It’s families like mine that Trump wants to ban from immigrating

Barring migrants who don’t speak English sounds reasonable – but a great deal would be lost by it

My father didn’t speak English until he went to school. At home, he had spoken nothing but Yiddish – the language with which his family came equipped when they fled to the United States from the Russian pogroms. For most of their lives his parents, and the rest of their relations who had arrived at Ellis Island at the beginning of the last century, never spoke much English at all. That did not prevent them from producing offspring who went on through higher education to become surgeons, dentists and psychiatrists. (My own father, to his lifelong regret, was one of the few cousins not put through medical school.)

I am reminded of my ancestry whenever a political leader threatens – as Donald Trump did last week – to limit legal immigration to proficient English-speakers with higher qualifications. There has been no visible progress on that “beautiful” 2,000 mile southern border wall to stop illegal migration, which Trump promised, preposterously, would be built with money provided by Mexico (a point of lively contention, as we now learn, between the White House and the Mexican government). So instead Mr Trump decided to diversify his migrant control plans. The new concentration would be on legal immigration: those arrivals who applied for green cards that offer residency leading to US citizenship.

The proposed RAISE (Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy) Act the President was endorsing is not unlike, in spirit at least, initiatives that have been suggested for Britain. The intention is clear and, on the face of it, reasonable: those with higher skills and a sufficient command of English are likely to be of immediate service to the country and so should be given preference over those who would compete with indigenous unskilled workers. The result of this policy in the US would be to cut immigration by half over 10 years. A similar move in the UK would mean that medical and IT staff would probably be admitted, but most agricultural and catering workers would not.

What would be lost would be all those people like my great-uncles, who never spoke English but kept their shops open day and night – much as many Asian shopkeepers do in Britain now – in order to guarantee that their children would become accomplished professionals. In effect, it would eliminate that dimension of migration that is all about improving the quality of life for your descendants: the foundation of the American Dream and the principle on which the country’s historical exceptionalism is based.

But there is, of course, more to this story than immigrant resolve. The clue is in the opening sentence of this column. My father, like all those born to foreign parents in his day, did not just learn English when he went to school: he learnt to be American.

The public school system in the US was, back then, consciously devised to turn children whose parents had come from anywhere in the world into proud, participating citizens of the new land. From the oath of allegiance to the flag that began every school day to the civics education that gave detailed instruction in the documents bequeathed by the Founding Fathers (whose sacred judgment is constantly invoked to this day in US political debate), there was no doubt about the object of the exercise: integration. It was not an enforced assimilation of the parents but a training of their children, who would then act as a cultural bridge for their elders between the old country and the new. So the immigrant ghettos that were a feature of life in early 20th-century America gradually disappeared – or were, at least, replaced by later incoming groups.

The Lower East Side of Manhattan, where once all the shop signs had been in Yiddish, ceased to be a Jewish enclave as a new educated, Americanised generation left for Long Island. Just to the north, the neighbourhood that is still called Little Italy (immortalised in the early Godfather films) is now just a sentimental shadow of its old self – because the children of those Italian migrants moved out, too.

Of course, the effects were uneven: Spanish Harlem above the Upper East Side still has a large Puerto Rican population, and black ghettoes (which are a product of unique historical problems) remain in cities across the country. But to an astonishing extent, the programme succeeded. Considering that the US is a nation of uprooted, displaced people – a fact whose force only became clear to me when I left to live in Britain – a quite remarkable sense of national identity has been created through an act of

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion political will. To the extent that it worked, it may well be unrepeatable: in later years, the US lost its nerve over the enforcement.

It was overcome, as was the fashion in much of the West, by anti-patriotic historical guilt. The virtual extinction of indigenous tribes in the earliest days, followed by the great sin of slavery and the seemingly inextinguishable taint of racism, made the instruction to be a proud American much more problematic. Even the predominance of English as the national language came into question: public schools in California, with its huge Hispanic population, became, alternately, bilingual and then again English-only.

But any problems of ambivalence that America may have had are nothing in comparison to the obstacles a deliberate assimilation project would face in this country.

The United States is a revolutionary republic with a written constitution that is a literal interpretation of the Enlightenment “social contract”. There can be no question that the nation was consciously invented with a specific moral and political purpose to which its citizens may legitimately be asked to subscribe. There may be arguments about the application of this principle occasionally, but the basic concept is unalterable.

Britain is very different: it is a land whose identity has been formed by historical accretions, cultural accommodation and compromise. So what it means to be British cannot be inculcated by authoritarian instruction. It will just have to be experienced and demonstrated with all the patient kindness of which this mature, evolved nation is capable.

The immigration act the President is endorsing is not unlike initiatives suggested for Britain