October 24, 2005
National Press Club
Washington, D.C.
MARK KRIKORIAN: Good morning. My name is Mark Krikorian. I am the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank here in town, all of whose work is online at cis.org.
There is constant debate in this town about what policies the American government should follow. The center's role is on immigration, to help foster more constructive debate than we usually have on the issue of immigration. But there are issues that we talk about all the time. Some of the personalities here are involved in issues related to Supreme Court nominations or foreign policies. Along those lines for those of you who follow this I am going to follow Basil Fawlty's advice and not mention the war, given we have very different opinions here on this.
But regardless of the various -- the policies that the American government is encouraged to follow -- those are all in a sense a super structure. There is a substructure which assumes, which is a coherent American nation, which then is able to debate what policies to pursue, and then implement them. And the book and paper we are going to discuss today are really about that issue; not so much, although in some regards, the specifics of policy, but more importantly, the substructure, the coherence of the American nation, which then is able to debate and pursue particular policies.
The book that we are going to be talking about is The 50% American. I think it's -- this is a proof, an advance proof -- but it's being printed this week. We have -- there are excerpts, advance excerpts, out there for those of you who want to see it. This is actually what it is going to look like. It is just the full version hasn't been printed yet. But it's The 50% American: Immigration and National Identity in an Age of Terror. And also an excerpt adapted from one of the chapters of the book, which is in your folders, specifically on the dual-citizenship issue.
The author is going to give his thoughts, kind of summary of the book; it's Professor Stanley Renshon, a political psychologist from the City University of New York Graduate Center, and a certified psychoanalyst, which is an interesting combination and I think helps shape the way he thinks about the issue, not so much the political theory of dual citizenship and dual allegiances, but the psychology of it, how to develop emotional attachments to the nation.
Commenting on the book will be two distinguished writers. David Frum is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor at National Review. His recent books are An End to Evil, and also The Right Man, a book about the Bush presidency. And Jim Pinkerton is a fellow at the New America Foundation, and a columnist for Newsday, and writes widely on a variety of other issues too: China, space policy, what have you.
So we will start with Professor Renshon and then David and then Jim, and then we will take some Q and A from the audience.
STANLEY A. RENSHON: Thank you, Mark.
Well, thank you, Mark, for that kind introduction, and thank you to David and James for coming here this morning and being here. It is my pleasure to be associated with the Center for Immigration Studies, whose motto might well be immigration research in the public interest. I am very appreciative of their support of my work.
That work takes a slightly different tact than most debates on immigration that center on how much immigrants cost or contribute to America. The core issue of immigration is not one of dollars or cents; the core issue in my view is national attachment and identity, emotional attachment to this country and developing an identity as an American. This is what I call the hidden core of the immigration debate. It doesn't matter if immigrants contribute more than they cost if they are not emotionally attached to the country and identify as Americans.
So too illegal immigrants are not only damaging to the United States because they begin their association with us by breaking the law and spawning a host of illegal activities from document fraud and human smuggling to government corruption. They are damaging as well because their enormous presence underscores and undermines citizen's confidence that the government can do or perform its most basic function, which is preserving the integrity of the American national community and its physical boundaries.
And it certainly does not count in favor of any proposed guest worker program now being considered in Congress that they envision an ongoing and continually replenished mass of unskilled workers whose only connection to the country is to provide it with large pools of cheap unskilled labor. American immigration policy is like a small U-Haul van forced to carry the entire contents of a skyscraper with four flat tires. The way to fix it is not by adding more cargo.
In 1782 a French aristocrat, turned farmer, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, toured America, and in his famous book, "Letters from an American Farmer," asked a profound question of us: "What then," he asked, "is this new American, this new man?" It is a question that we have been trying to answer ever since. He marveled at our ability then to take in all manner of people. And now that we have become more diverse than ever before, the question looms more importantly before us.
In a nation like the contemporary United States, comprised of many ethnic, racial, religious, and political groups, what is it exactly that binds us together as a people, and what, if anything, can be done to help further the national attachments of those who arrive and who are already here? What makes us Americans?
The traditional answer from both the left and the right is that the creed will unite us. Tamar Jacoby writes, quote, "Every school child knows that we are a unique nation not by blood or ancestry but by shared values." No less a diverse set of luminaries as Michael Walzer, Bill Clinton, and up to a few years ago Sam Huntington agreed. They all assert that what makes Americans American are shared democratic values.
These values, traditionally understood as the creed, are really cultural aphorisms, like democracy is the best form of government or everyone should have the right of free speech. These sentiments garner almost uniform approval in public opinion surveys. And so since everybody agrees, it is tempting to say that Americans have found the holy grail of political cohesion and attachment; but they haven't.
People are not united primarily by what amounts to cultural cliches operating at the stratospheric level unless those beliefs are connected to something that carries emotional power. And what might that be? Very basically, but very profoundly, it is emotional attachment. I think national psychology and national attachment is the psychological glue that holds this country together, and I see it as including five major elements.
One, a warmth and affection for; two, an appreciation of; three, a pride in; four, a commitment and responsibility towards; and five, support of the United States, its institutions, its way of life, and aspirations and fellow members. Love may be a summary term that covers all of these things, but each of the ingredients is important and all of them separately and together are critical in understanding how national attachment is related to the integration of immigrants and citizens in the American national community.
Every country, and the United States perhaps more than most, inspires idealization for its virtues and disappointments for its faults. The best remedy to either idealization or angry disappointment is realism. Yet, this is precisely what many Americans and immigrants alike lack: a realistic knowledge and a balanced appreciation of America's virtues and deficiencies. Curriculum and public debate that run afoul of no group sensitivities or unduly emphasize America's mistakes contribute little to fostering a more realistic, mature sense of national attachment.
Developing a realistic understanding of the country is important for another reason: It is the basic ingredient of appreciation, the second term of my attachment elements. Americans are often unappreciative of their circumstances because they take so much for granted: state-of-the art medical knowledge, telephones, paved roads, comprehensive sanitation systems, pure water, free primary and secondary education. The list is enormous and doesn't even begin to touch on the profound importance of freedom and opportunity.
One poignant paradox of contemporary American life is that immigrants are more aware of what America offers than many Americans, who are quicker to express their expectations and demands than they are appreciation. It is part of our culture of narcissism to take all that American offers as your due without appreciation of the gift that it represents.
