Is it wrong to tell immigrants to adapt to our language and culture?

With regard to my recent posts about Daniel Pipes, I said to a few correspondents that what I needed to do was disagree where there is a legitimate disagreement and where there are constructive points to be made, but to avoid unnecessary contentiousness with people who are basically allies. Then, after I posted an item on Pipes and Mark Reuel Gerecht, one of my correspondents complained about my comment about Gerecht where I said:

As an aside about Mark Reuel Gerecht, I would never trust a man’s advice on American politics if his name has such a foreign spelling that I can’t even figure out how it’s pronounced. What happened to assimilation?

My correspondent suggested that saying this in public would seem to violate my idea about avoiding unnecessary contentiousness.

Here is my reply:

I think it’s a legitimate—and constructive—point. His name is foreign, unrecognizable, and unpronouncible for an American English speaker. He publishes widely, presuming to advise Americans on what their national defense and security policies ought to be. If a naturalized U.S. citizen (or a native U.S. citizen for that matter) does not have enough understanding of and respect for the culture of his adopted (or native) country as to make a reasonable adjustment of his name so that people can at least pronounce it, why should I have regard for his opinions and advice about our country? His very use of that foreign name—and other people’s passive acceptance of it—sends the message that America has no national culture. If a person intends to become a part of this country—and not just as an ordinary citizen, but as someone participating in national debates at the highest level—then he should become a part of this country, rather than conveying the message that he’s an unassimilated foreigner with a bizarre name that no one can pronounce. I’m not just criticizing him. I’m calling on America to have a national culture once again. And that means having standards of assimilation that must be met before a person is admitted into the public square. (By the way, I assume that Gerecht is Israeli-born, because of his name, and that he is a naturalized U.S. citizen, since he worked for the CIA. However, even if he is a native-born American, my concerns about his inadequate assimilation still stand. Whether a U.S. citizen is foreign-born or native-born, he needs to be part of the culture of this country if we are to accept him as a spokesman for our country or as a participant in our national political debates.)

So what I am doing here is constructive, as well as consistent with the main theme of my own writings for the last 15 years, criticizing our open borders and multiculturalism policies.

In this connection, an aunt of mine, my mother’s oldest sister, a New York City native, after she was widowed in the late 1950s, was rejected for a teaching job in the New York City school system because she had a New York accent. That’s the kind of standards we used to have in this country. But now we’ve gone so far in the other direction that we can’t even expect that American national security experts have names that can be pronounced in the English language.

Immigrants today don’t realize that such adjustments are necessary, because the larger society has ceased sending them the message that assimilation is required. The only way to turn that situation around is for people to start once again sending that message. That’s what I, as one person, am doing. If more and more people did the same, we’d be living in a different country.

In the O.J. Simpson trial, the Los Angeles chief pathologist, who was on the stand for over a week, was an Indian immigrant named Lachmanan Sathyavagiswaran. His last name was so unpronouncible that they just addressed him as “Dr. Lachaman.” Not only that, but his soft, sing-song, indistinct Indian accent was very difficult to understand—over eight days of testimony. Yet he was the chief pathologist for L.A. County, who had testified at numerous murder trials over the years. This wasn’t a person working at a lower level job, this was a person in a top-level, public job. But America is so laid back and accepting of foreigners and foreign cultures that apparently in all those years not a single soul had ever said to Dr. Sathyavagiswaran that he needed to improve his pronunciation so that Americans could understand him.

It is exactly the same passive, cowardly, accepting attitude (after all, who are WE to tell immigrants that they should adopt to the culture, language and behavioral standards of this country?) that allowed the 9/11 hijackers to wreak their murderous havoc on us. Remember the woman in the Agriculture Department who was threatened by Muhammad Atta but didn’t report it because he was “new” to the country and ought to be given a break?

A final note: According to this biographical note about “Edward Shirley,” Reuel Gerecht’s pseudonym, Gerecht grew up in the Midwest rather than (as I had assumed from his Hebrew name) the Mideast, though the article doesn’t say where he was born. However, since the information concerns Gerecht’s pseudonym, it may be fictional along with the name. Either way, as I explained above, my point about the unsuitability of the name “Reuel” for an American still holds.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 21, 2005 02:01 PM | Send