A better welcome for our nation’s immigrants

Jeb Bush and Robert D. Putnam - America should learn from the lessons of its shared Cheap Rosetta Stone Software immigrant past. On our national birthday, and amid an angry debate about immigration, Americans should reflect on the lessons of our shared immigrant past.We must recall that the challenges facing our nation today were felt as far back as the Founders time. Immigrant assimilation has always been slow and contentious, with progress measured not in years but in decades. Yet there are steps communities and government should take to form a more cohesive, successful union.Consider what one leader wrote in 1753: Few of their children in the country learn English. The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages. . . . Unless the stream of their importation could be turned . . . they will soon so outnumber us that we will not preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious. Thus Ben Franklin referred to German Americans, still the largest ethnic group in America. A century later, Midwestern cities such as Cincinnati and St. Louis were mostly German-speaking. So worried were their native-born neighbors that Iowa outlawed speaking German in public and even in private conversation.Proponents and opponents of immigration agree on one thing: Learning English Rosetta Stone German V3 is crucial to success and assimilation. Yet learning a language as an adult is hard, so first-generation immigrants often use their native tongue. Historically, English has dominated by the second or third generation in all immigrant groups. Most recent immigrants recognize that they need to learn English, and about 90 percent of the second generation speak English, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Research by sociologists Claude Fischer and Michael Hout published in 2008 suggests that English acquisition among immigrants today is faster than in previous waves.Residential integration of immigrants is even more gradual. Half a century ago, sociologist Stanley Lieberson showed that most immigrants lived in segregated enclaves, Little Italy or Chinatown, for several generations. This segregation reflected discrimination by natives and the natural desire of strangers in a strange land to live among familiar faces with familiar customs. Only with Rosetta Stone Software suburbanization, encouraged by government policy in the 1950s and 1960s, did the children and grandchildren of the immigrants of the 1890s and 1900s exit those enclaves. That many of todays immigrants live in ethnic enclaves is thus entirely normal and reflects no ominous aim to separate themselves from the wider American community.