Ethnic Conflicts Abroad: Clues to America's Future?

NINETY-FIVE YEARS AGO, replying to the English historian Charles H. Pearson's pessimistic National Life and Character.- A Forecast, Theodore Roosevelt, the arch-optimist, wrote:

The Greek rulers of Bactria were ultimately absorbed and vanished, as probably the English rulers of India will someday in tbe future . . . themselves be absorbed and vanish, In Africa south of the Zambesi . . . there may remain white States, although even these States will surely contain a large colored population, always threatening to swamp the whites. . . . It is almost impossible that they will not in the end succeed in throwing off the yoke of the European outsiders, though this end may be, and we hope it will be, many centuries distant. . . . it is impossible for the dominant races of the temperate zones ever bodily to displace the people of the tropics.

Eighty-seven years later, a less successful aspirant to the U.S. Presidency, Eugene McCarthy, retained the scenario but reversed the roles when, in the Summer 1981 number of Policy Review, he discussed the challenge to North American civilization posed by the "neocolonialist" attitudes of immigrants of non-European stock to the United States: a development that TR would have had to strain to envision.

Today, by contrast, the following declarative sentences from Ethnic Conflicts Abroad: Clues to America's Future? (American Immigration Control Foundation, Water Street, P.O. Box 525, Monterey, Va. 24465; $4), a monograph by Glaister A. and Evelyn E. Elmer-seem merely to state a commonplace: "Although

America's apparent decline obviously has multiple causation, a factor of overriding importance is that its ethnically mixed population no longer rallies around common values to the extent necessary for successful attacks on internal and external problems. . . . No one cause of American institutional disarray is more important than ethnic conflict, whether over cultural dominance or over political and economic power." Considerably less commonplace, in this era of squeamish, dishonest contentiousness, is the Elmers' conclusion that the contemporary social and political ideal founded on notions of "pluralism," the "melting pot," "multiculturalism," and "rainbow coalitions" is a delusion based on a sentimental International House concept of the fraternity of peoples. The truth, so Mr. and Mrs. Elmer argue, is otherwise, and it is attested to by both history and sociobiology:

The abstract goals of ethnic groups are remarkably consistent everywhere. Each tends to strive for a high degree of control of its own destiny and to seek dominance over other ethnic groups, or at least to avoid dominance by them. A common and related goal is relative ethnic homogeneity within a defined territory. This desire may be less acute for a dominant group with an assured status in a ranked system than for the constantly uneasy rivals in an unranked system. [My italics.) Tactics used to pursue these goals depend somewhat on such factors as the number and relative sizes of competing groups, the existing institutional restraints, and the total cultural context. From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, examples of ethnic strife and violence abound, as do they in the United States; where, paradoxically, they are perhaps the most deplored and, at the same time, ignored, since to recognize them for what they are is to undercut one of America's most ingrained myths. James Fallows has pointed to the U.S. as an oddity among thc world's nations, owing to its theoretical belief that a society can be "enriched" by absorbing huge numbers of immigrants of every identifiable background and culture pace nearly every other of the world's societies, which apparently "think this can't be done, and that it's a bad idea to try." And so, in the Elmers' words, "American immigration policy, official and de facto, is based on an almost Orwellian reversal of traditional views . . . In some recent periods, the destination of half of the world's total immigration stream has been the United States."

The results, foreseeable from the continuation of this flow of emigrants to America, might itself have been extrapolated ftom an earlier, pamphletsized extrapolation: Miami Today the US. Tomorrow (American Immigration Control Foundation, $3), by John Ney, recently reprinted seven years after its original appearance. Ney's heart and brain are in the right place, but his work is jejune and badly written, corrupted by Menckenisms which no adult writer after Mencken has ever been able to employ without sounding like a perennial adolescent. (Ney attacks his "boobs"-ftom HLM's Boobus americanus-for not comprehending the immense social, cultural, and political damage done the U.S. by improperly controlled immigration, as if tens of millions of these "boobs" have not made their opposition to congressional irresponsibility egregiously plain to every national pollster who has queried them about the problem.) His conclusion, nevertheless, is in agreement with the Elmers' findings: "In Miami, for the first time in American history, a foreign culture and a foreign language have come to dominate a major American city. . . . The Hispanic culture will not integrate with the American where large numbers [of people] are involved."

For the future, the Elmers see, in the absence of active measures taken to prevent them, the following developments: 1) an unremitting increase in ethnic tensions in America; 2) a heightening of the ethnic elements in American politics, leading eventually perhaps to regional segregation of the nation's ethnic components and possible separationist movements; 3) a preoccupation with internal conflicts and loyalties of origin sufficient to prevent Washington from devising and adhering to "principled and consistent foreign policies," with all that that entails in the way of our further deterioration as a world power; and 4) the gradual transformation of the United States from a First World nation into a Third World one. Ten Steps lo Secure America's Borders (Federation for American Immigration Reform, 1666 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., Suite 400, Washington, D.C. 20009; $5) provides timely reading. For its detailed descriptions of hotspots along the Southwest border, I plan to carry it with me this year on an extended investigation of the proceeding rollback of the American frontier.