A Changing America

As our nation grapples with the immigration debate, the Census Bureau issued a report showing that the United States would become a minority majority nation by 2042. This news will surely cause those who fear change and "others" great stress. Yet, as our country continues its long journey as a nation of immigrants we are left to ask what are these differences that seem to divide us? Are immigrants really that different from the past? The answer is no.

A Nation of None and All of the Above

By SAM ROBERTS
Published: August 16, 2008

Deep inside a data dump by the Census Bureau last week was a startling racial projection: By midcentury, the United States will be home to 80 million more white people.

Never mind, for a moment, that the bureau also predicts that Americans who identify themselves as Hispanic, black, Asian, American-Indian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander will constitute a majority of the population by 2042. The number of people who say they are white is projected to rise by about two million every year.

At that rate, even while the Hispanic and Asian populations expand enormously, the proportion of Americans who identify themselves as white will barely shrink, from a little more than 79 percent, to 74 percent.

It’s not some new math metric that’s responsible. It’s the way the government defines race: most people who describe their origin or heritage as Hispanic or Latino also identify themselves as white.

Which raises an impertinent question: Why all the fuss about the nation’s impending racial and ethnic transformation?

Not only is the census all about self-identification, anyway, but all those projections, today and historically, have been subject to fungible cultural definitions. Mexicans were counted in a separate racial category in the 1930 census, but 10 years later that classification was dropped and the results were revised to count Mexicans as white. (As recently as the 1960s, there was no Hispanic category in the census at all; Asian Indians were classified as white.)

A century or so ago, the Irish Catholics, Italians, Eastern Europeans and even some Germans who arrived in droves in the United States were not universally considered white. (Much earlier, Benjamin Franklin feared that his fellow white Pennsylvanians would be overwhelmed by swarthy Germans, who “will soon so out number us, that all the advantages we have will not in my opinion be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious”).

“In the minds of many Americans of influence and position at the time, the post-1890 immigrants — Jews, Italians, various Slavic groups, Greeks — were probably as foreign as ‘Hispanics’ are today, and considered, as Hispanics are today, as in some degree ‘nonwhite,’ ” said Nathan Glazer, professor emeritus of sociology at Harvard, who wrote “Beyond the Melting Pot” with Daniel Patrick Moynihan. “I wonder whether, in the course of the fierce debates on immigration in the first quarter of the 20th century, anyone ever tried to calculate when ‘new immigrants’ and their children would be a majority of the U.S. I am sure someone among the immigration restrictionists must have raised that alarm.”

Professor Glazer predicted that in the decades to come, racial and ethnic distinctions would be further blurred by intermarriage (about one in three grandchildren of Hispanic immigrants marry non-Hispanic spouses; by 2050, nearly 1 in 20 Americans are expected to classify themselves as multiracial).

Also, since 2000, the number of babies born to Hispanic mothers in the United States has surpassed the number of new Hispanic immigrants, which means a growing proportion of Hispanic people are being raised as Americans from birth.

“The process of assimilation is such that our views of the degree of difference of newer non-white groups changes rapidly,” Professor Glazer said. “So the Jews and Italians, considered very foreign at the time of immigration by Henry Adams and others, were much less foreign by the 30s, hardly foreign at all by the 60s — they were then as white as other whites (for a time, called ‘white ethnics’).”

Race and ethnicity, says Joel E. Cohen, professor of populations at Rockefeller University, are really about culture, not biology. Categories contrived by bureaucrats and politically correct committees can be confusing and skew the results. “Even the notion of Hispanics ranges in people of European origin in Chile to those of native-America origin in the lowlands of Mexico,” Professor Cohen said.

Those categories might be driven by political constituencies with a stake in stressing their distinctiveness or by overwhelming increases in immigrants classified as a single group. Between 1970 and 2050, according to the latest census projections, the Hispanic population will increase 14-fold.

For any number of reasons — including the way the Census Bureau configures and words its questionnaires — most people who report their origin as Hispanic also list their race as white. The government defines whites as descendants of “the original peoples of Europe, North Africa or the Middle East” and Hispanic or Latino people as those “who trace their origin or descent to Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Spanish-speaking Central and South America countries and other Spanish cultures.” Origin is defined as “the heritage, nationality group, lineage or country of the person or the person’s parents or ancestors before their arrival in the United States.”
While the share of Americans who can trace their roots to immigrants who came directly from Europe has been shrinking, “the edges are getting blurrier,” says Jeffrey S. Passel, senior demographer of the Pew Hispanic Center.

