Zeke Hernandez

They're not competing ends of the same continuum, but they exist kind of orthogonally, right?

And so a person can be highly attached to two different cultures, or they can be detached to both, or they can be more attached to one or the other.

The most successful immigrants and the most successful societies that receive immigrants allow people to be who they were and also add something new to their identity.

As it turns out, I'm an immigrant from Uruguay and South America.

I feel very American, but I also feel Uruguayan.

I am both, right?

You can't tell me that I'm not both.

And so once we accept that model of cultures as not competing, but complementary things, then immigrants can kind of overcome that paradox of being from another place, but also fully being from the new place.

And all the evidence suggests that when allowed to do so, immigrants will successfully assimilate.

They will not when we tell them that they have to give up their previous identity.

And so once our policies are designed around that principle, things work out just fine.

And if I'll be allowed to just say just one more thing about this.

The other thing is that any changes that immigrants bring to society, you think of Italy as a good example, right?

A place with iconic food, right?

Italy wouldn't have Italian food had it not been for immigration, right?

A lot of the innovations in Italian cuisine came because Italians left

Italians returned, Italians sent back ingredients and ideas from the places they settled.

And so a lot of the modern Italian foods that we associate with being like always Italian didn't even exist a hundred years ago, right?

They existed because of a process of migration.

And so so immigrants will change things, but they change them very slowly.