Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [54]
Salins says the other major value component is our civic institutions. We’re the land of liberty and democracy. Here, people can say what they want, be what they want, do what they want. These are attractive values. And Americans are much more concerned about people sharing their values than sharing their cultural artifacts.
If American culture is under assault today, it’s not from immigrants who aren’t assimilating but from modern elites who reject the concept of assimilation. In Who Are We?, Samuel Huntington works from a definition of culture that is both broad and specific. Culture, he writes, refers to “a people’s language, religious beliefs, social and political values, assumptions as to what is right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, and to the objective institutions and behavior pattern that reflect these subjective elements.”
Key elements of America’s Anglo-Protestant culture, he says, “include: the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law, the responsibility of rulers, and the rights of individuals; dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create a heaven on earth, a ‘city on a hill.’ ”
Nothing indicates that today’s immigrants, like those who came before them, don’t share Huntington’s commitment to those ideals. But there’s plenty of evidence that those ideals make many of the professor’s colleagues sick to their stomachs. For multiculturalists, assimilation is a dirty word that elicits not just indifference but outright hostility. Some don’t want to judge one culture as superior or inferior to another, the type of relativism that Allan Bloom described so eloquently in The Closing of the American Mind. They espouse a kind of values-neutral belief system. If some societies believe in genital mutilation or keeping women uneducated and covered in a burka, who are we to judge?
But other multicultural elites, who dominate the academy, reject the assimilationist paradigm outright on the grounds that the United States hasn’t always lived up to its stated ideals. Americans slaughtered Indians and enslaved blacks, goes the argument, and this wicked history means they have no right to impose a value system on others.
In other words, conservatives who want to seal the border because the liberal elites have taken over are directing their wrath at the wrong people. The problem isn’t the immigrants, it’s the elites and their multiculturalist predilections who want to turn America into a loose federation of ethnic groups. Conservatives are right to complain about bilingual education advocacy, anti-American Chicano studies professors, Spanish-language ballots, ethnically gerrymandered voting districts, La Raza’s big government agenda, and so forth. But these problems weren’t created by the women changing the linen at your hotel, or the men building homes in your neighborhood.
Keep the immigrants. Deport the Columbia faculty.
For all the loud talk of late, the American public seems not to have lost confidence in the melting pot. If it had, you’d know it. There would be “English-only” signs and militarized border zones. There would be ubiquitous police checkpoints and far-right political parties like France’s National Front. Michelle Malkin would be considered a serious pundit, not Ann Coulter without the nuance.
Of course, there is some bigotry and stupidity out there, which we’ll always have. But when people really believe they can’t live another day with other kinds of people, they don’t send e-mails to The O’Reilly Factor. They engage in ethnic warfare. You get the Serbs and the Croats in the Balkans, the Hindus and the Muslims in India, the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda. What we have in America is periodic grumpiness, short-lived sniffing about the most recent arrivals, a vague and