Immigration and the Significance of Culture

It is often said that immigration poses a threat to national identity. A country that experiences a large influx of immigrants will find it more difficult to sustain its national traditions and the practices in which they are enshrined. A country’s unity is both expressed in and sustained by its citizens’ shared sense of history; by their mutual recognition of national holidays, symbols, myths, and ceremonies; by their allegiance to a common set of values; and by their participation in a range of informal customs and tendencies covering virtually every aspect of life, including modes of dress, habits of thought, styles of music, humor, and entertainment, patterns of work and leisure, attitudes toward sex and sexuality, and tastes in food and drink. Immigration transforms these sources of cultural unity into grounds of contention and conflict. Immigrants arrive with their own histories and traditions, customs and values, habits and ceremonies. The features and practices that define the host nation’s distinctive identity — the very features that give its nonimmigrant citizens the sense of belonging to a single people — are experienced by immigrants as unfamiliar at best, and alienating or oppressive at worst. All too often, the symbols of inclusion and commonality are thus transformed into emblems of exclusion and discord.