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One might easily gather, from following the arguments of many pro-immigrationist writers, that the immigration “crisis” amounts to nothing more threatening than the benign influx of millions of problem-solvers, New Pioneers, and energetic, idealistic converts who, in the words of Tom Bethell, “because they are the ones who will appreciate the country, will defend it and perpetuate it” (The American Spectator, August 1984). According to such arguments, the American Way is comparable to a hothouse filled with rare and luxuriant plants whose effulgence effects a magical transformation of those alien spirits who breathe the atmosphere preserved under the vaulted dome. This idea is essentially a romantically extended variation of the old melting-pot notion, says Brent A. Nelson, author of Assimilation: The Ideal and the Reality (The American Immigration Control Foundation, Water Street, P.O. Box 525, Monterey, Va. 24465; $2). Nelson continues: “According to the most optimistic exponents of this belief, the Republic will endure even if the descendants of its founders go into extinction because it is based on an imperishable tradition going back to William Blackstone, John Locke, the Magna Carta, and Anglo-Saxon common law.”

The “melting-pot ideal,” Nelson explains, is the second stage in the evolution of an American theory of ethnic and cultural assimilation. The first stage, “Anglo-conformity,” demanded nothing less than the total renunciation of the immigrants’ inherited culture and the total acceptance of that of the Anglo-Saxon plurality. The conformist phase prevailed nearly to the end of the nineteenth century, to be superseded, over the next twenty years, by the melting-pot phase, which gave way in its turn, during the 1920s, to the charms of “cultural pluralism,” with its appeal to what Milton M. Gordon, in Assimilation in American Life, called “the preservation of the communal life and significant portions of the culture of the later immigrant groups within the context of American citizenship and political and economic integration into American society.” Since the 1920s, of course, “Anglo-conformity” has been a dead duck as far as the American polity has been concerned; it has been almost wholly displaced by the melting-pot notion, as well as, to a lesser extent, by “cultural pluralism.” To the extent that “Anglo-conformity” lingers at all, it finds expression in the aforementioned belief that—somehow—the Anglo-Saxon heritage retains mystical properties capable of processing millions of impoverished Mexican peasants, Middle Eastern fellahin, and Asiatic refugees into so many Jeffersonian republicans.

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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One might easily gather, from following the arguments of many pro-immigrationist writers, that the immigration “crisis” amounts to nothing more threatening than the benign influx of millions of problem-solvers, New Pioneers, and energetic, idealistic converts who, in the words of Tom Bethell, “because they are the ones who will appreciate the country, will defend it and perpetuate it” (The American Spectator, August 1984). According to such arguments, the American Way is comparable to a hothouse filled with rare and luxuriant plants whose effulgence effects a magical transformation of those alien spirits who breathe the atmosphere preserved under the vaulted dome. This idea is essentially a romantically extended variation of the old melting-pot notion, says Brent A. Nelson, author of Assimilation: The Ideal and the Reality (The American Immigration Control Foundation, Water Street, P.O. Box 525, Monterey, Va. 24465; $2). Nelson continues: “According to the most optimistic exponents of this belief, the Republic will endure even if the descendants of its founders go into extinction because it is based on an imperishable tradition going back to William Blackstone, John Locke, the Magna Carta, and Anglo-Saxon common law.”

The “melting-pot ideal,” Nelson explains, is the second stage in the evolution of an American theory of ethnic and cultural assimilation. The first stage, “Anglo-conformity,” demanded nothing less than the total renunciation of the immigrants’ inherited culture and the total acceptance of that of the Anglo-Saxon plurality. The conformist phase prevailed nearly to the end of the nineteenth century, to be superseded, over the next twenty years, by the melting-pot phase, which gave way in its turn, during the 1920s, to the charms of “cultural pluralism,” with its appeal to what Milton M. Gordon, in Assimilation in American Life, called “the preservation of the communal life and significant portions of the culture of the later immigrant groups within the context of American citizenship and political and economic integration into American society.” Since the 1920s, of course, “Anglo-conformity” has been a dead duck as far as the American polity has been concerned; it has been almost wholly displaced by the melting-pot notion, as well as, to a lesser extent, by “cultural pluralism.” To the extent that “Anglo-conformity” lingers at all, it finds expression in the aforementioned belief that—somehow—the Anglo-Saxon heritage retains mystical properties capable of processing millions of impoverished Mexican peasants, Middle Eastern fellahin, and Asiatic refugees into so many Jeffersonian republicans.