Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Emma Lazarus, The Colossus
The year 2006 sees America caught up in a major national debate over what to do about an estimated 12,000,000 resident illegal aliens in our land. Political conservatives in the House of Representatives authored a punitive measure in December 2005 that would criminalize those 12,000,000 for this act; and to prevent addition to their numbers, it would seal the 2200-mile southern border adjoining the United States to Mexico. Political moderates and liberals, whose influence in the Senate vastly exceeds their voice in the House, prefer a blend of border enforcement with eventual acceptance of the presence of illegals through a process of making them eligible for citizenship. Meanwhile, they live in a certain limbo status here, doing jobs in gardens, fruit orchards, chicken and beef and pork processors, and large low-paying American retail companies.
What Do Americans Believe In? Top; Next Down
The faces of Americans immigrants are largely nonwhite today, but in much of the past, they were largely of European and therefore Caucasian racial origins. Once these white immigrants arrived in a flood of humanity to take jobs and live together in large families and communities with exotic food and language and institutions of their own, earlier-arrival "native" Americans quickly took umbrage at the invasion. This protest against change took the voice of a threat to cherished American values and tradition from these alien newcomers. These Irish and Germans and Italians and Slavs and Poles and Russians took our jobs, formed clans, spoke strange tongues, moved into slum warrens, drank too much, worshiped in strange ways, often disrespected the brahmins among the native-born, and generally acted as though our ways were not theirs. The protests of 2006 against immigrants are echoed in many past condemnations.
Even some champions of immigrants held to selective condemnation of other immigrants who flouted the champion's personal and political values. Thomas Nast, a German immigrant in childhood himself and a defender of beleaguered Chinese immigrants, hated the Irish Catholic immigrants of New York City, as his cartoons vividly illustrate (Fiorina et al. 2005, p. 91; Cartoons of Thomas Nast Reconstruction, Chinese Immigration, Native Americans, Gilded Era; Justice, 2006; Primary Sources Historical Society of Pennsylvania - see item 4 at The History Project). The religious uprising of Philadelphia in 1844, a relatively little-known event now, laid bare the fears and angers of eastern cities facing perceived invasion (Primary Sources Historical Society of Pennsylvania - scroll down to "The Riots of 1844"). The 1917 literacy test was explicitly aimed by older white Americans of largely northwestern European origin against the hordes of southern and eastern European immigrants during and after World War I (Fiorina et al. 2005, 93-94). Even among white Europeans, diversity has not come about in peaceful "We Are the World" fashion in our historical experience.
Text Ch. 4 consciously argues against the nativists who voice these protests. It insists that Americans hold close to certain beliefs, and that immigrants and immigration reinforce rather than undercut these distinctive national beliefs. I think this is largely a correct argument.
Those beliefs include something text calls classical liberalism. The term "liberal" has a quite different contemporary political meaning as our principle anti-conservative ideology held closely by believers in Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal government and also by defenders of diversity in personal morals and cultural legacies of the 1960s and 1970s. Classical liberalism has a root belief in the dignity and central importance of the individual over and above traditional institutions (nobility, religious hierarchies) that would define persons by rigid class identities. There is little doubting the American deference to individual initiative and prerogative (Fiorina et al. 2005, pp. 99-101). Americans largely disdain welfare recipients and believe that hard work brings elevation of status. A certain logical fallacy of "post hoc, ergo proctor hoc" (after this, therefore because of this) is invoked. Its expression lies in misfortune: you are not rich, because you did not work hard/smart/often/carefully enough; you lost your job because you were slothful/insolent/ungodly/a slacker. Of course this reasoning is flawed when completely random or non-personal reasons so often define how one fared. But true by the case or not, Americans assume that individuals generally make their own good and ill fortune when they live here.
