UK Guardian on the joys of Californication

[T_i_B]

No this is not another one about the recall farce but a great article celebrating the American melting pot. Make of this what you will.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1018390,00.html

I have a dream that one day Arthur Rosenberg, the Nazi ideologist of racial purity, will be brought back from hell to sit by the path that runs along the foothills above Stanford University. Let him sit there for an hour and watch them all jogging past: the Japanese-American, six-foot tall and built like a Texan quarterback, the Hispanic-American, the Iranian-Italian-American, the Scandinavian-Chinese-American, the German-Irish-Indian-American, sporting every shade of skin colour and variation of physiognomy, often in quite beautiful combinations. Then let Herr Rosenberg die again, of shock at this irrevocable confounding of Nazi dreams.

"America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming," wrote the Russian-Jewish playwright Israel Zangwill in 1908. But it was, precisely, the races of Europe that he saw melting together. As my Oxford colleague Desmond King shows in his splendid book Making Americans, the United States' 1924 Immigration Act imposed quotas which perpetuated the preponderance of white European immigrants. Only since that provision was finally revoked in 1965 have the millions of new Americans come in from Asia, Africa and Latin America. In 1960, just 16 million Americans did not trace their ancestry to Europe; now it's 80 million. When Richard Nixon became president in 1969 there were only some 9 million people in America who had been born abroad; now there are at least 30 million. Roughly one in every four of today's Californians was born outside the US. And they come from everywhere. If you look down the line of check-out assistants at Safeway or Fry's Electronics, all the peoples of the earth seem to be represented - and they all say "Have a nice day".

The other day, I walked into the Stanford students' union foyer as an Islamic prayer meeting was just dispersing. The young women all wore head-scarves, but if you had only heard a tape-recording of their conversations at parting you would not have been able to distinguish them, by accent, vocabulary or tone ("Ok guys-like-whatever") from any other American students. If there is a society on earth that can still perform the extraordinary feat of forging some sort of unity out of such diversity - e pluribus unum, as the coins say - it is America.

Who, besides the Americans themselves, has the greatest stake in their succeeding? We Europeans do. Look at the demographic map of the world, and you will see one continent above all that needs either a massive baby boom or large-scale immigration to sustain its ageing population. That continent is Europe. Much of our immigration is likely to come from the Muslim world. In theory, it should be easier for Turks, Moroccans, Algerians and Pakistanis to feel at home in Europe than in America, because Europe is just a loose, diverse continent rather than a single nation. In practice, it's the other way round. So we should learn from the Americans. What Europe needs is more Californication.