>>What's funnier is a little Korean boy running around the house speaking broken Spanish.
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>I love it! That is so cool.
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>I won't climb back up on my soapbox on this topic, because everyone who's here regularly has heard it before. It can be said in one sentence. -- That the U.S. is a melting pot is our greatest strength, not our weakness. We are a nation of immigrants.

The big thing about the melting pot is that it doesn't actually melt. You get the great mix and diversity, a great all-the-veggies-salad, not the homogenized mashed potatoes.

I figure there was an intent to have the melting part actually work, with all the immigrants trying to become instant Americans, to the extent of suppressing their native languges at home. But then... remember Kojak? It was the first one I remember where a character was displaying its native traits and was proud of it. Incidentally (or not), back then we also had a bundle of TV series (mostly comedy) spoken in local dialects, starting with the incredible Dalmatian (where they have hundreds of mangled Italian words), then there was one from Zagorje (a quite specific grammar and accent, with more of German and some Hungarian borrowed words), then there came others.

This shift between "we shall be amalgamated" to "we shall learn about each other" seems to be going on and on since the seventies or so, and I like it. There's a wisdom about the fish stew (the way it's cooked in my area) - the more different fish in it, the better it gets.