When one hears that phrase now what comes to mind is the franchise restaurant where menu offerings are all some type of fondue. It certainly is an appropriate name for a fun place to eat. It was in childhood that I first heard of the Melting Pot and it had nothing to do with food; it was a description of the ethnicity of the American citizenry.
The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island were the welcoming sights for tens of millions of immigrants. They were largely of European extraction and came from extreme conditions which we, as elementary school children, could scarcely imagine. Our teacher explained how well all that worked: When mixed together in the welcoming warmth of the United States, The Melting Pot began to work its magic and we were all blended into a single society. Too naïve to believe anything other than what our benevolent teachers told us, it sounded like an extension of a tranquil history that was largely myth.
Now, all these decades later, we are realizing that it wasn’t just school children who were mesmerized by the myth; the government felt that immigration was under control and it was part of Manifest Destiny, that 19th century philosophy that shaped what the country was to become. It consisted, historians now agree, of three parts: The special virtues of the American people and their institutions; America’s mission to redeem and remake the west in the image of agrarian America; An irresistible destiny to accomplish this essential duty. Historian Frederick Merk says this concept was born out of “A sense of mission to redeem the Old World by high example…generated by the potentialities of a new earth for building a new heaven.”
My, how things have changed! The flood of immigrants coming not just from crumbling societies of the Old World but from Mexico and South America, from Asia and China, from Africa and India began to fashion themselves into the changing fabric of our society. More often than not they were given jobs that Americans did not want but were better than they could have had in their native countries. Think of migrant workers, landscapers, part-time construction workers, and unskilled laborers in general; those are the jobs for the undocumented and in most cases the employer did not pay benefits, a wrinkle that American workers would not willingly accept.
Almost without noticing the population of the nation exploded but true immigration reform and control was never high on any administration’s to-do list. We had wars to fight, industries to save, planets to visit, technology to advance, social evils to correct, wealth to be coveted, and a host of other issues, equally important, but silently consuming a larger part of our national economy. Despite a few feeble attempts to control illegal entry into the country, what had been a trickle of Hispanics, mostly from Mexico, in the mid-twentieth century suddenly became a torrent of more than twelve million men, women, and children who had just showed up without documentation.
The southwest states felt it first in the 1970s but it wasn’t long before it spread across the south in general and then throughout the entire nation. Something had to be done! Nothing was done despite promises from whatever party happened to be in power. The Melting Pot had become The Seething Cauldron. That got the attention of the politicians. No one underestimates the power of ten million Latinos, but a problem that could have been addressed and solved fifty years ago, now is out of control.
Deportation of millions is out of the question. Documentation for all those who illegally entered is problematic. The Democratic controlled Senate passed some sort of bill but the Republican controlled House has not allowed it to come to the floor for debate for more than 500 days. Now the President has taken unilateral action which has created another firestorm. How dare he, fume the Republicans!
Who knows what will happen? At the rate Congress is going, more than likely there will be no progress until a new President is elected. You remember the old saying the mills of the gods grind exceeding slow but exceeding fine. Not so with our progress on immigration reform; the mills of our congressional gods have ground to a halt.
This is a classic example of ignoring a problem until it become too big to solve. Just as my favorite Melting Pot restaurant failed, I fear we are looking at the Melt Down and everyone should want to avoid that.
– Hayden Hollingsworth
