Today’s Topic : Personal identity versus American unity: an immigration flash-point.

The immigrant experience in the United States has, in recent years, been likened more to a salad bowl than to the old melting pot. Maintaining one’s national identity, so the theory goes, has replaced the generations-old ideal of assimilating into the American experience.

Of course, the melting pot was always as much myth as reality. Certain immigrant groups were prohibited from full participation in national life until federal immigration reforms were passed by Congress in the 1950s and ‘60s.

Still, a number of factors have conspired to make the salad metaphor more apt, not the least of which is new communications technology.

“Since 1965, technology has made migration a different game,” says David Yoo, a history professor at Claremont McKenna College. “In the 19th Century, making a break with your homeland was usually pretty permanent. Today, global migration doesn’t necessarily represent cutting ties.”

Trouble in Armenia? The Armenian community bands together. Fidel Castro tightens the screws? The Cuban community demands action. Problems in Central America? Unrest in the Middle East? All sides become involved.

It is only fitting, therefore, that the Haitian community in the United States has been riveted by the recent events in Haiti. In today’s Community Comment, Haitian activist Gerry Gaspard exhorts his small local Haitian community to help fellow countrymen rebuild their nation.

Like many immigrants before him, however, Gaspard does not advocate wholesale return of Haitians to their homes. The help can come in many forms; it does not require abandoning a new American lifestyle. It also is indicative of the general patterns of immigration.

“The first generation of immigrants inevitably tends to identify more with their home country,” says Ruth Gim-Chung, a psychologist at Pomona College in Claremont. “It is also inevitable that each successive generation will identify with America.”

The retention of language, customs and allegiances, however, raises difficult questions. Is it better for the entire community for immigrant groups to maintain their identity, or should immigrant groups be encouraged to assimilate?

“Whether we will be a melting pot or a salad bowl is a critical question on how well we will pull together and how people think about themselves in these isolated groups,” says Elizabeth Rolph, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica.

Nowhere is assimilation a hotter issue than in California. And there are many, even among immigrants, who believe unity is at least as necessary as ethnic identity.

Says Margarita Nieto, coordinator of the humanities program at Cal State Northridge and a first-generation Mexican American: “I’ve seen too many people becoming nothing more than defenders of their ethnic past. It leads to a great deal of unnecessary splintering among groups, and we’re only on this planet for so long.”