How to make an American.(Birds's Eye)

Browsing through my grandmother's citizenship textbook from the 1930s one day, I found Lesson 61 on the Americanization policies of Theodore Roosevelt:

 
   [Roosevelt] loved America above all else and his last public message 
   was a plea for the "complete Americanization" of our people in which 
   he said: "... [if] the immigrant who comes here in good faith 
   becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be 
   treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an 
   outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or 
   birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man's 
   becoming an American, and nothing but an American. There can be no 
   divided allegiance here. We have room for but one soul (sic) loyalty 
   and that is loyalty to the American people." 

The textbook captured the spirit of Americanization--that immigrants are expected to assimilate patriotically and become loyal Americans. More than one hundred years earlier George Washington had written to John Adams that he envisioned immigrants "assimilated to our customs, measures, and laws," and because of this, Washington declared, native-born citizens and immigrants would "soon become one people."

This sentiment is roughly the view of the majority of Americans today, but clearly not the opinion of many American elites. As Samuel Huntington argues in this issue (see page 20), elites in government, business, education, academia, and the media have for decades been actively involved in efforts to "deconstruct" the American nation and its traditional concepts of assimilation and citizenship.

Huntington explains in his new book, Who Are We?, that arguments over multiculturalism, bilingualism, ethnic and gender group preferences, dual citizenship, history standards, transnationalism--and immigration and assimilation are all part of the same conflict over the nature of the American liberal democratic regime. He is right to maintain that a "deconstructionist coalition" challenges the core principles of the American nation on all fronts. At the end of the day, the deconstructionists would transform an American nation based on the principles of individual citizenship, equality of opportunity, and self-government within Constitutional limits, into a new form of regime built on ethnic, racial, and gender group rights with decision-making increasingly in the hands of unelected elites.

While Huntington provides the comprehensive macro view, Jan Golab examines a micro case study of the problem in his essay on the politics of Indian casinos (see page 26 in this issue). What is ultimately at stake is whether the traditional American regime will be transmitted to future generations intact or wholly transformed.

Clearly, all of this means that the issue of immigration/assimilation (and these two issues should always be considered as one) must be examined within the broader context of the leftist assault on traditional American political principles. To help clarify the problem, let us explore a series of assimilation-related issues that will soon confront both elite and popular opinion. These include initiatives to revise the oath of allegiance, design a new citizenship test, and, most significantly, legalize the status of illegal immigrants.