Our nation’s motto originally referred to the 13 states joining together, but it also points to the many strands of our population fusing into one people.
Multiculturalism is fundamentally anti-American because it is driven by the opposite impulse — to divide the American people into separate, legally defined and enforced tribes. Its motto would be Ex Uno Plures — Out of One, Many.
Let’s start with what multiculturalism isn’t. It’s not multiculturalism to celebrate the Lunar New Year or have spaghetti with seafood on Christmas Eve. Multiculturalism is not having a sweet-15 party — a quinceañera — for your daughter, or volunteering at the annual Scandinavian festival.
In a sprawling, open, and tolerant nation like ours, there’s plenty of room for private, voluntary subcultures, and not just those of immigrant origin, but also regional and religious subcultures, and those based on any number of shared interests. (Greetings, fellow Trekkies!)
Above the subcultures, there is an overarching common culture that Americans share, and preventing its development — or even reversing it — through government action is the defining characteristic of the ideology of multiculturalism.
That unifying American culture is an outgrowth of our British Protestant inheritance, including its adaptations by African slaves. That culture was further shaped over the generations by the experience of living on the frontier, by the contributions of various waves of immigrants, by the Revolution’s political claims of human equality, and more.
The common American culture isn’t a single thing you either have or you don’t. It’s more like a collection of various traits and behaviors and assumptions found among all people, but with a mix and intensity specific to us. The Ben Franklin character in the musical 1776 at one point says, “We’ve spawned a new race here, Mr. Dickinson. Rougher, simpler; more violent, more enterprising; less refined. We’re a new nationality.”
Data underline that point. The World Values Survey, for instance, compares the political, cultural, religious, and other views of most nations of the world and finds that the United States differs from other nations in its religiosity, relative lack of class stratification, and other characteristics. The late sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset wrote of “American exceptionalism” not in a triumphalist way but merely as a description of the body of attitudes and behaviors that are more prevalent among Americans than others.
Those who claim that there is no broadly shared American culture are kind of like fish who don’t know they’re wet — they take for granted much of their worldview, without understanding that other cultures are different. Years ago I was in Central Asia with a friend from the Middle East, and we saw from a distance two groups of Western tourists; he quickly identified which group was American, simply from their gait and demeanor. Imagining there is no broadly shared American culture is a sure sign of parochialism.
The process of Americanization of immigrants and their children — their incorporation into this common American culture — is slowed by two things: excessive immigration and multiculturalism.
Immigrants, legal and illegal, now make up the largest share of our population ever recorded — higher even than during the peak of the Ellis Island era. Annual legal immigration usually runs at 1 million or more each year — and while the stricter enforcement of immigration rules under President Donald Trump has reduced that somewhat, the high levels of immigration will continue until Congress changes the rules themselves. A more moderate level of future immigration is necessary so that, as then-Sen. Jeff Sessions wrote, “The forces of assimilation can knit us all more closely together.”
But whatever the level of immigration, the ideology of multiculturalism is devoted to preventing the Americanization of newcomers. Horace Kallen, an early proponent of what we’d today call multiculturalism, wrote that with regard to immigrants, we should seek “not the elimination of differences, but the perfection and conservation of differences.”
By legally classifying Americans into different racial and ethnic categories, by promoting bilingualism in public schools and at the voting booth, by using taxpayer funds to promote “cultural diversity,” the anti-assimilationist ideology of multiculturalism interferes with the natural process of Americanization. It makes immigration much more problematic than in earlier eras, when assimilation was expected by all of society’s institutions.
‘THE RIGHT WAY FORWARD’: IMMIGRATION AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
President George Washington wrote of his hope that immigrants “by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures, and laws: in a word, soon become one people.”
The goal of the multiculturalist ideology is to prevent this from happening. America’s future depends on its defeat.
Mark Krikorian, a nationally recognized expert on immigration issues, has served as executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies since 1995.