4 ms·
"In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated
by leesalminen 10y ago
"In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American ... There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag ... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language ... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people."
-Theodore Roosevelt 1907
- anigbrowl 10y agoThat's why I favor outlawing things like St Patrick's day parades - do these people want to be Irish or American?
- leesalminen 10y agoI think it's disingenuous to say there's no difference between celebrating your cultural origins and refusing to adopt American ideologies. I'm of Finnish descent. I have a Sisu bumper sticker and eat pulla. Do I refrain from making small talk with strangers at a bus stop? Of course not! Americans tend to be more open to strangers than Finns.
- srssays 10y agoThe Amish though, they should definitely be sent back to Germany where they belong.
- anigbrowl 10y agoThe problem is that it's so easy for bigots to conflate one with the other - if you see some lady in a headscarf she might just be carrying on the sartorial tradition she grew up with, but a bigoted person might say she's a harbinger of Islamic radicalism. And there's no question that such radical Islamists exist, are generally strongly against the western-liberal-pluralist tradition, and that some of them are willing to commit heinous acts of violence. It would be a logical mistake to conclude that every Islamic person must necessarily be an extremist, but sadly it's not hard to think of politicians and pundits willing to mine that particular fallacy for all the political capital they can extract from it, and sadly there's a large portion of the population that is too dumb to spot the difference and who can easily be talked into scapegoating anyone who looks or acts differently, regardless of whether they actually pose any danger.
- leesalminen 10y agoThank you for this excellent reply. I understand the argument and agree with you. I guess we really can't have nice things.
- anigbrowl 10y agoBTW for confused readers I'm actually Irish and have nothing against parades - this was a satirical argument.
- WildUtah 10y agoPretty sure that at the St. Patrick's parade, they just want to get drunk on green beer.
- mcguire 10y agoOn one hand, Teddy wasn't a very nice man. On the other, the US had a German and Irish problem then.