Spring 2009

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Not So Huddled Masses: Multiculturalism and Foreign Policy

Scott McConnell

The modest contemporary literature on the connection between America’s immigration and foreign policies contains this assertion by Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, from the introduction to their 1974 volume Ethnicity: Theory and Experience: “The immigration process is the single most important determinant of American foreign policy . . . This process regulates the ethnic composition of the American electorate. Foreign policy responds to that ethnic composition. It responds to other things as well, but probably first of all to the primary fact of ethnicity.”

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What McConnell overlooks is the radical disconnect between the ruling elites and the subject population whose tax dollars and bodies the elite still control. I'd argue that a multicultural America (that is, a post-American America) would be powerless to organize against an alien central government with a monopoly on power. As a matter of fact, multiculturalism and imperialism are identical, and require a powerful central government to hold the whole squirming thing together. That's why the interventionists use Martin Luther King as the tyrannizing image of the emerging DC empire. Both Neocons and liberals invoke Martin Luther King: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." This justifies intervention everywhere, whether at home or abroad. If you’ve ever wondered why the media, government, and the education system hype the King myth, it's about the projection of US power. Like its old rival, the Soviet Union, the US projects itself as a “proposition nation” uniquely committed to equality, human rights, and diversity.

Posted by Mike Tuggle | June 24, 2009 9:28:37 AM ED

McConnell's quoting of the much overused 'the border crossed us' only tells 1/10 of the story. Yes there were 'Hispanics' in what is now the United States long before Yankee settlers arrived in the Southwest. At the same time, the ancestors of the vast majority Mexican-Americans came here long after the territory was part of the US. Largescale Mexican migration really began with the years of the Mexican revolution, about 1910 to 1920. Before that, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado contained a few old, isolated settlements under constant danger of attack from Indians (Apache's) , and the first Spanish/Mexican settlements in Upper California did not begin until 1769, some two and a half centuries after Cortes set the trajectory of what would become the modern Mexican state. In short, there was no rush to the north, no great migration, until the land had been developed by the hated Yankees. Most Mexican-Americans or there ancestors did cross the border, after Anglos had created a vibrant economy and democracy on the northern side.

Posted by Mitchell Young | June 26, 2009 6:40:50 PM EDT

In Mr. McConnell's article he overlooks the fact that just because the land doesn mean its not America's to do with what we please after the fact of us gaining it

Posted by Derek Mills | October 19, 2009, 2009 9:58:13 AM EDT

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