Review

The Unmaking of Americans

For centuries America has grown by encouraging foreign-born men and women to make the arduous journey to our shores, then inducting them into American culture. The process of creating new Americans, not in name only but in spirit, is known as Americanization. The past two decades, however, have seen a war on that process, waged by the multiculturalist left. This book is an eloquent expose of that war and a battle-cry for a return to Americanization.

"Being an American is not a matter of DNA," says Miller, but of "adherence to a set of core principles about equality, liberty and self-government. These ideas uphold an identity into which immigrants from allover the world can assimilate."

The universalism of America's founding ideals created the great "melting-pot," in which immigrants from hundreds of different countries became distinctively American. In their native countries, these immigrants are culturally very different. During the height of European immigration to the U.S., it was considered an open question as to whether they could live together. A free America proved they could.

Miller examines the opposition to this principle of assimilation. The conservatives, for example, fear that foreigners who do not share their parochial traditions will destroy America's culture. Even more insidious, Miller argues, is the newer multiculturalist attack.

Multiculturalists declare that Americanization is both impossible and undesirable. It is impossible because, they claim, America is a racist nation that excludes anyone but whites. It is undesirable because it requires immigrants to give up the "cultures" into which they were born.

Miller resoundingly repudiates all such views. The greatest strength of The Unmaking of Americans is its consistent rejection of the false alternative between conservatives, who oppose immigration in fear that it will destroy America's unity, and multiculturalists, who encourage immigration in hope that it will. Miller shows that both camps share the premise that culture is a matter of genes, not ideas.

Read this book if you want to know how to fight this war on Americanization.

(293 pages)

This review is courtesy of and copyright © by the Ayn Rand Bookstore.

Books

• The Unmaking of Americans, How Multiculturalism Has Undermined the Assimilation Ethic by John J. Miller. Leftists and Conservatives alike oppose the role of America as the country in which all immigrants can find a common culture based on the core principles of equality, liberty and self-government.