I read the article you linked to and agreed with much of it, though I did find some points in it to be a bit hyperbolic.
The U.S. where I live, in contrast to Britain, certainly is a nation of immigrants, but we used to expect those immigrants to assimilate into a more or less unified American culture. The idea was that when you first arrive in a new country, you are like a tourist traveling overseas or like a visitor to someone’s home: you make an effort to figure out how to get what you need and get around without offending anybody, so you try to learn what’s considered polite and what’s considered rude and don’t expect the permanent residents to change their ways just because you arrived on the scene. In fact, when those who already live here do make an effort to make you feel at home, whether by speaking to you in your language, overlooking your failure to master some new-to-you social graces or offering you a helping hand in some other way, you’re extra grateful. Over time, you’d pick up the language, the manners and mores and people’s general ways of going about their business, and you’d, in time, become more or less one of them. This is the way things used to be, at least.
Today, however, the elite orthodoxy of opinion-makers that dictates “right” and “wrong” in these kinds of matters is repeatedly signalling to us that these immigrants are considered paragons of heroism and virtue from the get-go, and it’s our duty to feed, clothe and accommodate them the way we’d accommodate someone with a disability on a public bus. Anyone who tries to criticize an immigrant or our immigration policy, or draw a distinction between those who came in here legally and those who broke our laws to sneak in or between those who are skilled, educated, gainfully employed contributors to our society and those who are leeches living off the system and dragging us all down is automatically blackballed as a fascist reactionary. The debate is so fantastically unmoored from the reality of what’s going on that it’s hard to comprehend how we got so far on the way to Babel so fast.
