Assimilating, an old story

Whatever America's failings, nobody does immigration better. We dither over how to cope with illegal immigrants or rationalize our system for deciding whom we admit. Yet the big thing -- making new Americans -- we get right.

That's why there's no need for a law, proposed in New York City by two councilmen from Flushing, that would require stores to have signs mostly in English.

In Flushing, signs are often in Chinese or Korean -- just as, elsewhere in the city, they were once in Yiddish or Italian or German. That took care of itself when earlier immigrants adopted American shopping habits and even lost track of their ancestral languages. The same thing will happen in Flushing, especially if we focus on upholding the bedrock values -- like free speech -- that make America so irresistible to immigrants, and becoming American so irresistible to their children.

That doesn't mean old-timers shouldn't feel a sense of displacement at the transformation of a community into what seems a foreign land. Such feelings aren't merely understandable; it would be strange if they were absent. In a nation of immigrants, they are as unavoidable as the feelings of exile that newcomers must surmount.

The secret to U.S. success with immigrants is assimilation, and it's hard to legislate that. So let the Flushing merchants have their signs. And rest assured, their kids will play baseball, eat hot dogs -- and, eventually, move to Long Island.