Book Review : Is America’s Melting Pot Just Bad Stew?

The Immigration Time Bomb: The Fragmenting of America by Richard D. Lamm and Gary Imhoff (Dutton: $18.95)

Books written to inform are held to rigorous standards with respect to the uses and presentation of information. Those that are written to entertain are permitted an extraordinary range of liberty; exaggeration, obfuscation and indirection are the norm. Books written to provoke are also permitted some liberties in the form of informed and intelligent speculation.

Then there are books that have as their end to propagandize. Almost without exception, they address controversial issues. With books of this nature, the issue is not whether they are permitted liberties--authors take them, frequently in outrageous fashion. They shape the data to fit their point of view and present information selectively.

A Call to Action

Richard D. Lamm’s latest book, “The Immigration Time Bomb,” a call to action on immigration reform, is one of the latter. Nothing Colorado Gov. Lamm and his co-author Gary Imhoff propose is new to the immigration debate. They would improve interdiction, make it illegal for employers to hire undocumented workers and place limits on the current system of family preferences. Their premises are not unreasonable. They argue that countries have a right and an obligation to control their borders and that the United States is not doing so; that the immigration flow is large and growing and that the United States does not have unlimited capacity to absorb all those who want to come.

When it comes to their selection and presentation of information as well as their conclusions, however, the reader is advised to engage her/his critical faculties immediately. Although intelligent persons disagree on the particulars, a reasonable case can be made for immigration reform. The case that Lamm and Imhoff make is another kind. Their case engages passions, not minds. Lamm and Imhoff argue that the new immigrants, who are overwhelmingly from Latin America and Asia, are damaging America’s social fabric (the book’s subtitle is “The Fragmenting of America”). It is a mean-spirited case they make, one with powerful nativist overtones, which they try to soften by protesting that they are reasonable and responsible citizens.

The authors focus on four areas in which they say the new immigrants are fragmenting American society: in their interface with America’s legal system, in matters of language and cultures, in the area of employment, in the matter of social services.

Chapter 3 (“Lawlessness”) is principally devoted to those Cubans who entered the United States in the 1980 boat-lift, a very large number of whom were criminals released from Cuba’s prisons. On this anomalous (and sorry) episode and population does the governor principally make his case about the “lawlessness” of the new immigrant population.

In Chapter 4 (“The Splintered Society”), the authors tell us that they “love America and want to save and preserve it,” that “America’s culture and national identity are threatened” and that we could end up like Hawaii, “which is Pan-Asian and American, but . . . is not Hawaiian.” The case they make has to do with the fact that the new immigrants are not evenly dispersed throughout the country but are concentrated in a few cities (Los Angeles, Miami, Washington), that their numbers keep increasing, that they’re overwhelmingly from Latin America and Asia, that they resist assimilation, that they bring conflict with them.

The issues (and the charges the authors make) are serious and complex; their discussion of them is not. Should the Scandinavian immigrants not have settled in Minneapolis-St. Paul? The Irish in Boston? The Italians in New York City? And has assimilation alone meant the end of discrimination and the attenuation of conflict for black Americans? It may not be nativism that the governor is espousing, but the arguments smell, feel and sound nativist.

Bilingual Education

Then there is that old shibboleth--bilingual education, and the threat that it presents to the American way of life. The debate on the issue focuses on a means (bilingual education) and forgets its ultimate goal: literacy in English. Limited-English proficient students constitute less than 1% of the total school population of the U.S. The overwhelming majority of illiterates in our society are monolingual English speakers.

Finally, the authors devote a fourth of the book to the issues of job displacement and drains on the public purse. The debate on these matters is very complex, but not as presented in this book. In the case of job displacement, the real question is complicated by issues of deindustrialization and robotization, the flight of American industries to other countries (including the Mexican border area and nearby Caribbean nations), competition from other countries and an economy that is changing profoundly and rapidly. The issue of the demands that undocumented immigrants place on the public treasury is likewise a complicated one. It is based on estimates of the numbers of persons served. Public agencies estimate high in order to secure higher levels of funding. Few are able to make distinctions between citizens and non-citizens, and there is little agreement about how to determine the tax contribution that undocumented immigrants make.

None of this is to say that large-scale immigration is not problematic or that it does not need to be addressed. On the contrary, it is the manner of the argument the authors make that is troubling. Not only do they set us against each other; they also ignore larger and more problematical realities. In addition to the economic strains American society is experiencing, it is also undergoing disturbing social changes. A recent (and excellent) sociological study, “Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life,” suggests that American society’s growing fragmentation might have to do with an “individualism . . . grown cancerous”; individualism, not immigration. De Tocqueville warned us about that cancer more than a century ago. We seem to need the warning today as much as ever.