Appreciation also underlies pride in the accomplishment of the national community. Obviously, if you don't appreciate something, you can't take pride in it. Now, excessive pride may precede the fall, but deserved pride but also serves a community purpose: to take pride in something is to feel that it's partially yours, another form of attachment. To feel that it is partially yours is one path towards feeling responsibility for and towards it.
So, to summarize, appreciation begets pride, pride begets caring, caring begets a sense of responsibility, and all together result in the widening of the emotional circle of attachment and commitment.
The term "love" of course conjures up a much maligned, wholly misunderstood force, patriotism, which is the much-neglected child of American democracy. Like so much of our culture, this term too has become contested. Liberals disdain it because the right embraces it and they prefer to define their attachment by their relentlessness of their criticisms. The right better understands its central importance but has been slow to grasp and to act on its critical implications for integrating immigrants and citizens alike into the American national community.
Yet, even if they had done so, they would have been swimming against the tide of powerful cultural currents. Over the past four decades, our capacity to help immigrants, and Americans too, become integrated has been compromised by two powerful centrifugal forces. One is the institutionalization of the view that race or ethnicity ought to be and is the principle vehicle of American national identity. This is a domestic form of dual citizenship.
The other is the view that Americans ought to trade in their parochial national attachments in favor of a more cosmopolitan, transnational identity. Advocates of this view embrace the growing incidents of dual citizenship and argue that America should be more "welcoming," in quotes, by helping immigrants retain and further develop emotional ties to their home countries. Our government, it is said, should allow and even encourage this.
And its most basic level, dual citizenship involves the simultaneous holding of more than one citizenship or nationality. Citizenship of course is a legal term and refers to the rights and responsibilities that become attached to a person by virtue of their having been born as or becoming recognized or a certified member of a state community. Nationality is different; it's a psychological term that refers to the emotional ties, core understandings about the world, and common experiences by the bind members of a group together.
It is entirely possible to have the rights of a citizen but feel little emotional attachment to the country that provides them. In that case citizenship is primarily instrumental, sought for the advantages that it confers, which is one reason why I don't think much of home ownership as the authoritative measure of assimilation. It is quite possible to own a home and feel little emotional attachment to the country.
Now, traditionally the bet that America has always made with immigrant self-interest -- which I approve of, by the way -- is that it could over time be leveraged into genuine attachment. In the past we have generally won that bet because of firm expectations that immigrants would assimilate and a concerted effort to help them do so. Today we have neither.
Strong emotional attachments provide a community with the psychological resources to weather disappointments and disagreements, endure hardships, find common purpose, and maintain a community's resolve in the face of historic dangers, which we now face. Strong emotional attachment and identification are the mechanisms that underlie sacrifice, empathy, and service. Citizenship without emotional attachment is the civic equivalent of a one-night stand.
Notable attachments of course are a fact of life. We are fathers to our children and children to our parents. We are husbands, professors, psychoanalysts, Jews, New Yorkers, and Americans. We are all of these things and more, but that doesn't mean that we can add to our attachments indefinitely or avoid making choices about which are primary. We cannot easily be observant Muslims and Christians or Jews at the same time, nor can we equally hold the profound attachments that nationality represents to several countries at the same time.
Some kinds of psychological attachments are simply incompatible; others require a choice about which will be primary. Dual citizenship, especially when it entails active participation in the political life of an immigrant's or a citizen's country of origin, leads to conflicts of interest, attention, but most importantly, attachment. Of course immigrants have feelings regarding their countries of origin, but a strong psychological and civic case can be made that they owe their primary focus and commitment to the country that is now their chosen home, and the United States in turn owes them the effort to ensure that they become integrated into the American national community.
My research suggests that there are now 151 countries including the United States that allow some form of dual citizenship. Most of them, with the exception of the United States, strongly regulate the rights and responsibilities of dual citizenship without outlawing it. They do so, no doubt, for the same reasons that lie behind the suggestions that I made in my book -- concerns with the viability of citizen attachments to their national communities. It is therefore possible to both permit and regulate dual citizenship and that is precisely what I propose.
Americans would be surprised and I think extremely disturbed to learn that it is entirely legal and in some circles preferred that American citizens vote in the election of foreign governments, serve in governmental positions in a foreign country, even while holding office in the United States at the same time, and serve in a foreign army. None of these practices advances the cause of integrating immigrant communities in our national community and in my view need to be stopped.
The impact of dual citizenship falls disproportionately on the United States. India and Mexico both allow dual citizenship for their nationals here, but neither has to worry very much about the civic impact of millions of dual citizens in their countries; the United States does. Of the over 22 million immigrants in the United States between 1961 and 2003, over 80 percent were from dual-citizenship-allowing countries; that is over 17.5 million, and that doesn't count the estimated 8.5 to 11 million illegal immigrants, 85 percent of whom are from dual-citizenship countries; nor do those figures take into account the children of both groups, nor Americans already here and eligible for dual citizenship.
Immigrant-sending countries have discovered the self-interested advantages of having large groups of their nationals become United States citizens while retaining strong emotional ties to their home countries. Princeton sociologist Alejandro Portes has written that Latin American countries have taken to promoting the acquisition of U.S. citizenship by their nationals so that they, their nationals, can make sustained economic and political contributions in the name of patriotism and hometown loyalty.
What kind of contributions? Well, consider Juan Hernandez, a former University of Texas professor, who in 2001 was named the first American to serve in the Mexican president's cabinet. Mr. Hernandez's role was to mobilize Mexican Americans in the United States. And what exactly was he mobilizing them to do? Well, in an interview with Ted Koppel on "Nightline," he made it quite clear: He wants Mexican Americans in the United States, quote, "to think Mexico first. I want the third generation, the seventh generation, I want all of them to think Mexico first."
Well, Americans on the other hand might well be excused if they wonder why one of their fellow citizens is legally entitled to work in and for a foreign government advocating putting America last and another country first. That is why in my book I propose two sets of legislative and policy actions. The first are meant to discourage immigrants and Americans alike from voting in foreign elections, advising or serving in foreign governments or armies, and establishing the norm that those actions should be actively avoided by Americans who could claim dual citizenship yet serve in decisionmaking capacities in government, political, or civic organizations.
The second set are meant to actively help integrate immigrants into the American national community by providing free English instruction, placing a limit on foreign languages for permits and other civic activities, providing venues where immigrants can learn how to navigate the day-to-day details of living in this country, and revamping public education to better integrate immigrants and Americans alike by providing the basis for realistic appreciation and attachment, back to the elements of national attachment.
