Immigrants to America and assimilation - 29 May 1998

Last Monday, the last one in May, was a public holiday in the United States and perhaps the most uniformly solemn one. It's called Memorial Day. Not so long ago it was Decoration Day. It was the idea of a surgeon who'd served in the Union army in the civil war and helped to form the first old soldiers' society. And its head, three years after the war was over, was one General John Logan. He called on veterans of the war to decorate soldiers' graves on every 30 May from this time forward. And so it has been done throughout the intervening 130 years. Long ago, of course, it embraced in homage the dead of many wars other than the civil war, through to the last one, the only war America ever lost. Vietnam. And it's been grimly obvious at every Memorial Day ceremony since 1974 that of all the wars remembered, the memories of Vietnam quicken most bitterly and jarringly.

On Memorial Day there are services, concerts, parades from Alaska to the Florida Keys. The service that everyone can see, the most brilliant and moving at the same time, is the televised service from Washington, with the National Symphony Orchestra and veterans, both famous and obscure, performing after dusk on a great plaza against the background of a purple sky and the immense pearly dome of the Capitol.

It is, as I said, a solemn occasion but I have to admit the guilty thought that I, and many more people too, find it also a rousing occasion because, mainly I'm sure, the promoters of these tributes, throughout the land, are able to tap the rich cornucopia of patriotic music that this country has acquired in the century and more since the civil war. I wonder if any other country resounds so powerfully and tunefully on such an occasion with such a fountain of marvellous melodies, from the large portfolio of John Philip Sousa through to the two or three patriotic gems of Irving Berlin? Indeed, the Washington ceremony ended with what on ceremonial occasions has become a second or alternative National Anthem, Berlin's "God Bless America". Through the sound of it and of a trio of glorious voices and a hundred-strong chorus, the camera panned slowly across hundreds and hundreds of sad or tense moist-eyed faces of every age and colour.

I've talked to friends of different political bias who find this scene unbearably moving or simply unbearable. Why unbearable? Because, I suspect, it stirs in people who do not believe in, or who deride, patriotism, it stirs in them guilty feelings of patriotism. Of course, this is an old feeling common to people on the Left, but now there is a new Left with a new attitude to exercise.

A famous Leftist professor, musing on this day about what he takes to be the sorry state of the United States, made the surprising announcement, "National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals". A surprise, from a boisterous Leftist professor. Not so surprising, however, when he follows up with the suggestion that the present United States is nothing to be proud of and that the best way of showing off your patriotism is to chant, all together now, "We caused the death of a million Vietnamese out of sheer macho arrogance".

"Come out into the public square", he urges his fellow academicians, "and make your voices heard in a new movement, a new campaign, a patriotic protest against America as it is!"

"America as it is", he maintains, "exists in terrible economic conditions that enslave its workers". This will be new to the vast majority of Americans who have to believe, from a recital of the facts, that never in living memory have there been so few unemployed, 5 to 6%, in a population of 265 millions and never an economy going along with such a minute percentage – 2% – of inflation. If he's not going to feel patriotic about the real America, what's to do next? "Be loyal", he commands, "to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every morning!" I grant that the professor is an extreme case but our universities are full of protesting professors of his type who appear to be disappointed ex-Marxists.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there hasn't been a dream country (do you believe it?) to believe in, in spite of 70 years' hard evidence that it was a nightmare country based, admittedly originally, on a noble-sounding dream.

I don't remember another Memorial Day which was followed by so many pieces in the serious media on patriotism. And they're all tied to an anxiety: how to absorb the long, late flood of immigrants of the past quarter-century – mostly from south and central America, and then a sizeable wave on to the west coast from Asia – how to bring them into the American mainstream? But there's also a new anxiety. A question whether they will all want to be absorbed, want to become Americans. That's entirely new and that's what disturbs old Americans who are uncomfortable with the now turbulent mixture we call multiculturalism.

Some months ago, I had to go downtown to get a document from the Immigration Office. I was in a cab driven by a young man, a Moroccan, as it turned out. Because of a backlog in handling the welter of applications in the city, it was taking a wearisome long time for his papers to be processed for him then to go before an examiner, to be given a test on this country and its institutions, then to take the pledge with several hundred others, and so become an American citizen.

He was glum and irritable and I thought it was over the long bureaucratic delay. But it turned out he was very much in two minds. He didn't really like the idea of having to become an American citizen. He was here on a work permit which apparently he wished could go on for ever. "Why?" I asked him. "Because", he said directly, "I would like to be a Moroccan first and an American second".

Now this is not an anecdotal item. Simply, there's widespread proof from surveys all across the country, to show that not only is there a very lively argument about the best ways for turning millions of incomers into literate Americans but more and more groups of defiant youths inside ethnic minorities who are asking why they should become Americans at all.

The Far Right really believes that there never was a melting pot, that immigrants, when burdened with a foreign tongue, were really incapable of becoming Americans and eventually died as strangers and left things to their children who knew only English and so stayed afloat in the big pool. On the Extreme Left, the New Left, if you like, the boasted multiculturalists, they see no reason why lots of immigrants should have to become Americans. One really barmy multicultural intellectual says, "Assimilation is nothing but a gentrified form of ethnic cleansing". As for the barmy extreme on the Conservative side, there is abundant proof in at least four generations of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe to disprove the stiff notion that immigrants are not capable of becoming American. What such complainers mean is immigrants with a foreign tongue are never quite capable of turning into successful Wasps – White Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Americans.

Well, these sometimes shrewd, loud, more often grotesque, arguments have been touched off by Memorial Day and are swirling round next week's big socio-political event in California when the people there take a referendum and vote on the famous, some say infamous, proposition 227.

It asks if Californians want to abandon and abolish the system that's been in force in the schools for about 30 years, namely bilingual education, that newcomers should be taught all subjects first in their native language, which is overwhelmingly Spanish, and on the side be taught English. The belief was that after say a year or two, their English would be good enough to let them swim safely in the mainstream. It was based on a false assumption that most bilingual teachers would be equally fluent in two languages. Most, in practice, turned out to be not very good at either. The probationary period stretched and stretched and at the end of five years many Hispanic children knew a little pidgin English and many also street Spanish. The overall consensus, from many studies in the deep south, the south-west and California, and New York City where bilingual education has been most exercised or enforced, is that it has been a disastrous flop.

Proposition 227 would toss all immigrant children into English classes at once for a year or more as, say, Russian or Asian children have to do. The most hopeful omen going for Proposition 227 is the news that a large proportion, maybe by now a majority of Spanish-speaking parents have seen the disaster and want the change.

The historical irony in all this is that the new promised solution is the only one that occurred to the schools, the politicians, the President of the United States at the beginning of this century, which saw that first enormous tidal wave of southern and central European immigrants. The first story I ever covered for the BBC was a night class in an elementary school up in the Bronx in a mainly Italian immigrant neighbourhood. It was a night school for the parents of children born here who were at school, had been tossed at once into the pool and learning nothing but English. The parents were being taught to catch up with their children, so that their children would not mock them as strangers. A situation full of pathos and comedy, but idealism too. For the parents wanted to become Americans as soon as possible for their children's sake. A long way from the superior professor who defined the process of becoming a citizen "a gentrified form of ethnic cleansing".

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