Americans no more?

National Review, Dec 31, 1997 by Scott McConnell

IT TAKES no great imagination for a visitor to Southern California to feel witness to a great tide of history. Heading south toward Los Angeles on U.S. 101, a valley opens up near Oxnard: with coastal mountains surging magnificently on the left, and the Pacific on the right, a driver can see flat green fields stretching for miles. There, stooped at the waist in orderly lines, are hundreds and hundreds of Mexican laborers.

Such a scene, with the mountains and speeding cars and lush fields, was visible thirty years ago as well, but without the same resonance. Americans could think, and many did, about the tedium and difficulty of the farm work and the poverty of the workers, all in a state of such plenty. But today this tableau gives rise to more powerful interpretations. These are more often explored by Mexican intellectuals or Mexican-American activists, but they should be in our minds as well.

Listen to the late Carlos Loret de Mola, writing in Excelsior, one of Mexico's leading newspapers: "A peaceful mass of people, hardworking, carries out slowly and patiently an unstoppable invasion, the most important in human history. You cannot give me a similar example of such a large migratory wave by an ant-like multitude, stubborn, unarmed, and carried on in the face of the most powerful and best-armed nation on earth." The result of this migration, he continues, is to return the land "to the jurisdiction of Mexico without the firing of a single shot." For despite the wealth of the United States and its historic ability to absorb immigrants and convert them into Americans, these workers "continue to be Mexican and even to impress their personality on their surroundings." The American upper classes live "in increasing splendor, [but] their luxury . . . marks the beginning of their decadence." The land, Loret de Mola concludes, "ends up in the hands of those who deserve it."

An exaggeration? A flight of romantic nationalist rhetoric? One would like to think so. But it cannot be shrugged off as easily as it might have been 15 years ago, when it was first published.

Since then, the immigration debate in the United States has grown from infancy to adolescence. Legislation to curb illegal (primarily Mexican) passage across the southern border has been introduced, debated, and passed -- with little decisive effect. Competing lobbies battle in Washington. Many politicians huddle somewhere in the middle and, if asked to speak out, stick to well-worn grooves.

Usually, a congressman or senator will oppose illegal immigration --at least in principle. As for legal immigrants, the congressman will tell you, they should assimilate. Assimilation has become the new magic word in the immigration debate, brandished like a cross before a vampire at those who worry out loud about the impact on American national cohesion of large numbers of newcomers from not always compatible cultures. Assimilation evokes the misty past of Ellis Island, through which millions entered, eventually seeing their descendants become as American as George Washington. For those who insist on viewing the present through the Ellis Island prism, today's immigration is full of promising parallels. David Rieff, in his insightful book, Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World, tells of the West L.A. bourgeois who sees in today's Mexican immigrants a likeness to the Italians who came through New York early this century. Meanwhile, the simile goes, the well-educated and highly entrepreneurial Koreans and Chinese resemble the Jews (the speaker's own forebears) from Poland and the Pale of Settlement. It is such a reassuring comparison, and these days one hears it often.

But such analogies prove shaky if examined. This one in the first place suffers from a pronounced lack of historical imagination -- as if there could be no other relevant model for a mass migration of peoples than the one which took place from Europe to the United States between 1880 and 1924. Furthermore, it ignores such fundamental factors as today's vastly different American economy, with its narrower paths to upward mobility. It gives short shrift to the history and geography of the American Southwest, and to the proximity and population of Mexico today, as compared to Italy then. Most negligently, it ignores the ideas and attitudes of the Mexican and Mexican-American politicians and activists who speak to -- and on behalf of -- the new immigrants.

Some who tout assimilation at least acknowledge how large is the wager being placed on it. Peter Salins, whose Assimilation, American Style has become a lodestar for Republican advocates of high immigration, admits that intergroup harmony in a multi-ethnic state is fragile and, historically speaking, rare. Only through vigorous assimilation of new immigrants has the United States avoided the strife which has plagued multi-ethnic states throughout history. Meanwhile, not enough assimilation is taking place, Salins contends; the process needs reinvigoration.

He recommends a retreat from bilingual education and re-emphasis on teaching English in the schools, a rooting out of multicultural curriculums to encourage immigrants to adopt a primarily American political identity, and a reinvigoration of the Protestant ethic --which he boils down to a readiness to work hard, make money, and get ahead. Worthy goals all, but given the circumstances of today's immigration, far more easily proposed than accomplished.