Now, I recently had the honor of testifying before the congressional House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration where, aside from a contentious exchange with Congressman Sheila Jackson Lee about whether the concerns I expressed here were anti-immigrant -- she repeatedly pressed for examples of real and immediate damage done by dual citizenship.
Well, in that regard, consider the Pew Hispanic Center's 2002 survey of 3,000 persons of Hispanic and Latino background. I recommend it to you; it's a very interesting set of data, which you can get online. Among the many useful questions the survey asked were those concerning national and ethnic identity. The survey asked respondents about the terms they use to describe themselves and found that a large majority of Latinos, that is 88 percent, indicate that they identify themselves by the country where they or their parent's ancestors were born, for example, a Mexican or a Cuban. They were almost as likely to use the term Latino or Hispanic -- much less likely to use the term American, which didn't show up very often.
We are talking about a lot of people here. There are 14.5 million people from Latin America living in the United States by some estimates. So to say that 88 percent of that sample refers to themselves primarily in terms of their country of origin is to say that we have almost 13 million immigrants with no "American" in their cognitive structure.
The data on what is happening to some immigrant children is no less troubling. A 1992 study found that 25 percent of the second-generation immigrant children identified themselves as a non-hyphenated Latin nationality, country of origin, despite the fact that they had been born in the United States and grown up here. A more recent survey of over 5,000 children -- it is the major study of Hispanic assimilation in the United States -- found that among the U.S. born, just four percent of American -- of Mexican-American -- youth identified themselves in any way as American, the lowest proportion of any group.
And I think there is also an issue, which has not been looked at carefully, which is just how much emotional attachment is represented by contemporary hyphenization. We assume that every group is like the Irish, but there is a lot of evidence to suggest that this historical parallel is misplaced. Now, it's hardly surprising that other countries try to maximize their self-interests here through their immigrants.
The question before us is whether we should encourage their success at the cost of our own civic and cultural institutions. I believe obviously the answer to that is no. No country and no democracy certainly can afford to have large groups, members of its citizens, with shallow national and civic attachments. No country facing dangerous enemies, as America now does, benefits from taking a laissez faire attitude towards truly integrating its citizens into our national community. And no country striving to reconnect its citizens to their civic and national identity can afford to encourage its citizens to look to other countries for their most basic and profound national attachments. Thank you.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Thank you, Stan. David?
DAVID FRUM: A few months ago I was invited to give a book talk at Rutgers University. I took the train, and I was met at the train station by a car. When you talk at universities you are usually picked up by a member of the faculty or a graduate student driving a battered Volkswagen with save-the-dolphins bumper stickers, but this was very different. Waiting for me there was a magnificent gleaming town car.
And I sat -- the driver of the town car let me in, I sat down, and as he sat with his hands on the steering wheel he was obviously pulsing with the need to talk. So I said, go ahead; what do you have to say? Well, it emerged that he had read my book about President Bush. He was a huge admirer of the president and he wanted to talk. He had two sons, one 24, one 22, and he wanted to know what they could do to help the United States. This was shortly after 9/11 in the war on terror.
The man had a very pronounced Middle-Eastern accent. I couldn't quite place the accent. It didn't seem to be Iranian. It was sort of exotic to me so finally I said to him, "Where are you from? Maybe your background could help me." Well, it turned out he was from Egypt. He was a Coptic Christian who had come to the United States in 1975, built a limousine company, and this was his finest car. And I said, well, that is actually potentially very helpful. Tell me, your sons, do they speak Arabic? He gave me a big smile with enormous pride -- "Not one word." (Laughter.) That, I suppose, is the way that it was supposed to work.
I think that I am here today as a negative example of the phenomenon that Staley Renshon is talking about in his very profound, thought-provoking book. I come from -- I am a third generation of hyphenated American. My maternal grandmother was born in New York City in 1913, ended up in Niagara Falls in New York, married a Canadian across the border, and then lived for 65 years in Canada as an American citizen. As she got frail, her telephone answering machine would say, "If I don't come to the phone, please send the Marines -- the U.S. Marines, please." (Laughter.)
My mother was an American citizen who grew up in Canada and I find myself a Canadian citizen who has lived most of his life in the United States. That story and the Coptic story you would think might bias me to say that the problems that Stanley Renshon has raised are problems that can be navigated. But I think one of the advantages of growing up in two countries is you at least are liberated a little bit from the American assumption that the American experience is the only one and that American success is the product of some kind of natural working out of the laws of human nature.
But there are other countries that have confronted the kinds of problems that we are discussing here this morning, and the record shows that most of those countries have not met them as successfully, and let me point you to an example that I think is the most salient and that deserves to be better known, and that is the example of Argentina.
Argentina is also one, or was, one of the great immigrant-receiving countries of the world -- was because who in his right mind these days would choose to move to Argentina? But there was a time when it was one of the magnet destinations, before 1914. And at that time, it was one of the wealthiest countries in the world. In 1900, income per capita in Argentina was higher than in the United Kingdom, and it drew people from all over the planet, especially from the Mediterranean region and especially from Italy.
The Argentine elite was a landowning elite -- that was the great source of wealth -- and had a formal democracy, but in fact an oligarchic form of government. In order to protect the elite, in order to protect its power without abandoning the forms of democracy, [it] settled on a conscious policy of making the obtaining of Argentine citizenship extremely difficult. And the result was that many, many, a very large proportion -- in fact, at various points as many as a majority of the newcomers -- were unable to obtain Argentine citizenship for decades after arriving in the country.
This is a different -- the origin of the problem here is obviously very different from the one that Americans are familiar with, but the consequences are the same, that a large proportion of the [residents] of the Argentine state in the years before 1914 were not Argentine citizens; they were Italians, they were Spaniards, but primarily Italians. As a result they were unable to vote.
As a result the Argentine state developed land policies completely opposite to those of the United States; whereas American land policy always encouraged the broad ownership of land, homesteading, but before homesteading cheap sales of public lands, at very low prices, then the Homestead Act, which essentially gave the land away for nothing. And then I think one can look upon America's mortgage policies as an extension of this long tradition of encouraging land ownership. In Argentina it was exactly the opposite; that the voters were able to vote and sustain policies that made it extremely difficult to obtain land and maintain huge landed estates.
The result was as the immigrant generations settled, as they acquired the language, they built into the very structure of the Argentine state profound conflict between people who regard -- people of old-stock Argentines -- old-stock Argentines with citizenship and these newcomers without.
