The Identity Question We Can’t Avoid

In 1984, when my parents were sworn in as American citizens, I distinctly remember their differing reactions: My father was thrilled to be counted as a citizen of the country that had taken us in, excited for the opportunity to participate in civic life and to enter into the peoplehood of America. My mother, on the other hand, was grateful for the security of citizenship, but cherished the freedom to continue on as an Iraqi.

I recall my mother coming through the front door triumphant, telling me of the encouragement she’d been given — alongside the other freshly-minted Americans — to hold tight to their original cultures and their long-held traditions. As long as we live in fidelity with America’s laws, she proclaimed, we’re free to stay Iraqis. She was beaming. 

I harrumphed in response. Herein was a great point of contention between my mother and me, even when I was young: the question of what it meant to be an American. She had come home happy that day, not only because she had become a citizen of a great nation, but because those in charge had confirmed her priors of what that honor truly meant.

My immigrant mother’s reasoning was thus: America had no identity to which we must assimilate. “They are just people who go to work all day,” she’d say. “They have no social life. They don’t even have food that is distinct; it’s all from other places.” We needn’t pursue an “American way of life.” One didn’t exist. 

This is what Mom desperately wanted to believe, anyway. She didn’t want to give up all the things that made her who she was. The dislocation and culture shock were brutal for her spirit. Her English was basic, and the modern culture of American hedonism scandalized her. 

Although Southern Californians were friendly, they didn’t have the warmth of the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean culture to which she was accustomed. Americans were individualistic and focused on work; the suburban landscape was isolating; the food was banal. In this new milieu she was poor, lonely, and working long hours at menial jobs. She held fast to the few Iraqi friends we knew at that time; she was happier when many more arrived. 

Without her Iraqi-Christian subculture, my mother would not have survived. Moreover, she felt her opinion was valid because this was the prevailing belief surrounding her. We lived in Southern California in the 1980s; My mother, like most of her West Coast neighbors, was a multiculturalist by disposition, and therein lay our fundamental disagreement. 

For me, the dislocation of immigrating to America and attempting to fit in was not the experience it had been for my mother. Being a child, I did not have her established identity. She could make a cocoon of a handful of Iraqi friends, but I was in a public schoolyard every day. I was a kid trying to survive, immersed in a hostile alien culture. 

I couldn’t simply be an Iraqi with English subtitles on. It was crucial I learn what it meant to be of them: the American kids. The civilizational shift I experienced shook up my metaphysical understanding of the world such that I didn’t even know what it was to be. “Who am I?” Questions my social problem spurred within me: “How am I supposed to live in this place called America?”

Contra Iraq, the land of my birth, and Greece — where we lived as refugees for a while — there was no thick ethnic identity in America. It was a composite culture that had long ceased to be associated with any ethnic origin.

The existential questions that plagued me from when I first set foot in this country are all questions of identity. They plague me still as they plague the nation itself, resulting in clashes at the border, on the streets, and in our legislative bodies. Cultural identity is the moral question in today’s immigration debate. 

My mother and I disagreed as to the question’s answer. Our experiences as immigrants, a generation apart, molded our thoughts and our outlooks. For instance, I came to believe that it was a form of thievery to live in this nation and use it purely for economic gain. I felt this was unjust to my adoptive country. Mom deduced that, since America did not have a unifying national identity, it was capable of withstanding a deep and law-abiding multiculturalism.

I soon found that a human person could not be whole and happy living in the fractured state for which she argued. Eventually, fractured individuals lead to fractured communities, and a fractured country. I, myself, felt fractured all the time. 

What is an American?

The idea that a person can be an American by simply assenting to living under certain governance seemed a bit too thin to me, then as now. Instinctively, I believed there was more to being an American — or to being anything else. I wouldn’t have known what “gnosticism” was when I was little, but I intuited that this idea belonged in that particular camp.

