Nativism at Yale Law

[Harold Schiffman]

Amy Chua: Nativism at Yale Law

By kyledeb on December 18, 2007 11:30 AM

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.

Nevertheless, I think Huntington has a point.

Around the world today, nations face violence and instability as a
result of their increasing pluralism and diversity.

- Amy Chua (Emphasis Mine)

It takes a lot more than successful immigrant parents to be
pro-immigrant, or pro-migrant, as I prefer.  Perhaps Chua doesn't have
individual hatred for the migrants she regularly interacts with, but
her arguments are certainly nativist.  This is probably what Nezua
would term an "appeal to melanin", but it's a little bit different
than that.  I would term it "an appeal to the migratory".  Chua makes
another appeal to the migratory in order to justify her support for
making English the U.S.'s national language:


A common language is critical to cohesion and national identity in an
ethnically diverse society. Americans of all backgrounds should be
encouraged to speak more languages -- I've forced my own daughters to
learn Mandarin (minus the threat of chopsticks) -- but offering
Spanish-language public education to Spanish-speaking children is the
wrong kind of indulgence. "Native language education" should be
overhauled, and more stringent English proficiency requirements for
citizenship should be set up.

- Amy Chua (Emphasis Mine)

This appeal to the migratory should certainly force readers to
question Chua's logic.  Anyone that uses their individual experience
in contrast to their systemic arguments does so on shaky ground.  Mitt
Romney occasionally said "buenos dias" to the undocumented migrants
tending to his lawn, but that certainly doesn't make him pro-migrant.

While this appeal to the migratory is cynical and intellectually
dishonest, it in itself, is not enough to justify the "nativist" in
the title of this post.

Pro-Legal Immigrant and Ignorant

Professor Kevin Johnson makes an excellent case against Chua in the
ImmigrationProf Blog:


Chua does contend that, as Samuel Huntington suggests in his book Who
Are We?, we should promote immigrant assimilation and a cohesive
national identity.  I agree.  However, what the U.S. needs to do is to
think more carefully about things that Chua fails to mention -- such
as that we need to provide more ESL classes and should devote the
resources so that naturalization petitions are processed on a timely
basis.  Demand for ESL classes greatly exceeds demand across the
United States.  Currently, naturalization backlogs are holding up
petitions for years.  Both of the proposals mentioned above are more
likely to promote immigrant assimilation and integration than, for
example, declaring English as the official national language and
compelling adoption of "American civic virtues."  Chua's analysis also
fails to acknowledge that (1) most immigrants seek to learn English
and that the second generation is largely English proficient; and (2)
the naturalization laws require a certain attachment to U.S. civic and
constitutional principles (which Chua suggests that immigrants need to
adopt).

Immigrant integration will be a key issue for the foreseeable future.
We should consider specific policy options that facilitate
integration, not attempt to compel it.  Unfortunately, the United
States has previous experience with compelled assimilation, including
efforts to prohibit non-English language and Catholic schools (see,
e.g., Meyer v. Nebraska; Pierce v. Society of Sisters), policies
designed to convince persons of Mexican ancestry to give up certain
cultural traditions (including foods, such as beans), and compulsory
English.   We would do better to learn from that history rather than
repeat it.

- Kevin Johnson


If Chua were truly pro-legal-migrant, as she narrowly defines it, she
would be in favor of much of what Johnson outlines above.  The
ridiculousness of these self appointed "pro-legal migrant but
anti-illegal migrant" advocates is that they fail to even spend even
an ounce of their time advocating for reforms that make the difficult
lives of documented migrants easier.


If Chua really were pro-legal-migrant, she would do something about
cases like those of Nigerian migrant,  Osaro Agbongiague, one of the
most noble migrants I know of:


Osaro Agbongiague, an American citizen originally from Nigeria spoke
about how he has finally been reunited with his wife. She had been
waiting three long years while her application was being processed to
be with her husband. Agbongiague spoke movingly about his wife's
arrival, "I've learned much about what it is like to live in this
great country, but I've also learned that at times you just suffer
even though you are innocent just because of the way things are and
there is nothing you can do about it. All you can just do is hope and
pray for the best. But I'm happy that she's here today."

Agbongiague continued, "The worst thing you can do to a man is to
separate that person from his loved ones. You can't sleep at night.
You are thinking, I hope I will still have the opportunity to see this
person again, because you are not sure what is going to happen at the
next moment. She was actually robbed twice in Nigeria. I was
completely broken. I felt if she was here with me this wouldn't have
happened. I didn't do anything wrong. I did everything the right way.
I followed the rules and regulations. How come it's taking such a long
time? I do understand that they have to do a lot of things. I do
understand there is a lot of process. But I still think something can
be done, to make it a little easier on people that have their families
back home and they want to reunite with them."

