Is Immigration Without Assimilation Invasion?

Assimilation isn’t hatred. It’s what prevents immigration from becoming a source of permanent demographic fragmentation and social division.

A nation is more than the dirt it exists on. It’s a people bound together by a common heritage, language, culture, institutions, traditions, and sense of belonging.

Immigration might strengthen that nation, but it can only do so when newcomers enter that inheritance and become a part of the national community. Think, for example, of the Biblical story of Ruth.

Ruth was a Moabite, but her loyalty was to Israel: “Your people shall be my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16). That should be the standard for immigration into any nation that intends to preserve its identity rather than be diluted or hollowed out from within. This is what assimilation should look like.

But immigration without any degree of assimilation will inevitably do the opposite. It will fracture the very society immigrants were invited to join. A country that continually imports people while refusing to demand integration eventually recreates a fragmented country of nations within a nation.

Different communities will eventually live alongside one another, attend different schools, speak different languages, consume different media, preserve separate cultural loyalties and develop entirely different visions of what the country should become. They will share little beyond geography.

But there is something profoundly unjust about expecting the native population to accept this transformation without being permitted to defend the culture and institutions they inherited.

Consider a house. If you invite guests into your home, you don’t expect them to rebuild the house around themselves. You don’t expect them to ignore the rules, reject the customs of the household and establish a separate household inside it. You expect them to respect the home they’ve entered.

What’s more, if those guests told you they hadn’t accepted your invitation because they liked you or cared about your family, but simply wanted what was on the dinner table, it’s safe to say they wouldn’t remain guests for long.

A nation has an even greater claim to that respect.

Assimilation isn’t hatred. It’s what prevents immigration from becoming a source of permanent demographic fragmentation and division.

A nation can welcome newcomers while still saying: This is our country. These are our laws. This is our language. These are our institutions. You are welcome to become part of this people, but immigration doesn’t entitle anyone to remain permanently separate from it.

A nation without a common identity eventually loses its common purpose. Once citizens stop seeing themselves as one people and instead retreat into competing ethnic, cultural and national loyalties, the bonds of nationhood don’t merely weaken; they disappear.

What remains is not a nation, but a vague population defined by little more than its differences. In the end, all you’re left with is millions of ununified “diverse” people with little in common beyond their competing claims to the same house.

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