And, as those of you who -- not everyone here is familiar with Argentine history but many, many people have been to Broadway, so I think you know how the story comes out (laughter) that this is the fundamental thought line that pushes the Argentine state after World War I into ever intensifying political instability that leads in the -- when agricultural prices fall after World War I and especially during the Great Depression, into class conflict . . . landed class conflict, which becomes national conflict, which provokes a series of military coups, dictatorships, instability, and a collapse of Argentine prospects.
And to this day, Argentina is of course on nobody's list of the world's most successful countries. In fact, there was a study recently done of one Sicilian village, and people in the Sicilian village in -- they studied the people who left the Sicilian village or the population after World War II. The people in this village had basically four choices to make. One was stay in Sicily, another was migrate to New York, a third was migrate to Buenos Aires, and a fourth was migrate to Turin.
And they studied the group of people to find out how they did. And it's a little embarrassing to say the best choice turns out to have been to migrate to Turin, which I suggest -- I guess shows that there is a discount. You drop status by having to change languages. New York was the second-best choice, staying in Sicily was the third-best choice, moving to Buenos Aires the worst choice. (Scattered laughter.)
I think it is really worth absorbing this example and the example of other countries, to understand that what happened in America was not the natural working out of the consequences of immigration that you simply make these choices and universal laws of human nature breaking it. America has had a policy of immigrant absorption. And the policy, as Norm Podhoretz once called it, was a brutal bargain. We now sentimentalize it; we have Columbus Day, we have all of these holidays to remember, but it was actually a policy of forced assimilation in which a lot of things that we look back [on] with maybe a twinge -- some of the very unwillingness of the United States to make allowances to new groups, which could be quite brutal.
Harriet Miers, the president's nominee, was just tripped [up] by Senator Schumer, who asked her about a case called Meyer v. Nebraska, a 1923 case that the president's supporters say is kind of obscure but is in fact the first case in constitutional law textbooks and is hard to miss. But Meyer v. Nebraska dealt with a law the State of Nebraska passed during the First World War to outlaw the teaching of German because at that time the Germans were the largest immigrant group, the United States was at war with Germany, there were questions about loyalty. And those questions were not dealt with in the Kumbaya, celebrate-our-glorious-diversity fashion; they were dealt with by saying there is going to be a policy for a really quite brutal forced assimilation.
In the period of slow immigration after the Second World War -- sorry, after the 1920s and through the 1930s and '40s and after the Second World War -- some of the reality of the American experience with immigration got sentimentalized, much was forgotten; there seemed to be little reason to remember it. It has become more and more relevant. And I would now like to point to something that Stanley did not say but I think that is present in his book.
The problem here is not just one of immigration; the problem is one of the coincidence of both the new immigration that is a planetary phenomenon but of which the United States is a major recipient, and a mode of self-criticism in Western elites, a loss of confidence in the institutions of their nationhood, of their statehood, a loss of confidence in the very idea of statehood, an understandable reaction after World War II against the principle of the nation state, a fear, having suffered through it, of the destructiveness of nationalism, and of great forgetting of the idea once so closely held that only through the nation could people discover freedom and democracy. How else -- in what other institution, through what other mechanism -- did you vote, did you have rights than through the nation?
There is, in other words, a problem not just from migration from below but from a change at the top where immigration becomes both the occasion and the excuse for an attack on the principles of the nation state. Part of the answer to this tremendous problem has to be a change in elite attitudes about the value of the nation. I think after 9/11 we may be beginning slowly to see that as all over Western Europe and the United States governments have to -- for the first time since the First World War -- have to deal with the problem of loyalty in immigrant populations.
It is not a . . . not something we like to talk about and it's less acute in the United States, although it's real here. But throughout Western Europe, governments are confronting the problem of substantial citizen populations that are not loyal, that actually give sympathy to hostile foreign powers. There is some of that even in the United States where there are -- where precedence, forgotten precedence from World War II, and even more from World War I because very few German-Americans had any sympathy for the Nazi regime. But quite a lot of German-Americans had had sympathy for the Kaiser's regime and it hadn't been a problem -- that these forgotten examples become relevant again.
But as the Western European experience shows us, absolute numbers are as much or more a part of the problem than the ideology of governing elites, that the American problem with disloyalty in the war on terror is much more manageable. Americans tell themselves the reason it's more manageable than the Western European problem is because of the superior attractive power of the American creed, because the American economy is so much more dynamic and so much more successful at creating jobs, and there is obviously considerable truth to that. But it's also true that the numbers are smaller, and that makes a tremendous difference.
Probably the most famous dual citizen was Eamon De Valera. He went on as an American citizen to become president, to fight a civil war in Ireland, and then to become president of the Irish free state. And he is remembered with sentimentality. And I think it is . . . when Americans visit Dublin and see his portrait on the wall of the presidential palace, it is an interesting footnote to history that one of the reasons that he became president of the Irish state was that the British didn't hang him when they could, and they didn't hang him when they could because he was an American citizen and they were afraid of the repercussions.
But that was at a moment when the foreign-born population of the United States was dropping during the great hiatus of immigration. I think now absolute numbers take something that was a footnote to history and makes it part of the main story, puts it into the main text. And I think that the solutions -- the legislative solutions offered in this book are profound and thought provoking, but I think that the question of absolute numbers has to be part of the discussion as well, and I thank you.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Thank you, David. Now, Jim?
JAMES PINKERTON: Thank you. Thanks to both of you. And thanks for that too.
I think that David just put a little cap on it in terms of the national security implications of dual citizenship. I was thinking to myself if there are 151 countries, as Professor Renshon says, that we have some sort of dual citizenship relationship with [the U.S.], we will be in a war with some of them fairly soon, just inevitably. That is not a statement of pessimism; that is just a statement of realism in terms of the way foreign policy works. And so some day soon the question will come to a dual citizen, "Are you loyal to this country or your country?", and they will say which one -- [this] will not have a small repercussion in terms of the way we think about this issue. We are not there yet and the challenge is to think to that point, and what we need to do in the meantime to prevent that from coming or at least having serious consequences.
Just for fun, having read Professor Renshon's essay, all of the things that foreign citizens are doing in the U.S. and vice versa, I thought, well, okay, let's just go back and look at the oath of citizenship from the U.S. government, which quoting here, "I hereby declare on oath that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, of which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen."
