Recent controversy over U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention conditions at Delaney Hall in New Jersey is emblematic of a much larger problem with a broad swath of the foreign population in the U.S. Democrats recently made a spectacle at Delaney Hall, demanding better detention conditions for illegal immigrants awaiting deportation. According to hysterical Democrats like Senator Andy Kim (D-N.J.) and New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill (D), illegal immigrants are being denied basic necessities like food. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, however, confirmed that several detainees are actually rejecting the food provided for them and “hunger striking” instead. Their demands? Specific ethnic foods.

“They say that it’s because they’re on a hunger strike, when it’s only a handful of individuals who want their ethnic group, their ethnic-right food,” Mullin said in a White House Cabinet meeting Wednesday. His response to the demands of the illegal immigrants and their Democratic Party advocates: “Well, they can go back to their country and get whatever food they want. The fact is, we’re giving them the calories they want. This isn’t Holiday Inn.”

Although clearly humorous, the comment from Mullin succinctly addresses one of the chief issues with many immigrants who have entered the U.S. over the past six decades. While the first two centuries’ worth of newcomers to America relatively quickly adapted to the U.S. way of life and assimilated to American culture and society, those who have arrived on this nation’s shores in more recent years have shown a fierce reticence to assimilate, transforming urban metropolises into factional ethnic enclaves and overwhelming small towns that have rarely, if ever, seen foreigners.

Little effort is made to learn the ways of the American, and Americans themselves are often treated with disdain or even hostility, all while more and more demands are heaped upon the American people: demands for ethnic food, demands for ever-greater “diversity,” demands to refrain from “cultural appropriation” (while simultaneously demanding that the insurgent cultures be accepted), demands that the social and moral ills certain ethnic groups bring with them be not only ignored but embraced. Mullin is right: many of today’s newcomers treat the U.S. like a hotel.

A Nation of Immigrants?

The vast majority of America’s founding stock were descendants of English settlers. Nearly all of the Founding Fathers were born in the colonies. The few who were not — such as Alexander Hamilton or Thomas Paine — were British subjects born within the bounds of the British Empire and of English descent. Some Scots-Irish, Germans, Irish, Dutch, and French were also part of the nation’s founding stock, but they were a minority and had already been living according to English customs, culture, and law, which in turn served as the basis for American customs, culture, and law. The first 30 years of the United States’ existence saw fewer than 250,000 immigrants arrive, all from Europe. They assimilated easily into the fledgling America, with its Christian faith and morals and European-rooted culture and law.

Immigration rose in the 19th century, with millions of Irish immigrants fleeing famine and British persecution and German farmers, workers, and artisans seeking lebensraum. The Germans largely avoided stirring up nativist hostility by settling in rural, sparsely populated areas; their skills and hard work earned them the love and respect of their neighbors, and they were quick to assimilate culturally, learning and speaking English and giving their children American names. The Irish had more difficulty gaining acceptance, partly due to their Catholicism, which the natives of heavily-Protestant New England, where the Irish landed and concentrated, frequently saw as a foreign influence or alien allegiance, partly due to their extreme poverty, and partly due to fears that the millions-strong mass of Irish newcomers would replace American workers and undercut American wages. The Irish faced intense discrimination and hostility, particularly from the Know-Nothing Party.

Unlike the Irish who had already moved to and settled in America in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, those fleeing the Famine were often uneducated and low-skilled, resigned to lives of poverty. They proved themselves to their American hosts by taking on dangerous, unskilled labor jobs, building much of the nation’s railroads and canals and dominating urban infrastructure construction, soon moving into more respectable (but equally dangerous) roles in police and fire departments. The willingness of the Irish to risk their lives for pay so low that American natives would have been insulted endeared the hard workers to many Americans, who additionally appreciated the quality of the work done by the Irish. The Irish gained further acceptance by fighting in the Civil War and proving their loyalty to their new homeland, and engaging in American politics, holding offices like mayor (Boston Mayor Hugh O’Brien, for example, or San Francisco Mayor Frank McCoppin) and congressman (William Bourke Cockran represented New York in Congress and gained a reputation as a gifted orator) by the end of the 19th century and even the presidency (John F. Kennedy) by the middle of the 20th century.

