By the way: Sauerkraut with Pineapple ist really fine. My father's second wife - a phillippina - cooked it like that and I liked it a lot.

'Exotic German food'... hahaha, sorry, I have to laugh about it, sounds funny. I guess there are few German meals which are interesting to other nations, maybe weisswurst with sweet mustard and pretzel...

Thanks for sharing your sauerkraut experience, rmay

Part of the answer is that Germans were practically Americans to begin with. They were Christians, had a work ethic, their culture wasn't all that different. German folkways are very unlikely to offend Americans, and vice-versa. I had at least one German ancestor who became a Quaker and married into a Brit family here. I imagine nobody thought of him as all that foreign. Now, there are a few Amish types here and there, but their separateness isn't threatening. They're semi-assimilated. When I was growing up in Terre Haute, Indiana, I remember that Italians and Syrians were considered vaguely foreign but Germans were not. Names like Schroeder seemed completely American.

Another factor is the receptiveness of the Scotch-Irish ethnic group to anybody who wants to join — that is, certainly anybody white in the European sense — as long as they "fit in" and become Christians if they weren't already and adopt the Scotch-Irish concept of patriotism and personal ethics.

As for the Mexicans, they're not assimilating very well at all. Thing is, they largely don't _want_ to, and maintain too many ties with Mexico itself. Partly that's because their culture is MUCH different from the American (unlike European immigrants) and the proximity of Mexico. Now, there are plenty of exceptions to this, but we're dealing with statistical reality, and if the majority of an immigrant group resists assimilation, the exceptions don't have much effect. Too much of the wrong kind of immigration can transform a country and destroy its native culture. Just ask Tecumseh:)

Again, speaking of German assimilation, when I was a kid, I looked forward to getting old enough to go to a German restaurant in my home town (they served beer, so I had to be 18 or 21 or something) and try exotic German food. When I finally got there, I was surprised to find out I'd been eating German food all my life. German cuisine had so influenced American cuisine that hardly any differences remained:) Sauerkraut for example. I'd been eating it forever. I thought it was an American dish.

Ewww. Pinapples in Sauerkraut. Fusionist! (actually I don't like the stuff anyway. hot food just isn't supposed to be sour).
to carry the discussion from that other cartoon over here: Germans did not assimilate that fast into US culture (about the third generation did). And I think it helped a little that even worse immigrants were coming in.. so let's just wait and see how the Mexican-American [...what a word] population will transform and what will be the next generation of immigrants that will even make the Mexicans look fairly decent.

Haha, very good, I guess that's what migration is all about.
Probably the whole world would detest sauerkraut, while I enjoy it sometimes, especially mixed with pineapples ;)