Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Volume 7, Number 2, Summer/Fall 2006

CIAO DATE: 08/07

Georgetown Journal of International Affairs

American Immigrants in American Conflict
Edwina Barvosa

Excerpt

Edwina Barvosa-Carter is an Assistant Professor of Social and Political Theory in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

In the United States, where immigration issues continue to dominate the headlines, the question of immigrant loyalty is critical. Wearing the hijab, raising a Mexican flag in the streets, and speaking Korean at home with first-generation parents: are these signs of a failure to identify adequately with American identity? Do they potentially result in disloyalty to the United States? In times of violent conflict, would such immigrant disloyalty undermine American national unity and threaten the nation's ability to realize its national interests?1 If we assume that identities compete with one another, then immigrant expression of origin-country identity is indeed a cause for concern.

Yet such a zero-sum conception of identity in general and of ethno-national identity in particular is ill founded. It fails to recognize that native-born children of foreign-born immigrants typically develop not one, but multiple group identities and loyalties. Such second-generation immigrants often have two or more ethnic identities, but generally only one full and primary national identity: an identity with the United States, the nation of their birth and long-term residence. This article looks at the multiple identities that second-generation immigrants have, and through which they are able to interpret and judge international conflicts with reference to both their American national identity and their ethnic identities. First, it defines the nature of immigrant identity in the U.S. context. Then it examines immigrant responses to conflict, differentiating between origin-country domestic conflicts and conflicts involving the origin country and the United States, for which the loyalty question is most troublesome. Finally, it concludes that retaining some ethnic origin-country identity can in fact facilitate loyal integration. When ethnic perspectives do dominate a second-generation immigrant's judgments of political conflict, they do so primarily in the case of domestic, rather than international conflicts-an understanding that might well calm the post-9/11 fears of Americans and urge us to adopt a more open and less deterministic perspective on national identity.

Defining Immigrant Identity

Two characteristics of second-generation immigrants' identities influence their responses to violent conflicts in the United States and abroad: the specific content of an immigrant's multiple identities and the situational expression of those various identities. The first of these, the idea that second-generation immigrants have a multiplicity of group identities, is an unsettling notion to those who still accept classic assimilationist ideals. Early proponents of American assimilationism envisioned that all immigrants to the United States would shed the cultural identities of their countries of origin and that succeeding generations would not preserve those identities. Such assimilation, it was argued, would produce a homogenous national identity in which immigrants would reap economic and social benefits by incorporating themselves into the American cultural mainstream. Incorporating immigrants on this assimilationist model required that immigrants assume only one identity: an identity of a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, and monolingual English-speaker.2 In this assimilationist view, ethnic and national identities were understood as zero-sum, in that immigrants who retained ethnic identities were seen as insufficiently American. Many regarded immigrant loyalties to be divided, such that they could not be relied upon to support the United States against their nations of origin in times of conflict.3

This assimilationist approach, however, ignored the often vital distinction between an "ethnic" (cultural) identity and a "national" (political) identity. Of these only the latter is generally based on allegiance to a given nation-state as a distinct legal and political system. This distinction is important in a multicultural society such as the United States, in that native-born immigrants, who have not lived in their family's country of origin, may learn their family's ethnic culture without also learning and embracing the national political identity of their parents' foreign homeland. By conflating ethnic and national identity in the American context, and by asserting that ethnic homogeneity is necessary for national political unity, assimilationists have entrenched in American political culture the false view that persistent ethnic diversity among immigrants threatens their loyalty to the American nation.4 A better alternative is to understand immigrant identities as involving acculturation rather than assimilation. Acculturation grants that immigrants may retain both their immigrant ethnic cultural identities and an American national identity with loyalty to the United States. Assimilationism, in contrast, assumes that successful immigrant incorporation must always eliminate all immigrant ethnic identities...

1 For a recent argument along these lines see Samuel Huntington, Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster 2004), 221-256.
2 Milton Gordon, Assimilation in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).
3 Charges of divided loyalty have not ceased and appear to be common in some contemporary foreign policy circles. In a recent survey, for example, Latino/a foreign service officers remarked that they were often charged by white colleagues as having divided loyalties that privileged the interests of countries of origin against U.S. interests. See Rodolfo O. de la Garza and Harry Pachon, eds. Latinos and U.S. Foreign Policy: Representing the Homeland? (New York: Rowman & Littlefield 2000), 10-12.
4 While this emphasis on cultural homogeneity has its antecedents in the Western canon, it has been challenged by contemporary political philosophers. For this development see John Stuart Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill: Essays on Politics and Society, Ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press and Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977); Jürgen Habermas, "Citizenship and National Identity: Some Reflections on the Future of Europe," in Theorizing Citizenship, Ed. Ronald Beiner (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995); and Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).