Mukherjee Illegal Immigration Analysis

Vicente Garcia
English 100- Elder
2/27/12

Assimilation: They key to success for immigrants

The history of the world can be described as a history of immigration, in which people move to different areas and are forced to cohabitate, or not in some cases, and adapt to their new surroundings. The conflicts or compromises that arise from the intermixing of people from different backgrounds play a large role in shaping the host country, and the world in general. Think about the events in American history that have been caused by its diverse population, and how profoundly the country has been divided due to them. The civil rights movement, and the ever ongoing issues of illegal immigration have left deep marks and folded pages in America’s…show more content…
It is a step that has to be taken, for skipping it creates a new identity different enough from the original culture to label someone as foreign, but not changed to the extent that they are considered assimilated. Mukherjee calls this as “a great disservice” because immigrants don’t belong to one culture or the other, but are isolated in a hybrid culture, hamstrung by the inability to read, write, or speak the common language. Imagine an immigrant driving through a city in a foreign country, getting lost because they can’t read the street signs, and not being able to remedy the situation by stopping to ask for directions because they don’t speak the same language. This is the plight of the immigrant that doesn’t assimilate, in which everyday tasks that citizens of a country take for granted morph into impossible endeavors, daunting and unassailable mountains. Every street sign is an obstacle, every neighbor is out of the reach of dialogue, one is alone in a foreign land. Immigrants must assimilate in order to be able to function, and live outside of the most isolated and primitive of conditions. To this effect, Martha Serrano argues against assimilation in her essay Chicana stating that it is important for Mexican-Americans to resist assimilation into American mainstream society in order to form a strong Chicano community,…show more content…
For example, if someone was planning for the building of a road, and had the option of going through an area that had large forests and mountains, or an area that was relatively level, which should they choose? The choice of whether or not to assimilate into society as an immigrant is just as clear. If immigrants choose to “hang on” to the old ways of life, they’re choosing the mountains, the hard road. In choosing not to assimilate, immigrants paint a target on their backs. Immigrants are the foreigner. They are the intruder. Immigrants are the thieves here to take jobs and wealth from the native people. Its easy to blame immigrants for the problems of the country, its easy to turn immigrants into a scapegoat. In A Tapestry of Hope, author Jeanne Houston describes how Japanese people were placed in internment camps during WWII, and states “There are those in our political leadership who are all too ready to find scapegoats ”(149) and that the situation is such that “More and more, it seems, those scapegoats are immigrants” (149). By choosing to remain different and “hang on” to the ways of the old country, immigrants make themselves easily identifiable as foreign, therefore creating an easy target. Immigrants don’t know the laws or language of the new country and cant defend themselves. They cant speak out against the oppression of rights, because no one understands , and they can’t refute it legally