Professor Glazer agrees. “I don’t think a change such that the census category of ‘non-Hispanic white’ becomes a minority in 30 years is so momentous,” he said. “By then we may not even be using that census category and long before then people will be asking why Asians are still considered a ‘minority’ of any kind.”

The Russian Mess

Why doesn't the U.S. and its NATO allies defend the pro-western government in Georgia as its very survival is threatened by a Russian invasion? Answer: We can't.

In Georgia Clash, a Lesson on U.S. Need for Russia

By HELENE COOPER
Published: August 9, 2008

WASHINGTON — The image of President Bush smiling and chatting with Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin of Russia from the stands of the Beijing Olympics even as Russian aircraft were shelling Georgia outlines the reality of America’s Russia policy. While America considers Georgia its strongest ally in the bloc of former Soviet countries, Washington needs Russia too much on big issues like Iran to risk it all to defend Georgia.

And State Department officials made it clear on Saturday that there was no chance the United States would intervene militarily.

Mr. Bush did use tough language, demanding that Russia stop bombing. And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice demanded that Russia “respect Georgia’s territorial integrity.”

What did Mr. Putin do? First, he repudiated President Nicolas Sarkozy of France in Beijing, refusing to budge when Mr. Sarkozy tried to dissuade Russia from its military operation. “It was a very, very tough meeting,” a senior Western official said afterward. “Putin was saying, ‘We are going to make them pay. We are going to make justice.’ ”

Then, Mr. Putin flew from Beijing to a region that borders South Ossetia, arriving after an announcement that Georgia was pulling its troops out of the capital of the breakaway region. He appeared ostensibly to coordinate assistance to refugees who had fled South Ossetia into Russia, but the Russian message was clear: This is our sphere of influence; others stay out.

“What the Russians just did is, for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union, they have taken a decisive military action and imposed a military reality,” said George Friedman, chief executive of Stratfor, a geopolitical analysis and intelligence company. “They’ve done it unilaterally, and all of the countries that have been looking to the West to intimidate the Russians are now forced into a position to consider what just happened.”

And Bush administration officials acknowledged that the outside world, and the United States in particular, had little leverage over Russian actions.

“There is no possibility of drawing NATO or the international community into this,” said a senior State Department official in a conference call with reporters.

The unfolding conflict in Georgia set off a flurry of diplomacy. Ms. Rice and other officials at the State Department and the Pentagon have been on the telephone with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, and other Russian counterparts, as well as with officials in Georgia, urging both sides to return to peace talks.

The European Union — and Germany, in particular, with its strong ties to Russia — called on both sides to stand down and scheduled meetings to press their concerns. At the United Nations, members of the Security Council met informally to discuss a possible response, but one Security Council diplomat said it remained uncertain whether much could be done.

“Strategically, the Russians have been sending signals that they really wanted to flex their muscles, and they’re upset about Kosovo,” the diplomat said. He was alluding to Russia’s anger at the West for recognizing Kosovo’s independence from Serbia.

Indeed, the decision by the United States and Europe to recognize Kosovo may well have paved the way for Russia’s lightning-fast decision to send troops to back the separatists in South Ossetia. During one meeting on Kosovo in Brussels this year, Mr. Lavrov, the foreign minister, warned Ms. Rice and European diplomats that if they recognized Kosovo, they would be setting a precedent for South Ossetia and other breakaway provinces.

For the Bush administration, the choice now becomes whether backing Georgia — which, more than any other former Soviet republic has allied with the United States — on the South Ossetia issue is worth alienating Russia at a time when getting Russia’s help to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions is at the top of the United States’ foreign policy agenda.

One United Nations diplomat joked on Saturday that “if someone went to the Russians and said, ‘OK, Kosovo for Iran,’ we’d have a deal.”

That might be hyperbole, but there is a growing feeling among some officials in the Bush administration that perhaps the United States cannot have it all, and may have to choose its priorities, particularly when it comes to Russia.

The Bush administration’s strong support for Georgia — including the training of Georgia’s military and arms support — came, in part, as a reward for its support of the United States in Iraq. The United States has held Georgia up as a beacon of democracy in the former Soviet Union; it was supposed to be an example to other former Soviet republics of the benefits of tilting to the West.

