Laila Lalami examined the word assimilate, a study of which would be incomplete without understanding past and present trends in immigration. Lalami provides several examples throughout history of how interactions between Americans and immigrants did not end well. At the turn of the twentieth century, political cartoons depicted “Irish refugees as drunken apes and Chinese immigrants as cannibals swallowing Uncle Sam” (Lalami). She also appears to conclude that America’s views towards immigration have remained hostile. Present day examples included a group of Romany people in Pennsylvania who were falsely accused of multiple unsanitary practices and a campus guest speaker claiming that Muslim headdresses should not be worn in America. She ends the paper by displaying how other countries, like Morocco, are willing to be open to people even though their practices violate the religious beliefs of the majority in the country. This explains Lalami’s techniques for explaining the word assimilation. First, she assumes the reader has a definition of assimilation or allows the reader to hold a definition of assimilation that may vary from her own. Second, she floods the reader with example upon example of how assimilation has failed time and time again. Finally, she concludes that our current principles of assimilation are unreasonable, impossible to achieve, and simply unnecessary. What makes Lalami interesting is that she was able to dismantle the whole idea of assimilation without ever giving a definition of the word.