However, immigration was yet to peak. Between 1880 and 1924, nearly 30 million newcomers would arrive on America’s shores. While still hailing almost exclusively from Europe, this tidal wave of newcomers differed from previous immigrant waves: Italians, Poles, Hungarians, and Russians were not native English-speakers. Some, like Eastern European Jews, came fleeing persecution or violence in their native lands, but the vast majority were fleeing only poverty, seeking opportunity and fortune in the rapidly-industrializing U.S.

In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt helped establish the U.S. Congressional Joint Immigration Commission, commonly known as the Dillingham Commission, after its chairman, Senator William P. Dillingham (R-Vt.). It was the purpose of the Dillingham Commission to study the origins and impact of the surge in immigration into the U.S. witnessed over the prior 30 years, an endeavor that employed over 300 congressional staffers and investigators and cost upwards of $1,000,000 at the time. In 1911, the Dillingham Commission published its multi-volume report, warning that recent immigration trends differed starkly from older immigration patterns and posed serious threats to assimilation and to the social and cultural stability of the U.S.

“The old immigration was largely a movement of settlers,” the Dillingham Commission wrote of the English, German, and, to a lesser extent, Irish immigrants of the late 18th and first half of the 19th centuries. “The new immigration has been largely a movement of unskilled laboring men who have come, in large part temporarily, from the less progressive and advanced countries of Europe in response to the call for industrial workers in the eastern and middle western States,” the report continued. “Racially they are for the most part essentially unlike the British, German, and other peoples who came during the period prior to 1880, and generally speaking they are actuated in coming by different ideals, for the old immigration came to be a part of the country, while the new, in a large measure, comes with the intention of profiting, in a pecuniary way, by the superior advantages of the new world and then returning to the old country.”

The “new immigration,” the Dillingham Commission found, was concentrated almost entirely in cities and urban hubs, and assimilation was slowed or outright reversed by a multitude of factors. First, ethnic or national groups tended to stick tightly to one another and form cohesive enclaves, essentially taking over neighborhoods, sometimes with several related families living together in the same house or same apartment. They would keep themselves “apart from native Americans and the older immigrants to such an extent that assimilation has been slow.” The English language, which was almost never spoken fresh off the boat, was learned slowly and laboriously, if at all, and language skills were already very low among those coming into the country. The Dillingham Commission found that more than two-thirds of new immigrants aged 14 or older were illiterate.

Second, the “new immigration,” was seemingly uninterested in bettering the U.S. and integrating into the American way of life. Most of the money earned working low-skill jobs in coal mining, iron and steel manufacturing, or clothing factories and slaughterhouses was shipped back to the newcomer’s home country, or set aside and saved so that, after a few years working in America, the newcomer could go home with his American earnings. These were in the days before the complicated plethora of immigrant and non-immigrant visas in use today had been introduced.

Third, the Dillingham Commission ascertained that the rapid, large-scale influx of foreign laborers threatened to undercut American natives, depriving Americans of jobs and honest wages. While the Irish Famine refugees had demonstrated that newcomers could establish themselves in low-skill labor fields as a stepping stone to greater success and bigger and better ways to benefit America and the American people, the products of the “new immigration” showed no such ambition and were instead content to remain stagnant in entry-level positions in manual labor, often shutting out American workers who were eager to start at the bottom and rise to the top.

Finally, the lack of assimilation threatened the cohesion and unity of national standards. Schools in urban immigration hubs like Boston, Chicago, New York City, and Philadelphia were overwhelmed with the illiterate, non-English-speaking children of Italian, Greek, Polish, Hungarian, and Russian newcomers, who were often themselves illiterate and spoke little English outside of what their jobs required. Crime and drunkenness spiked in the cities that were benefiting economically, but not socially or culturally, from the “new immigration.” The Italians, in particular, posed a crime issue, and it would be nearly a century before federal law enforcement would manage to cripple the Sicilian import known as La Cosa Nostra — the mafia.

It was partly on the basis of the Dillingham Commission’s report that President Calvin Coolidge, a fierce defender of the American worker, would establish the U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) in 1924 and move to heavily restrict immigration. The 1924 Immigration Act which Coolidge signed into law completely barred immigration from Asia (Chinese and Japanese immigrants had been plying the same tactics on the West Coast that the “new immigration” cohort had been on the East Coast, dominating low-skilled manual labor fields and forming ethnic enclaves) and placed severe restrictions on immigration from southern and eastern Europe, further establishing the visa system largely used today and requiring would-be immigrants to be vetted and interviewed by U.S. consular officers abroad before being permitted into the U.S. The 1924 Immigration Act was wildly popular and enjoyed near-unanimous support in Congress. Nine senators and 71 U.S. House representatives (out of 435 total) voted against the bill. One of the most vocal opponents of the Immigration Act was freshman House Democrat Emmanuel Celler.

