Posted on 01/15/2004 6:47:55 PM PST by Federalist 78
With the firestorm of debate over President Bush's immigration plan we've heard very little public airing of a factor that concerns many opponents of relaxed immigration policies: the changes to our culture they are certain to bring about.
Most are afraid to express publicly their anxiety over such changes. Why? Because opposition to these policies for many other legitimate reasons is enough to invite unfounded accusations of nativism. But if you outright admit your affinity for the unique American culture and your fear that unduly relaxed immigration policies (coupled with inattention to assimilation) might dilute it, you are sure to brand yourself as a full-blown racist.
America is the one place where it is taboo to be proud of your culture, which is ironic given America's record as the freest, most prosperous and most benevolent society in world history.
But we are not supposed to be patriotic, if patriotism means honoring and preferring our culture and way of life above others in the world. The theology of multiculturalism requires that you renounce allegiance to any particular culture as superior to any other. All cultures are supposed to be equally respected. The Pledge of Allegiance and the National Anthem are out. The United Nations, the World Court and oppressive global climate initiatives are in.
But beneath the slick packaging of "multiculturalism" and "diversity" we find that what they really stand for is the denunciation of Western civilization and America. All civilizations are equally wonderful in the world cultural mosaic – except those arising out of Western civilization, especially America.
If the multiculturalists had their druthers, what remains of a unique American culture would probably be eradicated, since it is viewed as bigoted and evil.
Didn't we used to boast about our motto "e pluribus unum" – out of many, one? Didn't we strive for a cultural melting pot? Didn't we have a civil rights struggle over such issues as eliminating segregation? Didn't the United States Supreme Court, in one of the most celebrated cases in our history, pronounce that "separate is inherently unequal"?
Yet today, under the relentless assault of "multiculturalism" we are reverting to our sad past by abandoning our commitment to integration and gravitating (in some areas) back to segregation.
We've turned ourselves upside down on the issue of race, as we have on so many other issues. What we rejected a few short decades ago as "unequal" and "racist," the practitioners of racial politics now seem to be endorsing as beneficial and desirable. And what we heralded during Martin Luther King Jr.'s heyday as the laudable goal of judging all people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, has now been replaced with the misguided and minority-demeaning policies of affirmative action. Under the modern politics of diversity we have demonized our aspirations toward colorblindness and glorified those toward race-consciousness.
What many opponents of loose immigration policies fear is not the influx of foreigners in American society, nor the immigrants themselves, who can't be blamed for wanting a better life and who would likely welcome assimilation into our culture. Rather, it is the deliberate destruction of the unique American culture and American civilization by "multiculturalists."
This isn't about race or ethnicity. Americans have always" been of different races and ethnicities, and proudly so. It's about assimilation and acculturation. Many, but certainly not all, of the people who support a radical softening on immigration laws are the same ones who discourage a distinct American culture. They often oppose those values and traditions that many believe are responsible for making America great.
It's difficult enough to absorb millions into your culture when you are trying hard to assimilate them and make them fit in smoothly and comfortably. It's nearly impossible when a huge portion of society (through no fault of the would-be immigrants) discourages loyalty to America, stands in the way of assimilation and promotes segregation, multiple cultures and languages, and the dilution of American culture and the English language.
We need to have an open and honest public discussion about immigration and to develop reasonable policies toward it: those that are geared toward assimilating immigrants, are fair to existing citizens, are respectful of the rule of law, and are committed to preserving an American culture.
I just wish that we could have a rational discussion about these issues without the demagogic innuendo about "nativism" and "racism." The unique American culture is racially and ethnically colorblind and wanting to maintain it is laudable, and imperative.
The Key Concepts of Transnational Progressivism
(1) The ascribed group over the individual citizen
(2) A dichotomy of groups: Oppressor groups vs. Victim groups, with immigrant groups designated as victims
Influenced (however indirectly) by the Hegelian Marxist thinking associated with the Italian writer Antonio Gramsci and the Central European theorists known as the Frankfurt School, global progressives posit that throughout human history there are essentially two types of groups: the oppressor and the oppressed, the privileged and the marginalized. (For a detailed examination of Gramscian or Hegelian Marxist influence in contemporary American political life see my "Why There is a Culture War: Gramsci and Tocqueville in America" (Policy Review, December 2000/January 2001.) In the United States, oppressor groups would include white males, heterosexuals, and "Anglos;" whereas "victim" groups would include blacks, gays, Latinos (including obviously many immigrants), and women.
