Alien notion.

`A SERIOUS dispute between conservatives has opened up" over immigration policy, John O'Sullivan writes "America's Identity Crisis," NR, November 2 1). Maybe, but I think not. What could open up is a serious, and potentially unpleasant, dispute over the arguments with which Mr. O'Sullivan overloads his appeal for cutting back on immigration. He asserts that Americans are undergoing an "identity crisis" that can only be resolved by their finally coming to recognize that they are a nation pretty much like other nations "in the European sense." Mr. O'Sullivan rightly insists that there is a distinctively American character. But he wants to expunge from that national character the belief that America is a distinctively open society in a way that is related to our being a "nation of immigrants." The serious dispute that John O'Sullivan perceives or wants to provoke is first about American identity, and secondarily about immigration.

On immigration, the spectrum of policy possibilities would seem to run from sealed borders and no immigration at all to unpatrolled borders and a welcome to as much of the world's population as wants to come. Aside from some extreme environmentalists and negative-population-growth zealots, nobody favors keeping everybody out, and very few favor letting everybody in. The perfectly legitimate debate, then, is about how many immigrants should be admitted and the criteria for admission. It is a debate that Americans have had from time to time, and if it's time to have it again, there needn't be any alarm about a national "identity crisis" or destructive division among conservatives. Unless the debate is conducted on the basis proposed by Mr. O'Sullivan.

There is overwhelming public support for three general propositions about immigration: the government should be in control of admissions, which means cutting illegal immigration as close as possible to zero; policy should be aimed at preventing immigrants from becoming dependent on welfare; and, against the ideologies of "multiculturalism," immigrants should be encouraged to assimilate. There are disagreements about the specifics of implementation, but those generalizations command very broad support. There may also be strong support for basing admission more on job skills and less on whether a would-be immigrant is a relative of somebody already here. In addition, many Americans might be open to following Canada in requiring that relatives post a bond for immigrants whom they sponsor, to ensure that they stay off welfare. Finally, if the policy is set forth in a coherent manner, Americans will, I believe, continue to support the idea that we should provide safe haven for refugees from political persecution.

All these matters can be more or less calmly debated without escalating into a national "identity crisis." If we're simply talking immigration policy, it is hard to understand the intensity of Mr. O'Sullivan's rhetoric. Unless changes are made, he says, we will be "overwhelmed" by people from other cultures; "the survival of America" is at stake; and so forth. But what changes in immigration policy does John O'Sullivan propose? He is rather vague.

At one point he says we should "reduce the level of legal immigration"; at another he says there should be occasional "pauses or reductions" in immigration to allow time to assimilate prior waves of immigrants. Fair enough. Since few people suggest that there should be many more immigrants, never mind more illegal immigrants, there would seem to be no reason why we could not have a relatively amicable debate about whether immigration should be maintained at present levels or reduced by a significant amount. Twenty-five per cent? Fifty per cent? And for how long? Before we get to such a debate over legal immigration, however, many Americans might think we should first get control of the illegal influx. In any event, one would hope that the pages of NR will be a forum for a full range of arguments on what ought to be done and why.

Redefining Our Character

THE dispute that could become very divisive is not over immigration policy as such but over the "why" offered by Mr. O'Sullivan for the direction that he favors. He proposes a redefinition of the American character that I expect most Americans find neither plausible nor appealing. Further, he blames immigration for some of our major domestic problems, such as multiculturalism and the welfare dependency of the urban underclass, in a manner that distracts attention from wrongheaded policies that are not the fault of immigration or immigrants. In addition, and although it is certainly not his intention, his argument has a high potential for reviving nativist sentiment and reinforcing what is referred to by the rather awkward term "declinism."

Nativism--the exaggerated fear of and scapegoating of immigrants--has a long and ugly history in American life and has in the past politically poisoned some brands of conservatism. Declinism--the belief that the era of "American exceptionalism" is past, that novus ordo seclorum is a snare and a delusion, that "morning in America" was a long time ago and will not come again--has usually been located on the Left, but political pathologies have a way of slipping their ideological leashes.

