Stanley Renshon speaks

As an American professor, what Renshon can say is limited but he does have some criticisms of American immigration and citizenship policy.  A few excerpts:

The core issue of immigration is not one of dollars or cents; the core issue in my view is national attachment and identity, emotional attachment to this country and developing an identity as an American.  This is what I call the hidden core of the immigration debate.  It doesn’t matter if immigrants contribute more than they cost if they are not emotionally attached to the country and identify as Americans.

So too illegal immigrants are not only damaging to the United States because they begin their association with us by breaking the law and spawning a host of illegal activities from document fraud and human smuggling to government corruption.  They are damaging as well because their enormous presence underscores and undermines citizen’s confidence that the government can do or perform its most basic function, which is preserving the integrity of the American national community and its physical boundaries….

Now, I recently had the honor of testifying before the congressional House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration where, aside from a contentious exchange with Congressman Sheila Jackson Lee about whether the concerns I expressed here were anti-immigrant – she repeatedly pressed for examples of real and immediate damage done by dual citizenship.

Well, in that regard, consider the Pew Hispanic Center’s 2002 survey of 3,000 persons of Hispanic and Latino background.  I recommend it to you; it’s a very interesting set of data, which you can get online.  Among the many useful questions the survey asked were those concerning national and ethnic identity.  The survey asked respondents about the terms they use to describe themselves and found that a large majority of Latinos, that is 88 percent, indicate that they identify themselves by the country where they or their parent’s ancestors were born, for example, a Mexican or a Cuban.  They were almost as likely to use the term Latino or Hispanic – much less likely to use the term American, which didn’t show up very often.

We are talking about a lot of people here.  There are 14.5 million people from Latin America living in the United States by some estimates.  So to say that 88 percent of that sample refers to themselves primarily in terms of their country of origin is to say that we have almost 13 million immigrants with no “American” in their cognitive structure.

The data on what is happening to some immigrant children is no less troubling.  A 1992 study found that 25 percent of the second-generation immigrant children identified themselves as a non-hyphenated Latin nationality, country of origin, despite the fact that they had been born in the United States and grown up here.  A more recent survey of over 5,000 children – it is the major study of Hispanic assimilation in the United States – found that among the U.S. born, just four percent of American – of Mexican-American — youth identified themselves in any way as American, the lowest proportion of any group.

And I think there is also an issue, which has not been looked at carefully, which is just how much emotional attachment is represented by contemporary hyphenization.  We assume that every group is like the Irish, but there is a lot of evidence to suggest that this historical parallel is misplaced.  Now, it’s hardly surprising that other countries try to maximize their self-interests here through their immigrants.

The question before us is whether we should encourage their success at the cost of our own civic and cultural institutions.  I believe obviously the answer to that is no.  No country and no democracy certainly can afford to have large groups, members of its citizens, with shallow national and civic attachments.  No country facing dangerous enemies, as America now does, benefits from taking a laissez faire attitude towards truly integrating its citizens into our national community.  And no country striving to reconnect its citizens to their civic and national identity can afford to encourage its citizens to look to other countries for their most basic and profound national attachments.  Thank you.

http://www.cis.org/articles/2005/dual05transcript.html

Posted by jonjayray on Monday, October 31, 2005 at 07:10 AM in Immigration
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