The Nation's Pulse: Sorry, Emma Lazarus
Carroll, Vincent
"The Nation's Pulse: Sorry, Emma Lazarus" Almost never is not the same as never," he said. "All right, counselor." "Well, I think you would agree that I have made my point," said little Stephen Douglas. When a little boy starts using...
...Yet anti-immigration sentiment in America had been growing before they drew their swords, and will continue to flourish even if they never utter another word...
...Political institutions" are not the onlygroups at work in this endeavor...
...But the document nonetheless reveals how the internal logic of multiculturalism forces powerful educators to repudiate the traditional goal of an academic meritocracy, since "the standards of merit are defined primarily from a monocultural perspective...
...Sad to say, Hispanic and even Asian-American business groups often support minority set-asides...
...The reason: his ancestors hailed from Mexico, whereas mine came from Europe...
...Two things are tipping the scales: multiculturalism and affirmative action...
...He felt aggrieved because contemporary politics had taught him to think of himself as a lifetime victim in an oppressed group...
...For the most part the memo is a stupefying concoction of the most hackneyed progressive jargon — "The reality is that I enjoy a dominant position in the area of disability and sexual orientation even though I am subordinate in race and gender...
...still others insist that assimilation is the key to overcoming social division, adding that more must be done to ensure that today's immigrants assimilate as thoroughly as immigrants in the past...
...She argues (in a sharp critique of Brimelow) that assimilation "is the issue and deserves more attention and reinforcement than it currently receives in public policy debates...
...What if the house put me into bankruptcy...
...Those of us who write commentary for a living— especially on newspaper editorial pages —spend a surprising amount of time across the table from folks who want government to rig the economy on their behalf...
...But assimilation loses its significance in a country in which people of certain ethnic stock are granted perpetual legal preference and formalized private advantage over others, no matter how thoroughly acculturated or successful they become—or even how often they cross ethnic lines to intermarry...
...Later, at about one a.m., I started to get really nervous about buying a new house...
...They are too busy laboring to get ahead in life, as immigrants always have...
...He was a modestly successful, mainstream, native-born American indistinguishable from most others of that description...
...His latest monograph, Immigration: The Demographic and Economic Facts, teems with citations and has been widely referred to in its own right, but is of no value whatsoever to anyone concerned with the political and social consequences of immigration trends...
...Meanwhile such civil rights organizations as the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund pursue agendas based on the premise that a minority group's success hinges on government intervention...
...These tiresome meetings doproduce the occasional epiphany...
...I paced around my apartment and felt scared down to my toes...
...Typifying the third reaction is Linda Chavez, the most thoughtful voice now arguing that today's immigrants must not be punished for an entitlement regime they did nothing to create...
...Ego, pride, and envy are ways of measuring my distance from God...
...Nonetheless, Brimelow and Borjas are not the sort of opponent one ignores...
...At an editorial meeting last spring, while sitting across the table from the representative for a coalition of minority contractors intent on defending government "set-aside" programs, I found myself pondering the man's appearance, and eventually being annoyed by it...
...When a little boy starts using his father's locutions and modes of speech, it brings so much joy to Daddy's heart I can hardly tell you...
...And lest anyone miss the hints he drops concerning the suspect nature of the other side's motives, Ungar concludes his book by approvingly quoting a hotel executive in Atlanta who claims, "There has never been any real basis for opposing immigration but racism, in one form or another...
...Such preferences pose a question of the starkest self-interest for non-minorities who oppose them but who also historically have cheered generous immigration quotas for their presumed economic benefit: Why sustain this enthusiasm, when the overwhelming number of immigration slots are taken by people who will immediately possess a host of formal and informal advantages over our own families...
...Brimelow's rambunctious Alien Nation almost single-handedly turned immigration into one of the conservative movement's most bitterly contested issues...
...I read this, and felt as if I had just set down a big rock from off my back...
...Immigration enthusiasts generally react in one of three ways to the suggestion that affirmative action has troublesome implications for their cause...
...Esoteric debates over immigration's effect on wage growth, population density, the high-tech industry, and the prospects of the underclass in all likelihood have little to do with the shift in public sentiment...
...Yet there he was, arguing without a hint of self-consciousness that he and his descendants should enjoy, in apparent perpetuity, a legal advantage over my descendants and me...
...They unleash their polemics against journalist Peter Brimelow and economist George Borjas, reviling the former and jousting with the latter, as if the two have become household names...
...Traditionally assimilation has been the end of the immigrant's journey into the American mainstream...
...He dressed like most professionals and seemed to earn a comfortable income...
