In a NY Times article about the recent finding that white births now account for less than half of all new births in the U.S., Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, co-director of Immigration studies at New York University, asks:
The question is, how do we reimagine the social contract when the generations don’t look like one another?
Answer: not very well. This accounts for much of the modern Republican Party.
This ends today’s installment of simple answers to simple questions.
What we do is to revive the vision of America as the great melting pot. That will take some doing, but it is not far from the surface.
That sounds nice, but has there ever truely been a melting pot? Also the minorities are obviously not spread evenly across the U.S.A. together with large amounts of autonomy for your regions/states compared to say Japan or France might make for some interesting things.
It is a matter of degree. There has certainly been the vision of the melting pot, which has had effect over time. We no longer discriminate against the Irish like we used to, for instance. 🙂