Now how did he and other immigrants then survive and assimilated, but today's immigrants, with modern conveniences, travel, and gadgets up the wazoo, can't do the same?
They don’t want to.
Different country.
Today’s INVADERS can go and ask for Food stamps, ‘free’ health care, ‘free’ phones, so they don’t have to assimilate - and the Marxists want them NOT TO!
Many of those German-Americans didn’t assimilate willingly. They had laws passed against them, were threatened, stolen from, persecuted, targeted by vigilante groups, put in internment camps, imprisoned, tortured, and sometimes killed.
Sometimes the cause of their being hated was their simply being different and being proud of being different. Many German-Americans spent their entire lives, generations even, only speaking the German language. They were the largest group of Americans and they assumed they had the freedom and liberty to live their lives as they chose, and that no centralized government had a right to tell them otherwise.
The centralized government, federal and state, sometimes disagreed. This was particularly true when German-Americans refused to pay taxes for what they considered oppressive acts of government. A number of German-American tax resisters were imprisoned and tortured, a few to the point of death.
After a couple of centuries of such treatment, eventually most of them had assimilated. But there remains many unassimilated German-American and German-speaking communities to this day: Amish, Hutterites, etc. They successfully resisted forced assimilation by sticking together and standing tall against government oppression. They are proud to be both Americans and German-Americans, because they understand what freedom and liberty means.