Mr. O'Sullivan rightly says that there is a distinctively American character. St. John de Crevecoeur observed as much in 1782: "What then is the American, this new man? ... Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.... The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas and form new opinions." Mr. O'Sullivan, however, appears to believe that what is distinctively American is that Americans are distinctively British. He writes, "Just as Christianity is the universalization of Judaism, so Americanism is the universalization of British culture." To become an American, we are told, is to become, "in effect, a WASP." The United States was "founded by a rebellion against legitimate authority," but its cultural identity is still secured by that authority. The suggestion is that "America's identity crisis" is the result of fits of absent-mindedness in which Americans forgot their Britishness and permitted high immigration.

Most Americans, certainly not all, agree that we have reason to be immensely grateful to Britain. From

Britain we received our language, much of our literature, and many of our most important political, legal, and cultural institutions. Americans, however, may think they have discharged a large part of their debt, not least by rescuing Britain in two world wars and by improving notably upon almost everything received from her. With the exception of some Anglophiles who might feel flattered by the idea, Americans will decline the proposal that they become honorary Brits. This may not be what John O'Sullivan intends, but for as far back as memory serves, European intellectuals have patronizingly urged Americans to grow up and recognize that there is nothing all that special about America. Our British cousins in particular, who have recently lost an empire, may understandably seek to reclaim a greater one lost long ago. But they are likely to find a much warmer welcome here as immigrants than as putative proprietors. The distinctively American experience is not one of preserving British culture for the world, although that may be part of what America has done, in its own way.

Numerous nations and peoples justly claim a proprietorial stake in the American experiment: German, Italian, Irish, Slovak, Jewish, Polish, Chinese, Mexican, and on and on. There is no Anglo copyright on the characteristics that make for assimilation and success in America: hard work, thrift, civic-mindedness, devotion to faith, family, and freedom. The successful third-generation Polish-American is not a WASP but a successful third-generation Polish-American. John O'Sullivan suggests this is self-delusion, that America developed a "myth" by which it persuaded immigrants that "in assimilating to the American nation, they were not being false to themselves." Of course, individuals may have all kinds of moral anxieties about whether they have kept faith with their heritage, but the more general conviction is that in assimilation and success they are being true to themselves and their forebears. It is, after all, why their forebears came here. Surely it can be confusing as one generation eagerly tries to reappropriate the "roots" that were just as eagerly left behind by a prior generation, but that is a typically American confusion. One might almost say that it is a component of the American character.

Like so many liberals (which he certainly is not), John O'Sullivan disapproves of hyphenated Americans. He is pleased that, in response to the Census question about ethnic identity, "a minority of respondents stubbornly identify themselves as simply `American.'" As Americans they are of course free to do that, but it does defeat the purpose of asking the question, and it does reflect a minority, even an eccentric, view of ethnicity in America. Mr. O'Sullivan believes that America, like every other nation, should move "from cultural to ethnic homogeneity." One has to wonder what ethnic homogeneity might mean in America. He writes that "the conservative view of American identity that underlies my argument holds that America is a nation no different from any other--almost."

The qualifying "almost" is necessary, according to O'Sullivan, only because the movement to "ethnic homogeneity" has been "punctuated and slowed down" by periods of mass immigration. This may be an interesting view of American identity, but it is certainly not the conservative view. It is in radical discontinuity with the American self-understanding from the constituting period to the present. And whether it is an interesting view depends upon finding out what "ethnic homogeneity" might mean in the American context. That we should all become WASPs is neither very interesting nor plausible. One might say that the homogeneity of America is in the shared recognition that there are many ethnic identities that, for limited public purposes, are subordinated to a common enterprise. The claim that America is "a nation no different from any other," far from being "the conservative view," is akin to national heresy. E pluribus unum does not mean, contra Vice President Gore, "Out of the one, many," but just as surely the unum does not cancel out the pluribus, as in "E pluribus WASP."

Evening in America?

To SPEAK of heresy in this connection is to recall G. K. Chesterton's observation that "America is a nation with the soul of a church." John O'Sullivan says that to speak of America in this way, as an "experiment" or an "idea," is to fall prey to "a brand of ideological, rationalist politics." (The idea of Chesterton as an ideological rationalist seems not quite right.) We have to deal, O'Sullivan insists, not with America as a philosophical conception but with the real America of history, accident, and lived cultural experience. Exactly, Crevecoeur, Tocqueville, Chesterton, and a host of other perceptive observers attended assiduously to the lived experience of America and came to the conclusion that it could not be explained apart from its understanding of itself as an experiment in the living out of certain ideas--as in "We hold these truths . . ." One thing they were very sure about: that America is not a nation "no different from any other." Maybe they were wrong, but I think not. Maybe that time is past now; maybe American exceptionalism is finished, the experiment has exhausted itself, the time of closure has arrived, and morning in America was yesterday. I hope not.