In order to give an answer to the identity questions plaguing my soul, I had to similarly answer the identity questions of America. What is the American identity? To that end, there are plenty of guesses.

Many will boldly proclaim: “We are a nation of immigrants!” Like my mother, they insist that true American identity belongs almost exclusively to its own vacancy. The cynics will quip, too: “Americans are about making money and buying stuff.” 

Others, like my Ethics and Public Policy colleague Henry Olsen, believe “that America is a nation bound together by its citizens’ commitment to its founding ideals. Chief among those are the dignity of the individual, from which follows that these people individually are at liberty to live good lives according to their own definition bounded only by what they collectively agree to pursue through deliberative, elective, and representative self-government.”

The philosopher Hannah Arendt, distinguished America from France. “America is not a nation-state,” she said. “This country is united neither by heritage, nor by memory, … nor by origin from the same. … There are no natives here.” In a conversation with Karl Jasper, Arendt even described America as “a society of job holders.” 

For Abraham Lincoln, an American was qualified by a deep belief in the famous principle “that all men are created equal.” He called it “the electric cord” that ties men together. Equality, he wrote once, makes an American, “as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh” of the very men who wrote the Declaration of Independence.

All these descriptions of American national identity have some merit, but John Jay may have quibbled with any one of them. “Providence,” he wrote in Federalist No. 2, “has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.” 

A few lines later he added, “This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.” 

His words are surely seen by some today as anachronistic at minimum, if not racist. As an immigrant, I just find them true. 

There were characteristics that denoted a nascent America. As I eventually came to see it, this was Anglo sensibility, Anglo-Saxon cultural and industrial patterns, the English language, Judeo-Christian values. For a time, these very similarities in social norms and morals, as well as a common religion, did provide a bond for Americans. It’s one I wanted for myself. 

In fact, this bond was once strong enough to warrant Chief Justice Jay’s deeming of the people of America as “a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties.” 

Historically, what is known as national identity — what makes one nation different from another and creates solidarity among a people — is attachment to several elements: common history, geographical place, culture, language, religion, traditions, music, art, civilizational memory, a variety of institutions particular to that nation, and ancestry. 

As a nation, we’re now attached by precious little, save a general agreement to our particular form of government. The more I age, the more it’s clear that even this last tying thread cannot hold out much longer.

Does unity over a form of government alone, without social cohesion, rise to what we’ve hitherto in human history understood as “national identity?” Could it be that we can have different languages, different religions, different traditions, different (and often clashing) cultures, different values, different ideas of what is right and wrong, what is good for society and the human person, and still be a nation? 

It doesn’t seem that we can. America is no longer inhabited by people descended from the same ancestors, who speak the same language, profess the same religion, hold similar values, and are similar in manners and customs.

These factors will affect what we believe should be the principles of government. That is, we are approaching a day where even our principles of government are called into question. For the radical left, that day has already arrived.

Weakening Ties

The unraveling of a shared cultural fabric has not happened in isolation; it created the vacuum in which leftist multiculturalism could take root and thrive. Indeed, modern multiculturalism found fertile ground in our country at the very moment when its traditional cultural anchors were weakening. Between 1970 and 2023, the foreign-born share of the U.S. population nearly tripled, reaching 14.3 percent, while religiosity collapsed: Church membership fell from 70 percent in 2000 to under half by 2020, and the share of Americans calling religion “very important” dropped from 70 percent in 1965 to 45 percent today.

Family stability also shifted. Though divorce rates have declined in recent years, the broader unraveling of family cohesion has been tied to declining religious involvement, which historically halved divorce risk. With religion and family eroding as immigration rates climbed, a void opened that multiculturalism (carried by the momentum of mass immigration) was uniquely positioned to fill.

Multicultural apologists began feverishly pushing their gospel of equity, insisting that all cultures are equal; without anything else to tie themselves to, a new immigrant could happily believe them. 

