An America where people subscribe to the notion that no matter what your station or country of origin, you could speak, worship, own property, and pursue as much education as you could find the opportunity with impunity.
Used to be you’d arrive with the vow to leave behind those aspects of your origins that kept you from those opportunities. One of them was your language. The other was that you were going to raise your children so that they could participate in those freedoms as fully unencumbered Americans. This is why English was insisted on by the early immigrants.
This embodied the notion of a melting pot. All the talents and experiences coming together within the Great American Experiment created something better than all those other countries and traditions separately.
A nation where people of other countries are urged to arrive illegally to take advantage of social welfare programs, are encouraged to flout the laws and traditions, and allowed to use their language as a way to alienate those that are providing for the public benefits they enjoy isn’t a melting pot.
It’s a chamber pot.
There’s a myth that people would come to this country leaving the old one behind, and it’s simply not true. Immigrants have always tended to cluster around their own kind, it’s how we get Chinatowns and Little Italies, and the almost all Irish 5 Points in NYC. Often times people speaking their own language, keeping their own customs, easing into the new culture.
The melting pot has never truly existed, it’s a fiction. Or if it did exist there was a notable lack of stirring because you always have been able to find pockets of other cultures in this country. From the earliest when the colonists from certain areas with certain religions would gather in the same area. This lack of stirring is how we wound up with the Pennsylvania Dutch who have their own version of German.
People holding their old customs is not tied to illegal immigration, and the need to glue them together is a lazy minded one. Legal immigrants for as long as people have been coming here have maintained this pattern.