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Really? Could not all sorts of languages be heard on the streets of the large cities (and in some cases elsewhere) for decades and decades after the immigration took off, whether it be Yiddish, German, Polish or something else? Indeed one occasionally reads those stories about the remnants of an immigrant community in some place or other where the old-timers still speak another European language.
True, but if you for some reason want to go out into the wider world — for work, for recreation, for education, whatever it might be, you had to at least get onboard with the dress, customs, and language of America. You couldn’t get a job and expect them to accommodate your cultural or religious garb. You wouldn’t be allowed to continue to speak your native language outside the enclave especially at work or school. This forced people to eventually assimilate.
Some of the difference is technology. I have Google translate and I can thus understand at a basic level, most languages well enough to do a very basic interaction. The rest is a sort of malaise that assumes that a country can actually survive as a cohesive unit without at least some baseline of a shared culture. The idea that one should be permitted to “let their freak flag fly” is corrosive because it’s precisely those shared expectations, morals, and folkways that produce social trust. I can’t really know that a person who behaves wildly out of the mainstream shares any of my values. I don’t know what would and wouldn’t offend them. This leads to less social interaction and often much shallower interactions because I can’t know what’s safe for polite conversation.
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Yeah, non-English, native language institutions and schools were the norm for most of American history, and were even legally codified in many states. That only reversed during our WW1 xenophobic fervor, and even then the Supreme Court ruled its illegal to forbid native language schools.
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