American Identity

Nowadays, identity is seemingly the most vital and crucial issue in most countries around the world and as far as our focus broadens identity crisis in the U.S. has been growing up to shaping America’s most dangerous threat. As Robert Kaplan asserts: ’’America, more than any other nation, may have been born to die.’’ (Who are we?, S.P. Huntington)

The truth is the world has witnessed the strict post-9/11 policies pursued by American government, even formation of an organization called Homeland Security was one of its results/means. One might observe that America, worrying about international affairs, now have shifted its attention to internal matters in a way that is tangible even to naked eye. All these countermeasures indicate U.S.’ concerns about security which lead us to conclude that there is a sense of insecurity. The insecurity is about the motto which reads: “to make a more perfect unity” (Abraham Lincoln) and that lest would it confront profound clashes.

An ethimology of the word unity would easily disclose the fact that every united entity has components which stand right next to each other for a higher purpose. That being said, anything disrupting this unity would be regarded as a menace and has to be crossed out at all costs. Mr. Huntington in his book “Who Are We?” writes: “historically the substance of American identity has involved four key components: race, ethnicity, culture (notably language and religion), and ideology.” He then says:”the racial and ethnic Americas are no more. Cultural America is under siege. And as the Soviet experience illustrates, ideology is a weak glue to hold together people otherwise lacking racial, ethnic, and cultural sources of community.’’

So, what America is facing as identity crisis today is the outcome of loads of immigrants who step foot on American soil but are resilient when it comes to assimilate with the American culture. In other words, the unity which comes in the Constitution as “we the people” gradually was shaped by ever growing number of immigrants; however, these immigrants, from “countries that one may not even know exist”, refuse to put their sub-national identities aside and just get in the melting pot. Ironically, this unity is getting decayed inside out. Samuel P. Huntington as one of his books’ theme (The Clash of Civilizations and Remaking of World Order) smartly puts: “in a post-cold war world, conflicts between cultures would replace conflicts between nation-states and conflicts between ideologies.’’ (Michiko Kakutani, The Wall Street Journal; Friday, May 28, 2004).

Most of America’s focus concentrates on legal and illegal immigrants from Latin America and chiefly Mexico which grows up to the point that a state like California demands for bilingualism. Huntington contends that: “ the continuation of high levels of Mexican and Hispanic immigration plus the low rates of assimilation of these immigrants into American culture and society could eventually change America into a country of two languages, two cultures, and two peoples.’’ Then he adds there is no harm in legal immigration of Mexicans and that they can and will “share” in the American Dream “only if they dream in English.”