When my great-grandparents arrived from Hungary and settled in Philadelphia, they did something that would puzzle many Americans today. They tried to lose their accents. They spoke less Yiddish at home. They wanted their children to sound like Americans.
They never forgot who they were. Hungarian food stayed on the table, the old language in their ears, and they remained proudly, observantly Jewish. They were not embarrassed by where they came from, but they did not regard America as merely a place to live. They believed it was a nation to join. That distinction lies at the heart of today’s immigration debate.
Gratitude shaped their understanding of citizenship. They did not think America owed them acceptance; they believed they owed America their loyalty. For many Jews from Hungary, the country seemed almost miraculous: a place where they could worship without fear, raise their children in the open, speak their minds, and take part as equals. They did not experience America as an oppressor or as one more stop on a global labor market. They experienced it as a gift. They hung a flag. They threw themselves into the Fourth of July with the same devotion they brought to Passover.
READ RESTORING AMERICA’S THINK TANK SERIES, THE RIGHT WAY FORWARD: IMMIGRATION AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
Their response to that gift was not resentment but responsibility. They wanted to know their neighbors, join civic organizations, volunteer, vote when they became citizens, serve on juries, and raise children who would leave America stronger than they had found it. They wanted to become Americans. They did not cross an ocean demanding that America become more like Hungary. They crossed it hoping they might become more like America.
Some will object to the word “assimilation.” It has come to sound like a demand that immigrants erase themselves. My great-grandfather’s experience was the opposite. America never asked him to stop being a Jew. It asked him to become an American. Assimilation was not a contradiction. It was the path to belonging.
Assimilation was never a one-way demand. America changed as immigrants arrived, just as immigrants changed as they became Americans. The point was not cultural purity but the emergence of a common national identity larger than either alone.
This is what today’s conservatives miss when they quarrel over whether America is a creed or an inheritance — whether we are bound by the ideals of the Declaration of Independence or by a particular people and its culture. My great-grandfather’s life rebukes both sides. To those who would reduce America to a proposition: no one gives his loyalty to a syllogism. He did not love an argument; he loved a country: its language and its holidays, its streets and its promise.
But to those who insist that America is a people into which one must be born, his life is the sharper rebuke. He was not born into it; he became it anyway.
A creed cannot carry itself. The Declaration does not raise a child, teach a language, keep a holiday, or hand a tradition from a grandfather to a grandson. Principles survive only when people pass them on — through families, congregations, schools, neighborhoods, and the countless small associations and communities that knit a country together. Culture is not the enemy of the creed. It carries the creed from one generation to the next, and it is what a newcomer actually joins. The creed tells us who can become American; the culture teaches us how. Neither survives without the other.
My great-grandparents did not ask how America might change to accommodate everything they carried with them. They asked how they might become worthy of what America offered. But that gratitude also imposed an obligation on America. A nation cannot ask newcomers to belong if it no longer believes there is an identity worth inheriting. When our schools neglect our history, when our cultural leaders treat patriotism as naivete, when assimilation itself becomes suspect, we make it harder for immigrants to do the very thing earlier generations longed to do.
My great-grandfather’s name is on a Supreme Court case. In Hines v. Davidowitz (1941), the court struck down a Pennsylvania law requiring resident aliens to register annually, carry identification cards, and produce them on a policeman’s demand. By the time the court decided the case, however, he had already become an American citizen. He had not come here to remain an alien. He had come to join the nation.
RESTORING AMERICA: MAKE TRUMP’S BORDER POLICIES PERMANENT
I think about this as I watch my own children grow up. I want them to know our Hungarian Jewish family, the prayers of their ancestors, the traditions that have carried us for centuries. I also want them to know the Declaration and Constitution almost by heart, and to understand why generations of immigrants saw American citizenship as a blessing. Those loyalties do not compete. They reinforce each other.
My great-grandparents wanted something wonderfully simple: for their children to grow up thinking of themselves as Americans. I want the same for mine. It was one of the great promises of America, and it remains one of its greatest responsibilities.