Congressman Andy Ogles said the quiet part out loud with a recent tweet baldly declaring that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.”
That cuts against the Constitution and all kinds of core American values in a way that is almost too boring to discuss. But Washington Post Columnist Shadi Hamid went viral with a response in which he offered a hot take of his own: “Muslims shouldn’t have to assimilate to belong.”
Jerusalem’s parents are immigrants who assimilated — making sure she learned English before entering preschool, for example — and she thinks it’s important that America continues to promote and celebrate assimilation. She puts a lot of weight on the evidence, from Leah Boustan and others, that immigrants to the United States do in fact assimilate very well.
I am on board with all of this, but a little more worried than Jerusalem is that it’s not good enough for liberals to reassure voters that assimilation happens. I think we need to do our share of the work to make sure that it happens. You can’t just opportunistically invoke successful assimilation to defend immigrants when they are under attack; you need to actively promote and celebrate America as a good society that is worth assimilating into. That means getting beyond certain progressive hangups about race and American history. That does not mean denying the existence of ugly episodes in the country’s story, but it does mean denying the claim that this ugliness defines America or that it is somehow unique to our country rather than part of a perennial pattern of ethnic conflict in human history.
My ancestors immigrated well before Jerusalem’s and did so at a time when the borders were generally more open but there was also more comfort with heavy-handed assimilation measures. Some of these went too far — I remember my grandfather telling me about kids in his heavily Hispanic community being beaten at school for speaking Spanish to each other — but I think there was something to the combination of legal openness and forceful promotion of American identity.
Hamid argues for a kind of deep pluralism, insisting that the core of America’s founding is the idea that citizens never have to converge on foundational questions.
There is something to this. Is it true that there is one God or several? If one, is Muhammad God’s prophet? Is there a second testament to the Bible? A third? These are deep, profound questions that Americans should and will disagree about forever, and Ogles is dead wrong to insist that any religion is out of bounds. But part of a liberal society is promoting a culture of liberalism. If numerically small sects such as the Amish or Hasidic Jews want to form insular, illiberal faith communities, there’s no issue there. But the influx of very large numbers of people with illiberal values is a real topic for concern. That shouldn’t be an excuse for ethnic bigotry or exclusion, but it’s certainly an argument that people who come here should embrace American (or Dutch) values and that those values should be promoted.
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In a couple of weeks, Jerusalem and I will be reviewing Jane Jacobs’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” so grab a copy and read along!
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