When Did Multiculturalism Get So Complicated?

Americans need to grow up when it comes to immigration and assimilation.

For the past few decades, the idea of multiculturalism in the U.S. seemed like something soft and mild. Schools and popular media reinforced the message that being American meant happily accommodating other cultures, offering abundant public services, prioritizing their holidays (even non-holidays like Cinco de Mayo and Kwanzaa), and striving to simply “live and let live.” Naturally, noticing certain patterns of behavior, good or bad, from an immigrant community was heavily discouraged while ongoing open dialogue and celebrating differences was aggressively pushed.

For us French Texans, Cinco de Mayo is a day of mourning.

So long as immigrants represented a minority of the population and most of them assimilated to American culture, multiculturalism seemed to work out fine. It also helped that incoming migrants (mostly from Latin America) came from a Christian culture and shared many of the same moral values as their northern neighbors.

Even after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11th and the quixotic War on Terror that followed, the notion of a soft and mild multiculturalism continued to predominate. True, Americans learned the hard way that certain cultures were not quite as compatible with American liberal democracy as previously believed, but criticism of Islam was nonetheless censored and the number of Muslim Americans was relatively tiny, so this claim was rendered moot.

Before there was Greta, there was Malala.

Only in the past few years have Americans started reconsidering this gentle framing of multiculturalism. It turns out that there are limits to how many strangers even a large diverse country like the U.S. can properly welcome and include. Far from being soft and mild, multiculturalism can be rather hard and rough depending on the quantity and quality of people coming in. Americans might be fine with an extra TV channel in Spanish and spotting the occasional street taco vendor, but how do they feel about gangs of unemployed young men roaming the street, harassing and occasionally sexually assaulting native residents? How do they feel about whole ethnic communities ripping off the public entitlement system for billions of dollars? How do they feel about ongoing threat of terrorist attacks, vandalism, and organized crime in their once quiet and boring suburbs?

Europeans realized this a decade earlier as they took in large numbers of Muslim migrants from the third world. Unlike Americans, most Europeans grew up in homogenous communities and thus have a lower threshold for outsiders. In theory, many Europeans believed that if immigrants could see the benefits of Western culture, they would begin participating in society by cultivating marketable skills, and giving up their old barbarous ways. Sadly, in the real world, most immigrants hardly bothered with learning anything useful, became permanently dependent on welfare, and formed their own segregated slums.

As native Europeans realized this, they also discovered that those elites who preached multiculturalism and generous public benefits in the fist place happened to be intolerant authoritarians who prefer a dysfunctional anarcho-tyranny over a functional democracy. As sociologist Karl-Olov Arnstberg recounts in his recent book The Sweden Syndrome, this has especially been true in Sweden where the once famed Scandinavian utopia was eaten away by its Muslim immigrants who refused to assimilate and placed a massive burden on native Swedes. Simultaneously, anyone who happens to speak out on this, as Arnstberg does, is swiftly cancelled.

Fortunately, the situation is a little different here in the U.S., at least for the time being. Conservative voices are not shy about condemning non-Western immigrants, particularly ones who engage in mass fraud. This was obviously the case with Somalian immigrants in Minneapolis (a.k.a. Little Mogadishu) who collectively scammed a whole bevy of government entitlement programs to enrich themselves and, worse still, funded terrorist activity back in Somalia. Shortly after this scandal broke, the investigations have now begun, politicians are being disgraced, and people are now checking other states where this is happening.

The misspelled sign that launched a thousand memes.

More importantly, the happy-clappy myth of unchecked multiculturalism is now being reexamined. Not only can Americans now understand the trade-offs that come with letting so many foreigners into the country, but they can also appreciate the significant differences between those foreigners. This understanding in turn helps people see the complex nature of immigration and many implications instead of mindlessly applying simplistic moral formulas of “welcoming the stranger” and “fighting for the oppressed” to the issue.

Today, blissful ignorance is no longer an option. At all levels (federal, state, and local), immigration has proven hugely disruptive to the economy, politics, and culture. Even if some of the immigrants themselves are more sympathetic, educated, and productive, like the recent wave of South Asians moving here in DFW, there are still a host of problems that come with their migration: fewer job openings, depressed wages, soaring housing prices, strained public services, and a less cohesive local culture. And this is to say nothing of the likelihood that most of them moved in through some form of visa fraud.

Just another Saturday at the Costco in Plano, TX.

This predictably causes friction between otherwise friendly neighbors who have seen their suburbs transform into something unrecognizable. Perhaps over a few decades and in smaller numbers, this transition could have worked better for all parties involved, but when this happens virtually overnight without any forewarning, it fosters hostility and instability. What was once a recognizable community united around a shared history along with a shared set of values and pastimes is now quickly dissolving into a fractured, stressful collective.

Of course, the first step to fixing this problem is simply identifying it. After so much denial and propaganda, Americans and the rest of the West are finally growing up on this issue. And while there are growing pains that accompany this development, there is also the prospect of a more mature populace better equipped to effectively regulate who comes into the country. For the moment, this adjustment obviously clashes with the conventional scripts on welcoming immigrants, but this is quickly changing. In time, hopefully soon, a majority of Americans will rewrite these scripts and do what it takes to have a more united and thriving nation.

Editor’s Note: This essay originally appeared in Chronicles Magazine.

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