Multicultural ideologists have incorporated this essentially Hegelian Marxist "privileged vs. marginalized" dichotomy into their theoretical framework. As political philosopher James Ceaser puts it, multiculturalism is not "multi" or concerned with many groups, but "binary" concerned with two groups, the hegemon (bad) and "the Other" (good) or the oppressor and the oppressed. Thus, in global progressive ideology, "equity" and "social justice" mean strengthening the position of the victim groups and weakening the position of oppressors—hence group preferences are justified. Accordingly, equality under law is replaced by legal preferences for traditionally victimized groups. Recently, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) ruled that illegal immigrants as a class are discriminated against, thus placing them into the victim status entitled to preferential treatment as a group.
(3) Group proportionalism as the goal of "fairness"
(4) The values of all dominant institutions must be changed to reflect the perspectives of the victim groups
"We must use multiculturalism and multilingualism to change the dominant culture of the United States."
(5) The Demographic Imperative
Global Progressives declare that demographic changes require Americans to alter their value system. The demographic imperative tells us that major demographic changes are occurring in the United States as millions of new immigrants from non-Western cultures and their children enter American life in record numbers. At the same time, the global interdependence of the world’s peoples and the transnational connections among them will increase. All of these changes render the traditional paradigm of American nationhood obsolete. That traditional paradigm based on individual rights, majority rule, national sovereignty, citizenship, and the assimilation of immigrants into an existing American civic culture is too narrow and must be changed into a system that promotes "diversity," defined, in the end, as group proportionalism.
(6) The Redefinition of democracy and "democratic ideals"
Global Progressives are redefining democracy from a system of majority rule among equal citizens to power sharing among ethnic groups composed of both citizens and non-citizens. For example, the current Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 1995 that it is "undemocratic" for California to exclude non-citizens, specifically illegal aliens, from voting. Former Immigration and Naturalization (INS) general counsel, T. Alexander Aleinikoff declares that "[we] live in a post-assimilationist age" and states that majority preferences simply "reflect the norms and cultures of dominant groups" (as opposed to the norms and cultures of "feminists and people of color"). James Banks, one of American education’s leading textbook writers says: "To create an authentic democratic Unum with moral authority and perceived legitimacy the pluribus (diverse peoples) must negotiate and share power." In effect, Banks is saying, existing American liberal democracy is not quite authentic; real democracy is yet to be created. It will come when the different "peoples" or groups that live within America "share power" as groups.
(7) Deconstruction of National Narratives and National Symbols
In the United States in the mid 1990s, the proposed "National History Standards," reflecting the marked influence of multiculturalism among historians in the nation’s universities recommended altering the traditional narrative of the United States. Instead of a Western nation formed by European settlers, American civilization is described as a "convergence" of three civilizations, Amerindian, West African, and European that created a "hybrid" American multi-culture. Even though the National History Standards were ultimately rejected, this core multicultural concept that that United States is not primarily the creation of Western Civilization, but the result of a "Great Convergence" of "three worlds" has become the dominant paradigm in American public schools.
(8) Promotion of the concept of Post-National Citizenship.
"Can advocates of postnational citizenship ultimately succeed in decoupling the concept from the nation-state in prevailing political thought?" asks Rutgers Law Professor Linda Bosniak. An increasing number of international law professors throughout the West are arguing that citizenship should be "denationalized." In the name of "inclusion," "social justice," "democratic engagement," and "human rights," they argue for "transnational citizenship," "postnational citizenship" or sometimes "global citizenship" embedded in international human rights accords and "evolving" forms of transnational arrangements. These theorists insist that national citizenship should not be "privileged" at the expense of postnational, multiple, and pluralized forms of citizenship identities. For example, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, under the leadership of its President, Jessica Mathews, has published a series of books in the past few years on "challenging traditional understandings of belonging and membership" in nation-states and "rethinking the meaning of citizenship." Although couched in the ostensively neutral (and often ponderous) language of social science, these essays from scholars from Germany, Britain, Canada, and France, as well as the U.S., argue for new and "evolving" transnational forms of citizenship as a normative good.
