The Balkanization of America: Multiculturalism Makes Assimilation Impossible

Last week, the police department in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, unveiled a new “optional” patch for officers featuring the words “Dearborn Heights Police” in Arabic alongside English. Although the department quickly reversed course amid swift backlash, it was yet more evidence of the growing balkanization of the American public.

According to the city’s now-deleted Facebook post, the patch, which would have been the first of its kind in the United States, was designed to “reflect and honor the diversity of our community — especially the many residents of Arabic descent who call Dearborn Heights home.”

Mayor Bill Bazzi, an immigrant from Lebanon, insisted the design was merely “under internal discussion among some within the police department, which was not put forth for consensus or further review.” That’s political speak, which means that had resistance not been so strong, the patch would already be stitched onto uniforms.

This episode in Dearborn Heights is not an isolated controversy, but part of a larger national trend.

After decades of mass migration, the fabled promise of assimilation has collapsed. America’s vaunted “melting pot” has hardened into ethnic enclaves, and the country is rapidly headed toward a situation where communities feel more like miniaturized versions of various nations around the world rather than one cohesive society.

The evidence of this is everywhere. High school graduations are now conducted entirely in Spanish, while city governments fly Palestinian flags above their halls and residents wave Mexican flags in defiance of federal immigration enforcement.

Politicians like Minneapolis mayoral candidate Omar Fateh hold political rallies exclusively in Somali, while U.S. Representatives in Congress, like Ilhan Omar, Salud Carbajal, and Shri Thanedar, who are all foreign born, demonize ICE and advocate for open borders. Omar has notably bragged about using her position in Congress to advance the interests of Somalia over those of the United States.

Meanwhile, in Fort Bend County, Texas, a 90-foot statue of a Hindu deity now towers over the landscape; a striking symbol of how foreign cultures are no longer blending into America but carving out a dominant space of their own.

Also in the Lone Star State, deep-pocketed Islamic groups are working on plans to build EPIC City, a proposed Muslim-centered community designed to operate like a nation within a nation.

These developments are the tangible results of the left’s decades-long push for “multiculturalism,” which by default means a deep erosion of a shared American identity. But while liberals prattle on about how “diversity is our strength,” even the most ancient philosophers recognized the perils of failing to cultivate a common shared culture within a democracy.

Plato discussed this very danger in The Republic. He warned that democracy’s diversity and freedoms carry within them the seeds of collapse. Social fragmentation takes hold as groups grow so different that they no longer understand one another, while moral decay sets in as individual appetites overwhelm reason and erode shared values.

Both ultimately lead to a descent into chaos and disunity.

Much later, in the American context, a spirit of Americanism was vociferously championed by President Theodore Roosevelt as a way to unify the United States.

Roosevelt disapproved of the idea of “hyphenated Americans,” which described individuals who identified their ethnic or ancestral backgrounds above that of their American nationality. He contended that genuine Americanism required unwavering loyalty to the United States, prioritizing allegiance to and love of this nation over prior foreign allegiances.

Today, absent this robust form of Americanism, we have instead been force-fed a doctrine of multiculturalism, which is in practice a form of anti-native culture.

As Professor Patrick Deneen correctly stated in his book, Why Liberalism Failed, “The homogeneous celebration of every culture effectively means no culture at all.”

This is not to say that other cultures are inherently bad or inferior to any other. But nature abhors a vacuum – and without a dominant, distinctly “American” culture, what is it exactly that newly arrived immigrants are supposed to assimilate into?

The answer is that there is no culture for them to adopt, so they keep their own.

In his book, “The Culture Transplant,” economist Garett Jones posits that immigrants bring distinct values and behaviors from their places of origin, passing them down to their descendants, thereby perpetuating these cultural characteristics in their adopted homeland.

That is particularly troubling in the United States, given that newly arrived immigrants are also immersed in a negative political culture that says America is evil, illegitimate, and founded on stolen land.

This combination is a recipe for national suicide.

But what about the perceived benefits of “multiculturalism?” Advocates tout surface-level celebrations of multiculturalism, such as food, clothing, music, and art, that, if absent from our society, would leave America a bland cultural wasteland.

These cultural markers are, in truth shallow distractions from the deeper realities of culture, such as religion, beliefs on childrearing, views on morality and education, enduring values, the meaning of order, and the role class plays in a society.

These cultural attributes shape nations far more than exotic cuisine.

The mass influx of legal and illegal immigrants experienced over the past few decades poses significant long-term challenges to the economic, fiscal, political, and, most critically, cultural well-being of the United States, with effects that will be felt across generations.

Immigrants have undeniably enriched America’s story, but it was never immigration in itself that made us great. What mattered, through the various waves of U.S. immigration, was that those who settled here sought to join the American nation, adopting its values and striving for the American Dream – not to recreate the places they were so desperate to leave.

Unless immigration is seriously constrained and, most importantly, reversed through continued deportations, as the Trump administration has attempted to do, assimilation will no longer be possible as each new generation becomes further divorced from America’s history, traditions, and values.

Plato foresaw it, Roosevelt warned against it, and today’s social turmoil confirms it: a nation that abandons the will to defend its native culture will not remain a nation in any meaningful sense of the word.

Adam Johnston is a writer whose work has been featured in The Federalist, The Blaze, and the Daily Caller. He is also the creator of the Substack publication “Conquest Theory” where he regularly writes about politics, history, philosophy, and technology. You can find him on X @ConquestTheory.