I support immigration and oppose the Republican anti-immigrant platform because it seems to me there is significant brain drain from many countries to the U.S. and that contributes to our success. For example, in this article is about white collar crime, it points out that many Somali-Americans were professionals back in Somalia. I'm not concerned about the crime because that seems like a somewhat higher tendency unt…
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I can only speak to my family's history and that I saw growing up, but my great-grandfather was an immigrant from a Slavic region (to be technical, Poland didn't exist yet, but he was a Catholic who spoke Polish).
To make a long story short, none of his kids ever spoke Polish. That wasn't familial pressure, but the physical and emotional abuse inflicted on children in schools to beat the slav out of them if they acted or sounded "fresh off the boat" - to the point where four generations later, all of us know that phrase because it's been said to us one way or another.
Contrast this with the most recent wave of Polish immigration to the same neighborhoods almost 80 years later. These are kids I grew up with. They had Polish clubs in school, they went to "Polish school," they spoke the language fluently and publicly, and to a certain degree that was celebrated by the rest of the community. The external pressure not to be Polish is essentially gone.
I don't have a grand point here, it's just something I think about a lot in these debates. I learned what the experience of my ancestors was, and saw something of what happened to my peers, and the only difference was 100 years. It seems to me the difference between what we think of as assimilation is really how likely a community is to join the melting pot depending on the internal or external pressures on that community.