<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: A Puerile Embarrassment
Review: "Hailing from across the ideological spectrum" "twenty-one of the writers who have thought longest and hardest about immigration" - what a joke! Only one immigration sceptic, George Borjas, is allowed a voice; the rest are all drawn from the shop-worn ra-ra neocon pro immigration chorus, with a few leftists thrown in, whom TJ must have known in her college days. Even worse,as Steve Sailer points out in "Remythologizing the Melting Pot" on VDARE.com, she displays no grasp on statistics and allows her writers to contradict themselves on matters of fact, such as why the German 19 Century influx was assimilated. Far better, in view of President Bush's Amnesty/Open Borders proposal to read Borjas' "Heavens Door".
Rating:
Summary: The melting pot...
Review: ....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.
Rating:
Summary: The melting pot...
Review: ....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.
Rating:
Summary: The melting pot...
Review: ....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.
Rating: 
Summary: Good effort.
Review: 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," disregarding the period of the Articles of Confederation; and John McWhorter states that modern English is two thousand years old.
Rating:
Summary: Self-negating
Review: 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...
Rating: 
Summary: Powerful examination of an enduring issue
Review: The subtitle really is significant: Americans need to concentrate on what it means to be American. Americans have a responsibility to communicate those high ideals to those of us who would wish to become Americans. This book does that. Across the board, each essay provides a powerful incentive to examine this question. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and recommend it highly.
Rating:
Summary: What it Means to Be an American
Review: This collection of essays is about assimilation in two senses. First, the subject concerns the process, so commonplace in this country that we forget how unique it is in the entire world, where people from other countries become citizens of America. This process involves not only the formal steps of naturalization, but the changes immigrants make to become part of American society, and the way their assimilation, in turns, changes American society. This subject is that rare topic that is both important and interesting. Open this book to any page and you'll learn something you didn't know about America's social history, and something you'll welcome adding to your knowledge of this country. The book is about assimilation in a second sense: 21 essayists from different professions and viewpoints put forward a sense of how assimilation works in the 21st century that hangs together, and gives hope that America will cohere and endure.
Rating:
Summary: Deriving Hope from History
Review: This is one of the best books of its type I have read. It does what so few non-fiction books do: places a current social dilemma in its historical context. Reading it, one realizes that making one nation out of people from all over the world is an unprecedented task at which America has been remarkably successful. These essays encourage the hope that the marvel of assimilation is not merely something that America used to do. Rather, it is a process that continues and seems likely to go on for the foreseeable future.
Rating:
Summary: Deriving Hope from History
Review: This is one of the best books of its type I have read. It does what so few non-fiction books do: places a current social dilemma in its historical context. Reading it, one realizes that making one nation out of people from all over the world is an unprecedented task at which America has been remarkably successful. These essays encourage the hope that the marvel of assimilation is not merely something that America used to do. Rather, it is a process that continues and seems likely to go on for the foreseeable future.
<< 1 >>
| 
