Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means to be American (review)

Whether one views America as a melting pot, a salad bowl, or "a complicated fusion cuisine" (p. 287), it is undoubtedly true that, aside from its Native American population, the United States is, and always has been, a country of immigrants. Today, even places like Fargo, North Dakota, and Lincoln, Nebraska, are experiencing new waves of immigration and a consequent increase in cultural diversity, leading journalist Tamar Jacoby to refer to multiculturalism as the new "civil religion of the United States" (p. 7). Edited by Jacoby, Reinventing the Melting Pot examines this trend, seeking to narrow the gap between those who view assimilation as a necessary good and those who view it as inevitably evil. According to Jacoby, the book's essays speak more strongly as a collection than they do as individual articles. Though they definitely discuss a crucial, current topic, there is a certain sameness to the work's pieces that reduces the discussion to an academic exercise and its very human subject to a sociological phenomenon.

The pieces in Reinventing the Melting Pot employ a plethora of statistics that would be useful to anyone researching recent immigration trends. Moreover, essays like Roger Waldinger's "The 21st Century: An Entirely New Story" provide careful analyses of how the assimilation process typically occurs; others like Douglass R. Massey's "The American Side of the Bargain" argue persuasively that the United States is not meeting its obligations in its implicit pact with immigrants and show that the benefits of immigration are felt nationally but its costs are borne locally (pp. 117-18). The book is at its best, however, in its more intimate, first-person narratives, such as Pete Hamill's "The Alloy of New York" and John McWhorter's "Getting over Identity," the only essay in the collection that deals extensively with cultural issues in immigration. Perhaps the most readable article in the entire book, Gary Shteyngart's "The New Two-Way Street" is not only told in the first person, but it is apparently also the only essay written from the viewpoint of a relatively recent immigrant.

Although Shteyngart's piece is excellent, it is, unfortunately, the only article in the collection that is expressed in an immigrant's voice—and the voice of someone who immigrated in 1980 at that. Statistics are helpful, but for readers in general, and for folklorists in particular, hearing more from contemporary immigrants themselves, those who are the actual subject of the work's discussion, would be invaluable. Furthermore, of the book's twenty-two contributors, only two are women (Min Zhou and editor Tamar Jacoby herself), and none of the essays actively considers the differences in the experiences of male and female immigrants. Given the variety of countries and cultures represented by today's immigrants, a consideration of gender differences would be a welcome addition to a volume such as this.

When it comes to the subject of the contemporary immigration experience, it would be difficult to match Mary Pipher's The Middle of Everywhere (Harcourt, 2002) in terms of its ability to combine pertinent statistics with immigrant voices and a genuinely readable presentation. Reinventing the Melting Pot has laudable goals, but it is of uneven quality and has too many similarly constructed, mainly theoretical arguments that lack the immigrants' viewpoints.