IMMIGRATION: Bobby Jindal’s Important Embrace of Assimilation

“My dad and mom told my brother and me that we came to America to be Americans,” Jindal says. “If we wanted to be Indians, we would have stayed in India.”

Bobby Jindal’s presidential quest may not take him all the way to the White House. But if his time on the campaign trail helps put assimilation back at the heart of the nation’s immigration debate, he will have rendered his country a valuable service.

The 44-year-old governor of Louisiana was born and raised in Baton Rouge. His parents had immigrated to the United States six months earlier from India, and Jindal’s election in 2007 made him the first Indian-American chief executive of any state in US history.

But Jindal didn’t run for governor as an Indian-American, and he isn’t running for president as an Indian-American. Throughout his career he has championed the value and virtue of what used to be called “Americanization” — the patriotic integration of immigrants into the American nation, becoming Americans not just legally, but culturally and socially as well.

“We must insist on assimilation,” Jindal said in the closing moments of the Republican “undercard” debate in Cleveland last week. “Immigration without assimilation is an invasion.” A TV commercial aired in Iowa by Believe Again, a super PAC promoting Jindal for president, highlights the governor’s emphasis on making immigrants into Americans.

“I am tired of hyphenated Americans,” Jindal says in the ad, which features clips of a recent speech. “We’re not Indian-Americans or African-Americans or Asian-Americans. We’re all Americans.” Instead of obsessing, as so many Republican candidates do, on the legal status of those who cross the border, Jindal emphasizes the importance of embracing the norms and mores of their new homeland. Immigrants, he declares, “should adopt our values, they should learn English, and they should roll up their sleeves and get to work.”

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