Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (48 page)

Most proponents of liberal immigration policy conceded that the influx of foreigners depressed wage rates in selected local labor markets, and that the tide of impoverished newcomers added to poverty and inequality in the United States. They asserted, however, that after twenty years in America, immigrants were no poorer on the average than was the population at large. The hard work of young and ambitious immigrants, they emphasized, further energized America’s economy and promoted growth that eluded other nations with relatively low levels of in-migration. The real goal of immigration “reform,” many observers said, should not be to establish low ceilings on the number of people annually admitted to the United States but to amend the laws so that preference would go to skilled and productive people (as opposed to migrants, many of them elderly, who made use of the family reunification provisions).

Opponents of greater restriction also sought to refute the claim that immigrants were slow to acculturate. On the contrary, they maintained, most newcomers were as eager as earlier generations of immigrants had been to embrace American ways, including mastery of the English language. One estimate of the pace of acculturation concluded in 2004 that 60 percent of third-generation Mexican American children spoke only English at home.
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Supporters of liberal immigration policy added that many Latinos and Asians (and Native Americans) were quick to out-marry. In 1990, the census reported that of those getting married, one-third of native-born Latinos and 50 percent of native-born Asian Americans were choosing spouses from outside their own ethnic groups.
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Percentages such as these indicated that considerable numbers of newcomers to America, most of them young people, were taking steps that moved them beyond their ethnic enclaves.

Thanks to an odd coalition of interests with influence in Congress, the liberal immigration policies that had flourished since 1965 managed to survive. This coalition united legislators (many of them conservative on other issues) who heeded the interests of employers in their constituencies—cash crop farmers, retail chain managers, hotel and restaurant owners, parents looking for housekeepers or babysitters—with liberals and others who sympathized with the plight of would-be immigrants (many of them refugees from oppression) and who proclaimed the virtues of cultural pluralism and ethnic diversity. Allying with the employer interests that clamored for low-wage workers, Americans with multicultural views such as these—including increasing numbers of newly naturalized voters—were more successful politically in the 1990s than they had been earlier in the century, when Congress had enacted tough, racially discriminatory immigration laws and when highly ethnocentric Americanization programs had proliferated in school districts.
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The political influence of pro-immigration views such as these was one of many indications that the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, a more welcoming nation than many other Western countries, was more receptive to ethnic diversity—more tolerant—than it had been in the past.

In 1986, when Congress made a major stab at revising immigration policy, lawmakers behind this coalition succeeded in passing a measure that offered amnesty to illegal immigrants who had been continuously in the country since 1982. President Reagan signed it, and an estimated 1.7 million immigrants, nearly 70 percent of whom hailed from Mexico, took advantage of this offer.
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The law included provisions aimed at requiring employers to verify the eligibility of newly hired employees to work in the United States. Employers who hired illegal immigrants faced seemingly tough sanctions, including prison terms. But Congress, bowing to the wishes of employers and many civil libertarians, did not really expect these sanctions to be widely observed. The act set up no reliable system of personal documentation (for instance, a computerized registry of Social Security numbers, or identity cards—widespread in other nations—featuring photographs, bar codes, and fingerprints) that might have enabled enforcement of these provisions.
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Non-enforcement of the law thereby sent a message that subsequent waves of illegal immigrants came to understand: The pro-immigration coalition of employers, liberals, and legislators with significant numbers of newly naturalized voters in their constituencies had no stomach for rigorous enforcement of sanctions. Nor did presidential candidates seeking Latino and Asian votes. Moreover, it continued to be extraordinarily difficult to track down the whereabouts of large numbers of people who overstayed tourist visas, to police the long Mexican-American border, or to stop the throngs of very poor and often desperate people in nearby nations from seeking a better life. The Border Patrol was hopelessly outnumbered, and the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization was underfunded and inefficient.

In 2000 and later, immigration remained a fairly contentious issue in the United States. Most people favored reductions in the size of it, as well as tougher measures against illegal entrants, but political leaders still tried to craft compromises that would enable undocumented but needed agricultural workers to earn temporary (or, in time permanent) residency. Benefiting from the low-wage labor of immigrants, most Americans—also enjoying Chinese takeout or salsa and chips—seemed cautiously accepting of the more ethnically diverse world that large-scale immigration had helped to create since the 1970s.

A cartoon in 2003 captured the political power of pro-immigrant interests in the United States—interests that helped to sustain one of the greatest social and cultural changes of late twentieth-century American history. It depicted a cluster of reporters with microphones surrounding a United States senator. A newsman asked him, “So you endorse the idea of sending all illegal immigrants back where they came from, Senator?” He replied, “Right! As soon as the grass trimming, cleanup, farm picking, and fast food work is done.”
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M
ANY OTHER AMERICANS
, however, complained in the late 1980s and ’90s of what they saw as a surge of contentious and separatist “multiculturalism,” driven in large part by the rights-conscious efforts of second-generation immigrants, especially middle-class Asians and Hispanics (and by certain liberal intellectuals). Like blacks, many of whom as of the early 1990s began to identify themselves as “African Americans,” increasing numbers of Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and other ethnic groups organized in order to protest against what they perceived as their marginalization in American life and against the negative stereotyping of their cultures that they saw in films, television, advertisements, and textbooks.

