Washington Post

Originally posted on Citizen Orange.

I admire people that work to build unity where there is division.  Building unity leads humanity in the direction of ideals.  Building consensus is admirable, but compromising with hate is not.

In her Washington Post op-ed, "The Right Road to America?", Yale Law Professor Amy Chua compromises with hate.  In an attempt to forge a middle ground between tolerance and toughness, she makes deals with the devil.  The net result is an argument that rests on nativism. 

Chua makes the fallacious argument that, within nations, "pluralism and diversity" leads to "violence and instability".  Reading her op-ed, I couldn't help but be reminded of the lunatic mission statement of Frosty Wooldridge's website (Another front for NumbersUSA):

Our English language is under assault and our schools
are drowning in ethnic violence, rapes, drugs and gang warfare. In
California, Texas, Florida and Arizona, our hospitals suffer bankruptcies
from non-paid services for 350,000 annual 'anchor babies'. Ten million
illegal immigrants displace jobs from America's working poor and depress
wages for many others. Leprosy, tuberculosis, Chagas Disease, hepatitis
and other diseases 'pour' into our country within the bodies of illegal
immigrants who avoid health screening before coming on board the United
States. Even worse, clashing cultures with religions that celebrate
'female genital mutilation' and subjugation of women are growing in
enclaves around our country. As Lincoln said, "A house divided against
itself can not stand." [...]

Our leaders are outsourcing and offshoring our
jobs to Third World countries while they import the Third World into our
country. America's middle class is being driven into the unemployment
lines. Our schools are becoming dysfunctional towers of Babel with over
140 languages. We can not stay afloat with this kind of linguistic chaos.
Yes, we have compassion for immigrants, but it's our country and our
children. Their leaders need to take care of them in their countries.
Unfortunately, Congress and leadership of this nation refuse to step
below the water line to see how fast we are sinking. We're $6.8 trillion
in debt. There were 20 different languages on the California recall
ballot. Whose country is this anyway?

- Frosty Wooldridge

Chua is certainly more logical and less extreme in her nativism than Wooldridge is.  But the premise of their arguments is the same.  Migrants subvert the U.S.'s national identity.

An Appeal to the Migratory

"Racism", "Pluralism", and "National Identity", are all very complicated terms that Chua plays with in her op-ed.  It would take a pages to define each of them and their interactions with migrants, and a whole books to discuss how they're interrelated.  What's worse, I've added another term to the mix: "Nativism".   Chua is smart.  She is not a political scientist or a philosopher.  Rather than weave her own argument, she draws on the work of Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, and his book, Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity.  I'm not going to delve into a critique of Huntington's book in this post.  Alan Wolfe does a good job in Foreign Affairs for those that are interested.

Either way, the most important thing to remember about all of these terms, is that they have systemic connotations.  That means that it doesn't matter what you're background, views, or actions are as an individual, it says nothing about your systemic views.  People of color can be racist.  Women can be sexist.  Migrants can be nativist.  The cracks in Chua's epistemology start to show when she uses her individual experience to make systemic arguments.   Readers should raise their eyebrows when she uses her parents to justify her support for Huntington.

Are we, as the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington warns,
in danger of losing our core values and devolving "into a loose
confederation of ethnic, racial, cultural, and political groups, with
little or nothing in common apart from their location in the territory
of what had been the United States of America"?

My parents arrived in the United States in 1961, so poor that they
couldn't afford heat their first winter. I grew up speaking only
Chinese at home (for every English word accidentally uttered, my sister
and I got one whack of the chopsticks). Today, my father is a professor
at Berkeley, and I'm a professor at Yale Law School. As the daughter of
immigrants, a grateful beneficiary of America's tolerance and
opportunity, I could not be more pro-immigrant.