Mexican-Americans in comparative perspective

Mexican-Americans in Comparative Perspective

The fact is, of course, that most Americans, regardless of their ethnic origin, view their country as a nation, unified by adherence to cultural norms that constitute an "American way" and which enable our peculiar political and legal system to operate satisfactorily. Certainly the acceptance of such norms tended to distinguish the nationalist movements of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and America, and Connor's efforts to re-define "nation" must seem at best eccentric. For all the statistics and opinion polls artfully collected by the contributors to his volume, it is far from clear that the most recent wave of immigrants from Central America is being assimilated, in the deeper sense of the word. As Nathan Glazer, among other contributors, points out, civil-rights legislation, equal-opportunity codes, and court decisions have weakened the ability of the private sector to induce immigrants to conform to American standards. Advocates of the retention of alien languages and identities have become more respectable and influential, while "popular opinion also now questions the legitimacy and desirability of forcefully imposing a common identity on immigrants and members of minority groups."

The prospect of the United States' accepting an essentially new conception of itself as a multinational state with minimal norms of assimilation is not a particularly happy one. Among other such states of the past or present are the Byzantine, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires, India and Iran, and the Soviet Union. If there is a lesson from history, it seems to be that multinational states can persist where authoritarian regimes are able to suppress centrifual tendencies; where such regimes fail to do so, the results have included civil war, separatism, and often disintegration. Kevin Phillips has already written about "the Balkanization of America," while the historian John Lukacs, in Outgrowing Democracy, has pointed to the disintegrative effects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigration on the Anglo-Saxon political order of early America and has suggested that the melting pot today is not merely overflowing but is itself beginning to melt. Why, American citizens and their legislators are entitled to ask, does the United States need to accept masses of new immigrants now and probably more in the future, when the pressures for cultural assimilation are weakening and the demands for minority rights and identity are increasing? To limit the debate on immigration to the narrow terms in which these two volumes conduct it is to ignore a deeper and more important dimension of what it is to be a nation, a question to which Americans on both sides of the issue might usefully turn their attention.

COPYRIGHT 1986 National Review, Inc.
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