-MIRA Coalition Press Release


This lack of attention to the plight of all migrants, documented and
undocumented, flies in the face of Chua's self-defined "pro-immigrant"
stance.  This finally puts me in the position to argue that Chua not
only fails to be pro-migrant, but she is in fact anti-migrant, or
nativist.

Too Much Tolerance

Central to Chua's argument is the idea that a strong national identity
is essential for holding together "widely divergent communities".
While some globalists might have trouble with this assumption, I am
agnostic to it.  A national identity in itself is not a bad thing.  A
national identity could be one that is tolerant of other people from
other nations, and therefor globalist, or national identity could be
narrowly defined nativism.  In other words, a national identity can be
good or bad.

It is in defining a national identity that problems usually arise.  In
her intellectual cowardice Chua defines this national identity only in
passing.  Despite the absence of a developed description of the
national identity Chua promotes, which I think would expose her
nativism, there are still discriminatory hints throughout.

Chua goes so far as to say "America's glue can be subverted by too
much tolerance".  This is an extremely problematic argument that hints
at a discriminatory national identity.  As soon as Chua starts talking
about too much tolerance, I can't help but feel that she strays into
an area where some humans are more equal than others.  She hints at
this selective equality here:


At some level, most of us cherish our legacy as a nation of
immigrants. But are all immigrants really equally likely to make good
Americans?

- Amy Chua

In true lawyer loophole fashion Chua promotes the arguments of
Huntington and O'Reilly, especially Huntington, at the same time that
she denounces them.  Her denunciation comes in the same breathe as her
only explicit definition of the U.S.'s national identity.


One reason we don't have Europe's enclaves is our unique success in
forging an ethnically and religiously neutral national identity,
uniting individuals of all backgrounds. This is America's glue, and
people like Huntington and O'Reilly unwittingly imperil it.

- Amy Chua

If an "ethnically and religiously neutral national identity", or
essentially tolerance, is "America's glue", then why do we need a U.S.
immigration policy that is both "tolerant" and "tough".  If tolerance
is the U.S.'s strength, then why compromise with toughness, or
nativist/racists like O'Reilly?  This is the fundamental contradiction
in Chua's argument and I believe she falls on the nativist side of
that contradiction, judging from her policy suggestions: "make English
the official national language", embracing "the nation's civic
virtues", and failing to provide relief for the millions of migrants
living in fear in the U.S.  Rather than address how problematic Chua's
policy arguments are, I'll humbly and respectfully ask Duke to tear
them apart if he so desires and gets the chance.  The pro-migrant
blogosphere is strong.

National Identity

All of this brings us back to the problem of a national identity and
defining it.  As a U.S. citizen, I hold the United States to the
ideals articulated in the nation's founding document:


We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness.

- U.S. Declaration of Independence


The sad truth, unfortunately, is that as much as U.S. citizens like to
believe that the U.S.'s national identity is founded on "certain
unalienable Rights", just as much time has been spent excluding people
from those unalienable rights.   Whether it's the Native American
genocide, slavery, women's suffrage, the Chinese exclusion act,
internment camps, or migrants today, the U.S. has always found a way
to exclude people from the very rights that it professes to be founded
upon.  I mean doesn't the word "unalienable" ring true in time when so
many U.S. citizens rail against "illegal aliens"?

Chua would have you believe that she is pro-immigrant because she
supports admitting immigrants on the basis of the "country's labor
needs", but she neglects to make any judgment about the millions of
undocumented migrants already residing in the U.S. except to say
"enforce the law".  Without saying so, she gives away another
important and admirable part of the U.S.'s national identity:


Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free

- Emma Lazarus


Despite her admission of the need for unskilled labor, Chua's mantra
might as well be "give me your ambitious, your rich, your educated
masses yearning to make money."

All of these elements add up to what I believe is nativism.  Chua is
certainly more tolerant than most anti-migrant advocates, but she
rests her reasoning on the same arguments that the hate-group FAIR
would.  The last thing we need is another academic with her legitimacy
emboldening the anti-migrant hate of John Tanton and his tentacles.

If you've gotten to the end of this monster post, I encourage you to
write an email to amy.chua at yale.edu to voice your opposition to her
views.

http://www.citizenorange.com/orange/2007/12/amy-chua-a-nativist-yale-profe.html

-- 
**************************************
N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to
its members
and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner
or sponsor of
the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who
disagree with a
message are encouraged to post a rebuttal. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)
*******************************************