REINVENTING THE MELTING POT
The New Immigrants and
What It Means To Be American
Basic Books, Paperback Edition, November 2004
Basic Books, Hardcover Edition, February 2004

Edited by Tamar Jacoby
Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow

TALKING POINTS

Please consider the following talking points for interviews with Tamar Jacoby on the topic of American assimilation:

Tamar Jacoby, editor, Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What it Means to Be An American (Basic Books, 2004)

Tamar Jacoby, editor, Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What it Means to Be An American (Basic Books, 2004)

Tamar Jacoby Reacts To Samuel P. Huntington’s
“Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity”

Manhattan Institute senior fellow Tamar Jacoby is available to discuss Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington’s controversial new book, “Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity” just published by Simon & Schuster.

Jacoby argues  that “Who Are We?” raises critically important questions about American identity, but in the end its answers are deeply disappointing – because of the way the book distorts the facts and exaggerates the threats we face as a nation.

• The questions at the heart of the book could not be more pressing. What does it mean to be American? How do we as a nation hold together in an age of globalization, multiculturalism and historically high levels of immigration? These are critical questions – arguably the most important we face today.

• All the more troubling, then, Jacoby says, that Huntington’s answers are so disappointing. Instead of wrestling honestly with the quandaries we face, he twists the facts to make his case and panders to readers’ fears with paranoid threat-mongering.

• Huntington’s worst distortions have to do with immigration – particularly Latino immigrants and whether or not they are assimilating. On this, Jacoby says, Huntington could not be more wrong. Today’s Latino immigrants are different in many ways from the Ellis Island immigrants of 100 years ago, but they and their children are going to join the American mainstream just as quickly and successfully.

• Huntington’s most egregious claim, according to Jacoby, is that today’s Latino immigrants are not learning English. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, study after study has shown, everyone in the Latino second generation – every Latino who grows up here – becomes proficient in English, and by the third generation, two-thirds of Latinos speak only English.

• Huntington is also wrong when he suggests that Latinos don’t want to assimilate. The first generation – often ill-educated, unskilled laborers working two or three jobs to give their families a better life – may not have much time to devote to it. But there are few Latino parents who don’t understand that to get ahead their children must speak English and be fluent in American ways.

• Contrary to Huntington’s claims, newly arrived Latinos and their children are among the most patriotic Americans, enlisting in record numbers to fight in Iraq and elsewhere. Outside a tiny circle of left-wing campus activists, there is virtually no Latino support for the idea of reclaiming the Southwest for Mexico – the millions of Mexicans who have voted with their feet to come to the U.S., often at great personal cost, know better.

• Huntington is also wrong, Jacoby says, about what it means to be American. He is right that nationality matters. He is also right that there is something different about Americans: he calls it “culture,” though you could also call it “national character” or simply the American spirit – and people the world over know it when they see it. But he is wrong to claim that it is quintessentially Anglo or Protestant.

• Of course, as Huntington points out, the Founders were Protestant Englishmen, and our political values – freedom, tolerance, equal opportunity, the rule of law – are a product of the British Enlightenment. But early Americans fundamentally reshaped their Anglo inheritance – most importantly by separating church and state and repudiating the British class system – to create a radically new nation based on a universalist conception of man. To say our national identity is Anglo-Protestant is to mistake origins for essence.

• Because he so mistakes the nature of American culture, Jacoby adds, Huntington also mistakes what it means to assimilate. We as a nation have never asked immigrants to buy into the particulars of our culture, Anglo or otherwise. What we require is that they adopt our political values. And this in turn – the very fact of living in a democracy committed to equal opportunity – has made the newcomers into Americans, encouraging the ethos of individualism, tolerance, hard work and the freedom to reinvent yourself that is the essence of our national character.

• Of course, Huntington is right that overheated multiculturalism can make assimilation more difficult. But a strategy based on scolding multiculturalists and suppressing ethnic difference will only backfire: after all, even immigrants who reject identity politics are offended when others tell them they have to give up the legacy of their parents and grandparents.

• In the end, perhaps the most troubling thing about “Who Are We?” is Huntington’s lack of confidence in the power of American identity – both its resilience and its appeal. The American nationality has always left room for difference, and we need fear neither immigrants nor difference today. On the contrary, as long as newcomers are loyal to the U.S. and its values – as long as they understand that what we all have in common is more important than our differences – we as a nation will only profit from the determination and vitality they bring.

• Jacoby concludes: it would be more productive, if Huntington and others who share his fears could channel their energies into a positive effort to draw new immigrants into the American mainstream. Instead of wringing our hands and crying wolf, let’s get to work helping newcomers learn English, encouraging them to become citizens, teaching them our political values and persuading them to participate in American politics and society.