Mr. O'Sullivan is being conservative when he urges us to pay attention to the particularities of the lived experience of a culture and not just to the ideas about it. His list of particularities that distinguish American culture is for the most part unexceptionable: baseball, hamburgers and hot dogs, jeans, etc. (although one wonders how the lung James Bible got on the list). He includes the New York skyline, but his vision does not take in, there just off to the side of the skyline, the Statue of Liberty. Nor does he suggest how one might think of New York without reference to mass immigration, past and present--and mass immigration of people who were and are very unlike WASPs. The image of an "immigrant nation" is not an idea imposed upon the lived experience of American culture; it is the lived experience of American culture.

All those whom O'Sullivan calls "native Americans" are participants in his elusive concept of America's "ethnic homogeneity." This includes the urban and mainly black underclass. Were it not for immigration, we are invited to believe, they, too, would be further along toward becoming WASPs. Immigration, we are told, is a major factor in reducing wages and creating unemployment for blacks in our inner cities.

That this is the line pressed by some sectors of organized labor and by not a few black demagogues does not mean it is wrong, but it does raise cautions. Demagogues who have long blamed white racists for the misfortunes of the underclass should not now be invited to blame immigrants.

It seems very improbable that the devastatingly high rates of non-employment and unemployability among blacks in our inner cities are caused by immigrants taking jobs away from blacks or depressing wage levels. The dysfunctionality, indeed the human catastrophe, of the one-third of black America that is in the underclass cannot be attributed to immigrants or immigration. As Thomas Sowell explains in his most recent book, Race and Culture, immigration undoubtedly has both costs and benefits, both of which are hard to calculate, but it is a familiar pattern for less productive members of society to blame ambitious newcomers for their problems.

John O'Sullivan writes, "The evidence of our senses is that areas with a high concentration of immigrants tend also to be areas of ethnic conflict." The examples of conflicts that he cites, however, are ones in which "native American" blacks have been the chief antagonists. Here in New York, the areas of highest concentration of immigrants are places like Elmhurst, Queens. In such areas, as many as fifty or sixty nationalities live together in close proximity, and native-born Americans are almost all under the age of twenty. Elmhurst is a place of relative safety and civility even at midnight, whereas Bedford-Stuyvesant, the area with the city's largest concentration of blacks, is a place of lethal danger any time of day or night. Putting the focus on immigration distracts attention from the real crisis of the urban underclass, a crisis that is, at most, only tenuously related to immigration.

Ready for Lunch?

A FINAL difficulty with O'Sullivan's argument is that it obscures what can be done about very real problems related to immigration. He notes that some argue that the problem is not immigration but immigration in the context of the welfare state and multiculturalism (ethnic quotas, bilingualism, and so on). To those who make that argument, Mr. O'Sullivan responds, "OK, let's make a deal. You abolish the welfare state and multiculturalism, and I'll agree to open borders. Oh, and let's do lunch sometime." Nobody's asking for open borders, but I should have taken him up on lunch on Wednesday, November 9, when it became evident that the American voters were determined to do something about, inter alia, the welfare state and the multiculturalism championed by the counterculture, and that Californians were determined that illegal immigration should be brought under control, an idea with which few Americans would disagree, although they might have problems with the way Proposition 187 proposes to achieve that goal.

