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Why America is not Exceptional. Immigration and National Identity in Europe and the United States Eric Kaufmann, e.kaufmann@bbk.ac.uk. Conceptual Frameworks. Decline of Dominant Ethnicity Political Demography. Jose C. Orozco’s Anglo-America. Anglo-Saxon Ethnic Origins, 1776.
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Why America is not Exceptional Immigration and National Identity in Europe and the United States Eric Kaufmann, e.kaufmann@bbk.ac.uk
Conceptual Frameworks • Decline of Dominant Ethnicity • Political Demography
Anglo-Saxon Ethnic Origins, 1776 Americans: "the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night; and on the other side, Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honour of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed." – Thomas Jefferson, 1776 (quoted in Horsman 1981: 22, emphasis added)
Anglo-Saxon Origins, 1889 "The fathers followed Boon[e] or fought at King's Mountain; the sons marched south with Jackson to overcome the Creeks and beat back the British; the grandsons died at the Alamo or charged to victory at San Jacinto. They were doing their share of a work that began with the conquest of Britain, that entered on its second and wider period after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, that culminated in the marvelous growth of the United States” – Theodore Roosevelt, 1889
Two Traditions • “The asylum of all nations...the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles and Cossacks, and all the European tribes, of the Africans and Polynesians, will construct a new race...as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting pot of the Dark Ages” - Emerson 1846 • “It cannot be maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied or do promise ever to occupy any very high place in the human family...The Irish cannot; the American Indian cannot; the Chinese cannot. Before the energy of the Caucasian race all other races have quailed and done obeisance” – Emerson 1846
1960s Multiculturalism and Reaction • “I define integration…not as a flattening process of assimilation but as equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance”- Roy Jenkins, Labour MP & Home Secretary, 1966 • “We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen.” – Enoch Powell, 1968
USA, 1970-2000 Source: Andersson, Hammarstedt, Neuman 2012 Source: data from Card, Mas & Rothstein 2008
Why America is not Exceptional Immigration and National Identity in Europe and the United States Eric Kaufmann, e.kaufmann@bbk.ac.uk