That to me is pretty clear that everything that all of the things -- like, the guy from Colombia who was a city official in Hackensack, who then ran for the Colombia Senate, and they said, well, how can you be the political official in two countries at the same time, and he said, well, I will represent Colombians in New Jersey, which leaves out everybody else in New Jersey. I mean, it's just -- these sort of things sort of curl your hair or uncurl your hair, and I -- as Professor Renshon notes, a lot of this goes back to the 1967 Supreme Court decision of Afroyim v. Rusk, in which it was held that you can be a citizen and vote in two countries.
And so I would also associate myself closely with what David Frum said about the importance of Supreme Court nominees both in this context and in other contexts. You need people with brains who can figure this stuff out. You can't just simply take platitudes and split the difference between left and right on some issues. Sometimes you actually have to have the capacity to think through the issue and to have context and perspective.
And so the assimilation of German American is a good parallel. I just happen to remember that during the war, President Wilson's secretary of the Treasury said that we have enough lampposts in American to hang all of the disloyal Germans if that is what it comes to -- pretty tough stuff. I think the ACLU was created after that, not before that -- (laughter) -- but nonetheless . . .
MR. KRIKORIAN: Probably because of it.
MR. PINKERTON: Probably because of that, but nonetheless it spoke to . . . you know, when you have a national security crisis, when you have people blowing up your arsenals in New Jersey like the Germans or the Irish were doing back in about 1917. You have to take drastic steps. That is how you win a war and, more to the point, how you avoid losing a war.
The best invocation of patriotism that I can think of comes from President Lincoln in his first inaugural address; that "the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, will yet swell into a union." That I think is -- again, you can't get better than that for poetry but as Stan says in his piece, it sort of does fail to capture -- it leaves open the idea . . . there is something too theoretical about it.
And so actually, at the risk of seeming to be part of the problem I will quote George Orwell and his invocation of British citizenship, which he -- in 1941, in which he said -- is talking about nations and how people love their nations uniquely and irrationally and emotionally, and viscerally.
He says, "When you come back to England from any foreign country you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes, dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their mild, knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different from a European crowd. Yes, there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar boxes" -- which are mailboxes. "However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it or for any length of time."
And I think that is Professor Renshon's discussion of the psychology. This is psychology. Orwell is about as sophisticated and smart as anybody who has ever lived, and yet he understood and was very explicit in that piece, which is called "The Lion and the Unicorn," that Britain would only find freedom and also victory in World War II -- not a small consideration in 1941 -- through the assertion of Englishness. And I think were I more literate and versed I could find good examples in America. I just thought of that one as one that has always stuck with me as beautiful and poetic and also a powerful invocation of unilateral loyalty, as it were, to one country -- or sole loyalty.
And just to wrap up, there are just a few obvious questions that are going to come in the years ahead. One is obviously dual citizenship. One is foreign citizens in the U.S. Army. Again, national security is not a small issue. There is a substantial body of opinion, especially here in Washington, which says it is great to have foreigners in the U.S. Army. As a matter of fact, they should earn their citizenship by being foreigners in the U.S. Army. Well, this will not have small consequences down the road somewhere in terms of spies and intelligence issues and so on and so on. I'll just predict, I'll just make that bet.
Another issue is affirmative action -- you know, how do you manage affirmative action programs for people who came here recently? I mean, in the last 10 or 20 -- they have the right ethnicity, the right genetic makeup to be eligible for affirmative action, but they come here and they can claim . . . and they know they can claim in advance because it's all on the Web, if nothing else, all the stuff you can get if you fall into a certain category. I think you can make a pretty good argument that we owe some historic debt to -- or obligation to -- African-Americans, who came here under extremely different circumstances hundreds of years ago, but it's hard to argue for somebody who came here yesterday. And again, maybe a dual citizenship at the same time is entitled to a whole heap of claims on America today.
But I'll go back to the most basic level of all, which is in a republic -- if this is a thing that we've all created as citizens of this country that we have an emotional connection to, that the founders in their wisdom -- following on the Greeks and
Romans -- said, the reason you have to be in a jury and the reason you have to be part of the militia and the reason you have to be an active citizen is because we want you to be so entangled with the state that you'll do a good job by the state and the state will do a good job by you. It's the people that create the nation and we can't have you be loyal to two people. It's just -- I mean, the Greeks and Romans would have just laughed. They would have said, what are you talking about? You have to take some smart lawyers to explain how that was the obvious implication of everything that the founders and others thought.
I think the political implications are pretty clear in terms of like the way President Bush is having a hard, hard time with his immigration program. There's some combination of crazed multi-culturals on the left, and Wal-Mart would love to just bring in guest worker / bracero helot class to do all our work for us and undercut wages and so on. But the American people, in their wisdom, without a lot of help from the media, without a lot of help from the elites, have sort of struggled to say no to this, and as Mark Krikorian, who has been fighting a lonely battle for ten years and I think now is starting to reap a fair number of victories, including some great quotes in The Washington Post on Saturday, is -- the reaction is coming in.
People just in their bones . . . most Americans have no idea of all the things that a dual citizen can do in this country, no idea that dual citizenship exists. But when they find out, I think the politics are just a total no-brainer. And that's before -- I'll close on this -- incidents like the one in London in July, where you have people who just obviously see England as, at best, an aircraft carrier, at best a place to plot and scheme terrorist attacks -- this will come to an end soon. I mean again, if we wind up in conflicts as we inevitably will, the whole notion of dual citizenship will just be, as Mark said in a different context in The Post on Saturday, as just so much paperwork.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Thank you, Jim. You know, we're in the chattering class when quotes are victories, but unfortunately that's true. Stanley, did you want a quick rejoinder or response?
MR. RENSHON: Not a rejoinder, just two points. First, David Frum's point about the loss of confidence in the elites -- and I think that is very true. One of the reasons I like George Bush quite a bit is because he is unabashedly a person who puts his national feelings first and has rallied, I think, support for the idea that Americanism is very important. He is, by a lot of names -- you and I both are Bush biographers -- and he's a stand-apart person. He can stand apart from the crowd. I think you may let Americans off the hook a little bit by -- Alan Wolfe did a book on a series of interviews, and what he found was that Americans are extremely tolerant. I call it avoidant tolerance, simply because Americans don't like to second-guess anybody's decision, so they sort of stand apart from all the things that they think ought to be done, but they don't want to raise their voice to say they should be done.