In sum, we can have a perfectly civil debate on immigration policy: on whether legal immigration should be increased, reduced, or kept as it is, and on whether the terms of admission should be changed, and how. But the debate is not going to go anywhere if it is premised upon a redefinition of the American character along the lines of something called "ethnic homogeneity," and upon a radical break with America's traditional understanding that immigration is closely related to our being a nation singularly open to the possibility and promise of the future. We do have a very real problem with aliens. These are native-born Americans who are profoundly alienated from the American experience. Our problem is with an indigenous overclass and an indigenous underclass. The overclass, sometimes called the knowledge class, is set upon a multiculturalist Balkanizing of the society, and is adept at exploiting the poor, including immigrants, toward that end. The underclass is composed of fellow citizens who somehow, and nobody knows quite how, must be induced to embrace the responsibilities and opportunities of citizenship. There are also serious questions about immigration policy that should be addressed. But they will not be addressed constructively unless it is recognized that the immigrant, far from being the problem, can today, as in the past, teach our alienated classes--and all of us--what it means to be that ever new thing, an American.

John O'Sullivan Replies

HERE is a passage in Fr. Neuhaus's response in which he goes off like the rocket's red glare. He accuses me of arguing that what is distinctively American about Americans is that they are distinctively British. He declares that Americans will decline my supposed proposal that they become "honorary Brits." He rebukes me and other (unnamed) British immigrants who would seek a role as "putative proprietors" of the United States. And he reminds me proudly that America twice pulled Britain's chestnuts out of the fire, in 1917 and 1941.

Well, really now. If I did not know Fr. Neuhaus to be a man of the cloth, I would suspect that his girl had run off with an Englishman.

This rodomontade was apparently sparked by the sentence in my original article: "Just as Christianity is the universalization of Judaism, so Americanism is the universalization of British culture." Omitted by Fr. Neuhaus is the sentence immediately following: "And in being universalized that culture changed to produce a distinctive American culture and identity." (Emphasis added. "Even without that gloss, the comparison with Christianity and Judaism should surely have told Fr. Neuhaus that I was describing a transformation. Yes, there is a British core to American culture, but it has been enriched by other influences.

Does Fr. Neuhaus accept even this limited view of America's British heritage? Well, sometimes he does, and sometimes he doesn't. On the one hand he concedes that "from Britain we received our language, much of our literature, and many of our most important political, legal and cultural institutions." On the other hand, "numerous nations and peoples justly claim a proprietorial stake in the American experiment: German, Italian, Irish, Slovak, Jewish, Polish, Chinese, Mexican, and on and on ... The successful third-generation Polish-American is not a WASP but a successful third-generation Polish-American."

Fr. Neuhaus has done his best to please everyone with this inclusive list, but his argument doesn't hold vodka. Americans drawn from "numerous nations and peoples" may certainly make a just claim to a stake in America, having worked, fought, and died for their country. But they have not shaped American identity and culture to anything like the same extent as the original settlers (four-fifths British in 1776). As Arthur Schlesinger--no Brit, honorary or otherwise--has written: "For better or worse, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant tradition was for two centuries--and in crucial respects still is--the dominant influence on American culture and society. This tradition provided the standard to which other immigrant nationalities were expected to conform, the matrix into which they would be assimilated." That is why the stake of any other ethnic group, however impressive, falls short of "proprietorial," and why a successful third-generation Polish-American speaks English and knows more of Shakespeare than of Adam Mickiewicz.

All of this might be a minor footnote in ethnic studies if it were not part of Fr. Neuhaus's larger argument that American identity is neither cultural nor ethnic, but a philosophical commitment (to liberty, political equality, etc. within which ethnic groups retain their distinctive character: "the homogeneity of America is in the shared recognition that there are many ethnic identities that, for limited public purposes, are subordinated to a common enterprise." (Emphasis added.) That is a better definition of multiculturalism than any multiculturalist has ever concocted. And Fr. Neuhaus extends this multicultural logic when he argues that anyone who describes his ethnicity to the Census as simply American is "reflecting a minority, even an eccentric, view of ethnicity in America."

Tell It to TR

IS THIS really the traditional or conservative view of American nationality? Teddy Roosevelt would not have thought so; nor the George Washington who argued that immigrants should be prepared for "intermixture with our people." They would then be "assimilated to our customs, measures and laws: in a word, soon become one people." Since George Washington's our" people were WASPs, e pluribus WASP is an undiplomatic but accurate way of expressing traditional Americanism: namely the assimilation of many peoples into one--the one here first.

