Johnson, Kevin. "National Identity in a Multicultural Nation: The Challenge of Immigration Law and Immigrants." Michigan Law Review, 103:6 (May 2005): 1347-1390.

This review essay, which will be published in the Michigan Law Review’s 2005 Survey of Books, analyzes Samuel Huntington’s provocative new book Who Are We?: The Challenges to National Identity (2004), which is rich with insights about the negative impacts of globalization and the burgeoning estrangement of people and businesses in the United States from a truly American identity. Professor Huntington’s fear is that the increasingly multicultural United States could disintegrate into the type of ethnic strife that destroyed the former Yugoslavia, or, in less dramatic fashion, has divided Quebec for much of the twentieth century. Forming a cohesive national identity with a heterogeneous population is a formidable task but, as Professor Huntington recognizes, critically important to the future of the United States.

Professor Huntington identifies and analyzes a perceived loss of national identity in the United States over the tail end of the twentieth century, during roughly the same period that the civil rights revolution forever changed the nation. Who Are We? takes the controversial position on U.S. immigration law and policy, which frequently touches a nerve with the public. Professor Huntington sounds a familiar alarm that immigration and immigrant law and policy is out of control and must be reformed. In asking the nation to reconsider its immigration policies, Professor Huntington again asks a question well worth asking.

Professor Huntington expresses fear about the impacts of immigrants – specifically Mexican immigrants – on the United States, its culture, and, most fundamentally, the American way of life. He sees immigration and immigrants as transforming a white Anglo Saxon cultural nation and fears what he sees on the horizon for the United States, which he suggests is something apocryphal, raising the specter of the fall of Rome. In expressing such fears, Professor Huntington ties immigration to critical aspects of national identity and sees the identity of the United States changing slowly but surely as new and different – culturally and otherwise – immigrants are coming in large numbers to the United States.

We agree wholeheartedly with Professor Huntington that national identity is central to the discussion of immigration and immigrants. In turn, the race and culture of immigrants affect the national identity. Unfortunately, such aspects of immigration law are frequently overlooked in academic studies of the subject.

– Abstract

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