The end of multiculturalism

National Interest, The, Jan-Feb, 2008 by Lawrence E. Harrison

Samuel Huntington was on the mark when he wrote in his latest book Who Are We?: "Would America be the America it is today if it had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is no. It would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil." (8) The Mexican Nobelist Octavo Paz had a similar view of the two Americas:

   One, English speaking, is the daughter of the tradition that has
   founded the modern world: the Reformation, with its social and
   political consequences, democracy and capitalism. The other,
   Spanish and Portuguese speaking, is the daughter of the universal
   Catholic monarchy and the Counter-Reformation. (9)

In The Americano Dream, Mexican-American Lionel Sosa argues that the value system that has retarded progress in Latin America is an impediment to the upward mobility of Latin American immigrants in the United States. So does former U.S. Congressman Herman Badillo, a Puerto Rican whose book One Nation, One Standard is both an indictment of Latino undervaluing of education and a call for cultural change.

The progress of Hispanic immigrants, not to mention harmony in the broader society, depends, then, on their acculturation to the values of that broader society. Efforts--for example, long-term bilingual education--to perpetuate "old country" values in a multicultural salad bowl undermine acculturation to the mainstream--and upward mobility--and are likely to result in continuing under-achievement, poverty, resentment and divisiveness. So too does the willy-nilly emergence of bilingualism in the United States--no language in our history has ever before competed with English to the point where one daily hears commercial enterprises responding to telephone calls with, "If you want to speak in English, press one; Si quiere hablar en espanol, oprima el boton numero dos."

Because language is the conduit of culture, the perpetuation of Spanish as a second national language of the United States implies the perpetuation of Latino culture. There is no word for "compromise" in Spanish, nor is there a Spanish word that captures the full meaning of the English word "dissent." A prominent Nicaraguan educator with a Harvard Ph.D. once told me that for Latin Americans, "dissent" (disenso, disension) is close to "heresy"--something that has been noted with respect to other languages, such as Russian. Moreover, as the Costa Rican psychiatrist Luis Diego Herrera points out in his essay in Developing Cultures: Essays on Cultural Change, many Spanish verb forms are passive reflexive (e.g., "It fell" rather than "I dropped it." "It got broken" rather than "I broke it."), a verbal structure that may nurture a lack of a sense of accountability.

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But while there is much to be concerned about with respect to immigrants from Mexico, and Latin America more generally, this is not true of all immigrants. The experience of immigrants from China, Korea and Japan contrasts strikingly with that of Latino immigrants. The Asians' rapid upward mobility is evidenced by their vastly disproportionate numbers at our most prestigious universities. Making up about 5 percent of the U.S. population, Asians constitute 41 percent of undergraduates at the University of California at Berkeley, 27 percent at MIT, 24 percent at Stanford and 18 percent at Harvard. The success of Asian-Americans reminds us of the east Asian "miracles"--initially economic, but now also, in several cases, political. East Asian immigrants have found it easier to adapt in part because they are influenced by traditional Confucian culture, which, like Jewish culture (Jews may be even more disproportionately represented in elite universities), shares some central values with America's dominant Anglo-Protestant culture. Both cultures emphasize "progress-prone" values, such as education, the belief that a person can influence his destiny, wealth is the product of individual creativity and advancement should be based on merit. (10)