America's melting pot no longer on boil

By LLEWELLYN KING
KNIGHT RIDDER/TRIBUNE
WASHINGTON -- Immigration is not what it used to be.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries when, for political or economic reasons, one left one's homeland for somewhere else, there was finality in the journey. People landing on Ellis Island, for example, had a one-way ticket. Their future lay in the land in front of them. The land behind them was history -- an ever-fading memory.
Nowadays, immigrants have it both ways. They move, mostly for economic reasons, to new lands, but remain strongly connected to their homelands. Cheap airfares, telephones and the Internet keep them tethered to the motherlands that bore them. They are psychologically bifurcated between the old and the new.
Modern transport and communications play a role in the duality of today's immigrants, whether they have moved from North Africa to Europe or from El Salvador to the United States. Today's immigrant assimilates slowly, or not at all.
I can speak to this as an immigrant myself. As I was born in Africa and lived in England, there is that part of me that is not totally American. After 40 years of living here and endeavoring to absorb an American viewpoint, I still find myself with an outsider's perspective. And I launched into Americanism vigorously: I signed up at my draft board before I was called, and I avoided the company of other expatriates.
Yet, I follow British politics as keenly as I follow American politics. And I spend hours reading the news from Africa on the Internet. If English were not my first language, if I had come with a family, and if I had been welcomed into an expatriate community, I would be that much less American than I am.
Since the bizarre global protests against the depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper, people have been asking why Muslims who have migrated to new lands have not assimilated. Well, they have moved physically but not spiritually or psychologically. Pakistanis in Britain fly back to the Subcontinent regularly and speak to their own communities by telephone almost daily.
Shadow of mosques
The British Pakistanis live in the shadow of their mosques, that forever will be for them a corner of Pakistan in Britain. While they enjoy the benefits of Britain's welfare society, they treasure their alien status: the continuation of the life and values that they failed to leave behind.
The same goes for Muslim immigrants to Belgium, Denmark, France, and even faraway New Zealand. They live not in those countries but in a virtual caliphate, made possible by technology and the tolerance of their hosts.
The larger the immigrant community, the more self-sufficient and the less pressure to assimilate. It is as true in the United States as it is in Europe.
Do you think that the Somalis living in Maine will be New Englanders in one or two generations? It has not happened to Moroccans living in France, or Turks living in Germany. The famous American melting pot may no longer be on the boil.
As if language and custom are not barriers enough to a new identity and way of life, the binding absolutism of Islam cauterizes its immigrants against new values, loyalties and possibilities.
When I became an American citizen -- and I wanted to be an American because America was someplace special that I wanted to be part of -- my friends celebrated and presented me with a flag that had flown over the Capitol. I was glad of my acceptance as a full-blooded American and just a little sad at what seemed like a rejection of my British past.
This thing of being an immigrant is not that easy, even when you are prepared to bid adieu to the culture that formed you. There are no more one-way tickets.
Llewellyn King is chairman and CEO of the King Publishing Co., publisher of White House Weekly and Energy Daily.