Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What it Means to Be American (Hardcover)

by Tamar Jacoby (Editor) "LIKE MANY ASIAN-AMERICANS of his generation, Eddie Liu isn't quite sure how to place or describe himself..." (more)
Key Phrases: immigrant bargain, downward assimilation, economic assimilation, United States, New York, Los Angeles (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
In 1908, English immigrant Israel Zangwill coined the term "melting pot" as a title for his newest play, a vision of America as an Eden where all races and ethnicities melted happily into a harmonious whole. One of the most enduring catchphrases in our lexicon, the "melting pot," as both ideal and reality is discussed and dissected in this collection of 22 essays from an appropriately diverse assortment of writers. Divided into five sections, the book examines the process of assimilation through historical, political, economic and racial lenses, and scrutinizes the impact of immigration on contemporary American society. This variety of perspectives makes the book an engaging and enlightening look at a phenomenon—immigration—that has often been plagued by misunderstanding. With contributions from journalists like Pete Hamilland and Michael Barone—who examines the acute challenges faced by immigrants after September 11—the book achieves a deep richness. Brimming with statistics (e.g. second–generation Latinos earn 50% more than first-generation Latinos; more than half of Asians and Hispanics now marry whites), the collection offers fresh viewpoints on modern immigration trends. Most of the writers agree that the words "melting pot" do not accurately describe the process of assimilation, or of Americans’ national identity. With tempered optimism, contributor Herbert J. Gans offers a new metaphor, comparing the ethnic makeup of the country to a kaleidoscope "in constant flux" that creates "the overall pattern of the nation." Much at issue among the writers is the idea of assimilation, which can be seen as either a positive force or as a threat to the cultural identity. Most concur, however, on its inevitability. Editor Jacoby concludes that "we are a unique nation: defined not by blood or ancestry, but by a set of shared ideas." The acclimation to these ideas is an ongoing and difficult process, at once changing the countenance of the country and confirming the notion of yet another noteworthy catchphrase, e pluribus unum— from many, one.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Jacoby has assembled a thoughtful, provocative collection of essays that reconsiders and ultimately attempts to reinvent the traditional myth of the American melting pot. With the immigrant population continuing to increase and the demographic landscape of the nation rapidly altering--one in nine Americans is now foreign-born, and blacks, Hispanics, and Asians now constitute more than 30 percent of the population--it seems to be an appropriate time to challenge an outmoded set of beliefs and values. These 21 essays endeavor to provide unique and often unorthodox answers to conventional immigration and citizenship questions. As the various social scientists, journalists, and writers included discuss the nature and the practicality of twenty-first-century assimilation and cultural identity, the reader is treated to an exciting new vision of what it means to be an American in an increasingly global and richly diverse society. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; First Edition edition (January 6, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465036341
• ISBN-13: 978-0465036349
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,170,973 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Self-negating, April 18, 2004

By	Steve Sailer (Chicago) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Reinventing the Melting Pot is notable because it is self-negating almost to the point of being self-detonating.

The contradiction between what it preaches and what it is reminds me of the famous Cretan Paradox that puzzled ancient Greek logicians. A poet from Crete named Epimenides contradictorily declared "I am a liar." Similarly, the very method by which Jacoby created her book gives the lie to its basic theme that assimilation is everything and selection is nothing.

Reinventing the Melting Pot illustrates how American intellectual discourse has become unmoored from American daily reality. The fundamental assumption of this book, as with almost everything published these days, is that social construction is all-powerful. We shouldn't worry about who or how many come to America because we can mold anybody into anything. To worry about which immigrants to let in is racist.

Yet, at the same time that intellectuals furiously propound the moral superiority of constructionism over selectionism, they, like most other Americans, have lost their taste for actually trying to mold individuals' characters. That's why none of the authors in the book except Harvard's George Borjas proposed anything new that we should be doing.

This reluctance to try to mold people is everywhere today. Look at the business world. Tom Watson Sr. had IBM employees sing 106 company songs. But that kind of social engineering of groupthink, valuable as it was in building a great company, would be inconceivable today. Now it's difficult even to get professionals to wear business suits. Instead, today's corporate ethos is selectionist: Pick the right people and then let them innovate.

Or, take education. Constructionism is the ideology, but selectionism is the reality.

