Losing the immigration wars
0 comment Saturday, August 30, 2014 |
From an article called Not So Huddled Masses: Multiculturalism and Foreign Policy
by Scott McConnell
The modest contemporary literature on the connection between America�s immigration and foreign policies contains this assertion by Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, from the introduction to their 1974 volume Ethnicity: Theory and Experience: "The immigration process is the single most important determinant of American foreign policy . . . This process regulates the ethnic composition of the American electorate. Foreign policy responds to that ethnic composition. It responds to other things as well, but probably first of all to the primary fact of ethnicity."
Yet, the authors noted a nearly complete absence of discussion of the issue, and they pursued it little themselves. Rather, they tossed it in as a supplement to their general argument: ethnicity was not going to wither away, leaving only colorful residues for annoyance or celebration. It would remain a primary form of social life in the United States.
Nonetheless, ethnicity played little role in the foreign policy battles of the 1960s and 1970s.''
This is an interesting piece, though I take issue with certain of his presuppositions.
He does correctly note that the 1965 Immigration Act was a turning point, and he makes the connection between the passage of that Act and the Civil Rights Revolution of the years preceding. On this blog I've mentioned that Ted Kennedy himself said that the Immigration Act was a natural extension of the Civil Rights Act, as if to imply that 'civil rights' for American-born blacks also extended to the 'civil right' to immigrate here for all nonwhite peoples. To continue immigration restriction, especially when the restrictions favored European immigrants, would be seen in the light of our newfound ideology as 'discrimination', and that, above all, was not to be allowed.
In any case, the backers of the 1965 act did not imagine huge demographic changes: there would be, they claimed, some modest increase in the number of Greek and Italian immigrants but not much else. The sheer inaccuracy of this prediction was already apparent by the early 1970s. The 1965 Act allowed entry of immigrants from any country, so long as they possessed certain job skills or family members living here or had been granted refugee status themselves.
The family reunification provision soon became the vital engine of immigrant selection. By the 1980s, it had greatly increased numbers of Asians and of Hispanics�the latter mostly from Mexico. The European population of the country was now in relative decline�from 87 percent in 1970 to 66 percent in 2008. If immigration continues at present rates (and barring a long-term economic collapse, it is likely to), by 2040, Hispanics will make up a quarter of the American population.''
I think he, (along with most who discuss this subject of demographics) greatly underestimates the numbers of Mexicans and other Hispanics who are here now (who knows how many?) and the number who are still coming. The government has consistently, and I think deliberately, lowballed their figures so as to allay the concerns of many people. And obviously, the low estimates produce an inaccurate prediction of how many will be here by 2040. I am convinced that White Americans will be a minority before that date. All the signs are there.
McConnell discusses the role played by ethnicity in our past foreign policy. He describes how the various ethnic groups in America influenced our country towards neutrality in both world wars, as conflicting ethnic interests caused heated disagreements about the right course of action.
In any event, America�s intra-European divisions began to melt away quickly after Pearl Harbor, as military service became the defining generational event for American men born between 1914 and 1924. The mixed army squad of WASP, Italian, German, Jew, and Irish became a standard plot device for the popular World War II novel and film.''
But did those wartime movies simply reflect the reality of the 'melting pot' America which had unified around the patriotic cause? Or were the movies meant to try to create such a reality and influence the real world? There was probably some of the latter involved. I've noticed how many World War II era movies were heavy on the 'one big American family' storyline, with each European ethnicity being celebrated and given positive treatment. Did the old distrusts and animosities evaporate during the War, or did they just get swept under the carpet for the duration?
McConnell connects the new post-war ethnic activism to the Cold War, with many Eastern Europeans being very anti-Communist.
Eastern Europeans lobbied for the rollback of Soviet rule, enshrining it as a GOP platform plank if not a practical commitment. Americans of East European background remained staunchly anti-Communist long after anti-Communism surrendered its luster in the aftermath of Vietnam, allying with neoconservative Jews and hamstringing Nixon and Kissinger�s détente policy. As anti-Communism became an engine of Americanization, the Cold War showcased the hyphenated American.''
I've noted too that the Cold War also became further incentive for America to embrace egalitarianism and to aggressively push 'civil rights', as a response to Communist propaganda. The old Soviet Union found that for many Americans, our Achilles' heel was the racial inequality that they saw in America. And the Soviets, being fully committed to egalitarian ideology, believed that any inequalities were the result of oppression and discrimination, not of any innate differences among the races. So they focused on the racial divisions in our country, seeing this as a way of discrediting our claims of being a free country with 'liberty and justice for all.' The Soviets, in addition to emphasizing in their propaganda how we were a country of haves and have-nots, a country with extremes of wealth and poverty, liked to accuse us of being racially backward. And our elected officials seemed especially stung by these allegations from the Soviets. They felt that we had to show the world we were making progress on 'racial unity' and thus win the propaganda war, the public relations war.
Now, we seem committed to continuing this 'multicultural', proposition nation image that was so deliberately crafted in the 60s and onward.
McConnell downplays the potential foreign policy influence of Hispanics, seeing them as not particularly loyal to the Mexican state, which they see as corrupt. I wonder if he noticed all those demonstrations a few years ago, in which Mexicans (and other Latinos) aggressively carried their national flags? Has he ever been through a Mexican neighborhood and seen how many Mexican flags fly? Granted these are anecdotes, not hard evidence, but I would say the Latinos, whether Mexican or other Latin Americans, are highly ethnocentric, aggressively so, as they have always been. He confuses loyalty to a state or regime with loyalty to their ethnic nation and their culture.
How can it be that we have always been a neighbor to Mexico, yet few Americans seem to know much about Mexicans, other than the stereotypes and the pro-Hispanic propaganda put out by the RNC et al?
McConnell, like most conservatives, seems almost exclusively concerned with the fortunes of political parties rather than the well-being and the future of the American people, the core, American population. I get the sense that he thinks we are already history, or soon will be, and this does not bother him.
He cavalierly describes the end of 'Anglo-Protestantism':
For if solidifying the American nation required a re-invigorated Anglo-Protestant culture, the initiative would have to come to a considerable degree from Anglo-Protestants themselves. Reading Huntington (and Kennan as well), one cannot but sense that what they really seek is a revival of something resembling the American national elite of the 1940s and 1950s, exemplified by the foreign policy "wise men" of the Truman era (of whom Kennan was one). But that particular Protestant elite, whose cousins held the commanding positions of America�s industries and universities, was more or less banished from the national stage in the 1960s. Not only is its return impossible; it barely exists. What has replaced it as the dynamic core of American Protestantism is the evangelical culture Bacevich describes, rooted in the South and West, whose attitudes were epitomized by the Bush-Cheney administration.
If the emergence of an American elite able to cement a strong national identity and coherent national interest is unlikely, what options remain for a country now irreversibly multicultural? Huntington saw the choice as either imperialism or liberal cosmopolitanism, both of which would erode what is unique about America.''
He describes paleoconservatives (among which he includes immigration restrictionists and 'America Firsters') as being future losers in the 'immigration wars.'
And yet he does not seem to see that it is America as we have known it which is being lost.
I suppose this is the fruit of seeing America as a political entity or an ongoing 'proposition' rather than a nation made up of a specific core group of people and a continuous tradition.

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