Indian-Americans need to wisen up
Indians are by no means the most problematic group of immigrants in America, but that doesn’t mean they’re a particularly good role model either, as an article in the Boston Globe on a celebration of India’s national day in Malden, a pretty gritty town just north of Boston, where the Indian population is growing quickly, illustrates:
As one reflection of that growth, the local Indian-American community will be taking part in the first celebration in Malden of Indian Independence Day, on Saturday from 6 to 9 p.m., at the former Emerson School building on Highland Avenue.
Indian Independence Day is a national holiday held each Aug. 15 in India that celebrates the nation’s becoming independent of Great Britain on that date in 1947.
There’s a perfectly good day for celebrating independence from Great Britain and it’s Fourth of July. Doing that might also mark a way for immigrants to the U.S. to mark their independece from their respective Old Countries.
“It’s just like the Fourth of July here,” said Kumar, who also resides in Malden.
“And then as younger families come, they bring their parents over so they can stay,” Thomas said. “The Indian culture is huge on family and extended family.”
Allow me to quote a young Asian-American woman I overheard talking to her mom last year: “This is America! Am-er-ica!”
There’s nothing more harmful to assimilation than chain-migration of family members. Nothing. Not even those idiotic foreign-language exercises that the federal government forces states and municipalitites to engage in at great cost to tax payers.
Shainu Thomas noted that because the immigrant community is still relatively new — most people are immigrants or children of recent immigrants, “people are still patriotic” toward India. “They still have ties . . . they definitely would like to maintain that sense of community.”
That’s how the British felt when they ruled the sub-continent for centuries. It’s called colonialism.
