Becoming American
by dixie
While I’ve always had an opinion on what makes an “American” (in the “citizen of the United States” sense, not the “living on one of the American continents” sense), it’s only in the past ten years that opinion has really crystallized into something I will pick fights over. Becoming a citizen is a pretty big deal, and only slightly more difficult than becoming a permanent resident (so I’ve discovered).
About the only thing people on both sides of the immigration issue can agree on is that the citizenship test (the knowledge-based requirement of getting citizenship) needed some work.
The new American citizenship test for naturalisation hopefuls has been approved and will be put into use next year. Always on the ball, the New York Times talks about it. The test includes Constitutional law, American history, and modern politics. This is, apparently, something that “genuinely talks about what makes an American citizen.” I’m forced to wonder whether every genuine American citizen can name the Speaker of the House, or any of the writers of the Federalist Papers. (Happily, “Publius” is an accepted answer to that last one. And “War Between the States” is an accepted answer for “Name the US war between the North and the South.”)
I don’t have a problem with newcomers being required to know these things. I just wish all voting Americans had such comprehensive knowledge of government and history. (This shouldn’t be interpreted to mean I believe there should be a test requirement for voting — that’s another discussion entirely.)
Not everyone is happy, of course. John Fonte, a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, said he “would like to see an even more vigorous emphasis on Americanization.”
I assume by “Americanization” he means understanding British philosophies on free markets and freedom of speech in a primarily German Protestant ethical framework. He probably means knowing about (if not liking) the nation’s iconic foods, like pizza (Italian/Greek), hamburgers (German), and fries (probably Belgian). He almost certainly means not taking part in the war on Christmas, and embracing German traditions like putting up a Christmas tree every winter.
He might mean sharing citizenship with people who claim to be Irish, Polish, German, and Italian (often all the same person) yet probably couldn’t point out Warsaw on a map.
Far, far away from here there are other countries struggling with immigration issues as well. I’m confident they will work things out faster and better than Americans have. Looking at America’s 400+ year history with immigration, its complete and utter failure to acknowledge the integral role immigrants have had in shaping modern American culture even after 200 years of invasion makes me wonder whether “native” people are capable of allowing the integration they say they expect.
Comments
Argh, now I need a new intro to my USA entry :D
Teach me to be slow. Part of what I was going to say was:
I particularly like Question 83,
I was way off with “Nuclear War”.
Wingnuts over here relentlessly hold America as the most successful integration experiment in the world, in near total ignorance of the facts. I think it’s a sotto voce way to suggest that old form of immigration control that reshaped people’s names to be anglicised.
The striking thing for me about being American was in the NBC Seafood, where, despite the clear (almost vanishing) minority of gwailo, it was the NFL game that was on the TV. It signifies to me something more substantive than a passing interest in sport.
Yeah, that’s what you get for not blogging in a timely fashion. ;]
I don’t know that one can draw conclusions about an entire nation based on what’s on the telly at a given time in an eatery. If one could, I might have assumed from wandering into a pub on the weekend that an important part of being Irish is Premier league football. Or horse racing.
The wingnuts might have a point, if they frame it correctly. It’s pretty impressive that a whole wad of Eurotrash wandered over here and cleaved so strongly to the land that their descendants now want to bar anyone else from coming in. I think it had less to do with laws or regulation than the sheer bloody-minded determination of the immigrants, coupled with the desperate situation “back home” that drove people to stick around and create 2nd and 3rd (and more) generation Americans.
It should also be noted that true “integration” is at best a long process that can be hindered or completely halted for the first generation depending on conditions. (I don’t understand how people expect migrant workers to become proficient in English when the only jobs the poor sods can get is working in fields with other people of dubious documentation.)
I might have assumed from wandering into a pub on the weekend that an important part of being Irish is Premier league football. Or horse racing.
You would not be far wrong, though. The Conservative Party in the UK often talk about the Cricket test, which is another attempt to capture the idea that national identity is a blended experience, but that it is about reaching down to find where the identity is something shared.
I’ve met a few Irish people who don’t list either football or horse racing as components of their identity, and they’re still as Irish as they come. I know I personally dislike having American football associated with me by default, and I try to avoid making similar assumptions about others.
Whether you choose to avoid making assumptions about specific people isn’t really a part of the general question about what national identity is. There will always be exceptions at a personal level.
In my experience, people who identify themselves as *-Americans are capable of seeing themselves through a filter of another culture, but to natives of that culture they will be immediately recognisable.
I would go so far as to say that for some considerable degree, the flavour of national identification is in itself very American, since it is an expression of an identity that is not apparent in, for example, Ireland.
The *-American thing is indeed a very American thing to be, but if other countries experience immigration the same way America did in the 19th and early 20th centuries (large-scale, often involuntary, and with much ghettoisation of newcomers), it may evolve elsewhere in a generation or two.
I think I stay away from using very specific cultural signifiers (like football of any type) to define something as broad as national identity because they’re very shallow and therefore almost useless. They can sometimes make for amusing rhetoric (“American football is a microcosm for American culture — mostly violence and committee meetings”) but rarely offer useful insight. It ends up being frustrating at best, insulting at worst.
And boo-urns, I say, to editing and clarifying your comments AFTER I’ve responded to them. ;]
Apologies for the late-edit, but in my defence you replied while I was in the edit window. I blame Xaosseed.
I guess that it’s not sport specifically, but rather the idea that you can make up a sense of identity from a small set of parts. Gridiron is more useful though because there is no way it could have come over, while soccer is less useful.
I do think a sense of identity comes from a blend of things, and those things might be identifiable, but it’s a bit narrow to target one or two thing and blow it out of proportion.
I waited all night to see if you’d edit your comment. ;)
That’ll teach me to go and do something irresponsible like using an example :D