Mark Krikorian warns that the immigration crisis will keep getting worse unless America’s leaders stop treating assimilation as a taboo and start promoting a shared American identity; he says elite doubt about nationhood, shifting cultural norms in schools, modern technology and record foreign-born population levels all combine to weaken assimilation, and he urges a national effort around the 250th anniversary to reclaim Americanization.
One of the core points Krikorian raises is that the problem is not immigrants themselves but a leadership class that has grown unsure about whether being American is a good thing. “It’s not the immigrants’ doing, it’s a problem we have where our leadership classes, whether it’s government, business, education, religion, everything, aren’t really sure about whether it is even a good thing to be an American,” he said, blunt and direct about the consequences of elite ambivalence.
He argues this uncertainty erodes the idea of nationhood and robs assimilation of meaning, reducing national identity to geography rather than shared values. “The idea basically here is that there is no meaning to nationhood or to peoplehood that living in the United States is kind of like living in Northern New Jersey as opposed to Southern New Jersey. You live in the United States, or you live in Mexico or you live in Swaziland, it doesn’t mean anything,” he explained.
Krikorian also calls out a mainstream leftward view that treats immigration law as inherently immoral, and he ties that worldview to resistance against enforcement. “The left increasingly, even at the mainstream level, they see immigration law itself as a kind of Jim Crow, that it’s immoral to keep anyone from moving to the United States if they want to. And everything stems from that,” he continued. “Because if that’s your worldview, then obviously law enforcement coming to round up and remove people who have no right to be here, no legal right to be here, is immoral.”
He warns that when leadership treats Americanization as shameful, assimilation falters by design. “So, in that context, how could we expect immigrants to Americanize successfully?” Krikorian said, adding, “What’s different today from, say, 100 or 200 years ago, is we now have a leadership class that doesn’t even believe in assimilation. They think Americanization is a dirty word.”
Krikorian paints the cultural shift through a personal lens, contrasting his mother’s school experience with what children are taught now. “My mother was a daughter of immigrants, went to public school in the 30s and 40s outside Boston, and she was taught to memorize the Gettysburg Address and George Washington was the father of our country and they sang Hail Columbia in school. You think they’re doing that in the L.A. Unified School District now, or in New York, or in the school district outside of Boston my mother went to? No!” he asked, driving home how schools shape allegiance.
He is blunt about the stakes: admitting large numbers without a cultural anchor makes little sense. “Until that changes,” he went on, “admitting large numbers of people, even legally, is frankly a bad idea.” That point underscores a conservative argument for matching immigration policy with civic integration goals.
Administrations that prioritize enforcement get credit in his account, and recent actions aim to reverse the previous era’s laxity. President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have pushed a stepped-up enforcement agenda, and the administration reports more than half a million illegal aliens removed since January, signaling a tougher stance on border control and interior enforcement.
Still, deportations alone won’t fix the deeper issue, Krikorian warns, because the demographic landscape has changed dramatically. “We now have the largest percentage of our population foreign-born ever recorded in American history. It’s close to 16% now. That’s more than it was during even the Ellis Island era … we’ve never been here before,” Krikorian said, noting that sheer numbers make assimilation a larger, harder task.
Technology also weakens the old pressures that forced cultural reorientation, he says, making it easier for newcomers to maintain home-country ties. “Newcomers don’t have to really cut off ties in the way that they had to do in the past,” he said. “In the old days, immigrating meant you had no choice but to reorient your emotional and psychological attachments to the new country … Nowadays, you can FaceTime home every day. You can hop on a plane and go to your cousin’s wedding in Bogota for a three-day weekend.”
His remedy is straightforward: leaders at every level need to adopt and promote a confident American story and insist on civic assimilation. With the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence coming in 2026, Krikorian sees “a real opportunity” for “a whole year-long process of starting to change the narrative and have that narrative percolate down to local institutions, individual schools, individual congregations, individual businesses, and kind of reverse this idea that America stinks and you shouldn’t want to become part of it.”
He closes with cautious confidence that the nation can absorb and Americanize newcomers if it chooses to lead. “We have succeeded in Americanizing large numbers of people in the past from very different societies,” he said. “It’s harder to do now, but we can do it,” he went on. “We have a real serious challenge ahead of us, but they’re challenges that we can meet if we respond.”
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