Americans No More: The Death of Citizenship. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1996 by James Fallows

Georgie Anne Geyer has for years practiced the best kind of foreign reportage, which involves spending enough time in some other society to sense what rings true and false in official pronouncements about the place. Instead of trying to persuade her editors, as so many of her colleagues did, that the most important foreign policy stories could be found in the restaurants and hotels of Geneva, London, Paris, and Rome, she endured the frequent hardship and occasional terror of going to the Kazakhstans and the Angolas. Though it has very serious flaws, her new book displays some of the familiar virtues of her reporting, this time about the United States.

The main point of the book is to ask what has become of the sense of "citizenship" - the connection between people and nation that is more than the mere convenience of carrying a passport or being eligible for public benefits. Citizenship, Geyer says, involves not just pride in or comfort with a certain culture but also a sense of shared obligation for its long-term survival and health. The obligation is what she says is withering away, in a silent but real death of American citizenship."

There are three main villains in the story Geyer tells. The first and most heavily emphasized is immigration, which in its legal form is dramatically changing the ethnic makeup of the country (more than 80 percent of legal immigrants now come from Asia, Latin America, and Africa) and in its illegal form creates a shadow-world of people living outside the law. The second is the American response to immigration, which Geyer sees as far too diffident. Rather than encouraging or requiring new arrivals to learn the language, adopt the culture, and in other ways become fully engaged citizens, the U.S. has, in Geyer's view, fostered the idea that America is no more than one big job market and shopping mall, in which people from different cultures can improve their economic circumstances while otherwise living just as they would have back home. The third villain is a Balkanized, what's-in-it-for-me mentality among Americans in general. This was the spirit expressed most clearly through Proposition 13 in California. (Prop 13 was the ballot initiative in 1978 that put a cap on property tax payments for existing homeowners and touched off a series of similar moves in other states.) The real push behind Prop 13 came from homeowners whose own children were grown and gone and who were peeved by the idea that they should still pay for schools used by someone else's kids. Self-interest is a fundamental part of politics and of life, but Geyer contends that the balance has been skewed so that larger, citizen-style interests carry much less weight than earlier in this century.

On each of these issues, Geyer is obviously talking about something real. While economists have generally viewed immigration as an overall benefit to America, it is not an absolute benefit, nor a blessing for everyone involved. Recent evidence, some of which Geyer covers, suggests that the constant flow of low-wage immigrant labor is aggravating the polarization of America's work force into very-well and very-poorly paid sectors. The absorption of people from varied cultures has gone surprisingly well, by the rest of the world's standards - but the last time the United States took in this many people this rapidly, at the turn of the century, the dislocation became so great that it led to the draconian controls on immigration passed in the 1920's.

The most surprising reporting in Geyer's book concerns the actual process of acquiring citizenship these days, which she says is so lax, "sensitive," and user-friendly that it's more like joining a health club than pledging fealty to a new nation. (In the old days, she points out, mandatory "citizenship" courses were full of indoctrination about the ideals of the Republic. After applicants had passed a fairly demanding civics test, the process culminated in a swearing-in ceremony whose pomp was meant to underscore the gravity of the step the new citizens had taken. Now, according to her reports, the courses and tests are meaningless and the swearing-in itself often treated as a mere formality.) While people may feel at ease with and sympathetic to many cultures around the world, citizenship in its deepest sense should be exclusive, Geyer says. Yet the U.S. (unlike most other nations) has become so tolerant of "dual citizenship" that in the 1990s Milan Panic could serve as prime minister of Serbia, and Aleksandr Einseln as a general in the Estonian army, while still holding U.S. citizenship.

Unfortunately, Geyer's discussion of these issues is not up to the importance of the problems she identifies. The book has several stylistic quirks that at first are annoying but become almost hilarious by the end of its 300-plus pages. The most obvious is Geyer's insistence on introducing every expert on her side of the case with a flattering adjective. As soon as you read that a person is "brilliant" or has some other favorable trait, you know that he or she will be quoted on the side of the argument Geyer is advancing. ("As the prestigious Kettering Review puts it," "as the brilliant black economist Thomas Sowell wrote," "the respected Vernon M. Briggs Jr.," "Norman Ornstein, the brilliant senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute," "Richard Estrada, the superb columnist for the Dallas Morning News," "Lawrence Auster, one of the most sensitive commentators on immigration," "the wise Otis Graham," "FAIR's extraordinary Dan Stein," "I went to see [Korea's] handsome and gentlemanly prime minister," and on and on). Also, in a way that I'm sure was innocently intended, she comes off frequently as if she is tooting her own horn. After she offers a political assessment to a professor in Belgrade, she votes his reaction: "`Your conclusion is absolutely right,' he averred." "As early as 1985, I had written a groundbreaking lead piece for the Encyclopedia Britannica Yearbook, in which ..." "In the winter of 1996, as I was finishing this book, I found myself writing ... [and then quotes one of her newspaper columns]." She does this so matter-of-factly that it can't even be called boasting, but the effect is still strange.