The Unmaking of Americans: How Multiculturalism Has Undermined America's Assimilation Ethic.

The Melting Pot Revisited

The Unmaking of Americans: How Multiculturalism Has Undermined America's Assimilation Ethic, by John J. Miller (Free Press, 320 pp., $25)

JOHN J. Miller, NATIONAL REVIEW's national political reporter, has long been a combatant in the conservative civil wars over immigration. As a former chief lieutenant to Linda Chavez and as an advocate of high levels of immigration, Miller has crossed swords with such NR stalwarts as Peter Brimelow and John O'Sullivan. However, in The Unmaking of Americans, Miller places more or less on hold the arguments over how many (and what types of) immigrants we should admit and concentrates on the issue of how best to assimilate the immigrants already here.

Miller unabashedly calls for a return to "Americanization": the attempt to assimilate immigrants so that "every stranger in our land becomes a patriotic American." With a mass of evidence gathered both from scholarly research and from investigative reporting, he demonstrates that American elites have undermined the assimilation of immigrants through their support for ethnic-group preferences, foreign-language voting, bilingual education, and the watering down of citizenship itself.

The book is well written, lucid, and packed with useful information about the history of immigration, the Americanization movement of the early twentieth century, and the group-rights revolution of the past thirty years. Mr. Miller asserts that opposition to Americanization comes from the multicultural Left ("global village people") and the nativist Right ("neo-nothings"). The multiculturalists fear that assimilation "will happen," and the nativists believe that assimilation "cannot happen." To his credit, Miller grapples with data that run counter to his pro -high-immigration stance by, for example, examining the rising welfare rates among working-age non-refugee immigrants.

The first part of the book traces the history of the idea of Americanization from its beginnings as an organized movement around 1907 through the success of the idea of "the melting pot" articulated in Israel Zangwill's play of that name in 1908 (it inspired Teddy Roosevelt to write the author, "I don't know when I have seen a play that has stirred me as much"), the influence of the First World War, the passage of legislation restricting immigration in the 1920s, and the provisions of the McCarran - Walter Immigration Act of 1952, which removed the final prohibitions on Asian immigration and eventual citizenship. As an advocate of continuing high levels of immigration, Miller appears reluctant to state the causative relationship between the legislation restricting immigration in the 1920s and the progress of assimilation from then onward. While, in my gut, I share Miller's distaste for the discriminatory Johnson - Reed Immigration Act of 1924, which kept many of my Sicilian relatives out of this country, objectively one has to recognize that, in general, the lower levels of immigration that resulted from this legislation contributed to the overall success of Americanization at that time. Nonetheless, Miller captures the spirit of the Americanization saga in clear and lively prose. We hear President Woodrow Wilson tell newly naturalized citizens in 1915 that "You cannot dedicate yourself to America unless you become in every respect and with every purpose of your will thoroughly Americans. You cannot become thoroughly Americans if you think of yourselves in groups." We hear Justice Louis Brandeis address the question "What is Americanization?" at Faneuil Hall in Boston in 1919: "the adoption of our language, manners, and customs is only a small part of the process . . . the immigrant is not Americanized unless his interests and affections have become deeply rooted here."

In the last chapter, Miller offers a ten-point "Americanization Manifesto." His demands include: ending ethnic-group preferences, strengthening the naturalization process, ending bilingual education, ending multilingual voting, and reducing illegal immigration. He hopes to get people on both sides of the immigration controversy to support Americanization. The author's worthy goal is not advanced, however, by labeling his conservative opponents in the immigration debate "neo-nothings." On the other hand, his project of fostering Americanization is an excellent idea that has the potential to unite conservatives.

During the past few years a variety of conservative thinkers --including NATIONAL REVIEW's John O'Sullivan and Richard Brookhiser and The Weekly Standard's William Kristol and David Brooks -- have emphasized the importance of national patriotism for a revitalized conservative coalition. A new emphasis on Americanization would also be likely to resonate with the conservative grass roots. Further-more, a renewed interest in Americanization would concentrate attention on the obvious connection between assimilation and high immigration. That is to say, the better the job we do of assimilating immigrants, the more of them we can afford to take in; conversely, the weaker our assimilation efforts, the fewer immigrants we can accept. But, perhaps most importantly, conservatives who work together on Americanization will realize that their true adversaries are not fellow conservatives who may disagree on how immigration policy can best serve our national interests; rather, the adversaries that all conservatives must understand they have in common are the anti-Americanization activists -- including foundation officials, multicultural educators, self-appointed ethnic spokesmen, and immigration lawyers -- whose contempt for the American nation-state, republican self-government, and our way of life is detailed in John Miller's fine book.