Dov Ber Borochov Quotes
No nation is interested in assimilating another without good reason. The assimilation of foreigners is actually in itself a most unpleasant business, and hence also undesirable. New people mean new candidates for benefits from the accumulated public assets, new hands hungrily stretched out for a share of the common loaf of bread. In order for a nation to desire the assimilation of another social group, it must first see in it something so valuable and attractive as to make it worthwhile despite all the inconvenience of including new partners in the distribution of the assets.
Every refugee and immigrant group has had to provide the “value” to which he refers. Usually this has been in the form of labor or scientific-cultural skills.
Dov Ber Borochov, 1881-1917, Russian Marxist & Zionist, On Questions of Zionist Theory, 1905
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Although Jefferson was a strong immigration enthusiast, he and others were concerned about the ghettoization. The early German immigrants did not universally adopt English, just as today’s immigrants do not all. This was a concern of Americans since the first immigrations. Yet it has always occurred despite concerns about it. However, the second and third generations all become fluent and literate in English.
In revolutionary America, not only were the colonists divided into revolutionists and loyalists to Britain, but among the revolutionists, there was no uniformity of manners, ideas, norms, beliefs or any other element of politics and unity. The great challenge to America and one of its great strengths is its diversity which is not a consequence of recent immigration, but has been a characteristic of the American body politic even in the Revolutionary War. Even English was not spoken by everyone as there were French, German, Scandinavian and other immigrants who had settled in the frontier and rarely came into contact with people other than those of their own family and community. The notion of a specific American culture to which which some today believe that we should return, never existed to begin with.
This is the origin of the “melting pot” term. Although British, Zangwill wrote this play for America and it was first produced in Washinton DC with Theodore Roosevelt in attendance. The theme was just the concept that most Americans think of relative to the large immigration of so many peoples to America.
This is a complaint similar to that made by anti-immigrant Americans. France, like most other countries of the world, has never had the large scale immigration of today, nor have they had such a large proportion of the same ethnicity at once—in this case, Muslim North Africans. There were never, before the last decades, enough immigrants of any ethnicity in France to have a choice of maintaining their traditional languages and culture and not learning French or otherwise assimilating. America, in contrast, had large immigrations of different ethnicities, and despite the erroneous beliefs of immigration opponents, these blocs of immigrants have wherever there was sufficient density—usually cities, they maintained their old language and other customs. However, their children and the next generation in almost all cases have abandoned the language and many of the customs of the old country. This was true of the Germans, the Irish, the Italians, the European Jews, the Russian Jews, the Scandinavians’, and the Hispanics with their different cultures.
Bourne was one of the first writers with a national audience to question the classic but never real “melting pot” theory of immigration and suggest the “salad” model though he never used the term.
The Christian Evangelicals in America have been split on their views of immigration. See {632917} for an example of a contrary position.
Most immigration reformers want to open immigration more widely. Ward wanted immigration restricted to certain ethnicities and limited. Essentially, this was code for anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism. The immigrants that he described as not being “helpful” have made some of the greatest contributions to America. One element of the immigration debate that is illustrated by this quotation is whether the United State should be homogeneous or heterogeneous. It has been the latter and that has brought the best of cultures of the world to the United States which has constantly been shaped by its immigrants even as it shaped and assimilated the immigrants.
In 1936 there was a right wing, nativist faction that was campaigning against foreigners, not unlike in 2016.
Dov Ber Borochov was a Marxist Zionist and one of the founders of the Labor Zionist movement. He was also a pioneer in the study of the Yiddish language.
