The Nationality that Emerges out of the Melting Pot

President Franklin D. Roosevelt once stated, “Remember always that all of us [Americans] are descended from immigrants.”  A recurring issue in immigration is how to facilitate the acclimation of immigrants to American civic virtues.  Michael Walzer’s “What does it mean to be an American?” rigorously examines this theme, as he discusses various interpretations of the term “American,” and how immigrants conform to fit these interpretations.  “It is a name that doesn’t even pretend to tell us who lives here. Anybody can live here, and just about everybody does—men and women from all the world’s peoples” (633).  One of the most interesting aspects of Walzer’s essay is the fact that these men and women can choose to retain the virtues and culture that accompany their lineage, or abandon them: “They are not…bound to remembrance… just as their ancestors escaped the old country, so they can if they choose to escape their old identities” (637).  I thought this notion was most applicable to New York City, where there is a “predominance of ethnic minorities in the city’s population and institutions today” (Kasinitz 1020).  For instance, in Colson Whitehead’s excerpt, “The Colossus of New York,” he argues that New York is a city of new beginnings, where every visitor is granted the chance to succeed; “New York City does not hold our former selves against us” (Whitehead 7).  Kasinitz proves this argument in “Becoming American/Becoming New Yorkers: Immigrant Incorporation in a Majority Minority City” with statistics that show that the “Russian Jews and Chinese are significantly more likely to have completed a four-year college or to have attended post-graduate education than…other groups, and significantly less likely to have dropped out of high school” (1024).  How is it that these struggling immigrant populations have managed to escape their old identities and work towards upward mobility here in America?  The truth is, despite “skills, credentials, and financial support” (1033) that have helped to “Americanize” immigrants and their children, the immigrant populations have not abandoned their old identities:  “however grateful they are for this new place, [they] still remember the old places” (Walzer 634). The 2000 census data reinforces this notion, as it shows that “Dominicans remain heavily concentrated in Washington heights…while many Chinese immigrants still live in Manhattan’s Chinatown” (Kasinitz 1027-1028).  This introduces a very interesting term in Walzer’s article: “Hyphenated Americans.”  “As in those modern marriages where two patronymics are joined, neither the first nor the second name is dominant: here the hyphen works more like a sign of equality” (650).  This is certainly something we value as Americans.  Perhaps an example of this would be the fact that we observe Sabbatarian laws (641), but at the same time encourage students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag (643).  This theme of compromising with the culture of immigrant groups, as discussed by both Walzer and Kasinitz, creates a new nationality that emerges out of the melting pot, “where the heat was applied equally to all groups, the earlier immigrants as well as the most recent ones” (637).