As a direct result of these reforms, Brimelow argues, the United States is headed toward "dissolution." If current trends continue, he prophesies, the country will divide into Quebec-like enclaves based on race and ethnicity: "[A]n Anglo-Cuban society like Greater Miami is going to have little in common with an Anglo-black society like Atlanta or even an Anglo-Mexican society like San Antonio. These will be communities as different from one another as any in the civilized world. They will verge on being separate nations."
But Brimelow's scare scenarios are neither particularly plausible nor particularly frightening. For a preview of our nightmarish future, for instance, Alien Nation turns to contemporary British Columbia. It seems that in Vancouver, "wealthy Chinese families are buying choice Victorian houses in wooded residential areas" and cutting down all the trees. They apparently do this because a Chinese superstition says that evil spirits live in the trees, writes Brimelow. Whatever the reason, "This behavior is deeply shocking to Vancouver standards." It represents "a genuine conflict of values....And it would not have happened without immigration." (Brimelow learned about this grave situation, incidentally, from participating in "a radio-call-in show.")
There's much more at stake with assimilation than suburban plant life, of course. The rise of multicultural and bilingual education is a distressing sign. Group entitlements can't peacefully coexist for long with individual rights. Despite the best efforts by the government to promote divisiveness through its public policies, however, today's newcomers give plenty of reasons to have faith in their assimilative capacity. Intermarriage rates are high. One-third of U.S.-born Hispanics marry non-Hispanics, and similar rates prevail among Asians. They're having lots of kids. More than 1.5 million children have one Hispanic and one non-Hispanic parent. In 1989, there were over one-third more births to exogamous Japanese/white couples than there were to endogamous-Japanese couples.
Demographers regularly remind us that the United States will become a "majority-minority" nation in the next century. But our concepts of race and ethnicity won't fit for much longer into the neat little boxes devised by Census bureaucrats. They will implode under the mounting pressure of Americans claiming unique combinations of ancestors from places such as Cambodia, El Salvador, and Senegal. Just as the Croatians, Czechs, and Poles of the early 1900s eventually broadened our notions of pluralism and identity, so will today's newcomers. According to a poll taken last year by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, many immigrants already feel like they're fitting in. When asked with which racial or ethnic group they shared most in common, both Asians and Hispanics picked whites--"the American majority" whose erosion so worries Brimelow.
Complete assimilation might take a couple of generations, it might seem to stall from time to time, and it will surely come with plenty of rough spots. But it will happen, just as it always has. By the time 2050 rolls around, today's furor over immigration will seem like nothing more than another episode in the long series of fusses Americans have had over every group of strangers at our gate. If we're still using terms like "majority-minority," they will probably mean something entirely different and unexpected.
Instead of grappling with these issues, however, Brimelow fantasizes about "America's white heartland" in the "intermountain West" and even "the Pacific Northwest going off with an independent British Columbia and Alberta." His belief that multiracial and multiethnic societies cannot work eventually turns into demands for ending immigration entirely, pleas for a national identity card, and pitches for restrictionist groups like the Carrying Capacity Network, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and Negative Population Growth.
We've seen declinist anxieties over immigration come and go before. Brimelow simply trumpets their arrival once again, parroting much of what's been said in the past and occasionally updating it for the 1990s. Even if immigration enthusiasts have not always won their political fights, they can at least take comfort in knowing that history has typically vindicated their thinking. Immigration to the United States has been, to borrow Brimelow's phrase, "a triumphant success." It remains so today. And there's no reason to impose a moratorium on our optimism about it now.
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