Nowhere in Jacoby's book does anyone dare suggest that immigrants with high IQs might assimilate better than immigrants with low IQs. Indeed, the dread letters "IQ" are verboten in intellectual life these days.

Yet, in the real world, parents scramble to get their kids into magnet schools and gifted programs, many of which select their students explicitly on IQ. (For example, the politically correct LA Unified School District operates a Highly Gifted Magnet school specifically open only to kids with stratospheric 145+ IQs.)

When Americans say a neighborhood has "good schools" or "bad schools," they mean "good students" or "bad students."

Most relevantly, consider how Tamar Jacoby created Reinventing the Melting Pot. Since she admires the government's mass immigration system so much, she ought to have picked her contributors the same way the government picks immigrants.

For example, because most immigrants are admitted solely because they are the kin of earlier immigrants, Jacoby should have allowed other pundits to force her to hire their relatives as her authors.

Or, in the manner of the U.S. Government's Diversity Visa Lottery, she could have let randomly chosen opinion mongers write her book.

Then again, in the spirit of the new Bush Plan, she could have let any writer in the world contribute a chapter, and the book would have ended up 10,000,000 pages long and in 100 languages.

But, no-she carefully selected as contributors those elite individuals she considers the best and the most congenial with herself.

Did she then seriously attempt to assimilate the first drafts, to mold them into a coherent, persuasive whole? Not that I can tell. She didn't even try to get her contributors to agree on terminology, confessing, "As an editor, I've let the essayists use their own language to describe immigrant absorption."

Nor does it look like she tried to keep her writers from being shown up as ignoramuses by her other writers. I'm not even talking about how Borjas makes practically everyone else look out to lunch. No, she didn't even bother to protect her neocon allies from being made to look foolish by her other neocon allies.

For example, Stephan Thernstrom argues that current immigrant groups will assimilate largely automatically because that's what happened to German-Americans. "There was a German ethnic group once, a huge and powerful one. But it has vanished in the melting pot," he intones.

Yet, in the very next chapter, Nathan Glazer explains that German-American multiculturalism didn't die out naturally, but "was expunged by World War I and its aftermath."

And later, Michael Barone gives some details of how German ethnicity was smashed in 1917:

"The Wilson administration and its propagandists conducted a campaign against German culture, renaming sauerkraut 'liberty cabbage,' suppressing German-language schools and newspapers, prosecuting political opponents of the war."

You might think that Jacoby would have asked Thernstrom to assimilate these facts about German-Americans and the melting pot into a new essay that wouldn't be so laughable.

But, nah, Jacoby's a modern American. And modern Americans just aren't into hassling people like that. That's why we select our colleagues so carefully-to minimize friction and discordance.

Except, according to Jacoby and Co., this prudence and discretion would be wrong when it comes to the fundamental civic duty of choosing who gets to immigrate.

Immigrants ought to select themselves. And we American citizens shouldn't have any opinion on the subject.

Yeah, right...

16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The melting pot..., April 13, 2004

By	Skeptic "Skeptic" (CA, USA) - See all my reviews

....was used in the original quote to describe "all the races of Europe," and not all cultures and national origins as suggested by Ms. Jacoby's synopsis. In any event, current waves are radically different for many reasons, articulated by Victor Davis Hansen, Samuel Huntington and others.

Time will tell whether remaking this country, soon to be permanently multicultural for the first time since its inception, will be an improvement or not. But if we are to chose the current Bush No-Borders Status Quo, we had better be certain that a nation of 500 million and growing, and increasingly unable and unwilling to communicate and interact, will be a better America than the one we have today. Will our environment, our schools, our wages, our security, our cities be better or worse?

If the latter, we may look back on Polyannas such as Ms. Jacoby and lament. Look to California for a sneak peek.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good effort., July 5, 2004

By A Customer

Overall, not a bad effort and worth the time to read for anyone interested in immigration and assimilation. However, the book lacks any real cohesion (perhaps because it is a collection of essays by many authors) and the first third of the book is extremely repetitive to the point that I felt I was reading the same essay over and over. Also, a few factual errors seem to jump out and detract from the book. For instance, Peter D. Salins refers to the U.S. Constitution as "the new country's first formal government" - it wasn't; and John McWhorter states that modern English is two thousand years old - it isn't.