I’m glad your experience is so positive; I see the impact in my area and I don’t think it is a good thing. Americans can’t many jobs because they can’t speak Spanish (to deal with the clientele), yet they are forced to fund the public schooling of the immigrants (whose parents often are either on the dole or working under the table).
Realistically we are not changing these people into “Americans”; just look at any fast food chain’s menu and how they have changed over the past couple of decades. They aren’t changing us, just replacing us. Without them, due to the low American birthrate, we’d have ghost towns all around the northeast.
“Americans can’t many jobs because they can’t speak Spanish (to deal with the clientele), yet they are forced to fund the public schooling of the immigrants (whose parents often are either on the dole or working under the table).”
When I was a little kid, I spoke Greek with my mother, English with my father and French when I went out to play. When I was in high school I got jobs at a local jewelry store. I had to speak French “to deal with the clientele”! No French, no job! I’ve used that French, complete with a strong Montrealaise accent, all over the world, even in an Indo Chinese jungle drinking blood soup with Hmong tribesmen. I should think Spanish could come in handy too. Of course we are funding ESL classes here too. But the overwhelming majority of the immigrants here are NOT on the dole or working under the table. In fact, the percentage of welfare use among the immigrants as a group is a fraction of what it is among our local home growns!
As for food, well last night my oldest was eating “lobster poutine”. French Canadian food is one of the true joys of life! Even if the French is gone, the food is still here and now we get to eat Ethiopian sambussa with it!
America is changing and what these latest immigrants are assimilating into isn’t and won’t be the America our Irish old people fought to assimilate into...for decades and decades, really 100 years, after they left in the Great Hunger. I haven’t got a problem with that. Flexible cultures survive and adapt. Rigid, tribal cultures like those in Europe eventually get conquered.