Somali immigrants remake Minneapolis is the headline of a good piece by David Paulin in The American Thinker today. He comments on the New York Times article that Ann posted on the other day, about Somalis and health care in Minneapolis. The article is part of a series in the Times called Remade in America, the first part of which I posted on earlier.
Paulin points out that Mexicans make up most of the influx of immigrants into Minneapolis. But he focuses on the Somalis because their cultural differences, their enormous health-care needs and the terrorist connections that are being investigated by the FBI have a greater impact on the city and on America. He points out that the lengthy account of their health care problems makes no mention of female circumcision; presumably none of the doctors or other people quoted mentioned it.
And he goes on to make this comment:
One of the unstated assumptions of the Times piece is that America is a nation of immigrants. That’s not quite correct. It is a nation of settlers and immigrants. The original settlers from England were White Anglo Saxon Protestants, as the late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington observed. Later, there were immigrants from Europe, and they adapted to the culture created by the original settlers while making contributions of their own. But in an era of multiculturalism, those days are gone. Now, every culture is equal. What’s more, the WASP and his culture is vilified.
Then he quotes Huntington from his book, Who Are We?:
Contributions from immigrant cultures modified and enriched the Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers. The essentials of that founding culture remained the bedrock of U.S. identity, however, at least until the last decades of the 20th century. Would the United States be the country that it has been and that it largely remains today if it had been settled in the 17th and 18th centuries not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is clearly no. It would not be the United States; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil.