>There is one aspect of it that you seem to be
>overlooking here - national identity politics. It is
>not really about 21 languages (which I think is
>wonderful thing), but about an immigrant minority
>conspicously displaying their foreign nationalism an
>allegiance in their host country - the flag, the
>language, the customs, the separate identity.
But that's not really the way things have historically worked in the US. Here, people assimilate - and I doubt that that's really changed much from the late 19th or early 20th centuries. Maybe the first generation doesn't, but the second certainly does, and by the third, the traces of the original culture have vanished except for a residue of kitsch. (And then there are ancestries like mine - product of an intermarriage of Irish and Italian, both of the first native-born generation.) I've been struck on visiting Toronto how homogenous the immigrant neighborhoods are - a stark contrast with New York, where they get more mixed up. This was explained to me as demonstrating the absence of any process of Canadianization that's comparable to the process of Americanization.
Doug