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From our founding as a nation, there have been those who worried that "foreigners" would sink us and change our national character. Benjamin Franklin warned in 1751: "Why should Pennsylvania, founded by dint of. dint of. the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly subsist so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them?"

It's genuine, Germans are our largest ethnological group today — numbering 43 million in the endure decennial Census — but so what? Despite German language schools — which enrolled for example many as 600,000 students in 1900 — and even some efforts by German emigres to form a German ethnic state in Texas or Wisconsin in the 19th century, Americans of German ancestry all speak English today and are entirely integrated into the American mainstream.

Similar worries emerged in the early 20th century, when millions of southern and eastern Europeans flooded our shores. Madison Grant, a Yale-educated lawyer and leader in the eugenics movement, predicted, "… in large sections of the fatherland the native American exercise volition entirely disappear. He will not inter-marry with inferior races and he cannot compete in the sweat shop and in the way trench with the newcomers."

But Grant turned revealed to be spectacularly wrong. The progeny of those Italian, Polish, and other immigrants succeeded in learning English, improving not single their confess housekeeping standing but that of all Americans. They also intermarried to an astonishing degree. Nearly three-quarters of young Americans of Italian high birth were matrimonial to spouses of non-Italian ancestry in 1990 and the figures for Americans of Polish descent were even higher, according to sociologists Richard Alba and Victor Nee in their book, "Remaking the American Mainstream."

And the same holds just for Asian Americans and Hispanics today. Intermarriage is becoming the norm. About one-third of married Asian American males are married to non-Asian women, as are nearly half of Asian American females. Among U.S.-born Hispanics, the number is resembling, with about one-third who are married to non-Hispanic spouses. And the number is higher in the midst of college-educated Hispanics, especially women, according to the Population Reference Bureau.

But I don't need to have reference to a demographer to know what's happening in terms of intermarriage and assimilation in the United States; I can look at my recognize family. I am the daughter of a author whose family came to New Mexico from Spain in 1601, and a origin whose ancestors came from England sometime ahead of 1800 and from Ireland in the mid-1800s. I married a man whose Jewish ancestors came from Poland and Russia in the late 19th and betimes 20th centuries. One of our sons married a woman whose ancestors are Scots-Irish and German. Another of our sons married a woman whose mother was born in Ecuador and whose father came from Cuba.

Our eight grandchildren are a perfect reflection of the American Melting Pot. But in precept to constitute the new American majority minority the Census Bureau has concocted, each of these children would regard to be classified for the reason that Hispanic, even those who are barely one-eighth Hispanic.

Isn't it time we quit obsessing about race and ethnicity? America has successfully integrated millions of people from every region of the world. Every indication is that we are still doing so. The naysayers keep being proven wrong when it comes to the great American assimilation machine. Come 2042, these "majority minority" predictions will lo as stupid as Ben Franklin's worries about Germans do today.

Linda Chavez is the author of "An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal." To find fully more about Linda Chavez, visit the Creators Syndicate structure boy-servant at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

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