metaphors for immigration

1. Metaphors
For immigration

2. The melting pot
The idea that America’s citizens are formed
from a mixture of all the peoples of the
world (or originally the peoples of Europe)
stirred up together and blending with each
other until the original nationality is no
longer recognizable and you are left with an
“American” identity in its place.
The original metaphor concerned a crucible
not a cooking pot.

3. J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur 1782
What then is the American, this new man? ... He is an American, who,
leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new
ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government
he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He has become an American by
being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here
individuals of all races are melted into a new race of man, whose labors
and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. Americans
are the western pilgrims.
• “All races” really meant people from all nations of Europe

4. Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1845
In this continent — asylum of all races — the energy of the Irish,
Germans, Swedes, Poles and Cossacks, and all the European tribes — of
the Africans, of the Polynesians – will construct a new race, a new
religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the
new Europe which came out of the smelting-pot of the Dark Ages.”
Emerson differs from Crevecoeur in that he includes different races

5. Israel Zangwill, 1908
“America is God's crucible, the great melting pot where all the races of
Europe are melting and reforming.” Of New York, he exclaimed, "Ah,
what a stirring and seething! Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and
Syrian, black and yellow ... what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem,
where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared
with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labor
and look forward ?!“
Zangwill wrote a play called The Melting Pot

6. Melting Pot versus Salad Bowl

7. Ethnic Stew

8. Mosaic

9. Lawrence Fuchs
“When a kaleidoscope is in motion, the parts give
the appearance of rapid change and extensive
variety in color and shape and in their
interrelationships. The viewer sees an endless
variety of variegated patterns, just as takes place on
the American ethnic landscape. The passing of
Jews, Irish, Catholics and even light-skinned
Mexican-Americans into working and middle-class
white Protestant society was fairly common in the
eighteenth and nineteenth century. Some groups,
such as the Huguenots, virtually disappeared.
Others, most notably the Mormons, came upon the
scene in a flash of history and gained additional
adherents over time. Most immigrants and their
offspring, identifying both with their countries of
ancestry and with the U.S., created ethnic schools,
newspapers, fire companies, fraternal associations,
credit unions, businesses, and labor unions. By
1990, the patterns of ethnicity were more
kaleidoscopic than ever, both in variety and
interaction and in the spread of diversity to every
section of the nation."