Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means To Be American

by Tamar Jacoby, William Frucht (Editor)

Nothing happening in America today will do more to affect our children's future than the wave of new immigrants flooding into the country, mostly from the developing world. Already, one in ten Americans is foreign-born, and if one counts their children, one-fifth of the population can be considered immigrants. Will these newcomers make it in the U.S? Or will today's realities -- from identity politics to cheap and easy international air travel -- mean that the age-old American tradition of absorption and assimilation no longer applies? Reinventing the Melting Pot is a conversation among two dozen of the thinkers who have looked longest and hardest at the issue of how immigrants scholars, journalists, and fiction writers, on both the left and the right. The contributors consider virtually every aspect of the issue and conclude that, of course, assimilation can and must work again -- but for that to happen, we must find new ways to think and talk about it. Contributors to Reinventing the Melting Pot include Michael Barone, Stanley Crouch, Herbert Gans, Nathan Glazer, Michael Lind, Orlando Patterson, Gregory Rodriguez, and Stephan Thernstrom.

Genres: Nonfiction

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Kavitha Rajagopalan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thought-provoking and very important. What do we mean by integration? How can we hope to achieve social integration - politics serving different interests and aiming for different outcomes overlap on the immigration issue. The identity politics slant fascinates me, but I wonder...I'll be the first to say there's no policy solution to integration, that people must want to be a part of some nebulous group identity, that society must embrace these same people on an emotional level as part of their collective - but I wonder how many immigrants believe that their parents ever really wanted to "become American" so much as "get an American life". People are conflicted, so naturally is a society made up of people.

I love that immigration policy debates persistently transcend narrow, parochial, partisan policy categorizations.