Op/Ed: Why Many First-Gens Will Never Be Americans
Seeing all the headlines lately, support for one nation, denunciation of the other, it seems like so much of our nationalistic impulse is directed outward, and what little attention was paid to actual American issues is even more scattered and diffused.
I saw a clip from an Irish media personality named Mia Katja, echoing the same sentiment many first generation Americans have for our country. Mia’s parents fled the war-torn African nation of Burundi in 1997.
“I’m proud to be Irish but I’m even more proud to be an immigrant.”
By all means, have pride in your ethnicity and heritage. But, to value your immigrant origin more than your new nation is toxic to its order and stability. Unfortunately, this flawed framework is already well-ingrained in the minds of many our own first-gens. It will not be undone anytime soon.
The first-gens not captured by this contagion must come to full political consciousness and counter their misguided ambitions.
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I never was especially political growing up.
Like many other kids growing up in Queens, New York City, we were the children of immigrants. My borough is known globally for being the most densely diverse municipality in the world. It’s no contest. Just walking down any primary road, Roosevelt Avenue, Main Street, you’ll see it for yourself.
I know diversity gets a bad rap lately, but there was a time when it actually worked. I saw it with my own eyes.
Kids of any color, religion, national origin, playing handball with each other, trying their best to pelt each other with that hard little blue ball. (Trust me, this was a great exercise in bonding.) Frequenting various trinket & hobby shops and internet cafes, we looked for the new Pokémon card game booster packs and honed our skills in the prototypical first-person shooter video game Counter-Strike. We visited each others’ homes, seeing our friends speak their native languages, enjoying their home-cooked food.
Whether you were lower or middle class, America was a stark level up from the abject poverty, political corruption, and outright warfare many of our parents had left.
Not a lot of people around the world have experienced genuine global wonder, condensed into a few square miles. Most won’t understand, but in many ways, it was a microcosm of what made the American liberal project so compelling and awe-inspiring — at least until it wasn’t.
We never thought about politics. It was a very simple calculus that was so obvious that it was rarely discussed: our parents uprooted their lives and left their home countries to come to the United States because it is better here. Not just different, but better. Again, this was so self-evident, that we didn’t talk about it much, if at all.
It was essentially ethnic diversity with an implied monoculture. The monoculture being simply, again, “USA is great. It’s better than home.” It’s unrefined, but it worked and was intensely practical. You had an entire generation of immigrants who often took shitty jobs, sometimes even downgrading from more prestigious positions back home, just to ensure their children’s future would be more prosperous.
But, for the most part, this simple monoculture was not passed on. Meanwhile, there was no explicit cultural dogma issued from the US to immigrants. The inferred plan was something like “we’re a melting pot, we will all mix and boil down into a beautiful American people.” Well, that’s not actually what happened.
As the first-generation children came up, their parents, almost as a rule, pushed them into higher education. I mean, why wouldn’t they? Why would they want their children to have the same calloused hands (and minds) as their own? To struggle and risk life and limb toward a greater ambition? It’s understandable, but in hindsight, this was a grave error.
And so off went the first-gens, into the hands of liberal professors and administrators who fawned over their exoticism. They sought to “empower” their students and fed into their own inflated views of the grandeur of diversity. As the object of thinly veiled orientalism, students readily bought into the hype.
A new type of progressivism emerged: these first-gens were suddenly ambassadors for their respective communities, armed with the left-wing moralism of professors who openly taught with communist and/or socialist philosophies. (I was literally assigned photocopied hand-outs of the writings of both Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci in a Media Studies course at Queens College.) Many of these types now staff New York nonprofits, the halls of the City Council, Albany, and universities. They are politically and culturally engaged, prioritizing not America, but their own flavor of social justice causes that resonate most strongly with their own background.
The melting pot has boiled over as dozens of new cooks entered the kitchen.
No one had intended it, but we created an entire generation of nationalists for every country but America; conservatives for their values, but not for American ones; and in some cases, political activists for the very same oppressive philosophies their parents escaped from.
There is a humility that comes with leaving your own country to a new, better one. You’re admitting defeat in a way. There should be a lesson to draw from this. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be a widely propagated lesson, except for immigrants who had the worst experiences, or those from the worst regimes, like communist China or Venezuela.
New York, and America, was not made great by immigrants working for disparate ends. It was made great by diverse peoples working toward common goals. But that has changed. There is a threshold where diversity becomes division, and we are well over that line.
This isn’t to say you can’t draw from your heritage. Family values, religiosity, social cohesion, modesty, respect for elders, etc. We desperately need these. But, everything not compatible with America needs to be cast away.
The more short-sighted among us, e.g. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, thinks that just because we’re not in full-scale collapse, everything is okay, that any criticism of the very obvious decline of our cities and country is just right-wing fear-mongering.
But many right-wing critiques of modern America seem rooted not just in dystopian fantasies but in dystopian fantasies that are generations out of date. There seems to be a part of the conservative mind for which it’s always 1975.
If you’re reading this, you already understand how out of touch Upper-West-Sider Paul Krugman is. This is boilerplate thinking for mainstream progressives: everything is okay, stop complaining, be thankful it’s not the 1970s and 80s again.
Here’s the thing: part of the wisdom of tradition is being able to distinguish what will uplift a society and what will lead to its decline. The great irony is that many immigrants come from traditional societies that already have this knowledge embedded in their cultural narratives and religions. And America is not exempt from any of these laws of history and human nature.
So this is a rallying call to the first-gens who can see what’s really going on. The country that your parents risked everything to come to is crumbling. I know you are proud of your heritage and where your parents came from — so am I. But if we don’t stand up and put America first, it will continue declining and will be well on its way to becoming what our parents tried to flee from.