When I first began reading the articles, I realized that it had never occurred to me that there is technically no ethnic group called “American”.  This fact struck me as very odd, because for all of my life, I have just accepted the idea that I am an American.  And I say this with a deeper meaning than that of just the country of my birth.  For me, the idea of an “American” has taken on a much larger meaning.  It defines who I was, who I am, and who I will always be.

I agree with Ashley in her disregard for Park’s assumption that all immigrants come to America only to leave behind their ethnic past and culture, assimilating entirely to the American lifestyle.  Many – dare I say ‘most’ – immigrants are coming to America to make a better life for themselves and their families, becoming Americans yet never losing the part of them “on the left side of the hyphen.”  I think that immigrants of long ago felt more pressure to assimilate quickly due to the sheer fact that racism and discrimination was a very popular thing among so called “native-born” Americans.  In more recent times, however, I feel that immigrants do not feel the same need to fit in.  American society is embracing the many different cultures coming to this country, and as was stated in the Kasinitz article, the ethnic groups and cultures are meshing very well with one another, creating an entirely new group altogether.

As Ashley and William said, I feel that America can now be seen as more of a “salad bowl” rather than a “melting pot”, which to me, is a very cool thing.  I mean, how boring would life in America be if everyone just melted into society, shedding their unique cultural backgrounds to become exactly like everyone else?

I agree with the concept of immigration that Ashley discussed in her spark. For example, Ashley talked about the salad bowl concept of immigration; this concept shows that even though people did immigrate to the United States, they still held onto their culture and past.  I thought that this was true because as you look at immigration today, there are so many cultures that preserve their ethnicity without completely assimilating to an American way of life. However, I thought of immigration and how much it changed over time because in the past, it was not even close to  salad bowl.  I think of the Horsman article  which discusses the famous doctrine of the ideal American being a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.  To me, that doctrine was what promoted this idea of assimilation and caused so much conflict in the beginning years of immigration; if you were ethnically different from the WASP ideology during early immigration, you were looked down upon because you did not meet that criteria.   Although immigrants did come in enormous numbers, at times quotas and exclusions were placed on immigrants because they failed to meet the WASP criteria; it was during these years of immigration that immigrants did not have the opportunity to show uniqueness because it was not even encouraged. During this time, I could not see immigration as a salad bowl, I see being what Park said in the Gerstle article; that immigrants assimilated in order to strive for something that they could not find in their own country.  Immigrants wanted to achieve a hope of success and live that American dream and if there ethnicity had to be hyphenated with American and have assimilation then so be it.