American Indians were among the groups that proudly began to assert ethnic identifications that they not emphasized in the recent the past. Prior to 1970, most Native Americans had not identified themselves as such to census enumerators. Thereafter, they seemed increasingly eager to do so. Though natural population increase among Indians was low, the number of Americans who proclaimed their Indian-ness thereby ballooned. In 1970, the census had reported a Native American population of approximately 800,000, or roughly four-tenths of 1 percent of total population. By 1980, this number had jumped to 1.4 million, and by 2000 it had risen to 2.5 million—or nearly 1 percent of total population. This was an increase in numbers that may have been bolstered here and there in very small ways by the eagerness of people to claim Native American ancestry in order to share in astonishingly high profits from Indian-run casinos, but it was driven far more powerfully by the rise in self-identification that many American Indians, joining the culture-wide surge of ethnic and racial pride, had come to feel.
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Multiculturalist activism of this sort was entirely understandable, for Anglocentrism had long dominated American popular culture and fostered unflattering stereotypes and discriminatory treatment of outsiders. Recognizing the power of white oppression in the past—Indians, for example, had suffered extraordinarily at the hands of whites—many Americans came to agree that change was long overdue. Hailing the spread of ethnic and cultural diversity, they began to challenge the Anglocentric curricula that had long predominated at schools and universities.
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When famous people proudly proclaimed their multiethnic heritages, many people smiled. The golf star Tiger Woods, for instance, told Oprah Winfrey in 1997 that he wished to be called “Cablinasian”—that is, a blend of Caucasian, black, Indian, and Asian. Though his statement irritated a number of African American leaders who wondered why he did not celebrate his blackness, “liberal multiculturalism” of this sort had an appeal to the millions of Americans who were recognizing the desirability—or the inevitability—of greater cultural diversity.
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Business leaders, perceiving such a future, began to mount aggressive campaigns of niche marketing in order to target the many consumers who asserted ethnic identifications.

Other Americans, however, resisted what they regarded as the exaggerated claims to entitlements by minority groups. The United States, they thought, was becoming a crazy quilt—a ragged one—of aggressive ethnic interests that were playing a selfish and therefore divisive game of identity politics. They objected especially to the extension of preferences such as affirmative action to people other than blacks and Native Americans, groups that had experienced uniquely brutal discrimination throughout the American past. Why, they asked, should Mexican Americans, most of whom fared far better in the United States than they had in their home country, enjoy rights and entitlements that other ethnic groups had not been offered in the past? Why should Asian Americans from upper-middle-class backgrounds expect to benefit from admissions procedures at universities? Why were schools required to spend large sums of money on bilingual education? As the Los Angeles riots had demonstrated, some African Americans and Latinos seconded popular resentments about Asians—aggressive newcomers, they complained, who displaced them from their jobs and/or looked down on them.

Complex and often resentful feelings such as these mounted in California, where voters approved Proposition 209 in 1996. This prohibited the state and local governments from giving preferences in hiring, university admissions, or contracting on the basis of “race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.” In 1997, California voters approved Proposition 227, which was aimed at ending bilingual education programs in the state. Analyses of this vote exposed the gulf that divided Latinos from non-Latinos. Though the referendum passed easily, 61 to 39 percent, Latinos opposed it, 63 to 37 percent.
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Many Americans bridled at what they regarded as expressions by immigrants and others of “excessive self-esteem” or “romantic ethnicity.” Some of these expressions, they complained, encouraged ethnic or racial separatism—that is, “illiberal multiculturalism.” The eminent historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a liberal in his politics, published a widely noticed book on the subject in 1991. Its title,
The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society,
revealed the extent of his concern. Schlesinger was caustic about the spread on college campuses of detailed and politically correct speech codes that sought to protect minorities but that in some cases threatened rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. Highly Afrocentric versions of history appalled him. One racist version, taught by a provocative professor at the City College of New York, described whites as materialistic and aggressive “ice people” who brought the three “D’s,” “domination, destruction, and death,” to the world. Africans, having been raised in sunlight, were warm, humanistic, and communitarian “sun people.” Rich Jews, this teacher told his classes, financed the slave trade.
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Ethnic chauvinism especially worried Schlesinger, who believed that it was severing bonds that had held the United States together. “A cult of ethnicity,” he wrote, “has arisen both among non-Anglo whites and among nonwhite minorities to denounce the idea of a melting pot, to challenge the concept of ‘one people,’ and to protect, promote, and perpetuate separate ethnic and racial communities.” This “multiethnic dogma,” he emphasized, “abandons historic purposes, replacing assimilation by fragmentation, integration by separation. It belittles
unum
and glorifies
pluribus
.”
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Outside of a few hotbeds of continuing conflict, such as California, battles over multiculturalism, like many other struggles over cultural change in the United States, seemed to ebb a bit in the late 1990s. Indeed, in most parts of America these controversies had been far less heated that they were in many other countries at the time. In the 1990s, as earlier, violence flared in Sri Lanka, Spain, Northern Ireland, and the Balkans, to name but a few of the spots on the globe where angry activists and separatists stoked the flames of rebellion. By contrast, surveys of attitudes in the United States revealed that large majorities of middle-class Americans, regardless of race or ethnicity, continued to subscribe to common values—notably democracy and the importance of hard work and achievement—and that they mostly accepted the diversity that multiculturalism was promoting. Weathering extremes, this center normally held.
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For the most part, the legacy of multiculturalist activism that had risen in the early 1990s seemed as of the early 2000s to be fairly benign. By then, it had succeeded to an extent in challenging the Anglocentrism that had been common in American textbooks, museums, films, and the media. Fights over political correctness on college campuses had subsided. In their reaction to rising immigration and multiculturalism, as to many other trends that arose in the United States during the late twentieth century, most American people exhibited higher degrees of acceptance and adaptability than had been the case in earlier years of the century.