The next four decades saw immigration into the U.S. taper off significantly and allowed those who had arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries time to assimilate. Many never did, but their children and grandchildren did, learning English, embracing American norms, intermarrying, and eventually fighting for the U.S. in World War II. By the dawn of the 20th century, the foreign-born share of the U.S. population peaked at 14.8% (roughly 12 million). The foreign-born share of the population would fall by more than 10% (to 4.7%) by 1970, but the Hart-Celler Act would reverse the stabilization and normalization that Coolidge’s immigration restriction allowed the U.S. to enjoy.

The New New Immigration

Celler (the New York Democrat who so vehemently opposed the protectionist policies of the Coolidge administration) and Democratic Senator Philip Hart introduced and had passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, better known as the Hart-Celler Act.

President Harry S. Truman in 1952 instructed the Commission on Immigration and Naturalization to compile a report, entitled “Whom We Shall Welcome,” identifying the detriments of restrictive immigration policy. That report widely lambasted Coolidge-era quotas and restrictions as racially discriminatory, and later served as the basis for the Hart-Celler Act. The bill was supported by President John F. Kennedy, who, as a senator, penned a revisionist history pamphlet called “A Nation of Immigrants,” but faced enough opposition from both the American public and congressional conservatives that it was not passed until several years after Kennedy’s assassination, at the height of the civil rights fervor. While President Lyndon B. Johnson was perhaps the bill’s most vociferous advocate, only 51% of the American public expressed support for scrapping the old immigration restrictions, according to a 1965 Gallup poll.

While most legislation was signed by the president in the White House, in Washington, D.C., Johnson made a special spectacle of signing the Hart-Celler Act, bringing a host of legislators and administration officials to a staged event at Liberty Island, New York. Relying heavily on the rhetoric of Kennedy’s “A Nation of Immigrants,” Johnson castigated the 1924 Immigration Act as outdated, racist, and even evil, saying that it “violates the basic principle of American democracy, the principle that values and rewards each man based on his merit as a man. It has been un-American in the highest sense, because it has been untrue to the faith that brought thousands to these shores even before we were a country.”

The Hart-Celler Act, which took effect in 1968 despite having been signed into law in 1965, abolished many of the old restrictions and quotas, instead allowing and even encouraging immigration into the U.S. from nearly anywhere in the world and establishing a preference caste which would soon come to be abused for the purposes of chain migration. Since the Hart-Celler Act went into effect nearly 60 years ago, more than 76 million foreigners have entered the U.S. legally — not counting the tens of millions more who have entered illegally. While nearly all immigration into the U.S. over the preceding 200 years originated in Europe, the share of European immigrants to the U.S. has since fallen to only 7%. The foreign-born share of the U.S. population has risen again to 14.8%, now representing over 50 million. The largest faction of Hart-Celler immigrants hail from South America, but others include Indians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans, Africans, Middle Easterners, and more.

Assimilation Nation — Or Not

European immigrants to America had much in common with their American hosts: a shared European culture and shared Christian faith, which in turn informed morality, law, and even social interactions. Assimilation was easier due to a common foundation, and European immigrants who chose to make their homes in America were largely grateful for the opportunity and endeavored to adapt to the national norms, traditions, and culture. Even when some foreign customs were retained, they were often adapted to the American way of life. For example, St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated widely across the U.S. but has become a celebration not just of Ireland’s patron Saint but of the contributions of Irish immigrants to the American nation.

The newest slate of “new immigrants,” those who arrived in the wake of the Hart-Celler Act, have evinced a greater reticence to assimilate. Indian immigrants show high levels of economic assimilation, often arriving in the U.S. on work visas (like the H-1B visa), but show noticeably high levels of native cultural retention. More than 80% of Indian immigrants marry other Indians, and many continue speaking Hindi or Punjabi, despite the prevalence of the English language in India. Additionally, many retain their native religion of Hinduism and host public religious celebrations and festivals. For example, the tallest statue in the state of Texas (and fourth-tallest statue in the whole U.S.) is the Statue of Union, a 90-foot-tall statue of the Hindu god Hanuman at the Sri Ashtalakshmi Temple in Houston. It was unveiled in 2024.

