Assimilation policy and salad bowl

I am not egocentric enough to tell you about my whole life but I find it interesting to tell you that little episode to show you how I came seriously to the thoughts I put forward at the end.
For Spring break I went to Los Angeles. Before I left, I was told that I would improve my Spanish rather than my English. I thought it was overestimating the influence of the Spanish language in that city and I thought it was nothing but cliché. Now I must admit that I was wrong! When you walk in many neighborhoods you can hear people speaking Spanish around you. When you take buses, Spanish-speaking people surround you. In every neighborhood you can see ads written both in English and Spanish. Very often, you can read casual warnings in both languages.

We all know objective facts about Latin-American immigration to California. We all know how huge is the Mexican population living in Los Angeles. But, it is hard to realize it until you are confronted to it directly.

When I came back I couldn’t help thinking about the concepts of immigration and integration. It became obvious for me how different the conceptions of immigration were in Europe and in the United States. Indeed, in Europe it is commonly said that immigration was successful when the immigrant became completely converted to embrace the culture of his new country of residence; it is even sometimes considered, though not always acknowledged, that the immigrant should lose a part of his native culture in order to make the immigration successful and to become fully integrated. The dominant policy concerning immigration in Europe is turned to assimilation while in the United States it is blatant that the “salad bowl” became the rule and that a kind of assimilation policy didn’t occur.

I don’t know which policy is the more appropriate. Both the European and the American policies have defects but it seems to me crucial that the immigration policy should be more discussed for the years to come. It is obvious that the immigration policy was designed decades ago for the society of that time and it did not evolve much since then, contrary to society. And that becomes all the more in a city like Los Angeles where, as soon as you arrive there, you can no longer ignore the huge Latin-American community and you realize that policies need to be adjusted to such realities.