Successful assimilation is cure for U.S. immigration woes

WASHINGTON — One of the reasons for the success we've enjoyed in Afghanistan is that our viceroy — pardon me, ambassador — there, who saw the country through the founding of a democratic government, was not just a serious thinker and a skilled diplomat but also spoke the language and understood the culture. Why? Because Zalmay Khalilzad is an Afghan-born Afghan-American.

It is not every country that can send to obscure faraway places envoys who are themselves children of that culture. Indeed, Americans are the only people that can do that for practically every country.

Being mankind's first-ever universal nation, to use Ben Wattenberg's felicitous phrase for our highly integrated polyglot country, carries enormous advantage. In the shrunken global world of the information age, we have significant populations of every ethnicity capable of making instant and deep connections — economic as well as diplomatic — with just about every foreign trouble spot, hothouse and economic dynamo on the planet.

It is true that other countries, particularly in Europe, have in the last several decades opened themselves up to immigration. But the real problem is not immigration but assimilation. Anyone can do immigration. But if you don't assimilate the immigrants — France, for example, has vast isolated exurban immigrant slums with populations totally alienated from the polity and the general culture — then immigration becomes not an asset but a liability.

America's genius has always been assimilation, taking immigrants and turning them into Americans. Yet our current debates on immigration focus on only one side of the issue — the massive waves of illegal immigrants that we seem unable to stop.

The various plans, all well-intentioned, have an air of hopelessness about them. Amnesty of some sort seems reasonable because there is no way we're going to expel 10 million-plus illegal immigrants and we might as well make their lives more normal. But that will not stop further illegal immigration. In fact, it will encourage it because every amnesty — and we have them periodically — tells potential illegals still in Mexico and elsewhere that if they persist long enough, they will get in, and if they stay here long enough, they can cut to the head of the line.

In the end, increased law enforcement, guest-worker programs and other incentives that encourage some of the illegals to go back home can only go so far. Which is why we should be devoting far more attention to the other half of the problem — not just how many come in but what happens to them once they're here.