Because even WASPs came from somewhere else, Fr. Neuhaus sees mass immigration as essential to the idea of America as "a distinctively open society" and even as "the lived experience of American culture." There is more myth than mystic chords of memory here. Continuing high levels of immigration have not been the American experience. As Roy Beck points out in his invaluable Recharting America's Future (Social Contract Press), U.S. immigration has been a constant repetition of waves and lulls. Judged over a longer period, there have been five phases: the colonial era (1607-1775), annual average immigration: 3,500; the new nation (1776-1819), annual average: 6,500; continental expansion (1820-1879), annual average: 162,000; the Great Wave (1880-1924), annual average: 584,000; and the era of the rise of the middle class (1925-1965), annual average: 178,000. There have been only two periods of sustained mass immigration: the Great Wave of 1880 to 1924 and the period since the 1965 Act, which has seen immigration rise to 1.3 million annually. Any wave of immigration, moreover, has pushed public opinion firmly in favor of restrictions. Restrictionist legislation was firmly (and popularly) in place from 1925 to 1965. And public-opinion polls have shown a steady two-thirds of Americans favoring less immigration since the mid sixties. The "lived experience of American culture," therefore, includes not only long periods of little or no immigration, but also the imposition of high immigration levels upon a reluctant people by the alienated American overclass.

Fr. Neuhaus joins that class in dismissing popular anxieties. He thinks its "very improbable" that immigration has contributed economically to the plight of the black underclass. Admittedly, immigration is only one factor contributing to that plight--others are the decline of blue-collar jobs, the minimum wage, and the welfare-induced crisis of the black family--but over thirty years it has been an important factor. If the U.S. had not admitted ten million, generally low-paid immigrants during the 1980s, would more black Americans have been employed at higher rates of pay? Very probably. Still, the debate suggests a useful definition of the term "nativist": someone who thinks that black Americans have a greater claim than immigrants on the support of their fellow Americans.

Fr. Neuhaus judges that immigration does not foster inter-ethnic violence because it is committed mainly by native black Americans. But it was no part of my argument that immigrants were to blame: ("That is not to say that immigrants are responsible for such violence; very often they are the victims of it.") My point, supported by arguments Fr. Neuhaus does not address, was that present levels of immigration fostered conditions which made violence more likely. But he is wrong to place the blame for violence so heavily on native black Americans. In the L.A. riots, for instance, they were fewer than half of those arrested--3,083 compared to 4,307 Hispanics, of whom more than 800 were illegal aliens. Similarly, the riots in Washington Heights were the work mainly of Dominican immigrants. We should provide no semblance of an excuse for anyone who beats up anyone; nor should we blink at the truth.

Fr. Neuhaus believes, finally, that arguments over immigration obscure the real problems of multiculturalism and welfare. These are indeed damaging programs which we should either abolish or drastically reform. But high levels of immigration serve to expand both by adding to their client constituencies. My argument to this effect went unaddressed by Fr. Neuhaus--perhaps because he hopes the new Congress will soon render it moot. I share his hope. But the early signs are that welfare at least is likely to be transferred to the states. In which case, it might be abolished--in Utah.

Naturally, I am pleased that Fr. Neuhaus favors immigration reform. Of course, the pages of NR will be open to the "full range of arguments over what ought to be done and why." But when he discusses the principles that should underpin such reform, has he misinterpreted my endorsement of "an American ethnicity" and of America as a nation "in the European sense" as indicating a racial or ethnic exclusivity? The American identity defended in my two articles--a cultural identity evolving into an ethnic one--incorporates all America's constituent ethnicities, and the common culture unifying it is enriched from non-Anglo sources.

Thus, when Fr. Neuhaus asks if native black Americans would be WASPs by now without immigration, the answer is, of course, that neither the subjunctive mood nor the qualification applies. Black Americans are already WASPs in my slightly metaphorical sense, that is, full heirs to an American culture with British roots but exotic foliage. Their claim to membership in it is at least as good as my own since, when their ancestors were living in West African villages, my own forebears were paddling coracles and speaking Gaelic in the West of Ireland. In particular, the language of the King James Bible--which Fr. Neuhaus doubted should be in my samples of American culture--vibrates as naturally in black churches as it did in Lincoln's speeches. Indeed, a recent "Gospel Rap" song describes a sinner fighting the Devil with his "King James switchblade." Culture develops--and preserves. I rest my case. Father Neuhaus is editor-in-chief of First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life.