Mixology
June 11, 2001

By Tamar Jacoby

Review of 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.

Though understandable and perhaps adaptive in the old country, these cultural characteristics have often proved dysfunctional in the American context. But in all cases, both positive and negative, inherited predilections are far from immutable. Quite the contrary, Barone writes: "In time, the environment of the United States fosters different, more functional habits of mind-a process that can be called assimilation."

This is a somewhat novel and highly suggestive view of assimilation: a far more transformative process than many on the left are comfortable with or many on the right believe possible. (I can't wait to hear Barone square off with Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, who argues pessimistically that the dysfunctional traits of the new immigrants will prove ineradicable.) But The New Americans makes an ardent, convincing case about how such change has occurred in the past-and how it can be made to work again in the future.

Barone is not the first to warn Americans about the need to be more assertive in acculturating newcomers. John J. Miller and Peter Salins, among others, have argued for enhanced "Americanization" efforts that would teach civic values and remind immigrants of their responsibilities. But Barone takes the argument several steps further by pointing out just what we did-and what worked-in the past and how similar tactics might be adopted in similar cases today.

Thus in an earlier era when the Irish knack for politics turned nepotistic and predatory, the mainstream did not hesitate to voice strong disapproval. Today, in contrast, black political patronage is seen as progressive, even when the often corrupt set-asides it spawns do serious damage in majority-black cities. So too, determined public-school teachers once marched even the most recalcitrant Italians through at least a basic course of study. Today, many public schools let education-averse Latinos off the hook with low expectations, social promotion, and ineffectual "bilingual" instruction. Most disastrous of all, in Barone's view, is the way contemporary culture encourages many blacks' inherited assumption that the larger society is fundamentally unfair and that they, as an aggrieved group, therefore need not play by its rules.

Barone pulls no punches in condemning the failure of contemporary Americans to champion our values and insist on immigrant absorption. "The fundamental obstacle to the interweaving of blacks, Latinos, and Asians into the fabric of American life is not so much the immigrants themselves," he writes; "it is the American elite." And yet Barone is confident that Latinos, like Italians before them, will make their way into the political and economic mainstream-more slowly than one might wish, perhaps, but eventually arriving. For blacks, too, Barone sees much reason for hope in recent trends: the halving of welfare dependence, the sharp reductions in crime of the 1990s, and so on.

Concerned as he is about the mainstream's loss of confidence, Barone never gives in to the temptation to bolster his case with undue alarmism. The result is a realistically hopeful book, at once appropriately admonishing and yet deeply heartening about the future. Assimilation is "already happening, and rapidly," Barone writes, and "it can happen even more rapidly" if all Americans step up to the challenge of fostering it.

©2001 National Review

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