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

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...

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.