Krikorian expands the debate

Here’s yet another welcome sign of a shift in the immigration debate. Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that has always strictly avoided the larger questions of culture and national identity when criticizing current immigration policies, is now talking about the damaging effect of immigration, or rather of pro-immigration slogans, on our sense of nation—a concern he has never to my knowledge expressed publicly before. Krikorian wrote on June 7 at The Corner:

JPod: Sure, many phrases are no longer connected to their origins. Few people saying “writing on the wall” are even aware that it’s a reference to the Book of Daniel, let alone trying to make a point about the king of Babylon.

But “nation of immigrants” is not that kind of phrase. It has an ideological purpose, to downgrade and delegitimize America before the beginning of mass immigration in 1848, or maybe even before 1880. It is, in a sense, the unofficial motto of multiculturalism. America is much more a “nation of settlers” and a “nation of slaves” that it is a nation of immigrants. As important as some immigrant groups have been in shaping the ongoing development of American culture (especially Germans, Italians, and Jews), the template was established by English and Scottish settlers, as well as by the reinterpretation of Anglo-Celtic culture by the African slaves. Immigrants may be the frosting—but the cake was baked long before they arrived. [Emphasis added.]

Wow—I’ll bet that blew JPod’s hair back, in a manner of speaking.

I made similar points to Krikorian’s in my article, “Are We Really a Nation of Immigrants?”, published at FrontPage Magazine in April 2006:

To say that America is a “nation of immigrants” is to imply that there has never been an actual American people apart from immigration. It is to put America out of existence as a historically existing nation that immigrants and their children joined by coming here, a country with its own right to exist and to determine its own sovereign destiny—a right that includes the right to permit immigration or not….

This friendly-sounding, inclusive sentiment … turns out to be profoundly exclusive. For one thing, it implies that anyone who is not an immigrant, or who does not identify with immigration as a key aspect of his own being, is not a “real” American. It also suggests that newly arrived immigrants are more American than people whose ancestors have been here for generations. The public television essayist Richard Rodriguez spelled out these assumptions back in the 1990s when he declared, in his enervated, ominous tone: “Those of us who live in this country are not the point of America. The newcomers are the point of America.” Certainly the illegal-alien demonstrators in Los Angeles last week agreed with him; America, they kept telling us, belongs to them, not to us.

Also, Krikorian’s idea of a pre-existing American culture to which later German, Italian, Polish, and Jewish immigrant groups added some new elements without changing its fundamental form was developed in Milton Gordon’s important 1964 work, Assimilation in American Life, which I discuss and quote at length in The Path to National Suicide: An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism, pp. 37-45. PNS is available in pdf form and can be read or printed out here.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 10, 2007 01:45 PM | Send