meaningfully integrated into the American culture. That has been the vision in the past of a melting-pot theory of immigration. The metaphor assumed that divergent immigrant cultures would eventually blend into a uniform national identity. Unfortunately, there are three problems with that vision.

First, the numbers are very large. The U.S. foreign-born resident population is at least 50 million. That is a huge number that significantly exceeds immigration numbers in the past and includes a greater cultural diversity than ever before.

That leads to the second problem: tribalism. Immigrants from some cultures melt into the American pot more easily than others. Tribal people are taught to be loyal to their own group rather than to national ideals. An immigrant from Germany is likely to endorse western values more than someone from Somalia, where loyalty to family and tribe trump loyalty to abstract American values.

Third, American political leaders cannot agree on what even constitutes American values. We are a polarized country where the political elite attack such things as patriotism, American exceptionalism, and pride in one’s country.

We can’t agree about American ideals. Thus we aren’t even asking immigrants to embrace American values. It’s time to identify what those ideals are.