But that, along with America and Europe’s actions on Kosovo, left Russia feeling threatened, encircled and more convinced that it had to take aggressive measures to restore its power, dignity and influence in a region it considers its strategic back yard, foreign policy experts said.
Russia’s emerging aggressiveness is now also timed with America’s preoccupation with Iraq and Afghanistan, and the looming confrontation with Iran. These counterbalancing considerations mean that Moscow is in the driver’s seat, administration officials acknowledged.

“We’ve placed ourselves in a position that globally we don’t have the wherewithal to do anything,” Mr. Friedman of Stratfor said. “One would think under those circumstances, we’d shut up.”

One senior administration official, when told of that quote, laughed. “Well, maybe we’re learning to shut up now,” he said. He asked that his name not be used because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the issue.

C. J. Chivers contributed reporting.

Ben Stein's Take on Taxes

A Familiar Tax Tune, but It’s Not Mine

By BEN STEIN
Published: August 9, 2008

A FEW days ago, I saw Senator John McCain on television saying something I had heard a few times before. Basically, he said that if you want to have your taxes raised, don’t vote for him.

Let me start by saying that I am a huge fan of Senator McCain. He’s got guts. He had a harrowing five years in captivity for his country. His son serves in Iraq and the senator never talks about it.

And, I do not want my taxes raised. I already pay a staggering amount of tax and I don’t care for it. In fact, I would like to pay no tax at all. I could have so much more to prepare for onrushing old age.

But the unhappy fact is that it’s necessary to raise my taxes and the taxes of all upper-income Americans. (I do wish, however, that “upper income” started just a dollar above me.)

The sad truth of the last two two-term Republican presidents is that their economic premise, the key part of their economic game plan, simply has not done what it’s supposed to do.

That is, cutting taxes, especially on upper-income Americans, does not generate so much economic activity that it replaces all the lost I.R.S. take and then some. At least those have been the results so far. When Ronald Reagan lowered taxes, personal income tax revenue stagnated from 1982 to 1984. Now, you may say that revenue rose sharply after that. So maybe that was a mixed result.

But when President Bush drastically cut taxes after he was first elected, the I.R.S. take from individual income taxes fell and did not recover its 2001 level until 2006.A conservative purist might rejoin here that it would be fine if income tax receipts fell, because we would then have a smaller government and a freer society.

That would be nice, but far from true. Instead, government just keeps growing. Government spending grew dramatically under President Reagan, very nearly doubling, and leaving us with a federal deficit vastly bigger than the one he inherited. I know that a large chunk of that increase was to rebuild the military. I heartily approved of it.

But if you want to have a military buildup — and we need one now, desperately — that’s usually a reason to raise taxes, not cut them.

Under the current president, we have had the same story. As income tax receipts fell, military and other spending rose rapidly. Again, this spending was justified as far as I’m concerned. But we have been left with immense deficits and a doubled national debt as President Bush enters his final months in office.

Mr. McCain wants to extend many of President Bush’s income tax cuts and to reduce taxes on corporations. But the facts of life are that we have a large budget deficit, even though some other nations have even larger deficits as percentages of gross domestic product. We have to pay interest on it. As a people and a nation, we owe this money in large part to foreigners — and that can have political implications. The facts of life are that federal spending is almost all untouchable: the military, Social Security, Medicare, interest on the debt, pensions. The discretionary part is tiny.

Every category of federal spending is likely to grow. This means that if we don’t raise taxes, if we keep doing what we’re doing, the immense deficits and debt will not go away — and will probably grow.

The question is simply this: Do we want to step up to the plate like responsible people — I hate to say this, but the last responsible people who actually did this were named Bill and Bob (Clinton and Rubin) — and shoulder our responsibilities? Or do we just kick the can down the road a bit and leave the mess for our children and their children?

And if we do raise taxes, should people who are barely getting by pay them or should people who are getting by very nicely pay them?

I don’t like taxing rich people or anyone I like. But our government — run by the people we elected — needs the revenue. Do we pay it or do we make our children pay it? Dwight D. Eisenhower — and Bill Clinton — knew the answer: You behave responsibly and balance the budget except in rare circumstances.

Somehow, Republicans (and I am a Republican) have forgotten this basic lesson of adulthood. Maybe Senator McCain is grown up enough to remind us of the real urgency of personal and national responsibility. Or maybe not.

Ben Stein is a lawyer, writer, actor and economist. E-mail: ebiz@nytimes.com.