A group of Chinese-American activists in Boston don’t think you should have to, and want local ballots to be translated.

Boston’s 2008 presidential primary ballot could read like a bad Chinese menu.

There might be “Sticky Rice” in column A, “Virtue Soup” in column B and, in column C, “Upset Stomach.”

Those could be choices facing some voters if the names of Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson and Hillary Rodham Clinton were converted into Chinese characters, according to Massachusetts’ top election official. And that gives Secretary of State William Galvin heartburn.

On Tuesday, Galvin filed a challenge in federal court to a Justice Department agreement requiring that ballots be fully translated to protect the rights of Chinese-speaking voters.

Galvin says Chinese — which uses characters, not letters; has sounds with several meanings; and is spoken in several dialects — will create ballot chaos.

I know the knee-jerk PC reaction to this is “we need to embrace all cultures.” My reaction to which is...well yeah, but at what point do we start requiring that the people who come here actually become American while embracing their heritage and traditions?

America was made great by people who came from all over the world because those people, upon arriving, didn’t try to remain Italian or Irish or what have you.  They integrated.  They became Americans, and (even taking into account the hardships many of them dealt with upon arriving) they flourished.

The surest way to keep a group of people marginalized in a place like America is to foster their isolation by telling them not to integrate.  Which is essentially what the PC-crowd would have us do.  They’d have us keep these people speaking their native languages and living their lives as they did in their native countries, all of which forms a barrier between those people and the rest of our society.  A barrier that ultimately does them no good.

As an example of this, think of the Indians on their reservations.  Regardless of the morality of taking their lands from them, what we’ve done since then has been even worse.  We’ve herded them onto isolated tracts of land, told them to keep living as they always had instead of inviting them to join and integrate with our society, and now a lot (but by no means all) of the reservations are dens of crime, substance abuse and poverty.

Teddy Roosevelt, President of this country during one of our most active times of immigration, once said this:

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation of all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.

And this:

In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile...We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language...and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.

Again, we didn’t become great because we’re Chinese or Mexican or Canadian.  Our country became great because we’re Americans.  Now the Chinese and Mexicans and Canadians can come here and become Americans, and we should welcome them with open arms (as long as they’ll respect our laws), but when they get here they should become Americans.  Not keep being Chinese or Mexican or Canadian.