re: #579 Targetpractice

That’s one line of drivel I’ve heard time and again by old white folks who are bleating nonstop about the immigration crisis: “They’re not assimilating! They’re not becoming part of America! They’re not like past immigrants!” But whenever I press them to think of what it is that these immigrants are doing that past ones haven’t, the response is always the same: “THEY WON’T LEARN ENGLISH!!!”

That was one of Benjamin Franklin’s concerns way back in the 1750s about the hordes of non-white immigrants overwhelming our shores (that would be German protestants in Ben’s day): They wouldn’t learn English or assimilate.

Hysteria over immigration is older than the country itself, and it never seems to change its stripes.