Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore by James T. Patterson

Author:James T. Patterson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: 20th Century, Retail, Oxford History of the United States, American History, History
ISBN: 9780195122169
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2005-01-01T15:00:00+00:00

9

Immigration, Multiculturalism, Race

In challenging George H. W. Bush for the GOP presidential nomination in 1992, Patrick Buchanan proclaimed that rising immigration was threatening to tear the United States apart. “Our own country,” he said, “is undergoing the greatest invasion in its history, a migration of millions of illegal aliens yearly from Mexico. . . . A nation that cannot control its own borders can scarcely call itself a state any longer.”1

Though Buchanan was an especially vocal opponent of large-scale immigration, he was by no means the only American to fret about the “Balkanization” of the nation, or about the surge of “multiculturalism,” as rising rights-consciousness by various minorities was dubbed at the time. Six years earlier, 73 percent of voters in California had approved Proposition 63, which amended the state constitution so as to establish English as the state’s “official language.” Seventeen other states followed California’s example in the late 1980s.2 Though Proposition 63 was not implemented in California, its symbolic thrust—aimed in part against bilingual education programs—was clear. In California, as in Texas and other states where high numbers of immigrants had been arriving since the 1970s, ethnic tensions were rising.

The rush of immigration, however, was but one of a number of social and economic developments that seemed to be intensifying conflict in the United States at the time. As the Los Angeles riots demonstrated, racial confrontations seemed to be especially dangerous. Popular reactions to the sensationalized, long-drawn-out arrest and murder trial in 1994–95 of the black football hero O. J. Simpson, who had been arrested on charges of killing his former wife and a male friend of hers—both white—revealed extraordinary polarization by race. In 1998, three white racists in Jasper, Texas, tied James Byrd, a black man, to the back of a truck and dragged him to his death.

Class divisions, though less dramatic than these, also continued to trouble American society. As earlier, many blue-collar workers and labor union leaders protested against rising income inequality and against what they said was outrageous corporate arrogance and selfishness. The liberal economist and columnist Paul Krugman, a forceful critic of the rich and powerful, wrote that average salaries of corporate CEOs had risen from $1.3 million in 1970 to $37.5 million in 1998—or from thirty-nine times to more than a thousand times the average earnings of their workers. He was convinced that the United States had entered a “New Gilded Age.”3

Like Americans who were then insisting that the nation was in “decline” and beset by “culture wars,” people who endorsed the arguments of partisans like Buchanan on the right and Krugman on the left maintained that a wide range of fights over rights and social justice was polarizing the United States. Media reports intensified such feelings. Politicians—more fiercely partisan and unforgiving in the Clinton years than at any other time since Watergate—added to a popular sense that Americans were at one another’s throats in the 1990s.

GIVEN THE RAPIDLY RISING NUMBERS OF IMMIGRANTS to America since the 1970s, it was hardly surprising that alarmists such as Buchanan captured attention in the late 1980s and 1990s.

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