And so, what I think we need is a conversation led by a segment of the elites, including the president, and those of us here who are less than the highest level elites, which mobilizes the resources of the American community at a general level to give voice. You know, if people don't know that there are other people out there who believe the same way and are willing to take a stand, they think that they are alone, and in their silence, they retreat. And so I think the discussion is a good one.
Over on the oath, I've read a lot of things about the oath of allegiance, and my thought about it is this: there is a difference between taking an oath and the follow-through of your feelings. There is a lot of social psychology, which reports that if you take a position that you don't necessarily agree with, you wind up agreeing with it. But I think it's one thing to ask people to renounce their membership in another community, and it's quite another to do the things that allow them over time to actually psychologically do that. So I'm not one of these believers that say just if you reform the oath, you'll have citizens automatically. I think the government has to get involved in a big way to help them do that over time. That's it.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Okay, thank you Stanley. We'll have some questions from the audience. If you could identify yourself, yes, ma'am.
Q: (Off mike.) I have a couple of questions. The first is -- you said something in regard to India and Mexico about civic responsibility, that the . . . you know, the U.S. has to bear some part of the civic responsibility that the country of origin doesn't. So if you could first elaborate on that, please.
And the second was that I think that the logic behind dual citizenship is that it makes for happier immigrants because it allows them to retain some roots in their country of origin. So if it makes for happier citizens, doesn't it allow them to become better citizens in this country?
MR. RENSHON: Well, your second question first -- I believe it's quite possible to be happy by being an American citizen and retaining some connection to your country of origin. My point of view is not that we should get rid of those connections, not that we should mandate that they never visit or read a foreign-language newspaper. My point is simply that the primary stance of people in the United States ought to be oriented toward their country here. And so, somebody asked me on a radio show the other day, well your book is "The 50 % American." How much Americanism could you want? Well, this guy wanted 100 percent Americanism. And I said, well, you know, it should be primary. You know, if somebody has got -- and this is just speculation -- if somebody's got 75 percent attachment to this country and 25 percent attachment [elsewhere] -- I understand that. That, to me, is not a problem. What is a problem for me though is when you have an equal share of attachment, which means you could flip a coin about which way anything will go, or even less. I think people ought to be oriented emotionally and civically primarily here, and I think we ought to be trying to help them to do that. And I believe that they will be happy as citizens who have that as an opportunity.
With regard to India and Mexico, my point was simply this: that all of the countries who send immigrants here are playing part of a double game. They're all for dual citizenship when it comes to having their nationals in the United States become citizens and attached at home, but boy, if you wanted to become a citizen of India or Mexico, it really wouldn't be quite so easy. And with regard to India, it's an amusing story that for many years the Indian community here was agitating to have some form of dual citizenship. And so, after ins and outs and so forth, the government passed a law for dual citizenship for Indians abroad in specific countries -- not everywhere, in specific countries. Well, gee, who are those specific countries? Well, the United States is right up at the top of the list, other countries, the Western European countries, are right up at the list. And that is understandable. They want to have their citizens where they will do the most good for India. And I don't fault India for wanting that or Mexico or Zimbabwe. I think that is international politics. People do that. But that doesn't mean that we have to encourage that or allow it or facilitate it, and so that's the distinction I would draw
MR. PINKERTON: I would just add that perhaps the greatest political scientist on the subject of national identity and sovereignty, Thomas Hobbes, would not have worried whether people were happy or not. That was not his problem. (Laughter.)
MR. KRIKORIAN: Identify your -- John, if you could just identify yourself.
Q: John Fonte with the Hudson Institute. On the question of happiness, I suppose there are some married people who would be happy if they had four or five spouses. That doesn't mean you should necessarily facilitate that.
I have an addendum. I commend Stan's work and I think it's terrific, and this is very informative. Just an addendum on where we are, as somebody was saying -- and you guys can comment or not comment -- legislation now has been introduced in the Congress as part of J.D. Hayworth's Enforcement First Act of Title XII, Section 703, which lists specific acts now of showing dual allegiance, which are being criminal in this proposal, an act of, a fine of $10,000 with one year in jail if you violate the oath of renunciation of allegiances . . . if you vote in a foreign country, if you serve in the government of the foreign country, if you serve in a foreign army, if you use the passport from that foreign country. And also, in the act, the foreign countries are notified that these people are now citizens of the United States. And also the State Department group is directed to change its policies of tolerance for dual citizenship with one of opposition.
Now, this legislation in a sense is historically -- it really comes out of the 1930s. Franklin Roosevelt established a commission working with Congress to codify all of the immigration laws and come up with suggestions. All of these things are part of FDR's report to Congress in 1938. They were enacted in the Immigration Nationality Act. And then we had the -- (inaudible) -- case, which was thrown out in '67, so now the effort is to criminalize. So there is some -- these are victories. There is some advance on this. Yes, David.
MR. FRUM: Can I -- when you're done. Yeah.
Q: One more point. By addendum, the next Pew study that Stan mentioned was even -- also interesting on this is this study was taken six month after 9/11, so it was the height of patriotic feeling. People were still identifying themselves -- I mean 55, 60 percent as Mexicans, only 20 percent American and so on. So the identification was with the home country first, Latino second, and either American or hyphenated-American third or fourth. But this was in -- the survey taken March or April/May of '02, so it was eight, nine months after 9/11, so it was the height of patriotic feelings and still you have this problem. So that was my addendum.
MR. FRUM: Those are very -- John, those are very interesting ideas. I think they remind us again of the problem of absolute numbers. I mean, when those ideas were originally proposed during the Franklin Roosevelt administration and accepted by Franklin Roosevelt, they were isolationist attempts to keep America out of World War II. They were never enforced. I mean, many Americans joined the RAF. Many Americans served with the French. My wife's family became Canadians because her paternal grandfather migrated from New York in order to fight in World War I. He was angry that the United States wasn't in and actually he wanted to join -- actually this is quite a funny story -- he wanted to join the famous Black Watch regiment, and he arrived at the dock in Quebec City. And he didn't have enough money to get across, but there was a recruiting sergeant there for the Black Watch. And so he signed up, not knowing it was the Canadian Black Watch as opposed to the Scottish. He ended up as the creator of the Canadian Armored Corp.
