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An expert warned that the U.S. immigration crisis in America will continue so long as the country’s elite reject the idea of the “Americanization” of immigrants.
Mark Krikorian, who is the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told Fox News Digital during an interview that one of the core drivers of declining assimilation in America is not only mass immigration itself but an ongoing “identity problem” in which the country’s elite have made assimilation a “dirty word” by rejecting American identity and exceptionalism.
“It’s not the immigrants’ doing, it’s a problem we have where our leadership classes, whether it’s government, business, education, religion, everything, aren’t really sure about whether it is even a good thing to be an American,” Krikorian, one of the country’s most notorious authorities on immigration policy, continued.
“The idea basically here is that there is no meaning to nationhood or to peoplehood that living in the United States is kind of like living in Northern New Jersey as opposed to Southern New Jersey. You live in the United States, or you live in Mexico or you live in Swaziland, it doesn’t mean anything,” he explained.
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“The left increasingly, even at the mainstream level, they see immigration law itself as a kind of Jim Crow, that it’s immoral to keep anyone from moving to the United States if they want to. And everything stems from that,” he continued. “Because if that’s your worldview, then obviously law enforcement coming to round up and remove people who have no right to be here, no legal right to be here, is immoral.”
“So, in that context, how could we expect immigrants to Americanize successfully?” Krikorian said, adding,”What’s different today from, say, 100 or 200 years ago, is we now have a leadership class that doesn’t even believe in assimilation. They think Americanization is a dirty word.”
“My mother was a daughter of immigrants, went to public school in the 30s and 40s outside Boston, and she was taught to memorize the Gettysburg Address and George Washington was the father of our country and they sang Hail Columbia in school. You think they’re doing that in the L.A. Unified School District now, or in New York, or in the school district outside of Boston my mother went to? No!” he said. “They teach American kids to, at best, be ambivalent about America, depending on the school district, even hate America.”
“Until that changes,” he went on, “admitting large numbers of people, even legally, is frankly a bad idea.”
President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have embarked on an intensive immigration enforcement agenda. With over 515,000 illegal aliens deported since Trump took office in January, the administration is on track to significantly exceed the record number of illegals deported out of the United States.
However, Krikorian warned that deportations will not be a complete solution to the problem.
“We now have the largest percentage of our population foreign-born ever recorded in American history. It’s close to 16% now. That’s more than it was during even the Ellis Island era … we’ve never been here before,” Krikorian said.
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This is further coupled with the rise of technology, which Krikorian said makes it less important for immigrants to integrate into their new communities.
“Newcomers don’t have to really cut off ties in the way that they had to do in the past,” he said. “In the old days, immigrating meant you had no choice but to reorient your emotional and psychological attachments to the new country … Nowadays, you can FaceTime home every day. You can hop on a plane and go to your cousin’s wedding in Bogota for a three-day weekend.”
The solution, in Krikorian’s estimation, is U.S. leaders, from the president to schoolteachers, embracing American identity. With the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence coming in 2026, Krikorian said there is a “real opportunity” for “a whole year-long process of starting to change the narrative and have that narrative percolate down to local institutions, individual schools, individual congregations, individual businesses, and kind of reverse this idea that America stinks and you shouldn’t want to become part of it.”
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“We have succeeded in Americanizing large numbers of people in the past from very different societies,” he said.
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“It’s harder to do now, but we can do it,” he went on. “We have a real serious challenge ahead of us, but they’re challenges that we can meet if we respond.”
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