Our understandings

Is immigration a right?

No. Immigration is not a right. It is a privilege graciously offered by the host country. Respect the host country’s law. Immigrate legally. Do not take advantage of that generosity by cheating the system.

You say you are not a political organization, but are you not biased at all?

Yes and no.

Yes: the label on the organizers has moved while they have not. In the Obama years they were called left-leaning. In President Trump’s first term, left. In the Biden years, the extreme right. In President Trump’s second term, centered. Their views have not changed much in twenty years. The political spectrum has. By today’s California standard they are classified as conservative-leaning. In this republic each person may hold an ideology and speak it freely under the Constitution. The First Amendment is not a courtesy we extend only to ourselves.

No: the foundation is not a political organization. We do not run campaigns, endorse candidates, or support protests or movements. We teach the civic order legal immigrants joined: a constitutional republic, a written Constitution, and equal treatment of persons under law. We aim to be of use to legal immigrants of every faith and every political inclination. Conservative organizers do not make this a conservative party. They make a civic school that is honest about where it stands.

What does assimilate mean here?

To leave another country’s way of life and to live in this one. Not to remake America in the image of the place you left. The honest bargain of legal immigration is to adapt: learn the language of the law, the habits of self-government, and the limits a Constitution places on power. We come not to alter but to adapt and assimilate.

Does assimilating mean losing your ethnic heritage?

No. From our study Does Assimilation Mean Giving Up Your Ethnic Identity?:

Every durable free society has kept two rooms. In one room you may remain who you were: food, feast days, grandparents’ stories, a faith, a mother tongue spoken to children at night. In the other room there is a shared public language, a single criminal law, a constitution that outranks clan and cleric, and a habit of work and contract among strangers. Ethnic identity lives mainly in the first room. Citizenship lives in the second.

The American settlement asked newcomers to cross into the second room without burning the first. Germans kept sausages and Lutheran hymns and still learned English for the courthouse. Jews kept the Sabbath and still sat on juries. Chinese kept the New Year and still signed contracts in a language the judge could read. That was not “giving up identity.” That was refusing to turn identity into a second government.

That is the answer. Keep your name, your table, your dead. Enter the public order that made this country worth choosing: the Constitution, the English of law and work, and duties joined to rights. Assimilation is not the end of identity. It is identity learning where it stops—and where the Republic begins. Read the full essay or the PDF.

Is the United States a democracy?

People use the word that way in ordinary speech. The form of government is a republic under the Constitution. Democracy, as the Founders used the word, means majority rule without a higher law. A republic means the public thing: the law binds the majority too. Rights are not a 51 percent question. The Constitution does not use the word democracy. Madison, Hamilton, and Adams warned that pure democracies are turbulent and short-lived. Franklin said they had made a republic, if you can keep it. Limited government that protects rights makes people freer; anarchy is not freedom.

Why Socialism/Communism won’t work

We understand why socialism and communism are designed to fail. They are not accidents that went off course. They are built on a false picture of the person and of power, and then they run that picture to its conclusion.

There is no free speech, so error cannot be named in public and power cannot be checked by ordinary people. There is no real private property, so no one has a secure claim to the fruit of their work, and the state becomes the only landlord that matters. Power is concentrated in a party or a planning office. The few who hold it are not constrained by law; they are the law. Incentives then break. Work, thrift, and honesty stop paying in the ordinary way. Loyalty to the apparatus does. The person is no longer a citizen with rights. The person is subordinated to the party and the state, to be used, corrected, or discarded.

A republic under a Constitution is the opposite of that design. Power is split so that no office can do everything. The law binds the majority as well as the minority. Expression is protected even when it is inconvenient to those in charge. Private property is not a slogan. It is how a free person stands apart from the government. The person is not subordinated to a party. The government is subordinated to the law.

When Franklin left the Convention, he was asked what they had made. A republic, he said, if you can keep it. We teach that contrast because we have lived the other arrangement, and we know what it costs. We do not teach it as a campaign.

Why this country

We chose the United States because it is a country in which a person may speak, own, work, and worship without first asking a party’s permission. Government here is limited by a written Constitution. Rights are not a 51 percent question. A majority does not get to vote away what the Constitution protects.

We also chose it because it treats people as individuals. We oppose sorting people by race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation instead of treating them equally under the Constitution. Equal protection, as it is written, is the opposite of administering people as members of a group. A color-blind republic is not a mood. It is the civic order this country claims, and legal immigrants should be taught that claim as it stands.

We did not come to import the politics we fled. We came to live as Americans under American law: to adapt, to assimilate, and to keep the republic we were allowed to join.

A republic, if you can keep it

The United States is a republic under a written Constitution. It is not a pure democracy, in which a majority may do as it pleases. In that older sense, democracy means majority rule. A republic means the public thing: the law. Rights in the Constitution are not subject to 51 percent. A unanimous jury is a small picture of the same idea. Some questions are not a simple vote.

The Constitution does not use the word democracy. Madison, Hamilton, and Adams warned that pure democracies are turbulent and short-lived. When Franklin left the Convention, he was asked what they had made. A republic, he said, if you can keep it.

Limited government is how rights are kept. A government bound by law that protects persons makes people freer. Anarchy is not freedom. On that spectrum, the Constitution sits with limited power that protects rights, not with a total state.

Rome is the caution. It began as a republic with limited law. People forgot what that meant. Subsidies, controls, and the habit of voting themselves benefits turned the republic toward democracy, then toward oligarchy and Caesars. That is a civic warning, not a campaign.