by Muneerah B.

Created on: October 10, 2008

The Increasingly Faceless Nation

In recent years, reality television has shown the diversity of America to the rest of the world. We are seeing more singing and dancing contestants with unfamiliar last names which are difficult to pronounce, Americans with a tinge of accent lingering on their tongues as they live on an island and young women who are determined to break the mould of the average American fashion model.

While these people are pursuing their American dreams, they are also an advertisement of the American Dream. That dream has long been the reason for many who uproot themselves to make the United States their new home just like the others who came before them.

Every new wave of immigrants throughout the century brings a jolt of resentment from the citizens in fear for their security, jobs and tradition, from Americans who were uneasy with Southern and Eastern Europeans under Coolidge's presidency to the constant debates over amnesty programs till now, they were all in sparked off by the fear of losing or upsetting the American identity. In 1993, Time magazine reported that "during the second half of the 21st century the descendants of white Europeans...are likely to slip into minority status". It speculated that immigration will be so rampant in the Untied States that it will literally change the face of the country.

Needless to say, immigration has transformed the nation in so many ways. Throughout its history, America depended on the labor of immigrants for the economic growth of the country. Starting from the Europeans in the industrial sector in the twenties to the South Americans agriculture workers to the Chinese paper sons and daughters in restaurants, sweatshops and laundries, they have all contributed to the nation in a way or another by toiling in the riches of the United States.

Even though US immigration laws in the past were infamously dripping with ethnic or racial prejudice, United States is ultimately a nation of immigrants and its culture and social structure are shaped by the immigrants within its borders. Immigrants also created a 'culture within a culture', as they try to blend both their ethnic identities and American lives to form something totally new and unique to the culture of the US. This explains for Tex-Mex and Chup Suey, two distinctively American foods with a strong hint of Mexican and Chinese influence respectively. As a lot of the immigrants children try to make sense of their dual (or mixed) heritage, many of them also fueled the identity of the arts and literature in the United States in a new light. Writers like Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston published books exploring their Chinese-Americans identities, while Beau Sia and Suheir
Hammad channel their thoughts through poetry. While Hip-hop musicians Jin and the Far East Movement are Asian American men who got involved in American culture they grew up in. These are reasons why the typical American culture is anything but typical. What makes the American identity unique is the very fact of its diversity.

The US immigration laws may have had its flaws but were all done in the best interest of the American identity at the time they were passed. Ironically, American culture, values and lifestyle are as flexible as its immigrant laws and as tolerant as the American people in (eventually) assimilating (yet another wave of) new immigrants as part of the ultimate American culture.

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