To the Editor:
It seems that Allison Sciortino has not learned completely from her Florida vacation (March 31). If she did, then she would not have glorified her first-wave immigrant ancestors and condemned "modern" immigrants.
Assimilation is a process that takes several generations. One cannot expect a Cuban immigrant to arrive in the United States and speak English right away. In fact, it is harder for an adult to learn a new language than it is for a child.
Immigrant children generally can speak English better than their parents who have been in this country an equal length of time.
I know foreign-born adults who have taken night and weekend English courses and their English still comes out awkward because the structure and nuances of their native tongues are so fully ingrained in them that they either mix up the order of words in their sentences, translate idiomatic expressions too literally or, at best, speak with a foreign accent.
To claim that immigrants "have not made much of an effort to learn English" is unfair and untrue.
But language is only part of the reason why immigrants form ethnic enclaves in American cities and suburbs. It all boils down to one simple fact of life: we all find comfort among people who are like ourselves.
The old world immigrants initially isolated themselves from mainstream American culture, settling in homogeneous ethnic communities (little Italy in New York, for example). They did this not only because they found strength in numbers, but because the white Anglo-Saxon Americans did not exactly welcome them with open arms. White Americans closed jobs, communities and social organizations to Italian, Irish, Polish and other European immigrants.
Of course, this has not changed in the 150 years since the United States experienced its first wave of immigration. However, now that the old immigrants have been accepted as mainstream Americans, many of them forget the hardships their ancestors faced. They denigrate the new immigrants for perceived resistance to assimilation.
To further aggravate matters, immigrant groups discriminate against other immigrant groups of different ethnicity. Nonetheless, third- and fourth-generation children of Europeans at least have the added advantage of looking like white Anglo-Saxons.
African and Native Americans have been in this country much longer than the old immigrants, and yet they are still targets of stereotyping and discrimination. Asians, Latinos and others have been in the United States for a couple of generations now, but it is doubtful that the rest of American society will ever overcome fear and distrust of these groups.
My parents did not move our family to this country so that we could persist in our native ways. In fact, my brother and I have assimilated so well that we have, regrettably, forgotten much of our Korean culture.
However, I resent strangers who feel the need to simplify their English when speaking to me because they think I "just got off the boat." No matter how westernized my clothes are, or how fluent my English, I will always appear to others as a foreigner first.