(9) The Idea of Transnationalism as a major conceptual tool.
The theory of transnationalism promises to be for the first decade of the 21st century what multiculturalism was for the last decade of the 20th century. In a certain sense, transnationalism is the next stage of multicultural ideology—it is multiculturalism with a global face. Like multiculturalism, transnationalism is a concept that provides elites with both an empirical tool (a plausible analysis of what is) and an ideological framework (a vision of what should be). Transnational advocates argue that globalization requires some form of transnational "global governance" because they believe that the nation-state and the idea of national citizenship are ill suited to deal with the global problems of the future. Academic and public policy conferences today are filled with discussions of "transnational organizations," "transnational actors," "transnational migrants," "transnational jurisprudence," and "transnational citizenship," just as in the ‘90s they were replete with references to multiculturalism in education, citizenship, literature, and law.
Many of the same scholars who touted multiculturalism now herald the coming transnational age. Thus, at a recent conference, the same American Sociological Association (ASA) that promoted multiculturalism from the late 1980s to the mid-‘90s now featured transnationalism. Indeed, the ASA’s then-president, Professor Alejandro Portes, argued that transnationalism is the wave of the future. Combined with large-scale immigration , transnationalism will redefine the meaning of American citizenship, he insists. The distinguished University of Chicago anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has suggested that the United States is in transition from being a "land of immigrants" to "one node in a postnational network of diasporas."
It is clear that arguments over globalization will dominate much of early 21st century public debate. The promotion of transnationalism as both an empirical and normative concept is an attempt to shape this crucial intellectual struggle over globalization. The adherents of transnationalism create a dichotomy. They imply that one is either in step with globalization, and thus with transnationalism and forward-looking thinking, or one is a backward anti-globalist. Liberal democrats (who are internationalists and support free trade and market economics) must reply that this is a false dichotomy—that the critical argument is not between globalists and anti-globalists, but instead over the form Western global engagement should take in the coming decades: will it be transnationalist or internationalist?
ANTI-ASSSIMILATION ON THE HOME FRONT
It is significant, but little noticed, that many of same NGOs (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International) and international law professors who have advocated transnational legal concepts at UN meetings and in international forums are active in U.S immigration and naturalization law. On this front the global progressives have pursued two objectives: (1) eliminating all distinctions between citizens and non-citizens and (2) vigorously opposing attempts to assimilate immigrants into the "dominate Anglo culture."
Thus, Louis Henkin, one of the most prominent scholars of international law when discussing immigration/assimilation issues attacks "archaic notions of sovereignty" and calls for largely eliminating "the difference between a citizen and a non-citizen permanent resident" in all federal laws. Columbia University international law professor Stephen Legomsky argues that dual nationals in influential positions (who are American citizens) should not be required to give "greater weight to U.S. interests, in the event of a conflict" between the United States and the other country, in which the American citizen is also a dual national.
Two leading law professors (Peter Spiro from Hofstra, who has written extensively in support of NGOs, and Peter Schuck from Yale) complain that "since 1795" immigrants seeking American citizenship are required "to renounce ‘all allegiance and fidelity’ to their old nations." In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, they advocate dropping this "renunciation clause" from the Oath. They also reject the concept of the hyphenated American and prefer what they call the "ampersand" individual. Thus, instead of thinking of a traditional Mexican-American who is a loyal citizen, but proud of his ethnic roots, they prefer immigrants (or migrants) who are both "Mexican & American," who retain "loyalties" to their "original homeland" and vote in both countries, thus ignoring the solemn Oath of Renunciation and Allegiance.
University Professor Robert Bach was the author of a major Ford Foundation report on new and "established residents" (the word "citizen" was assiduously avoided) that advocated the "maintenance" of ethnic immigrant identities, supported "non-citizen voting," and attacked assimilation (suggesting that homogeneity not diversity "may" be the "problem in America.") Bach later left the Ford Foundation and became deputy director for policy at the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in the Clinton Administration, where he joined forces with then INS general counsel T. Alexander Alienikoff, to promote a pro-multicultural, anti-assimilation federal policy. Alienikoff, a former (and current) immigration law professor, has characteristically declared, "we need to move beyond assimilation."