But in context, where the numbers are reasonable, all of these -- many of these things you're pointing to are not necessarily problems. In fact, if you criminalize them, you actually will hamper much of the free action of future American presidents. I mean, the day may come when an American president wants to turn a blind eye to American citizens enlisting in the armed forces in Taiwan. That . . . you could well imagine that he would want not to criminalize that, whereas he might want to take a very different attitude to American citizens who try to enlist in the armed forces of the People's Republic of China, or you could multiply examples on your own. In a world in which immigrants and foreign-born are 3, 4, 5 percent of the American population, all of these concerns become much less pressing and you can then take a more subtle and less self-constraining approach to this problem of how you feel about your citizens taking part in the activities of foreign countries. When you're up to 10, 12, 15 percent, then you have to use these blunt instruments whose harms may well fall upon America and America's ability to conduct an effective foreign policy in the future.
Q: Well, actually, I didn't mention part of the bill, which maybe solves your problem, which is within the bill it says exceptions can be made in terms of the national security interests of the United States. And that's exactly what you're talking about. In the interests of the United States and Taiwan, Americans who join the Taiwanese army -- that is part of the bill as well. This actually wasn't simply isolation. It was actually -- it had direct connection with the pledge of loyalty, which we're discussing. One of the issues discussed was the vote in the Saar referendum in Germany in 1935. It turned out that some German-Americans were voting the Nazi line in favor of Anschluss in Germany with the Saar election in 1935, and that was specifically mentioned. Either German-Americans voting actually against American interests for the Saar region joining Nazi Germany, so there was definitely a question more of that.
MR. RENSHON: John, I think I'm going to take a step away from your point of view, if I may, and it has to do with the word criminalization, which is a harsh, tough word, and I'm not sure I would think it was a necessary word. I'm for administrative sanctions. I think people should be fined if they violate these norms and so forth. But I think the thing we are trying to do is to establish a norm, and I'm not sure you have to have a law, which requires people to spend a year in jail. That I think just defines itself and the precedent will establish the norm if people are careful with it.
Secondly, there is a political dimension to this, and I can, you know, I can just imagine somebody saying of this war, oh sure, you want to send people to jail for their feelings about their home country. And it seems to me that politically, that is a losing proposition. Americans, I think generally, will bridle at that idea and perhaps correctly so. And so I would -- I agree with the goals. I agree with the administrative costs that should be placed on people. But I think the idea of sending people to jail will probably wind up to be unnecessary a) and b) self-defeating. And so I just have a worry about that.
Q: I don't imagine anyone would actually go to jail. The point of it was to discourage -- (inaudible). But in past, you lost your citizenship.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Did you have anything here?
Q: Yes, sir. I'm -- (inaudible) -- with Henry and Associates. Would you folks address the implications of your concerns about assimilation for the guest worker debate we're about ready to have? Particularly guest worker programs that lead to citizenship for some of the 11 million illegal aliens that are here now.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Okay, well, I'll take that up. I think it is very relevant for even those guest worker programs that pretend not to give permanent status -- the president's proposal and the Kyle-Cornyn proposal -- will in fact end up giving permanent status, so that they're really -- they're all the same. They're all going to give permanent legal status, which is in English, we call amnesty, to large numbers of illegal immigrants and they're going to overwhelmingly be coming from dual citizenship countries. In fact, the percentage is even going to be larger than the overall immigration flow because they're going to be hugely disproportionately Mexican among the illegal immigrants.
And even if the fantasy of temporary-ness were somehow maintained, their kids are still going to be U.S. citizens because the interpretation of the 14th Amendment isn't going to be changed. I mean I asked the White House spokesman last year about whether they were going to change that with regard to the guest workers and they sort of -- first of all, never heard of it, which is no surprise, but they said, no, no, no, of course not. We would never do anything like that.
So the fact is that the proposals now really are just proposals for massive increases in immigration. They're not separate from the rest of the immigration debate, and so, David's point about absolute numbers I think really is right on. You can screw up assimilation and citizenship policy if you have a tiny number of immigrants. It's still bad, but if you screw it up, the damage is very small. What we're talking about, like Stanley said, is adding more cargo to the broken U-Haul. And so, my point is that the issues of citizenship and national and emotional attachment are relative to the immigration debate because what we're talking about in this upcoming debate really is nothing but massive increases in immigration, and so, whatever the form takes, the citizenship and integration issues have to be central to that. I don't know if I said everything that needed to get said.
MR. : I think that's a really excellent answer.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Yes, ma'am, you were next.
Q: Marcella Sanchez with The Washington Post. I have two questions for Dr. Renshon. First you talked about the five steps to emotional attachment. And I think I missed -- the second step you said it was appreciation, that immigrants tend to take things, appreciate things, more than Americans (that we take normally for granted). So what is your point there? That they do bring more appreciation but at some point it's not enough?
Also, something you mentioned in your book, and I'm paraphrasing, that immigrants today tend to look more to the past --
MR. RENSHON: Yes.
Q: As opposed to immigrants in the past who looked to the future. But we've heard about the German experience at the beginning of the last century. How different was their experience? Were they actually really looking to the future or actually looking to the past?
MR. RENSHON: I think the phrase I used in the book was look backward rather than forward, and that phrase meant to denote that people who came here before really were escaping from lives that they really didn't want to look back on or have anything much to do with. They came to America for freedom, for opportunity, and they were focused on finding that here and finding their lives here.
Today, it's obviously much easier to retain your ties to your home country. And it's also the case that home countries are now in the business big time of cementing those ties to the old home country and increasing them. So that's one large difference between then and now. There are many other differences.
For example, people who came here in the '20s and the '30s came into a culture in which Americans at all levels, that is both the elites and the masses, assumed that you came here and you would be an American. It wasn't debatable. It was simply an assumption that was a good thing that you would do. Immigrants who come here now come into a culture that is contested. When you think about what the cultural wars are, there are army wars, there are history wars, there are all sorts of wars. And all these wars, when you think about them, what are they? They are wars about the meaning and the importance of our major institutions. Every institution in the United States that carries some weight has been quote-unquote "contested," to use a dainty phrase that really doesn't do justice to the savagery of the debate. And so, immigrants I think are rightly confused and perhaps perplexed when they come into a society and they are told to assimilate, but every cultural institution and phrase is one which people say, oh yeah, that's awful. You know, that's bad. You shouldn't be doing that. So I think there are a lot of differences between then and now, and I can't remember them now, but I have a chapter on the differences between then and now, and so I'd alert you to go there.
