HUNTINGTON'S AMERICA
David Frum - NRO
So I did indeed include a reading of Who Are We in my Fourth of July observances, and yes I certainly do see why the book has stirred up so much fuss. <font size=4>Huntington has delivered an alarming and in many ways convincing warning of current US immigration policies, which he accuses of corroding American national identity. He warns above all that today’s fashionable chatter about “multiculturalism” is becoming an enabling device for something much more dangerous: “biculturalism,” a future division of the country between its English-speaking majority and an emerging Spanish-speaking minority.
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Immigration skeptics have been predicting disaster for hundreds of years now. By and large, those predictions have not come to pass. Norman Podhoretz likes to remind immigration skeptics of an article Henry James wrote after visiting the Great Hall at Ellis Island. James feared that these newcomers and especially the Jews among them would never appreciate or even acknowledge America’s literary heritage. Soon James came to feel so alienated from this new America that he quit the country altogether for Britain, where was naturalized in 1914. His literary reputation, never high to begin with, faded away entirely after his death in 1916. But beginning in the 1930s, a group of literary critics began to reread and praise him. They argued that he ought to be recognized as a great American writer, one of the very greatest American writers. They prevailed. Now for the punchline: Guess what these critics had in common? Maybe the names of three of the most prominent will give a clue: Lincoln Kirstein, Philip Rahv, and Leon Edel.
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On the other hand, the mere fact that a warning has not yet come true does not prove that it will not come true in the future. If I urge you to wear a seatbelt, it is not a good answer to reply that you have so far been safe without one. The odds are against you – and Huntington argues that the odds are increasingly against America as we have known it. Huntington is right to argue that America owes its law, its social organization, and its political ideals to seventeenth-century England. And he has a point too when he warns that the American “Creed” may not be enough by itself to sustain national unity if the connection to America’s origins should be severed.
All interesting, all important.
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But it seems to me that a book whose main target is the issue of Mexican immigration ought to give harder thought to the causes and appropriate responses to that immigration than does Who We Are. For three decades, legal and illegal immigration to the United States have offered ambitious Mexicans a way out of the failures of the Mexican economy and Mexican society. It’s not enough to say, “Lock them out.” Mexico is right next door: Its stability, its success are crucial American national interests. There can be no effective US immigration policy that is not also a Mexican development policy.
That’s why President Bush’s original approach to Mexico back in 2001 emphasized both temporary work permits for Mexicans in the United States – and also Mexican reforms to encourage US investment, especially in the energy sector. (Incredibly and despite NAFTA, Mexico still bans foreign investment in oil and gas – conceding monopoly control to the sputtering and corrupt state company, Pemex.) <font size=4>You can dispute the particulars of the Bush plan if you like, but he got the basic concept right: If Mexicans could find opportunity in Mexico, they would not need to come search for it in America.
Huntington might reply that he is a scholar of American politics, not Mexican: It’s not his job to suggest solutions to Mexico’s difficulties. But such a response would expose the biggest weakness in Huntington’s nationalism. Geography means that Mexico’s difficulties cannot neatly be isolated from America’s. Mexico’s difficulties are America’s difficulties too.
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There is a certain kind of nationalism that exhibits a proud indifference to and even disdain for Mexico. But the price of indifference to Mexico is continuing economic turmoil in Mexico – and continued mass Mexican migration to the United States.
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Nationalists believe that the nation is entitled to make demands on the members of that nation. And paradoxically one of the most urgent demands that modern American nationalism makes is that Americans must understand Mexico and care about it – and do a better job of helping it to find its own way forward.
Obviously Mexico's progress remains fundamentally a Mexican responsibility. But America can help. America can prod. America can even insist. And if it does, America will benefit - and not just economically.
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08:21 AM
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