By Stephen Steinlight, Edited and Republished by Lewis Loflin (2025)
Extract from The Jewish Stake in America's Changing Demography: Reconsidering a Misguided Immigration Policy by Stephen Steinlight, October 2001. In 2013, Dr. Steinlight’s observations are even more relevant with the raging immigration debate and two Muslim immigrants bombing the Boston Marathon.
Our current policies encourage the balkanization that results from identity politics and the politics of grievance. The high percentage of new immigrants who are poor and uneducated, suffer linguistic handicaps, experience dizzying cultural disorientation, and possess no competitive skills for a postindustrial labor market remain effectively trapped within the underclass or the meager support systems offered by their tight tribal enclaves.
The numbers simply overwhelm available resources at the state and federal level. The new faith-based initiatives—so questionable from a First Amendment standpoint, potentially troubling in terms of generating sectarian strife over federal dollars, and capable of providing government sanction to discrimination—would also be utterly incapable of addressing the problem. That is, if the program survives the Senate and is found constitutional, which is a big if.
None of this would be a problem if we adopted the Chamber of Commerce/Wall Street Journal mentality. That worldview applauds an endless supply of immigrants as desirable to fill the bottomless demand for the wretched of the earth to occupy the bowels of the service sector, suppress U.S. wages overall, and further weaken the already marginalized American labor movement.
But if we are interested in sustaining the American dream of upward mobility and social integration, that vision is both cynical and hopelessly inadequate. According to social analysts from the political left to the political right, Alan Wolfe’s thesis finds substantial agreement: American social cohesion and the integrity of its democratic process are faring well, but the nation faces one paramount challenge—the growing chasm between the very rich and everyone else.
With this anxiety in mind, and with concerns about creating a workable pluralism amid an exploding and increasingly transient immigrant population, does it make sense for America to follow the European model and create a massive underclass of impoverished, alienated, and socially disconnected guest workers? It is hard to imagine that anyone who values social democracy could favor such a solution—but it is becoming a reality on the ground for three reasons: the misery of the world’s desperately poor, employer greed, and the loss of control of America’s borders.
The inability of government to cope with the scale of the problem—whether policing borders or providing adequate social services—also strengthens the role of the ethnic enclave in addressing it. The resultant dependence on the religious and cultural institutions within these communities for sustenance often slows or blocks acculturation, and worse.
Within those tight ethnic enclaves, home-country allegiances and social patterns endure, old prejudices and hatreds are reinforced, and home-country politics continue to shape, even control, the immigrant’s worldview. In many cases, ethnic communal support for new immigrants or patronage of their businesses is subject to the blessings of atavistic, unassimilated, and antipluralistic communal and religious leadership that often has a political agenda at odds with American values.
This is certainly the case within the Pakistani immigrant community. In many cases, Old World political party structures, replete with their targeted, self-serving handouts, remain powerful. Breaking these patterns of control exerted by the sending country and promoting acculturation that honors the immigrant’s culture and origins but prioritizes American values can be achieved only by reducing the current overwhelming scale of immigration that thwarts any effort to develop practicable solutions to these problems.
Here is a compelling reason to demand an end to multiculturalism. Consider the two immigrants who bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013. One married a non-Muslim and forced her to convert.
Was it rabid anti-Western hatred driven by Islam, or the constant drumbeat on our college campuses that America is racist, homophobic, and oppressive, that turned these two young men into murderers? Was there even any effort to encourage them to assimilate to American values when multiculturalism not only discourages this but actively attacks American culture?
Acknowledgment: I’d like to thank Grok, an AI by xAI, for helping me draft and refine this article. The final edits and perspective are my own.
