Those with liberal views and short memories often urge Americans to learn from Europe when it comes to building a fairer and more just society and a foreign policy stance that avoids unilateralism and empire. The implication of this position was not only that American had much to learn, but a great deal to emulate.

Given Europe's financial problems, less talk is heard along those lines these days. And there is growing appreciation that Europe's call for a more "world community"-friendly foreign policy stance is a luxury made possible by American military capacity and protection. Read more...

Multiculturalism in the United States has a long silent history. The United States has, from its founding, taken in immigrants from different cultural backgrounds, many of whom were, at the time, controversial. First, it was the Germans who raised questions about whether they could or would become "real Americans." Then questions were raised about the Chinese and after them Irish and the Eastern European immigrants. Now it is Hispanic-Americans and Muslim-Americans of whom we ask those questions. Read more...

There are some things that are simply not easily or widely discussed in immigration debates in the United States and abroad, and the virtues of multiculturalism are among them. I have called them taboo immigration topics not because there are explicit prohibitions against discussing them, but because in all the myriad contemporary American immigration policy debates it is very rare to find any discussion of them. The silence is not accidental. Read more...

The Washington Post's Next Great Pundit puts a great deal of faith in the report he touts from the Kaufmann Foundation in his comparison of immigrant-rich Detroit (good) with immigrant-poor Cleveland (bad). Yet that report actually had this to say about Detroit: Read more...

Connor Williams, winner of the Washington Post's contest for "America's Next Great Pundit 2010", is a master of non sequiturs, at least if his opinion piece entitled "The Midwest Needs Immigrants" is representative. Read more...

In reading through the many commentary pieces related to our national immigration debates, it's worthwhile to start to draw some distinctions. There are those rare successful efforts to make sense of a specific immigration issue whose analysis leaves you more informed than when you started. There are those with which you essentially agree, but which are not much help in advancing your understanding because they essentially restate conclusions you have already reached. Read more...

Hyphenated American identities have helped many millions of new legal immigrants to the United States, from every continent in the world, find their way eventually to becoming full-fledged members of our national community. So why do we seem to have discarded that unparalleled record of success when it comes to America's largest and fastest grown new immigrant groups – "Hispanics"/"Latinos" ? Read more...

Hyphenation helps new immigrants resolve a very personal and consequential set of questions: How can I acknowledge who I am while at the same time recognizing the reality of a fresh start in a new country of whose community I would like to be a part? But it does more than this. Read more...

New legal immigrants have chosen the United States as their home in which to live and work, but it is not yet fully their country. Nor, can we expect it to be right away.

The new immigrant arrives having spent his childhood and formative years in his country of origin. She has absorbed its language, culture, and outlook, while at the same time having had an uncountable number of experiences that reinforce and deepened the connections among these elements. So that immigrant arrives here with an already formed identity. He or she is a Nigerian, a Chilean, a Vietnamese, and so on. Read more...

To understand the role of the hyphen in helping legal immigrants become Americans it is important to keep in mind its role in managing the emotional currents of the immigration process.

Immigration begins with the decision to give up a great deal to make a fresh start in a new country. For most immigrants this requires adjusting to a new culture, a new language, unknown economic prospects, and a lonely existence apart from family, friends, and community. Read more...

Theodore Roosevelt's hyphen animus was as mistaken as it was understandable. He had a country about to go to war and 23 million new immigrants, most of them from the very continent where the war was being fought. And some of these immigrants had mixed feelings about plunging into a conflict that reignited complex feelings about their former home countries. Read more...

One of the most successful tools in the arsenal of assimilation is barely noticed. It is not as obvious as learning English. Its benefits are not as apparent as getting an education, or a job. But it has been instrumental in helping millions of immigrants make the emotional transition from their countries of origin to new attachments that are, in the best circumstances, part of becoming an American.

I am writing about the mighty hyphen. Read more...

Two recent pieces of commentary on the extremes of the immigration debate deserve recognition for casting light on immigration rhetoric that has no legitimate place in our discussions. Read more...

Some ideas are so astoundingly bad that it is not only hard to take them seriously, but also to understand how they could be seriously made. Which brings us to Nicholas Kristof's recent column entitled "Primero Hay Que Aprender Espanol, Ranhou Zai Xue Zhongwen," which translates to "First, one must learn Spanish. Then Learn Chinese." Read more...

