July 2, 2026 | The Wall Street Journal
Assimilation Is the Key to Citizenship
When I became an American, I didn’t lose my heritage. I joined a civic tradition.
July 2, 2026 | The Wall Street Journal
Assimilation Is the Key to Citizenship
When I became an American, I didn’t lose my heritage. I joined a civic tradition.
Excerpt
Many of my earliest memories are from a dingy closet-turned ESL classroom in Queens, New York. Most days, I sat between a Chinese student and a Ukrainian student. Across from us sat twins from Mexico who’d arrived in the U.S. only weeks after my Coptic Christian family came from Egypt. That classroom was my first encounter with assimilation, though none of us would’ve called it that.
Today, the very idea of assimilation has fallen out of fashion. It’s frequently invoked as a synonym for cultural erasure, reduced to little more than conformity to a “cultural mainstream,” or recast as an unreasonable expectation placed upon newcomers.
Ms. Wahba is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.