Melting Pot Promises

Next door to the India Kitchen, however, at a pub called Fuzzy’s Bar, where a grill called Wolf Dawg serves burgers and “hot dawgs,” patrons griped about their immigrant neighbors as “Jeopardy!” played on two small television sets. “Everybody wants to bring their country here,” said Bruce Holloway, one patron who lives in Bayside, Queens. “They don’t want to look like Americans, they don’t want to dress like Americans, and they don’t want to speak English.”

This sort of attitude baffles me, especially coming from someone in New York. The borough was named in honor of a Portuguese woman who had married an English man. The borough sits next to Nassau county, which was indirectly named after a millenium-old German town.

The fact that Bruce, whose last name is English, says that these ‘immigants’ (to quote Moe Syzlak of the Simpsons) should act more like Americans by speaking English should be a good giveaway to him that he’s not thinking clearly about this issue.  

via Queens Ice Cream Stand at Center of Ethnic Divide - NYTimes.com.