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Title details for To Be an American by Bill Ong Hing - Available

To Be an American

Cultural Pluralism and the Rhetoric of Assimilation

#17 in series

by Bill Ong Hing
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The impetus behind California's Proposition 187 clearly reflects the growing anti-immigrant sentiment in this country. Many Americans regard today's new immigrants as not truly American, as somehow less committed to the ideals on which the country was founded. In clear, precise terms, Bill Ong Hing considers immigration in the context of the global economy, a sluggish national economy, and the hard facts about downsizing. Importantly, he also confronts the emphatic claims of immigrant supporters that immigrants do assimilate, take jobs that native workers don't want, and contribute more to the tax coffers than they take out of the system.
A major contribution of Hing's book is its emphasis on such often-overlooked issues as the competition between immigrants and African Americans, inter-group tension, and ethnic separatism, issues constantly brushed aside both by immigrant rights groups and the anti-immigrant right. Drawing on Hing's work as a lawyer deeply involved in the day-to-day life of his immigrant clients, To Be An American is a unique blend of substantive analysis, policy, and personal experience.

  • Creators

  • Series

    Critical America

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    March 1, 1997

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780814744840
      • File size: 2485 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Booklist

      February 15, 1997
      %% This is a multi-book review: SEE also the title "MultiAmerica." %% What does a "multicultural society" mean to citizens of the U.S? Two upcoming titles explain.For more eclectic readers, Reed collects more than 50 brief essays by "scholars, students, journalists, a physician, and a psychiatrist" from many of the nation's multiple cultures. Section titles suggest the contents: "The Unbearable Whiteness of Being," "Stranger in a Strange Land," "To Pass or Not to Pass," "Is European America Dead?," "Fiction: Inter-Ethnic, Internecine, Fratricidal," "Media Distortion Disorder," "What's Ahead for Ethnic Studies?," "The Pariah Syndrome," and "The Future: Nationalism and Internationalism." Introducing the volume, Reed asks how Americans can discuss race or a common culture "when wealthy white men talking to each other, or to themselves, are what constitutes a dialogue' about multiculturalism and race these days?" The essays in "MultiAmerica" are "not" limited to wealthy white men; they represent an interesting start at such a dialogue.Having grown up a U.S.-born son of Chinese immigrants in a polyglot Arizona town called (of all things!) Superior, and having practiced immigration law for most of his adult life, Ong Hing needs no textbook to discover that the United States has been multicultural since the first Europeans arrived--or, for that matter, since the Bering Sea treks of the ancestors of today's Native Americans. With nativism an increasingly blatant element in the battle to defend a single, blandly European culture, Ong Hing draws on personal experience as well as research to study immigration's impact and to propose going "beyond the rhetoric of assimilation and cultural pluralism [to] think seriously about what it means to become an American in an increasingly diverse society." He combines willingness to accept some forms of separatism with insistence that a genuinely common core of beliefs can and must be taught. ((Reviewed February 15, 1997))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1997, American Library Association.)

Formats

  • OverDrive Read

subjects

Languages

  • English

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