It has been well-documented (through Congressional hearings and investigative reporting) that the financial backing for this anti-assimilationist campaign has come primarily from the Ford Foundation, which in the 1970s made a conscious decision to fund a Latino rights movement based on advocacy-litigation and group rights rather than on civic assimilation. On this front, the global progressives have been aided if not always consciously, certainly in objective terms, by a "transnational right." It was a determined group of transnational conservative Senators and Congressmen that prevented the Immigration Reform legislation of 1996 from reducing unskilled immigration. The same group worked with progressives to block the implementation of a computerized plan to track the movement of foreign visitors in and out of the United States. Whatever their ideological, commercial, or political motives, the constant demand for "open borders" and "free movement" of people as well as goods by the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages and by certain commentators, lobbyists, and activists on the transnational right has strengthened the anti-assimilationist agenda of the global progressives.
The Multicultural Theocracy: An Interview With Paul Gottfried
What are the prospects for containing or rolling back the multicultural theocracy?
Note I do not think these battles will solve long-term problems; unless Western peoples start having families again, the social unit and population base needed for a civilization will be lacking.
While societies can assimilate, there are three presuppositions that must obtain: a core population that carries a distinctive culture that it hopes to preserve; a minority that is accepted on the condition that it eagerly embraces that majority culture; and a sufficiently controlled immigration so that assimilation is possible.
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America has become inhabited by suicidally self-hating gutless imbeciles.
That pretty much describes the attitude in Canada right now...ever since Trudeau actually.
That pretty much describes the attitude in Canada right now...ever since Trudeau actually.
Do you view the denunciation of Western Civ as prerequisite to global gov't, or is this just a hobby for those that indulge.
Yes, let us all "respect" the inventions of America (automobiles, antibiotics, space travel) no more than the inventions of the Middle East (car bombs, plane bombs, suicide bombs); The cuisine of Italy (ravioli, pizza, shrimp diablo) no more than the cuisine of New Guinea (roast catapillars, platypus eggs, snake); The political system of a free America Democracy no more than than the evil dictatorship and imprisonment of North Korea; And Capitalism no more than Communism...
"Multiculturalism" is nothing more than the patients in the asylum imposing mental illness on the rest of us.
I have this weird affliction that I suffer from. It's called PATRIOTISM.
I would prefer not to have dual citizenship foreigners living or working in America because I don't want anyone to have divided loyalties when it involves patriotism.
Which country is more important to you. America or your home country? If you have to make choices between your home country and America, then as far as I'm concerned make the choice to go home.
Your foreign co-worker who does not want American citizenship is coming here to suck the sweet juices out of America and then take the fruits of his labor back to his/her homeland.
These people come here because their homeland isn't as productive and free as America is.
Countries that require citizenship to own property are not too business smart. Would I invest millions of dollars to start a company in a foreign country on my own? Possibly, I would if the business climate was right and I could locate competent employees.
If I have to share my business control with a foreign businessman because I am not a citizen of that country, hmmmmmm, now I would hesitate.
I am the one putting up my cash and he's putting forth his citizenship. Big Deal!
Of course, I could open my company up to shareholders, then it's not my cash anymore. So, if I lose everything it's no great loss to me personally. Just a dent in my reputation. That's what we see in international companies. The Board of Directors doesn't have a personal investment in how the company does. There is no personal loss if the company fails in a foreign country.
This policy of non-enforcement of immigration laws in America has an even more destructive effect to our communities. In many immigrant communities, assimilation into gangs is winning against assimilation into our civic culture.
The Bush administration has allowed this matricula consular card, over the strong protest of the FBI. This allow the free movement of illegal aliens across America.
I am not a social engineer but I do recognize the steps that our local, state and federal politicians have been taking to destroy the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
"America is the one place where it is taboo to be proud of your culture, which is ironic given America's record as the freest, most prosperous and most benevolent society in world history."
Being proud of our culture is what made America the country of first choice for immigration. Mexico and many other South American countries are encouraging their criminals and lower uneducated class to emmigrate to America.
Will the continued invasion of these people do anything to guarantee that America will remain the country of first choice?
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