If you don’t speak Spanish, Miami really can feel like a foreign country. In any restaurant, the conversation at the next table is more likely to be Spanish than English. And Miami’s population is only 65 per cent Hispanic. El Paso is 76 per cent Latino.

Chinatowns and Little Italys have long been part of America’s urban landscape, but would it be all right to have entire US cities, where most people spoke and did business in Chinese, Spanish or even Arabic? Are too many Third World, non-English-speaking immigrants destroying the US identity?

For some Americans, even asking such questions is racist. At the other end of the spectrum, conservative talk show host Bill O’Reilly fulminates against floods of immigrants who threaten to change America’s “complexion” and replace what he calls the “white Christian male power structure”.

But for the large majority in between, Democrats and Republicans alike, these questions are painful, and there are no easy answers. At some level, most of the Americans cherish the American legacy as a nation of immigrants. But are all immigrants really likely to make good Americans? Are we, as Samuel Huntington warns, in danger of losing the American core values and devolving “into a loose confederation of ethnic, racial, cultural, and political groups, with little or nothing in common apart from their location in the territory of what had been the United States of America”?

My parents arrived in the US in 1961, so poor that they couldn’t afford heat their first winter. I grew up speaking only Chinese at home. Today, my father is a professor at Berkeley, and I’m a professor at Yale Law School. As the daughter of immigrants, a grateful beneficiary of America’s tolerance and opportunity, I could not be more pro-immigrant.

Around the world today, nations face violence and instability as a result of their increasing pluralism and diversity. Across Europe, immigration has resulted in unassimilated, largely Muslim enclaves that are hotbeds of unrest and even terrorism. The riots in France last month were just the latest manifestation. With Muslims poised to become a majority in Amsterdam and elsewhere within a decade, major West European cities could undergo a profound transformation. Not surprisingly, virulent anti-immigration parties are on the rise.

The US is in no danger of imminent disintegration. But this is because it has been so successful, at least since the Civil War, in forging a national identity strong enough to hold together its widely divergent communities. The Americans should not take this unifying identity for granted.

The anti-immigration camp makes at least two critical mistakes. First, it neglects the indispensable role that immigrants have played in building American wealth and power. European immigrants led to the US’ winning the race for the atomic bomb. Today, American leadership in the Digital Revolution — so central to the American military and economic preeminence — owes an enormous debt to immigrant contributions. The US is in a fierce global competition to attract the world’s best high-tech scientists and engineers — most of whom are not white Christians.

Second, anti-immigration talking heads forget that their own scapegoating vitriol will, if anything, drive immigrants farther from the US mainstream. One reason the Americans don’t have Europe’s enclaves is our unique success in forging an ethnically and religiously neutral national identity, uniting individuals of all backgrounds.
America’s glue can be subverted by too much tolerance. Immigration advocates are too often guilty of an uncritical political correctness that avoids hard questions about national identity and imposes no obligations on immigrants.

The right thing for the US to do — and the best way to keep Americans in favour of immigration — is to take national identity seriously while maintaining our heritage as a land of opportunity.


The Washington Post