A popular right-wing complaint about immigration is that the left doesn’t want immigrants to integrate. I don’t think this is true. Both the left and the right want new arrivals to their culture to share their values, they just aren’t on the same page about which values.
I’m not actually sure where the misunderstanding comes from. You see a lot of conservatives making claims like ‘liberals think that beating your spouse should respected if it’s part of your (minority) culture’ and I’ve yet to run across a single liberal saying such a thing. Maybe they mean something more like ‘liberals think that diversity is great and more important than actual correctness, so when they embrace diverse viewpoints they end up embracing abhorrent ones’. Only elsewhere conservatives (reasonably) make the complaint that the left is not remotely concerned with viewpoint diversity, just with the ‘different sets of oppressions’ kind, and accordingly is hostile to underrepresented perspectives like the evangelical one or the Appalachian ex-coal-miner one. Do they think that the left is more tolerant of ‘sometimes beating your spouse is okay’? or ‘being gay is okay unless you’re Muslim’?
I think that’s part of it; the left is definitely less viscerally mad about Muslim oppression of LGBT people, mostly because how mad we are is related to our own experiences and most of us have dealt with intolerant Christians in positions of structural power and not with intolerant Muslims in same, and the right is right here passing laws right now while ISIS is very far away and everyone agrees they’re terrible so they’re hard to get too worked up about.
But maybe most of the difference is in where the attribution lies for the bad beliefs. The left will tend to say that the beating spouses is patriarchy and the oppression of LGBT people is homophobia and transphobia, and the conservative will say they are both Islam. Then the liberal interprets the conservative as trying to dodge responsibility for the much more rampant sexism and homophobia and transphobia of the Christian right, and the conservative interprets the liberal insistence that it’s nothing to do with the actual religion which the people in question would cite as the basis for their beliefs as proof they don’t actually care about fixing those things, or why would they ignore the obvious cause staring them in the face?
And the difference lies in which things they want erased by integration: conservatives want immigrants to have conservative values, like learning English and being a reliable voting bloc against abortion and not relying on handouts and not wearing hijabs and eating American food, and liberals want immigrants to have liberal values like diversity of foods and clothing styles and languages and supporting Palestine and hating the right.
But there’s still a problem. As far as I can tell, Hispanic immigrants are that ideal conservative immigrant: Christian, socially conservative, no hijabs, integrating fast, and so forth. And conservatives can’t stand them either. I’m not sure if that means that integration is a red herring and not actually what anyone cares about, or if it’s another weird artifact of the way the American immigration debate borrows talking points from the European one despite totally incomparable situations or what. But I think firm commitment to immediate total integration would do very little about conservative opposition to immigration.
I’m pretty sure that this debate does not actually cash out into a coherent abstract ideology-of-integration. For either side. And if you try to force it into that framework, you will end up with a garbled mess.
For the conservatives:
So…the (obvious) thing about traditional tribal loyalist worldviews is that absolute specifics are important. It’s not like “I’m an ethno-nationalist who will die for God and country, and you’re an ethno-nationalist who will die for God and country, so clearly we agree on all the fundamentals and we should get along great!” What matters is the particular group and flag and rallying-cry to which you give your allegiance, and in fact the people you hate and fear most are probably the people who have feelings-identical-to-yours but happen to be affiliated with some other group and flag and rallying-cry. To those who idolize the tough-guy warrior ideal, foreign limp-wristed egghead liberals may be contemptible, but foreign tough-guy warriors are much more the real problem.
If you want to be cynical, you can say that most American conservatives are going to be super unhappy about Markedly “Other” Immigrants no matter what, and that all their talk about integration is just political fig-leafing. There’s probably some level of truth to that. But even to the extent that they really mean it, “integration” doesn’t translate to “they’re proud and strong and religious and big-family-having just like us!” It translates to “they bow to our sovereignty, they see themselves as being fundamentally Us, they don’t belong to any other team with which we might have to compete.”
And by that standard – from the standpoint of an American conservative, who views white-working-class heartland Republican life as “real America” – there is no sizeable non-white minority community in the country that has integrated, or that displays any real interest in integrating. Minority communities here, especially in the last twenty years or so, tend to be big on identity-pride and tend to maintain a sort of defensive group consciousness. (Gosh, I can’t imagine why.) A proud strong religious big-family-having population of Hispanic immigrants isn’t an integrated part of the polity, it’s an embedded threat, at least so long as the immigrants in question continue to stick together and to define themselves against the whites surrounding them.
…yes, there is an obvious death spiral here.
For the liberals:
Sometimes, it doesn’t really matter what the precise contours of your beliefs are, so much as which parts of those beliefs you reliably choose to emphasize.
American leftists believe in multiculturalism, they support identity-pride, and they hate anything smacking of the “melting pot” or assimilation-pressure. If you get them talking, they’ll tell you exactly that, loudly and at length.
…and, yes, in fact, there’s only a limited extent to which they really mean it. The vast majority of the time, they don’t actually approve of wife-beating – or forced arranged marriages – or honor killing – or other noxious behaviors that have solid pedigrees as Very Traditional Minority Culture. They hate it when oppressed peoples do those things, almost as much as they hate it when rich straight white men do those things.
But somehow they keep taking the side of the oppressed peoples in every social fight, even in circumstances where the oppressed peoples are obviously doing these noxious things way more than anyone else, and they often downplay the destructive manifestations of Very Traditional Minority Culture as much as they possibly can. Conservatives who bring up those problems tend to get dismissed and ridiculed whenever possible. Because arguments are soldiers, and no one trusts in anyone’s good faith.
(Rotherham! Black-on-black crime! Every pundit and Tumblrina who openly admits to hoping that any given crime/atrocity has a white perpetrator!)
A sufficiently-suspicious conservative can find ample reason to decide that maybe leftists care less about their egalitarian anti-harm principles than they do about standing behind their Delightfully Ethnic Political Allies.