Mixology. - Review - book review

National Review, June 11, 2001 by Tamar Jacoby

The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work Again, by Michael Barone (Regnery, 338 pp., $27.95)

Just a hundred years ago, at the height of the last great wave of immigration, Irish, Italians, and Jews were each regarded as a race apart: so Michael Barone reminds us in this short, smart introduction to the tide of new immigrants who have arrived on our shores in recent decades. All were considered physically distinctive in ways that could never be ignored or erased, and each was thought to be burdened by a sharply inferior, "unassimilable" culture. "By the definitions [of] 1900," Barone muses mischievously, "we are already a majority-minority nation." Thanks to the Ellis Island influx, the northern European Protestants who initially settled the country have long been a distinct minority.

Of course, no one thinks of contemporary America that way. The "racial" categories that once seemed so immutable-and the strange newcomers who once seemed to pose such a threat-have ceased to stand out as they once did. And so too, before long, may the categories that seem so important and immutable today.

"Americans one hundred years from now may not think of blacks, Latinos, and Asians as members of separate races," Barone writes. What makes these immigrants (or, in the case of blacks, newcomers to mainstream society) distinct will not, and need not, be obliterated, just as what makes American Irish, Italians, and Jews distinct has not been obliterated. But the rest of the nation may-nay, probably will- eventually come to think of today's migrants as racially and ethnically "us" rather than "them."

For Barone, today's pessimism about immigration is as foolishly unfounded as yesterday's. The great, slow, mysterious absorptive alchemy that worked in the past can and will work again. It wouldn't hurt if we could recover a little of the confidence and moral leadership that helped us to set standards for earlier migrants. But even if we don't, Barone remains relentlessly-and on the whole persuasively-upbeat about the massive demographic change sweeping the United States, convinced that the new immigration, like earlier ones, will ultimately be a boon for all Americans.

The New Americans is based on the intriguing conceit that each of today's new migrant groups bears a strong resemblance to an earlier one, and may follow a similar path into the mainstream. Both the Italians who arrived at the turn of the 20th century and the Latinos of today come from excessively centralized, politically dysfunctional societies where individual initiative was discouraged, social mobility was sharply limited, and ordinary people saw no reason to trust government or look to politics for change. As a result, in America, both groups have tended to rely on their families and their own hard work to sustain modest lives.

In a somewhat different pattern, Irish Catholics and blacks were once members of a permanent underclass in a hierarchical "status society" based on rigid caste distinctions-cultures in which, for someone from the underclass, there was scant connection between individual effort and reward, and it made little sense to play by the rules of the larger polity. As for Jews and Asians, particularly the overseas Chinese, both are traditionally oppressed minority groups who have learned to rely on education and business acumen to survive and excel wherever they settle.

Barone supports these thought-provoking comparisons with chapter-length portraits of each group: informative, statistic-packed sketches of the newcomers, their cultural backgrounds, and how they have fared in America. As Barone himself points out, the parallels are more telling in some cases than others: The Latino-Italian similarity is by the far the strongest, while that between Asians and Jews is fairly one- dimensional. And the more compelling the parallel, the better-the more original and argument-driven-the portrait.

Barone readily acknowledges that he has drawn heavily on the work of a new generation of writers on race and ethnicity-among them Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, John McWhorter, Fred Siegel, Gregory Rodriguez, and myself. His great strength-and where he makes his most significant contribution-is in his retelling of the political history of each group: Irish ward politics, the rapid rise of black elected officials, the persistent regional diversity of the Latino vote. This, together with his brisk, authoritative distillation of the new thinking on race, makes his book an indispensable primer: the perfect introduction to American ethnicity for any reader tired of the boosterish conventional wisdom fostered by the civil-rights establishment and its allies in university ethnic-studies departments.

The book makes no apology-nor need it-for its assumptions about inherited culture and the way this can determine a people's "habits of mind." Each of the six group portraits, unstinting in what may sound to some like stereotypes, makes a persuasive case that history and tradition have given the migrants in question a distinct cultural character. Irish immigrants and blacks, Barone does not shrink from saying, have been more given to crime than many other groups: They think the rules of the larger and, in their eyes, fundamentally unfair mainstream society don't apply to them. Similarly, because of the conditions in the socially stratified societies they come from, Italian immigrants and Latino newcomers have traditionally put little store in education, and often undermined themselves by shunning individual achievement.