Politics & Power Quote by John Shadegg

Shadegg’s line isn’t nostalgia; it’s a political argument dressed up as history. By declaring that “most previous immigrants” came “to become Americans,” he’s setting a moral baseline for belonging: the good immigrant is the one who arrives with a one-way ticket in both directions, geographic and emotional. The sentence does a lot of quiet sorting. “Relinquished” implies not just change but sacrifice, turning assimilation into a kind of civic proof of seriousness. If you don’t shed old ties, the subtext suggests, you’re not fully committed.

The pivot to language is the sharper move. “English was their key to prosperity” frames English less as a practical tool than as a gate that rewards discipline. It places responsibility on the immigrant to adapt, not on institutions to accommodate, and it recasts economic mobility as a test of personal grit. “They worked hard to master it” functions as a rebuke to contemporary multilingual realities: bilingual education, Spanish-language media, remittances, cheap flights, and digital communication all make “return” and “ties” more plausible than in earlier eras. His “previous immigrants” are a curated archetype, not a full record; many historical communities maintained strong ethnic networks for generations.

Context matters: Shadegg’s career rose during decades when immigration debates shifted from European assimilation narratives to anxieties about demographic change and cultural cohesion. The quote’s intent is to normalize a strict assimilation model and quietly delegitimize forms of belonging that are plural, hyphenated, or transnational. It works rhetorically because it makes a policy preference feel like a lost national ethic.