Many African immigrants also live in cultural enclaves, not mixing with the American native population but residing in their distinctly Ethiopian, Nigerian, or Somali neighborhoods. Some factions have also demonstrated a near-total disregard for American laws. Large numbers of Somali immigrants, for example, have been involved in rampant fraud schemes, robbing American taxpayers of tens of billions of dollars allocated to welfare programs for the vulnerable and needy. Much of this money is then shipped back to Somalia. Somali immigrants have also been shockingly slow to learn English and, even when engaging in the public sphere, often rely heavily on their native tongue. Somali immigrants have even imported their tribal conflicts, which have impacted American politics in areas with high concentrations of Somali immigrants.

Immigrants from the Middle East also evince low assimilation rates, particularly among Muslim groups. Arabic is spoken at home in about 75% of cases, and English is learned and incorporated into everyday usage slowly, if at all. Muslim immigrants also establish parallel societies based on their religion, with halal ceremonies, mosques, and Muslim holy day celebrations. Increasingly common is also the establishment of Sharia law courts, with some Muslims even physically preventing others from taking disputes to American courts, insisting that their grievances be addressed in Sharia courts.

Hotel America

As Mullin observed, far too many foreign newcomers to America treat the nation like a Holiday Inn or a Hart-Celler Hotel. They expect to find their own cuisines and style of dress accepted, they demand that their foreign cultural norms and customs be respected and even deferred to in some cases, often while disregarding or even mocking America’s native culture and the social norms and customs that have distinguished the nation as the greatest country on earth.

In response to new U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) guidance requiring nonimmigrant (temporary) visa-holders to return to their home countries to apply for legal permanent residency, Indian social media users heaped abuse on American citizens, simply because they were required to follow U.S. law and await green cards in their home countries. Many referred to American natives as “dumbass white trash,” while others insisted that Americans are incompetent, that Indian immigrants built America, and that the U.S. will collapse without imported Indian workers.

This is not the behavior of people grateful for an opportunity to succeed and willing to assimilate to the culture of their gracious hosts. In the 17th and 18th centuries, it was common for Europeans to seek their fortune in the New World. However, this fortune came at a cost. A lengthy journey across the Atlantic Ocean was merely a prerequisite to braving the dangers of the American continent’s wilderness and taming the brutal frontier. Europeans left behind civilization, the comforts of what was then the modern world, and very often bid goodbye to family and friends for the remainder of their lives in the hope of building a new life in the New World.

The immigrants of today are different. Certainly, many are no less ambitious, but they arrive not in an untamed world which must be settled at the risk of life and limb, but in a thriving nation populated by countless success stories of nearly mythical proportions. They have not been tossed about atop the Atlantic for months on end but have hopped on flights of a few hours long. They have come not to “go West, young man,” and pioneer the unclaimed, but to scramble to the top of a glittering tower of assembled riches.

America is not some international hotel intended to house and service the poor, the fraudulent, and the entitled of the Third World. America is not an ill-guarded bank ripe for robbing or an unprotected armory to be pillaged. America is not a “vibrant” or “diverse” “multicultural” bazaar. America is a nation, America is a people, America is a home. Over the past 250 years, hundreds of thousands of men have died fighting wars for this nation, for their home, for the home of their children, and their children’s children. Hundreds of thousands more have died pioneering and settling this nation, taming the wilderness and making the inhospitable frontier hospitable, so that their children might inherit this treasure. Hundreds of thousands of men have died working this land, tending her fields and farms, building her skyscrapers and monuments, digging her canals and laying her railroads, and policing her streets, all to make this country a better, more beautiful, and safer place for their own children.

Immigrants are welcome in America, certainly, but they will only be welcomed on America’s terms and not at the expense of the American people. Despite what Kennedy would have claimed, the history of America is not that of a “nation of immigrants,” but of a nation of pioneers and patriots, of brave men and women eager to tame the untamable and settle the unclaimed and untouched. Newcomers with such a spirit may find a welcome here, should they readily accept the American way of life, language, culture, and traditions. In other words, foreigners are welcome, if they are willing to no longer be foreigners, if they will instead embrace the noble title of “American.” The Hart-Celler Hotel days are over. No vacancy.