Equality goes along with the dignity of the individual: any one man or woman is as good as the next. The fact is that Americans do not fare equally well at all, as our inequalities of wealth and of income are very large, and getting larger rather than smaller. Nonetheless we adhere to ideals of equality in the figurative start of a race; this is equality of opportunity. Affirmative action on racial or gender basis is largely accepted when framed as an effort to let everyone start the race fairly. But any "leveling" or equality of outcome is shunned; and affirmative action is shunned when framed in surveys as an effort to erase differences in performance and reward once the race is run. Americans do not believe in leveling through governmental largesse for the less well-off; we rank below all the European societies in either acceptance or adoption of those policies (with allowance for differences in per capita wealth). Americans do believe in educational opportunity; we rank well above Europeans in funding our public education right through subsidized college educations at more than 3000 public and private American universities. No European society comes close to that commitment to mass education.
The commitments expressed in these values are not trivial. The 2002 federal law tagged No Child Left Behind has a titled ideal of ensuring that every child somehow will start the race to get ahead on equal footing; and schools will be held accountable through regular monitoring of test results to see that each year's renewed start-of-race is again on equal footing. This is self-contradictory, for one central purpose of education beyond elementary level is to foster some advanced and specialized skills of major value in public and private life. If you and I have comparable musical talents and you alone train in music, you'll leave me behind (unless you're a real slacker!). If schools succeed in fostering these things among their students, the beneficiaries leave the other children behind. Children not being left behind really expresses an ideal of starting the race fairly; unmentioned is that by the time they are adults, the outcomes will be quite unequal.
Political power-seeking is viewed as highly suspicious activity by these individualistic Americans. Those who look to it are suspected of slanting the game to gain advantage for themselves and those they work for. Here I mention "principal-agency" theory, which isn't cited (yet) in text. The politician is working as agent for some set of persons called the principal. That's what an elected official presumably does for the citizens of his or her elective domain; and that's why I've insisted that democratically elected officials treat their voters better than the non-voters. It's pursuit of power and privilege by both the agent and the principal, which hires the agent for that end. The economists call this "rent extraction" whereby the Eighth Congressional District of the State of Missouri elects Jo Ann Emerson to the U.S. House in hopes that she will successfully compete for federal largesse for this District. It's less earned (via creation of new wealth) than extracted (taken out of the "common pool" of federal money to be spent here). It flies against the notion that each individual produces his or her own wealth. It smacks of factional pursuit of privilege for itself through hiring of politicians who service special interests at expense of the rest. This suspicion is also why Americans followed the progressives' lead in creating a civil service, so that individuals could fairly compete for jobs on merit grounds rather than winning them through political connections and privilege.
Americans hold other values in distinction to many Europeans--and also Canadians. A leading item here is religiosity. Free Online Dictionary defines it as "being religious" and possessing "excessive or affected piety" (definition of religiosity by the Free Online Dictionary). This is a complex term but is denoted by recognizable outward behaviors like membership and regular attendance at religious observances of recognized religious institutions. As one student told me, "it's church people, right?" That's right.
Far more Americans are church people than Canadians or Europeans are. The surveyed differences are large (Fiorina et al. 2005, p. 103, Figure 4.7). Pope Benedict XVI has observed that the problem for Catholicism in America is "filth" (in reference to sexual misconduct by priests) whereas in Quebec and Europe it is "indifference" as Montreal's majestic Notre-Dame Basilica and St. Joseph's Oratory cathedrals sit largely empty (mtlweblog.com - Montreal churches). Even though America with its First Amendment is not "a Christian nation," our nation is mostly peopled by Christians of many denominations. One consequence is that compared to these countries, "American politics is highly moralistic" (p. 104) on matters of public observance of religion by elected officials, and expectations of personal probity on sexual conduct. But it's not that all Americans share religious faith to comparable degree. Americans are becoming increasingly divided over such moral issues, and the root source of division is religiosity within the broad swath of Christian churches and observers. Nowhere in Europe is there conflict over teaching biological evolution as there is here--where the intense opposition to it derives from fundamentalist and evangelical persons of deeply held religious convictions (Gross 2006). The Europeans are perplexed by this and by why American religiosity is so robust compared to their own current experiences.
