What Justin Gest And David Lubell primarily mean as they write for the LA Times is that Trump must give amnesty to people who are unlawfully present in the U.S., with a secondary focus of integrating people who are here legally who have so far refused to assimilate, while also casting some Blamestorming and charges of raaaaacism at Republican voting areas which refuse to tolerate lawlessness, violence, trespassing aliens, and people who bring notions like treating women as 2nd class citizens, female genital mutilation, honor killings, Sharia law, etc
It’s up to Trump country to integrate immigrants now
The violence perpetrated by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 12 represents the most extreme manifestation of the cultural anxiety latent in many American cities and towns that are confronted by demographic change.
Peering at maps of concentrated blue enclaves and the vast red countryside, it may seem that there are two Americas — one that welcomes diverse peoples and facilitates their integration into the United States, and another that perceives diverse peoples as a threat to the cultural composition of the country.
Except, in those blue enclaves, immigrants are not integrating. They’re creating pockets of otherness. Pockets of illegal aliens. Pockets where English is not spoken. Demanding that we speak their language, and allow them to practice their beliefs, which are often 180 degrees opposite of America. We have a saying here in NC: if you don’t like the way we do things, I-95 goes north and south. I-40 goes west. Pick a direction.
We both keep one foot in each America. One of us is the child of a refugee father and a mother from rural Georgia, who graduated from a Los Angeles public school, lives in Manhattan and focused his recent research on white working-class people’s marginality in the Rust Belt. The other grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs, spent a year abroad in Ecuador before moving to Tennessee and later Atlanta, married the daughter of Rust Belt dairy farmers and has focused his career on reducing fear of immigrants in conservative America.
For us, the two Americas are not as separate as many think.
The big cities where we live have become the critical agents of globalization — recruiting immigrants as part of a global economy and multi-ethnic society that is more closely connected with other cities worldwide than their geographic peripheries.
Talk about some Progressive cred. Perhaps they should worry more about the violence in their own Democratic Party run cities with their “multiculturalism and diversity” first.
And indeed, a growing number of communities in Middle America have already begun to act as models for this paradigm shift in immigrant incorporation. Over the last 10 years, cities such as Dayton, Ohio, St. Louis, Mo., and Boise, Idaho have facilitated comprehensive planning processes in which long-time residents were at the table as decisions were made about how newly arriving immigrants and refugees would be received.
Which have all seen spikes in crime.
In 160 communities that have signed agreements to advance immigrant inclusion, local city councils have passed 600 policies that boost integration by accommodating second languages, facilitating access to schools, sensitizing law enforcement agencies, and simplifying small business ownership for all.
Earlier in the missive, we were told how the immigrants (legal ones) were helping in learning English. Now, we are being told that we must accommodate the immigrants (mostly illegals). And we must change the way police act towards lawbreakers, provide loans for illegal aliens, pay for their schooling, and so forth.
And, of course, the subtext is that we give them amnesty. Which means more Democrat voters in traditional Republican voting areas. Funny how that works.
