Who Belongs in America?: Presidents, Rhetoric, and Immigration

Afterword: A New Hope or a Recurring Fear?

AFTERWORD A New Hope or a Recurring Fear? Vanessa B. Beasley IN THE INTRODUCTION, I suggested that the history of political rhetoric concerning immigration to the United States could be read through a long-standing cultural dialectic that features the immigrant as both a symbol of hope and a source of fear. In these final pages, I offer a more specific account of how I see this dialectic playing out within the individual chapters. Together, the chapters suggest that presidential rhetoric has sometimes done little to assuage, and has sometimes even encouraged, public fears about immigration and its perceived threats to the United States. And yet, throughout U.S. history and now again in contemporary times, presidents and other politicians have also been well aware of the economic benefits that immigrants bring to the United States. If it is true that one of rhetoric’s central functions is accommodation—the use of language to conjoin two or more things that might have been thought to be mutually exclusive—then it is perhaps no surprise that both politicians and citizens have regularly turned to rhetoric in order to make sense of immigration, for both good and ill. Michael Novak’s essay clearly contains both hope and fear. However, the object of both of these emotions is not necessarily immigration or even immigrants themselves. For Novak, the “symphony” of ethnically diverse American citizens living together in relative peace is a unique source of inspiration for the rest of the world, a “high achievement” in A New Hope or a Recurring Fear? | 273 “the history of human communities.” Even if this accomplishment is admittedly a “work in progress, never fully achieved,” it takes at least some of its shape through the words and deeds of U.S. presidents. In Novak’s words, “by giving shape to a nation’s priorities over a four-year span, a president can bring the people together in a common set of tasks.” In this view, the U.S. presidency is therefore also a source of hope. “By his knowledge, sensitivities and intuitions,” Novak writes, “[presidents] can give voice to their aspirations and grievances and lead the nation in directions that are both in accord with the nation’s founding principles and fruitful for all her citizens.” And yet it is within this body of citizens itself that Novak locates a new danger to the United States. The threat is not from immigrants but instead from “a substantial number among important elites” who “no longer give credence to some of the nation’s founding principles.” Preferring what Novak refers to as “European principles” over the “original American proposition,” these elites, which for Novak includes most notably college and university professors, see “human history as dominated between oppressors and the oppressed” and therefore seek to “moraliz[e] social con- flict.” Although Novak maintains that he means only to call attention to this “Gramscian project” rather than to condemn it, he is concerned with the threat such a growing intellectual culture could have on the United States’ unity and, more specifically, its executive office, which he views as standing “at the crossroads of American culture.” Some presidents may choose to accept all or even part of the Gramscian model, according to Novak, who names William Clinton as an example. But for presidents who are instead guided by more traditional American ideals—“government of the people, by the people, for the people—a people committed to liberty understood as self-control and self-government”—this European way of thinking will be a “major obstacle, an army fierce in opposition,” and thus a threat to the nation, according to Novak. Ideas can be more frightening than the individuals who would espouse or promote them. Even though Novak’s warnings about the “Gramscian project” allegedly promoted by university professors would be overshadowed by renewed fears about Islamic fundamentalism just months after he first presented his analysis, the idea that foreigners’ ideas are wildly dangerous and inherently disruptive to traditional American ways of life is not a new one, as chapters 2 and 3 make clear. In Craig R. Smith’s study of John Adams and the Federalist attack on the First Amendment, for example, we are reminded of one of the earliest 274 | beasley examples of a struggle that recurs throughout U.S. history: the dramatic conflict between free speech and those who would limit it...