Text and I are also curious about depth and breadth of American religiosity. I leave text details to you. For my part, I believe its extent is based partly on Americans so often being restless, mobile, and rootless. They seek anchor in some institution that offers sanction against feeling alone and powerless. That is certainly what church congregations offer. It's a way to meet others of like mind. The American west and south have also been home to countless new churches forming at almost a whim with minimal state interference. The supply of different Christian churches is almost endless, even within one denomination such as the Baptists. When congregations get into political fights over doctrine, they divide and form two congregations; that can soon become four, and so forth. Demand is robust but so is supply. Almost no American is located too far away from a sampling of different churches with parking lots.
I also believe that religion is taken as protection by parents against recognized hazards in personal behavior of their children. Gregory Paul's cross-national study of "the prosperous democracies" investigates the widely given claim that American religiosity produces a superior way of life via indication of lower rates of teenage pregnancy, incidence of abortions, youth suicide, homicide, and other signs of trouble than the more secularized European and western countries (Paul 2005). The results work exactly the opposite, with America leading the way in these troubles by wide margins. Exactly this result is what generates much of the interest in religion among Americans. Church is a more important haven for the troubled than the contented, was more valued right after the terrorist attack of 9-11 than beforehand. If the deeply secularized societies of Scandinavia were to witness large outbreaks of drug abuse, indiscriminate sexual excesses, binge drinking, and homicides among the young that defied secular efforts to curb these things, then religion is likely to gain credence as protection from a dangerous cultural climate. Americans who deeply hold to fundamentalist religious beliefs often say that our culture is going to hell in a hand basket, and that the country must return to God or face civic breakdown. They blame secularism for all--or almost all--our troubles.
Immigrants Past and Present Top
What isn't blamed on secularism is blamed on immigrants, especially those who came illegally. No one is initially more rootless than a single immigrant who pioneers the way for others to follow. But historically America has seen many exceptions to that. These exceptions are whole groups who migrate to (or within) this New World en masse. We have examples of that among many religious congregations close to home. German Lutheran and Catholic congregations staked out New World townships such as Altenburg on the Cape Girardeau County-Perryville County border, or many another German-American settlement in the hills near this town. These pilgrimages to a promised land can occur within America's vast spacess, where migration is technically not "immigration" yet is still a mass movement to a new place. Mormons were run out of Illinois and Missouri by force, so conducted a highly organized westward wagon train trek to Salt Lake City below the lofty Wasatch Range. There they reside today as the dominant political and economic force of the State of Utah.
Closer again to here, those migrant German-Americans spoke German at home, went to Lutheran and Catholic churches with German pastors and priests, brewed and drank beer, farmed in the same ways Germans have done successfully all over the New World, married each other and had children, and generally prospered enough that 1 in 3 of my students now have distinctly German surnames. They endured suspicion toward their clannishness, sought refuge against divided feelings over two 20th century wars pitting America against Germany, confronted prejudicial moralizing against beer during the prohibition era, and saw German language teaching expunged from local schools during and after World War I. Nowadays, there is no overt expression against German-Americans, not here, nor in Texas where I lived amongst many persons of that background. But the old remember, and the young assign it to the past.
That can be explained by subversion of such distinct subcultures. American life works to thoroughly break down cultural enclaves. Those enclaves are necessary havens for new groups, but their value is eroded as children are born into the American culture. They learn English as a first or close second tongue--in public schools if not directly at home, church, and neighborhood. They grow to adulthood and seek mates. Many of those mates come from outside the enclave, and not through arranged marriage across a similar enclave a few kilometers away. Part of American individualism is choosing for yourself whom to court and whom to seek in marriage. The effect is to take us away from our origins. But one side effect is often to leave us rather rootless, seeking solace in religion for the unexplained and the unfathomable.
Works Cited
Gross, Liza. 2006. Scientific Illiteracy and the Partisan Takeover of Biology. PLoS Biol 4(5): e167. URL: biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0040167
Justice, Benjamin. 2006. Thomas Nast and the Public School of the 1870s. History of Education Quarterly 45.2 (2005): 51 pars. 22 May 2006. URL: www.historycooperative.org/journals/heq/45.2/justice.html.
Paul, Gregory. 2005. Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look. Journal of Religion & Society, Vol. 7 (2005). URL: moses.creighton.edu/jrs/2005/2005-11.html.