Americans No More: The Death of Citizenship.

Georgie Anne Geyer has for years practiced the best kind of foreign reportage, which involves spending enough time in some other society to sense what rings true and false in official pronouncements about the place. Instead of trying to persuade her editors, as so many of her colleagues did, that the most important foreign policy stories could be found in the restaurants and hotels of Geneva, London, Paris, and Rome, she endured the frequent hardship and occasional terror of going to the Kazakhstans and the Angolas. Though it has very serious flaws, her new book displays some of the familiar virtues of her reporting, this time about the United States.

The main point of the book is to ask what has become of the sense of "citizenship" - the connection between people and nation that is more than the mere convenience of carrying a passport or being eligible for public benefits. Citizenship, Geyer says, involves not just pride in or comfort with a certain culture but also a sense of shared obligation for its long-term survival and health. The obligation is what she says is withering away, in a silent but real death of American citizenship."

There are three main villains in the story Geyer tells. The first and most heavily emphasized is immigration, which in its legal form is dramatically changing the ethnic makeup of the country (more than 80 percent of legal immigrants now come from Asia, Latin America, and Africa) and in its illegal form creates a shadow-world of people living outside the law. The second is the American response to immigration, which Geyer sees as far too diffident. Rather than encouraging or requiring new arrivals to learn the language, adopt the culture, and in other ways become fully engaged citizens, the U.S. has, in Geyer's view, fostered the idea that America is no more than one big job market and shopping mall, in which people from different cultures can improve their economic circumstances while otherwise living just as they would have back home. The third villain is a Balkanized, what's-in-it-for-me mentality among Americans in general. This was the spirit expressed most clearly through Proposition 13 in California. (Prop 13 was the ballot initiative in 1978 that put a cap on property tax payments for existing homeowners and touched off a series of similar moves in other states.) The real push behind Prop 13 came from homeowners whose own children were grown and gone and who were peeved by the idea that they should still pay for schools used by someone else's kids. Self-interest is a fundamental part of politics and of life, but Geyer contends that the balance has been skewed so that larger, citizen-style interests carry much less weight than earlier in this century.

On each of these issues, Geyer is obviously talking about something real. While economists have generally viewed immigration as an overall benefit to America, it is not an absolute benefit, nor a blessing for everyone involved. Recent evidence, some of which Geyer covers, suggests that the constant flow of low-wage immigrant labor is aggravating the polarization of America's work force into very-well and very-poorly paid sectors. The absorption of people from varied cultures has gone surprisingly well, by the rest of the world's standards - but the last time the United States took in this many people this rapidly, at the turn of the century, the dislocation became so great that it led to the draconian controls on immigration passed in the 1920's.

The most surprising reporting in Geyer's book concerns the actual process of acquiring citizenship these days, which she says is so lax, "sensitive," and user-friendly that it's more like joining a health club than pledging fealty to a new nation. (In the old days, she points out, mandatory "citizenship" courses were full of indoctrination about the ideals of the Republic. After applicants had passed a fairly demanding civics test, the process culminated in a swearing-in ceremony whose pomp was meant to underscore the gravity of the step the new citizens had taken. Now, according to her reports, the courses and tests are meaningless and the swearing-in itself often treated as a mere formality.) While people may feel at ease with and sympathetic to many cultures around the world, citizenship in its deepest sense should be exclusive, Geyer says. Yet the U.S. (unlike most other nations) has become so tolerant of "dual citizenship" that in the 1990s Milan Panic could serve as prime minister of Serbia, and Aleksandr Einseln as a general in the Estonian army, while still holding U.S. citizenship.

Unfortunately, Geyer's discussion of these issues is not up to the importance of the problems she identifies. The book has several stylistic quirks that at first are annoying but become almost hilarious by the end of its 300-plus pages. The most obvious is Geyer's insistence on introducing every expert on her side of the case with a flattering adjective. As soon as you read that a person is "brilliant" or has some other favorable trait, you know that he or she will be quoted on the side of the argument Geyer is advancing. ("As the prestigious Kettering Review puts it," "as the brilliant black economist Thomas Sowell wrote," "the respected Vernon M. Briggs Jr.," "Norman Ornstein, the brilliant senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute," "Richard Estrada, the superb columnist for the Dallas Morning News," "Lawrence Auster, one of the most sensitive commentators on immigration," "the wise Otis Graham," "FAIR's extraordinary Dan Stein," "I went to see [Korea's] handsome and gentlemanly prime minister," and on and on). Also, in a way that I'm sure was innocently intended, she comes off frequently as if she is tooting her own horn. After she offers a political assessment to a professor in Belgrade, she votes his reaction: "`Your conclusion is absolutely right,' he averred." "As early as 1985, I had written a groundbreaking lead piece for the Encyclopedia Britannica Yearbook, in which ..." "In the winter of 1996, as I was finishing this book, I found myself writing ... [and then quotes one of her newspaper columns]." She does this so matter-of-factly that it can't even be called boasting, but the effect is still strange.

The deeper problem is an exaggeration of the trends she discusses, which often gives the book a sky-is-falling tone. Geyer tries to build in a defense against this criticism by arguing that Americans are too complacent about their society's ability to withstand all stresses. The most frightening part of the book may be its first chapter, which describes the way in which other complacent societies, notably, in Europe, ignored ethnic tensions until the tensions became far more destructive than they had to be. But alongside its detailed reporting about the behavior of immigrants or the problems with the INS the book presents warnings that are clearly preposterous. For instance: "Henry Kissinger, for one, has predicted to me that America will be `irrelevant' by the turn of the century if our present national proclivities continue." "The turn of the century" may have sounded portentous when he said it, but now it is barely three years away.

The discussion of immigration contains eye-opening findings based on Geyer's reporting - for instance, that the Border Patrol has been successful in containing illegal immigration when it has actually tried, as in an experiment in El Paso; or that the National Council of La Raza, an important advocacy group for Mexican-American interests, has almost no membership base and is funded nearly exclusively by foundation and government grants. But these are mixed in with an ahistorical assumption that immigration went much more smoothly in other days. In fact, to read the muckraking literature of the early 1990s to realize that Americans of that day were far more worried about the indigestibility of Italians, Slavs, and Russian Jews than any of Geyer's "respected" authorities is worried about Hispanics today.

Geyer chooses exactly the right topic in using California's troubles as a model for the nation's. A generation ago, California displayed "citizenship" in the form she endorses, with excellent public schools, parks, and roads. Now the indicators of public wealth - these same schools, parks, and roads - are headed down, and private wealth piles up behind security fences. This is an important parable for America, but it involves more than the pressure of immigrant masses, to which Geyer ascribes most of the blame. ("Meanwhile, Southern California is breaking down under the inundation of so many unabsorbable people and needs.") Another recent book, Blue Sky Dream, by David Beers, goes farther toward explaining the California story. It emphasizes the way that huge military budgets created a sense of limitless abundance in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the era of Pat Brown. In the time of Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown this gave way to a more crabbed mood of each interest group resenting any claim on its tax dollars by any other group. Kevin Starr's multi-volume series America and the California Dream also shows that immigration was only one of several factors narrowing the sense of "citizenship" in the state. Still, Geyer's heart is in the right place, and with a reporters good instinct she directs attention toward the right subjects.