From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true, and the beautiful are taught, nurtured, and honored, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.

Elites are institutions that determine the kind of the tenor of social expectations.

Don't value assimilation and in fact reject the idea of assimilation.

This is your host, Scott Bertram.

Welcome to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network.

That was Mark Krikorian.

He is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

More at c.org. You can also follow him on

X at Mark S. Cricorian. Mark joins us today to talk about an essay he wrote about assimilation

here in the United States. Mark, thanks so much for joining us. Glad to be here. Talking today

about an essay you wrote over at the American Mind, people can find it at

Americanmind.org. The Americanization challenge is real. So you argue in this piece that

America's problem isn't so much immigrants failing to assimilate perhaps, but that America

itself has stopped insisting on assimilation.

Can you explain what you mean by that distinction and why is it the core issue?

Because my basic point is that immigrants, while different in a lot of ways from the past,

really aren't fundamentally different.

What's different is us.

And as far as assimilation goes, there are two things that in modern America make assimilation more complicated.

The first is a good part of the modern world, which is transportation and communications are much easier

and cheaper than ever before. A century ago, you couldn't hop on a plane and go to your, you know,

cousins wedding in Palermo for a four-day weekend and then come back to work. Nothing like that

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