To the Editor:

In “What To Do About Immigration” [March], Linda Chavez writes that Peter Brimelow and I “believe that national identity must be defined in explicitly racial and ethnic terms.” Mr. Brimelow is more than capable of defending himself in an intellectual brawl, with his usually effective right upper-cut [“Letters from Readers,” June].

As for myself, since Miss Chavez bases her claim in part on my citation of demographic forecasts that America will have a nonwhite majority by the year 2050, many of your readers will infer that I have defined American identity as an explicitly white one. Not only is this not my view; it is the precise opposite of the view of American identity I have advanced.

In my three articles on this topic, I have used the same, or very similar, formulations: namely, that American national identity is a cultural one developing over time into an American ethnicity that encompasses all of the country’s existing ethnicities.

Thus, two sentences after my definition of a nation which Miss Chavez quotes, I added: “And because it is more cultural than ethnic, this [American] identity is also more inclusive.”

Two sentences after that, I anticipated her point that intermarriage was accelerating assimilation:

The longer that new Americans inhabit the same culture as everyone else, the closer they draw to each other—as the figures for intermarriage indicate.

And in a controversy with Richard John Neuhaus, I wrote:

The American identity defended in my two articles—a cultural identity evolving into an ethnic one—incorporates all America’s constituent ethnicities, and the common culture unifying it is enriched from non-Anglo sources.

Surely that settles that.

As to the demographic forecasts of a coming nonwhite majority, Miss Chavez tells me that I can “relax” because culture, not race or ethnicity, is the issue. Her reassurance is kind but needless. Again, in the article from which she quotes, I wrote explicitly that

if . . . black Americans were to become the majority in 2050, . . . we could view this with indifference. A changing ethnic balance resulting from differential ethnic birth rates among people of the same nationality—people profoundly committed to one another in a wider American ethnicity—should not make white Americans feel culturally dispossessed.

The problem with this immigrant-driven demographic change, I went on, was culture, because while

some [immigrants] may become so [i.e., American], others, living in a welfare state and with multicultural programs, may remain in some sense alien, retaining languages and cultures separate from those of the American nation.

Again, Q.E.D. surely.

I can only speculate as to why Miss Chavez should have misunderstood the drift of my argument. Was it a case of guilt by association of ideas? To be interested in immigration is perhaps not in itself a hanging offense. But to be interested in immigration and national identity, and particularly to argue that the latter may be threatening the former—well, Miss Chavez did not pause to think but issued the instructions: “Round up your usual suspicions.”

If I did not know Miss Chavez better, I would be afraid she had mistaken me for a stereotype.

John O’Sullivan
Editor, National Review
New York City

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Linda Chavez writes:

In a National Review article last November, John O’Sullivan warned, darkly, that “The forecast of a majority-minority America by 2050 is entirely dependent upon immigration levels.” Then, in the next sentence, he complained that today’s “immigrants and their children, as we have seen, may not be as American as apple pie in any real sense.” Am I wrong to think that Mr. Sullivan is rather deeply concerned about something other than culture here? Immigrants, after all, have never been “as American as apple pie.” Yet in the past we have managed to assimilate culturally exotic Russian peasants, Polish Jews, and Chinese laborers quite successfully. Today, rates of assimilation are probably higher than they were during the last great wave of newcomers.

The only major difference between the immigrants of today and those of yesterday is race and ethnicity. Over 80 percent of current immigration is from countries in Asia and Latin America. True, there are other considerations, such as the rise of the welfare state and of racial and ethnic preferences, but, ultimately, these are other considerations, and have nothing to do with immigrants specifically.

I admire much of what Mr. O’Sullivan has to say about American nationhood, but he is clearly making race and ethnicity, rather than cultural assimilation, the issue.