Gregory Rodriguez put one of the most novel defenses of the recently defeated DREAM Act in a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece. He does not, of course, take up any of the glaring and egregious loopholes contained in the bill as written, but his argument is unusual enough to be considered on its own merits, or lack thereof. Read more...

The idea that the United States needs a temporary worker program is fast becoming conventional wisdom. The logic underlying this supposed need is well captured in an article by Daniel Griswold of the Cato Institute. He writes, "The fact that 400,000 to 500,000 foreign born workers were joining the U.S. labor force illegally in years past indicates the general magnitude of the need for additional legal workers when the U.S. economy resumes normal growth. Read more...

With the decreasing likelihood of "comprehensive immigration reform," at least as it has been formulated to date, and the defeat of the so-called DREAM act, interested parties on all sides of the immigration debate are searching for new policy initiatives that can stand on their own and not be dependent on any "grand bargain" of amnesty and increased immigration in exchange for promises of enforcement. Read more...

What a difference a lame duck makes. At his press conference after the midterm elections, the president appeared subdued, acknowledged a "shellacking," and promised a renewed search for common ground.

Then, at his post-lame duck news conference, the president, according to one wag, went "from shellacking to swashbuckling." More importantly, the president clearly had recovered both his usual high level of self-confidence and his transformational ambitions. Read more...

Removing the most egregious loopholes in any revised dream act still leaves complex and difficult problems to be solved. Read more...

Debra Saunders makes the very good suggestion in her column on the most useful starting place for revising the DREAM Act: "If Republicans write the bill, [is that] they can make sure the Dream does not include egregious loopholes." She doesn't name the offending culprits, but they are obvious: Read more...

The DREAM act, as I noted in yesterday's posting, speaks to the circumstances of the group of illegal immigrants most likely to draw sympathy from across a wide spectrum of political views. The problem, sympathetic conservative columnist Debra Saunders notes, is to find "a middle way that unites the right thing to do with smart politics." Read more...

Those who accuse conservatives with heartless and unshakable antipathy to immigrants, devoid of any understanding of the human and moral complexities that are part of our nation's immigration dilemmas, don't bother to know much about conservative thinking. Case in point: Debra Saunders' heartfelt column supporting a future GOP written version of the so-called "DREAM Act." Read more...

In a burst of ironic serendipity, the Wall Street Journal published two articles on the perilous state of the American economy and the idea, now gaining traction, that immigrant entrepreneurs are one solution to our economic problems. Read more...

So, do the new Pew numbers mean that even with only a small uptick in the American economy, the number of illegal immigrants is beginning to rise again? If this were the case, it would undercut administration claims that it was its tough enforcement policies that were responsible for decline in illegal immigration that Pew had found in an earlier study. Read more...

It seems like only yesterday that news reporters, legalization supporters, and the Obama administration were touting the new Pew study that reported, "U.S. Unauthorized Immigration Flows Are Down Sharply Since Mid-Decade." Read more...

The recent Politico story entitled "Hispanic vote a 2012 wild card" does not present a very attractive picture of "Hispanics." It presents them as having a narrow, self-interested focus on the almost total advancement of their group in the immigration process with little regard to the possible needs of other groups or the United States more generally. Read more...

Every once in a while an immigration news story comes along that is just so bad, that there is no other word to describe it but awful. Regretfully that is a case with a story on the role of "Hispanics" in the just concluded 2010 elections. The Politico story is entitled "Hispanic vote a 2012 wild card" and is written in part by the ordinarily sensible journalist Ben Smith. Read more...

In one of the most widely known deductions in the Sherlock Holmes mysteries oeuvre, the famously logical detective realized that the fact that a guard dog didn't bark meant he must have known the killer.

Which brings us to the president's post election press conference.

Among the many questions he was asked, several had to do with the possibilities of finding common ground with the new Republican Congress: Read more...

Among the many important results yesterday's election is the resounding defeat of two measures that would have allowed non-citizens to vote. In previous entries, here, here, here, and elsewhere, I had taken up the most recent efforts to do away with the requirement that only citizens be allowed to vote. Read more...

In what can only be described as a very ugly exhortation, President Obama called on Latinos to "punish our enemies." That remark, reported by the New York Times, was part of the president's full-scale effort to motivate Latinos to come back to the Democratic fold and help buttress their cause in the elections next week. Read more...