Let us get something straight before the usual guilt parade shows up. America does not owe the world a remake of its identity. We can be a confident, globally engaged country and still insist on a distinct American way of life built on the rule of law, a shared language and a shared civic culture. When I use the word "mongrelized" I want to be clear about what I mean so nobody pretends to misunderstand it. This is not about race. America has been multi-ethnic for a long time and that is not the issue. I am talking about civic dilution - turning the country into a patchwork of separate enclaves with different norms, different loyalties, different languages and different expectations of law. That is not progress. That is fragmentation. And history is brutal to countries that fragment.

A Nation of Laws Includes Immigration Laws

America is a sovereign country. That means we get to set our borders, our entry standards and our citizenship requirements. If you want to come here - especially if you want to stay here permanently - then you do not get to treat the laws as optional or negotiable. The entire point of America is that laws matter. Immigration is not a feelings-based program. It is a legal process. And citizenship in particular is not simply living here. It is joining the political community with rights but also responsibilities: voting, serving on juries, understanding the system you are helping to steer.

That is why federal law requires naturalization applicants, with limited exceptions, to demonstrate an understanding of English and U.S. civics. This is not my preference. It is in the statute. And as of March 1, 2025, English was designated as the official language of the United States via Executive Order 14224. That order does not require federal agencies to stop offering services in other languages and it does not restrict what anyone speaks at home. It re-centers the national standard rather than policing private life. If you want citizenship or long-term integration, learning English is not oppressive. It is the baseline expectation of joining a functioning society.

Assimilation Is Not Bigotry - It Is How America Works

People love to smear assimilation as if it were some dark idea. It is not. Assimilation is straightforward: you keep your heritage, you adopt America's civic identity, you learn the common language, you live by the laws and you raise your children as Americans. That is how a diverse country stays one country. When assimilation is replaced by "live however you want, owe nothing, demand everything," you do not get unity. You get balkanization - competing sub-nations inside one border. And once that starts, you do not celebrate diversity. You fight over power.

The countries that have struggled to build stable, prosperous societies tend to share the same institutional problems: inconsistent rule of law, weak contract enforcement, shaky property rights, corruption and political instability. These are not moral judgments about people. They are governance dimensions that the World Bank tracks explicitly because they predict whether a society can sustain safety, investment and upward mobility. When those foundations are weak, the ceiling stays low regardless of how talented the population is. That is exactly why assimilation matters. You do not preserve a high-performing country by normalizing parallel societies, permanent language separation and the posture that says we are here but we are not really joining. If people come to America because the American system works better, then the deal is simple: learn the civic operating system that made America work - English, rule of law, shared norms and shared loyalty. Otherwise you do not get diversity. You get fragmentation, and fragmentation is how successful nations start sliding toward the dysfunction everyone claims they are escaping.

We Can Act Globally Without Surrendering Who We Are

There is a modern lie that says nationalism is inherently evil. It is not. Healthy nationalism is stewardship - the belief that this country is worth preserving, improving and handing off intact to your children. America can trade globally, lead globally, defend allies, attract talent and export culture while still maintaining a clear national identity at home. A nation that cannot define itself cannot lead anybody. It can only apologize. And a country that has spent two generations apologizing for its identity has noticed, if it is honest, that the apologies do not produce the unity they promise. They produce the opposite.

A shared language and the expectation of assimilation are not instruments of cruelty. They are the conditions that make a free, stable and prosperous society possible. If we stop expecting newcomers to integrate - if we normalize parallel societies inside one border - we will slowly lose what made America exceptional: social trust, civic unity and rule-of-law stability. A nation that will not protect its identity will eventually find it has nothing left to protect. That is the lesson every fragmenting society in history has learned on the way down, and it is a lesson that sounds alarmist right up until it isn't.

My Bottom Line

Immigration enforcement is not xenophobia. English as a national standard is not oppression. Assimilation is not the erasure of heritage. These are the practical requirements of maintaining a coherent national community that new arrivals can actually join and benefit from. The alternative - open borders, no language expectations, citizenship without civic integration - is not a more compassionate version of America. It is the dismantling of the architecture that makes America worth coming to in the first place. The people who built this country enforced standards. The people who will keep it intact will do the same. Compassion and standards are not opposites. Only one of them, on its own, builds anything that lasts.

If the American system is broken, explain the line at the border. If it is worth coming to, then it is worth joining on its terms. Those two facts belong in the same sentence every time this conversation happens.