Dinesh D’Souza has been in the news this week. He has just had a new book published 'What's So Great About America,' (Regnery, April 2002). The Christian Science Monitor, 26 Apr. carried a review. See: http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0426/p11s01-coop.html
For more info about the book or for D’Souza’s biodata and photograph, go to http://www.dineshdsouza.com/ More photographs of him are at: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=Dinesh+D%27Souza&btnG=Google+Search ........................................... Dinesh D’Souza has written a provocative article in the 30 Apr. issue of Financial Times (UK) entitled “European countries struggling to assimilate immigrants should look to the US for ways to minimise ethnic tensions.” Full text: The uproar over Jean-Marie Le Pen in Europe has most Americans intrigued but not worried. America has its own Le Pen. He is the author, television personality and sometime presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan. Unlike Mr Le Pen, however, Mr Buchanan commands the support of only about 1 per cent of the American people. The reason for this is that the US has found a more successful model for dealing with immigrants than most European countries. The French, in particular, can learn a lot from the US's way of attracting people from all over the world and then allowing them to "become American". "Becoming American" is, I admit, a strange concept. Many countries would find the very idea incomprehensible. For instance, an American could come to my native country of India and live there for 30 years. He could even take Indian citizenship. But he could not, in any meaningful sense, "become Indian". You become Indian by being born in India to Indian parents. By contrast, millions of people have come to the US over the years and they have become Americans. This process takes time: in some cases assimilation does not happen until the second or third generation. This was true of the Irish, the Italians and the Jews who came to America a century ago and it is also true of the Koreans, the Pakistanis and the West Indians who come to America today. The reason why assimilation works is that America has a common culture that is not defined ethnically and is, in principle, open to all. In addition, America has found a formula for deflecting ethnic consciousness and steering the energies of people towards something else. That something else is commerce. America is fundamentally a commercial society. The only "right" mentioned in the original constitution prior to the addition of the Bill of Rights is the right to patents and copyrights. The American Founders did not want to import into their new nation the religious and ethnic battles that had divided and nearly destroyed Europe. Drawing on the teachings of John Locke, they arrived at a novel solution: to focus the daily lives of citizens not on denominational controversy or ancestral disputes but on bettering their condition and making money. The American approach is expressed in Samuel Johnson's remark: "Men are never as harmlessly occupied as when they are getting money." The basic logic is that people who are saving to make an addition to their kitchen, who are planning for the weekend or for their annual holiday, who are watching their port-folios, are not going to waste their time duelling over religion or ethnicity, or over whether someone else's ancestors wronged their ancestors. Of course, this portrait is somewhat idealised. Racial and religious tensions do erupt in America. Many African-Americans feel excluded from the top echelons of commerce and their activists want financial reparations for historical wrongs. Still, the commercial experiment in America continues to work remarkably well. Look at New York City. It is a place teeming with racial, religious, linguistic, stylistic and even moral diversity. One might expect it to be a cauldron of conflict. In reality it is a peaceful and prosperous place. A second reason for America's success is that it is a merit-based society in which who you are is much less important than what you can do. Another way to put this is that Americans usually judge people, as Martin Luther King put it, "not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character". Once again, I am not suggesting that this American ideal is always respected in practice. Discrimination is a reality - but what distinguishes America is the supreme effort that the country has made to reduce the scope of nepotism and discrimination and to increase the scope of opportunity and merit. Mr Buchanan and his fellow nativists allege that the US has too many immigrants. They say that immigrants take the jobs of native-born Americans because they are willing to do the same job for less. This is undoubtedly true but America's low un-employment rate shows there is plenty of work for everyone. Moreover, the relatively cheap labour of immigrants allows consumers to benefit from cheaper products. Americans also know that immigrants will clean homes, serve as nannies and pick strawberries - jobs that American-born workers are reluctant to do. Last, immigrant doctors, engineers and computer programmers bring needed skills to the country and help to keep America the most inventive and dynamic economy in the world. As with Mr Le Pen, Mr Buchanan's most resonant argument against immigration is not economic but cultural. The immigrants, he says, are corrupting American values and eroding the American way of life. As proof, he points to high rates of crime and illegitimacy, the vulgarity of popular culture and so on. These are legitimate social concerns - but who has caused such cultural decline? Not the immigrants but the natives. In many cases, immigrants bring values of hard work, self-discipline, deferred gratification and family unity that can provide a moral lesson to native-born Americans. None of this is to say that the problem of immigration has been solved in the US. Some immigrants come to the US looking not for economic opportunity but for the hand-outs made available by the welfare state. In some parts of California and Texas, immigrants seem reluctant to assimilate; and multicultural activists urge them not to give up their native language and native culture. These unfortunate developments help to strengthen anti-immigrant sentiment in America. Still, the US has avoided the Le Pen problem. Indeed, America has demonstrated that it is possible to have a successful multiracial society. For Europeans who are frustrated with the situation of alienated, undigested immigrant populations in their midst, there may be valuable lessons to be learnt from the folk across the Atlantic. =================== Don’t forget, you saw it on GoaNet! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-W-E-B---S-I-T-E-=-=-= To Subscribe/Unsubscribe from GoaNet | http://www.goacom.com/goanet =================================================================== For (un)subscribing or for help, Contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dont want so many e=mails? Join GoaNet-Digest instead ! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Help support non-commercial projects in Goa by advertizing!! * * * * Your ad here !!
