Diversity makes us safe?

(Cross-posted at Sine qua non)

Over at The New Republic's blog The Plank, Noam Scheiber reads against the grain of an article on what factor(s) contribute to British Muslims being drawn to extremist thought and action. He offers up some anecdotal evidence that perhaps not all of this can be laid at the doorstep of Islam:

I think this is a pretty typically British way of viewing culture and cultural assimilation--you're either on the team or you're not--and I think it's a serious problem. I can't speak directly to its implications for Muslims, but I do have some experience with it when it comes to Jews, having spent two years living in England during the late 1990s. What repeatedly struck me was the fact that, unlike the United States, where there's generally no conflict between being self-consciously Jewish and being self-consciously American, in Britain one identity is almost always secondary to the other. Most of the Jews I knew either considered themselves Jews who just happened to be living in England--these tended to be religiously observant Jews. Or they considered themselves Brits who just happened to be of Jewish descent. (In many of the latter instances, I didn't even realize they were Jewish until I'd known them for several months.) There just didn't seem to be much room for dual identity, which seemed like a potentially alienating state of affairs--you're free to be ethnically or religiously proud, but if you are, you shouldn't expect to be accepted as part of the cultural mainstream.

(emphasis added)

Scheiber doesn't do this, but I think that implicit in this commentary is an appropriate reminder, if not a lesson, for this country regarding our present national debate on immigration. Many say this is a national security issue, and some point precisely to the dilemma many European nations have regarding their increasingly isolationist Muslim populations as evidence, but more often than not it seems to me that what is at stake for them is the securing of an "American" identity against the Other (who happens more often than not to be dark-skinned and not Protestant). They seek to address that fear through advocating much more stringent border security (significantly, along the southern and not the northern border, even though no arrested terrorists I've heard of have crossed from Mexico but from Canada), English-Only movements and the like.

As someone said in something I read elsewhere yesterday but can't recall where, our homegrown terrorists are best embodied not by immigrant populations but by Timothy McVeigh (and, I'd add, Eric Rudolph), good white, (Protestant-)God-fearing English-speakers: quintessentially American by definition who nevertheless became ironically and tragically self-estranged from the very culture that raised them.

You can see what I'm getting at, I hope: the subtext of many get-tough immigration proposals is fer-us-er-agin-us-ism, the unstated assumption that, as a prerequisite to residency in this country not only one's political loyalties but also one's cultural loyalties must be singular and clearly defined--and that we'd prefer that those cultural loyalties be "American." To which I'd just say that it does seem to make sense, does it not, that explicit and implicit pressures on people to choose "our" side seems more likely to cause some to choose the "other" side--something we'd do well to avoid. It is our great strength as a nation, as a people, precisely that we don't do this, and it would be to our credit--and no doubt contribute to our national security--that we continue not to do that.

UPDATE: This morning at the Plank, Alex Massie, who wrote the article to which Scheiber was responding, has his own response up, in which he comments helpfully on the distinction between "Britishness" and "Englishness". It's worth a visit over there to read because it happens to make, within the British/English context, the very distinction between constructed (read: political) and cultural identities that I fear have been blurred/elided/ignored by some (though NOT my commenters) in the course of debates on immigration in this country.

Technorati tags:
Immigration, Terrorism