http://www.harvardindependent.com/ViewA ... cleID=9877

Beyond the Border Patrol
The consequences of multiculturalism.
4/13/2006
By Chang Liu
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The recent immigration debate seared one number into the public consciousness: ten million. That would be ten million estimated illegal immigrants currently living in the United States. Ten million, to give you a sense, is roughly the population of Michigan, the eighth-largest state. It is two million more than the population of New York City. It is Harvard’s undergraduate population, 1,538 times over. In other words, it is a lot of people.

But I want to give you a smaller number: 50. That’s the percentage of Americans that, according to Census Bureau projections, will be non-white by 2050 — 16 percent Black, 23 percent of Hispanic, 10 percent Asian and Pacific Islander, and about 1 percent American Indian, Eskimo, and Aleut. 50 is a much easier number to conceptualize: it’s half.

While pundits and presidents are still stuck on the recent failure to launch of the immigration-reform bill, an obvious life-or-death issue for those ten million and the businesses that depend on them, the much larger question has been sidestepped: the children of those ten million, born in and legal citizens of the United States, along with the generations of immigrants legal and illegal already settled in the country, are adding and applying wide strokes of brown, black, and yellow to the white face of America. Multicultural America is soon going to have to deal with all the contradictions of multiculturalism. And no amount of border control is going to stop that.

So this is a letter to those opponents of immigration living with the delusion that by somehow closing the borders, we can preserve the baseball-and-apple-pie essence of America. Those days are over. The Japanese, Koreans, Cubans, and Dominicans all play baseball better, and that apple pie was probably baked with apples picked by migrant labor. America is changing, and here’s how you’re going to notice.

Language. Don’t worry — so long as the job market depends on it, everyone will still speak English. Just don’t expect to hear nothing but English when you’re on the streets. That Tower of Babel you hear in New York nowadays is going to cast its shadow wider — first to the other major cities, but eventually to the heartlands. The banks in the town where I’m from, Cary, North Carolina, already have bilingual signs. That trend is going to continue, towards trilingual and quad-lingual. As America diversifies, pure assimilation is going to take a backseat to retaining ethnic identities. The need to “fit in” is going to be much less compelling, and people will retain their languages and cultures over more generations.

They’re going to be encouraged by the continued proliferation of non-English media. That’s right: even more trashy Spanish-language soap operas. And Chinese. And Hindi. The culture industries are globalizing, and Hollywood is no longer the only studio in globaltown. Foreign flicks are going to leave the art house and enter the boob tube. Not only are these shows going to reach audiences through conventional channels like television and theaters, they’re going to get there via the Internet, via DVD, and via satellite. If you want to keep up, either learn the languages or learn to enjoy subtitles.

And English itself is going to change. If you thought Ebonics was bad, wait until you hear what we’re going to be speaking in fifty years. Imagine if you will, Spanish mixed with Chinese mixed with Hindi, all done in urban. If you want a taste of this future, go listen to a Singaporean speak Singlish — a Creolized language with a half-Chinese, half-English grammatical structure with Malay vocabulary mixed in for good measure. That’s where having a deeply multicultural society gets you. Bye-bye, OED. Hello, UrbanDictionary. Where’s that translation button?

All of which brings up the question of what our schools are going to teach. If it were up to me, it wouldn’t be Chaucer. In literature and history, we should consider from the elementary level onwards pushing beyond the European–American paradigm and engaging with “World Literature” on a deeper level. Stop relegating it to one unit, one week, and integrate it into the curriculum. It is the same as with African American studies: stop with Black History Month and just teach it as American history. Want to teach revolution? Teach Thomas Paine and Franz Fanon side by side. Want to teach alienation? Compare F. Scott Fitzgerald with V.S. Naipaul. I’m not asking for some sort of pedagogical affirmative action, teaching inferior works just because they were written by non-whites. I’m asking for a complete reevaluation of our literary canon, one that isn’t fixated with teaching the full evolution of Western literature.

In foreign language–teaching, we should let new realities guide our choice of primary languages. Moving down on the rankings should be French and German. Off the list should be Latin. Moving up should be Chinese. Staying important will obviously be Spanish. This is to reflect not just the shifting demographics of the U.S., but the new sheriffs in globaltown. China and India are where the people and money are going to be. France? Not so much.

Despite all this diversity, we will need to hold together those values we have in common. Instead of busily spreading democracy abroad, we will need to inculcate democratic values to every immigrant and every student. “America” needs to become a civic concept in which every citizen, regardless of race or ethnic origin, is invested.

It’s changing… It’s changing… You can close the borders. You can build the walls. But we’re already here. Deal with it.


Chang Liu ’06 (changliu@fas) sheriff Nuevo of globaltown-lah is.