As far as immigrants appreciating a lot of what they come for, this was, if I may . . . you know I was in Vietnam, and the only way you can speak to people frankly is out of earshot of other people. So I had a guy who took me around on a motorbike, and every time we were on the motorbike, of course, then he could talk to me about what he was doing. And he was telling me about his family, and his wife was working, and they worked very hard and what were they working for? Well, they were working twelve, fifteen, twenty hours a day, both of them, to get money. Money for what? To be able to afford education. And it struck me. I mean, here I was, I was in my 60s and I said, God, you know, we don't do that in the United States. It's free. You know, you pay taxes, but it's generally free. And that got me to thinking of how much we have here.
And so I think, in a way, when you think about immigrant psychology, we start out with some pluses. We didn't get into it here, and I have a section in my book on American national psychology. I think there is an American national psychology. Part of it has to do with ambition. Part of it has to do with optimism. Part of it has to do with the Protestant ethic without the Protestantism. I mean there are all sorts of psychological underpinnings to this culture, and I think we have an advantage with immigrants because they come with ambition -- that's good. They come with the idea of working hard and delaying gratification. That's good.
So we have the ability to help them to make the transition because they come here with the capacities that we value in our culture. And yet, we don't do it, so that was my point about immigrants coming here with some of the basic prerequisites, if you like, for success in American society. What remains is to have a culture that understands and values them and states it quite clearly, and a government which says yes, this is important. Let's do something about it.
MR. FRUM: I want to add a broader thought response, just add to your point and to the point asked by the very question about India that maybe helpful here. Educated Americans are very influenced by the example of what is going on in Europe right now. And I mentioned before this problem of the difficulty that Americans have because of the fascination and largeness of American political culture ever seeing -- of getting a broad view of how things work around the world. And one exception to that is Western Europe, where Americans have watched the dissolution of national identities in the European Union, and it's really quite remarkable.
There's a town in Majorca now that has a German mayor. He's a summer resident, because throughout the EU, the policy is that if you are a German and you have a residence in Spain, so long as you're a German citizen, you cannot vote in a Spanish national election, but you're perfectly free to vote in municipal or local elections, or indeed to run, or indeed to hold office. So you can be a German living in Spain and be mayor of the town. And I think a lot of Americans look at this and you have to find it inspiring.
I was just in Alsace, a piece of ground for which hundreds of thousands, millions of people lost their lives. I was on a bike and I bicycled from France across the Rhine into Germany and then bicycled back again, no questions. I mean it was a truly inspiring moment. But I think when Americans look at that and they say, ah-ha, Europeans are laying nationality behind and maybe we should do the same with double nationalities with the rest of the world, they don't -- Europeans though, you want to take that same bicycle trip -- well, you can't, there's water. But if you wanted to do it into Turkey, it's a very different business.
Europeans are not laying nationality aside. They're building a new nationality out of older components, just the way it's happened with the creation of the Italian state, just the way it happened with the creation of the German state. They don't always admit to themselves that is what they're in the process of doing, but that is in fact what they are doing. They're building a common citizenship. And the day will come when Germans will be able to vote in Spanish national elections, because the idea of Germany and Spain as distinct sovereignties will have been left behind. Different people will have different views about whether this is desirable or not, but it is not a global citizenship that they are building, it is a European citizenship that is available to this new embryonic entity that they are -- I think their leaders with fairly open eyes are deliberately building. And it's a very different thing.
And I think one of the things that makes Americans open to the idea of these kinds of dual nationalities is they have some idea of America being involved in something like this. And certainly in this age, when people go back and forth and do business in London and business in New York, and a lot of the national passions that led to the great wars of the 20th century behind us, again those are welcome things, the abatement of that kind of nationalism. But I think that there is -- and it's a little awkward to define or to explain, but we need to keep in mind that this is not a world in which we're moving to in which national passions are going to disappear. They may just become, as the Europeans are demonstrating, broader. But the idea of communities of insiders and outsiders and of conflict between communities of insiders and outsiders, and of the possibility the state may come where it demands the total allegiance of its citizens. And we hope those things happen rarely, but there are moments where states do demand total allegiance. That is not going to vanish in the world of the 21st century.
MR. PINKERTON: Just a couple points -- I remember hearing once Peter Salins at the Manhattan Institute say that immigrants -- because they're hard-working and thrifty -- are actually better than Americans, which I said, gee, I mean, that's . . . I thought part of the right of being an American is to be lazy and stupid. (Laughter.) It's probably like people in your own family. They're still part of your family. You're stuck with them.
I just caution again this notion of America as a bunch of meritocrats, because if America is a great idea and it's the best place with the lowest capital gains tax rate to be -- and I'm all for that by the way -- but if it doesn't happen to have the lowest capital gains tax rate, if America is a great idea but there is some country with a better idea, then you've got a problem down the road somewhere. And I think that's again where national security implications are not small.
And at the risk of this panel becoming too much of a love-fest, I would say that things in the European Union and within Europe aren't quite proving the kind of multicultural, multi-national dream that David alluded to. Let's hope Germany and France never go to war again, but the French and the Dutch voting down the European Charter, I think suggests that the dream of a united Europe from Lisbon to Helsinki or wherever it is, is not quite happening. And frankly, I think that's a good thing, I must say. I think that I'm really with the Enlightenment nationalists of the 18th and 19th century who say look you find freedom within your country. There is an identifiable people known as the French or the Italians or the Americans, and you trust them to provide your freedom and your rights to you. That's a much better system than trying to pretend that everybody from Croatia to Belgium is the same kind of people. I just don't agree with that.
MR. RENSHON: David, I also want to disagree just a bit because it seems that, at least in England, a lot of people don't want to have a loss of their national identity. And there was a poll that was published -- I don't have the figures in my mind -- but it was an astounding number of Muslims felt no loyalty to the British government or to the British country and so, I think it's operating at two levels. You have an elite who is moving towards this idea of a unified national identity, but there is a lot of feeling on the ground that we want to be who we are, and so, I think you have that same split between the elites and the masses that you discovered or you talked about here.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Well, it's already getting late. We're going to have to continue that debate later. Transcript of the whole discussion will be on our website cis.org. I can't speak for all of the panelists, but I mean I'm happy to be accosted afterwards. And to plug the book again, The 50% American, from GU Press, "Immigration and National Identity in the Age of Terror." They are printing it up apparently right now somewhere, so even as we speak, so I encourage it and I thank the panelists for participating.
(Applause.)
(END)