...But whether or not they crave special status, most get it in the form of lifetime membership in a protected minority group —and it hardly mailers that this system has been foisted upon us by a native-born, largely white intelligentsia...
...My wife and I have decided to buya new house so we can all live together and our little angel can have a flat place to ride his bike and play with his friends...
...The economist Julian Simon, Ungar's polar opposite in terms of seriousness and sophistication —and in his own way as influential as Brimelow in the immigration debate—simply sidesteps such issues as affirmative action...
...I am a person made up of the seven deadly sins...
...We've found a house we might conceivably afford...
...What if I ran out of money...
...My life is now, and always has been, totally unmanageable by me without God's help...
...Skerry notes that the percentage of Mexican Americans who distinguish themselves racially from whites has been growing: "Unlike the political institutions in place during the last great wave of immigration," he writes, "those in place today are tutoring Mexican Americans to define themselves as a victimized group that cannot advance without the help of racially assigned benefits...
...Borjas meanwhile is the economist most frequently cited by Brimelow to support his argument in favor of a moratorium on all immigration...
...Most immigrants fortunately neither seek nor embrace such destructive advice...
...As Peter Skerry, author of Mexican Americans: The Ambivalent Minority (and another sharp critic of Brimelow), correctly observes, "Mexican-American academics...typically view themselves as part of a colonized people...
...Immigration is being killed by quotas...
...Churches, schools, foundations, and the news media are also reinforcing the notion that the American system is rigged on behalf of a racial elite, and that grievance, not gratitude, is the appropriate attitude for the newcomer toward his adopted land...
...Some sneer at the idea, impugning it as racist...
...Alas, this little boy also soaks up every time I curse when someone cuts me off, and every time I make a comment that some might (wrongly) construe as racist or homophobic...
...It was also once common to find Mexican-American academics and leaders who argued that Mexicans were similar to other white immigrant groups...
...That viewpoint has all but vanished...
...The problem: He and I were outwardly interchangeable...
...For the immigration backlash is growing because of uncomfortable conclusions drawn from everyday life...
...I may not be much, but I am all I think about...
...I can go crazy over it or I can pray over it and be sane about it, but I should not be surprised by it...
...If immigration enthusiasts hope to carry the day, they must first explain how racial entitlements are ever going to be overcome...
...When I get like this, I reach for my book of Malibu Serenity Sayings...
...50 March 1996 • The American Spectator This argument is used to justify not only preferences in government contracting, but in college admissions and hiring and promotions throughout much of the labor market, too...
...These shock troops of multiculturalism unwittingly function as recruiting agents for the movement to seal our borders...
...If there is something deeply wrong in my life, I am probably doing something seriously wrong...
...The American Spectator March 1996 51...
...Now such a description is taken for granted by nearly everyone...
...Late last year, the vice chancellor for student affairs at the University of Colorado —an Asian-American woman hugely successful by any definition —sent a three-page memo to numerous university officials in which she laid out her "personal view of diversity...
...others duck the connection...
...Just a generation ago in the 1960's, a study funded by the Ford Foundation found that many Mexican-Americans did not like to think of themselves as a minority at all...
...The Hispanic contractor in my office didn't feel agg-rieved because he had yet to assimilate...
...As a nation we are swelling the ranks of those with a material incentive to resist the restoration of the principle of individual merit...
...Mat does matter is that this system remains deeply entrenched, and will he all but impossible to root out in the next decade — despite such minor victories as the Supreme Court's majority opinion in Adarand Constructors v. Pena...
...I took them down over many years of prayer meetings in an abandoned schoolhouse in Malibu...
...THE NATION'S PULSE by Vincent Carroll Sorry, Emma Lazarus Immigration enthusiasts are steadily losing ground in the national debate, and they don't seem to understand why...
...His skin tone was light...
...He spoke American English with no trace of accent...
...They have saved my life a good many times...
...VINCENT CARROLL is editorial page editor of Denver's Rocky Mountain News...
...Sanford Ungar exemplifies the first approach in his new book, Fresh Blood: The New American Immigrants...
...I do not deserve any more than I have...
...Here are some of my favorites: • When all else fails, turn it over to God...
...Like so many of her colleagues, this vice chancellor has joined a growing cadre of tens of thousands of admissions officers, personnel directors, government bureaucrats, diversity trainers, and corporate executives who now crusade on behalf of a medieval concept of group entitlement...
...Ungar writes that a "benign multiculturalism, seen by some conservatives as such a threat to American life, may make simple sense after all...
...Most Hispanic leaders share his perspective, as do a growing number of Asian-American activists...
...But it's a stretch, and money is always a scary topic for me...
Vol. 29 • March 1996 • No. 3
