Americanize or bust.(Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means To Be American )(Book Review)

Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means To Be American Edited by Tamar Jacoby Basic Books, 335 pages, $27.50

Immigration policy raises three issues: What sorts of people do we let in? How many do we let in? And how do we assimilate the new arrivals?

Conservatives are divided over the first two questions. Some are optimistic that high levels of unskilled immigrants from cultures very different from ours can be successfully absorbed, and that they benefit our country generally and our economy in particular. Others worry that we are taking in so many poor and unskilled non English-speakers that we are courting disaster.

A new anthology, edited by Tamar Jacoby, comes down squarely on the side of the optimists. But it will not entirely persuade or reassure the worriers, because the various authors clearly have different definitions of what constitutes assimilation.

The book collects 20 essays by an impressive array of immigration experts, with an opening and closing essay by Ms. Jacoby. Among the contributors are Stephan Thernstrom, Nathan Glazer, Gregory Rodriguez, Joel Kotkin, George Borjas, Amitai Etzioni, Peter Skerry, John McWhorter, Michael Barone, and Stanley Crouch.

Each contribution is thoughtful and provocative, with a wealth of social science data throughout. Such data--the number of immigrants arriving now compared to various other times in our history; their countries of origin; which parts of the country they settle in and what they do there; how fast they and their children and their grandchildren learn English; intermarriage rates; their political beliefs and social views; the incidence of social pathologies--are essential to any intelligent analysis.

On a political spectrum, the views represented in this book range from medium right to medium left. There is a fair amount of consensus that, all in all, the most recent wave of immigrants--for the first time in American history overwhelmingly non-European--is being absorbed successfully. A frequent theme is that when immigrants are added to America's melting pot they are changed, but so is America. Assimilation, in other words, is a two-way street. Immigrants are not simply submerged and stripped of their old ways, but actually change what it means to be American.