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homes and idle young men who sire children that they don’t raise and don’t provide for. That may be the black inner-city scenario, but by and large that’s not what’s going on among Mexican immigrants. High teen pregnancy rates notwithstanding, 80 percent of Mexican-American children are raised in two-parent families. Mexican women usually end up marrying the father of their children, which is not the case among blacks. As Chavez explains, “Hispanic marriage rates are nearly identical to those of non-Hispanic whites; 77 percent of Hispanic women will marry by age 30, compared to 81 percent of non-Hispanic whites, and they are no more likely to divorce.”

DEPORT THE MULTICULTURALISTS

A couple of years ago, Boston College political scientist Peter Skerry penned an essay for The Wilson Quarterly on the history of the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of welcome to immigrants. Drawing on the work of historian John Higham, he explained how the statue originally had nothing to do with immigration. A gift from France to commemorate the centennial of our war for independence, Lady Liberty “was intended as a beacon of hope to those struggling for liberty in their own lands, not as a welcome light for those seeking liberty here,” wrote Skerry. But symbols are mutable, and it didn’t take long for the copper icon’s transformation to occur, helped along by the Emma Lazarus sonnet it inspired. However, today’s immigration debate, like others in the past, is still very much about what the Statue of Liberty originally stood for: certain ideals and values. As Skerry puts it:

Liberty was depicted as a woman whose austere, classical demeanor was meant to suggest the universality of America’s founding ideals. These were underscored by the tablets of law that she cradles in one arm, and the torch she holds high with the other. And with her back to New York, Liberty strides oceanward, sending her light out into the world.

Assimilation is less about immigrants adopting our culture than about immigrants adopting our values. And America has been uniquely successful in this regard. Canada has utterly failed to bridge its linguistic divide. French Canadians in Quebec aren’t just pro-French language but also anti-English. The United States has as many French Canadians as does Canada, and a large percentage of them live in New England, yet there has been no such tension on this side of the border.

The British haven’t been particularly adept at assimilation, either. Their approach has been to encourage a sort of permanent heterogeneous status for newcomers, with an emphasis on tolerance and respect but no real expectation that immigrants melt in. On the Continent, Western European countries like Germany, Italy, and Spain make no pretenses. They are truly ethnic societies where any ethnic divergence stands out. Given its history, Germany is careful about protecting civil liberties and has worked hard to banish any vestige of outright racial or ethnic discrimination. But as any Turk living there today will tell you, you’re either German or you’re not. Just like you’re either Polish or not, Czech or not, and Italian or not. Even in Scandinavia, where political correctness is even more strenuous than in Germany, you’re either Swedish or you aren’t.

France at least gives lip service to the notion of accepting all newcomers as French. And it even has a national slogan—“Liberté, égalité, fraternité, ou la mort! ”—that stresses ideals over ethnicity. But today that’s mostly an elite conception. In practice, the motto is at odds with deep-seated cultural and ethnic habits, as demonstrated most recently by the Muslim riots of 2005, the country’s worst since 1968.

The key to the success of the U.S. assimilation model, says Peter Salins, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is that “we put so much more stress on shared values rather than shared cultures.” In an interview, Salins explained that immigrants find America’s values and ideals as attractive as its economic opportunities. Yes, they come here to get rich, but it’s more than that. It’s also our