Thus, immigration and multiculturalism began to operate as a feedback loop: every new wave of people absorbed into a creed of division rather than unity, feeding a cycle that undermines the very idea of an American nation. Per one Brookings Institute study, younger generations now report weaker ties to “being American” as a primary identity, with many prioritizing race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality as more central. 

Instead of joining a strong America, immigrants are being handed multiculturalism’s script of grievance. The result is a warped partnership; newcomers and their ideological shepherds together hollowing out the country they both claim to strengthen.

Today, my traditionally-minded mother’s hesitance to join the throes of Western modernity wouldn’t be totally illogical. Assimilation to America’s libertine culture comes at a steep price. There’s a litany of consequences following immigration and assimilation — for the immigrant himself. 

These ruinous effects are curiously glossed over by the open borders do-gooders. No one wishes to mention the frightening American circumstance into which the immigrant enters: one where no-fault divorce is prevalent, drugs are spread, children are sexualized, and the public school system corrupts. The Left won’t speak about its pervasive ideological propaganda which fosters contempt for parents and even for the self. 

As a result, American life has steadily shifted away from an aspirational ideal.

Regaining What’s Lost

Immigrants now face a bleak choice. Either they conform to the empty multicultural reality within our borders or they retreat into their ethnic enclaves. Instead, they ought to be given a third option: a healthy and cohesive American culture rooted in geography, family, and faith. 

That means an American culture which loves the land itself, builds strong families, and reveres a public faith that provides the moral foundation for freedom and civic life. It also means an education system that works with parents to pass down America’s ideals — hard work, dignity of the individual, and commitment to our founding principles — rather than grooming children into perversities. Americans need to commit themselves to marriage and family life, while our politicians follow through on their proclaimed support for blue-collar workers, so they might pursue these worthy goals.

This kind of American society takes time to build, and means living without the constant churn of a multicultural influx that erodes it faster than it can be restored.

America once slowed immigration to great effect, as with the Immigration Act of 1924; this change in policy gave us the time to absorb the 20 million immigrants from the Great Wave. Studies show that during this pause, newcomers integrated at unprecedented levels: learning English, intermarrying, entering citizenship, and rising into the middle class. 

The much-needed immigration halt consolidated national identity and cultural cohesion, carrying forward well into the mid-20th century. But that process was disrupted after 1965, when quotas were abolished and mass immigration resumed, leaving the country without time to absorb new arrivals. We’ve struggled since. 

Nations aren’t meant for large-scale influx. Scholars note modern assimilation can take three or four generations. Yet America keeps replenishing the pool, making full integration nearly impossible.

A new slowdown in immigration would not be an act of hostility toward newcomers, but an act of stewardship for both them and us, a way of ensuring that those already here can be fully absorbed into a shared national life. Without such breathing room, assimilation will remain shallow, and America will continue to fracture under the weight of constant cultural replenishment. A deliberate reduction, even to a trickle, would buy the time necessary to rebuild the strong civic and moral framework into which future immigrants might truly belong.

I had the privilege of immigrating to an America with a stronger sense of self than what we see today. As an Iraqi child attending public school in the Reagan years, I was molded by the blatant patriotism of my teachers; it was from them I learned about America’s founding and what the Declaration of Independence means for us as a people. From them I learned about the inhumanity of slavery and the courage of the civil rights movement, and it was from them that I learned the Pledge of Allegiance — a pledge that taught me love for this land and this people, so that I could enter into America’s peoplehood.

I wish that same inspiration for the immigrant children who cross our borders today, and I don’t think hope is lost. The Anglo-Saxon sensibilities of this nation remain. Hard work, the dignity of the individual, and commitment to our founding ideals are yet part of our shrouded American identity, and thankfully so. We’ll need to reignite that very ethic as we recreate the strong, virtuous republic this nation was meant to be. 

In Federalist No. 2, John Jay saw a nation providentially designed for one people, united by the strongest ties. That unity granted generations of newcomers something earnest and good with which to join up. If we can manage to restore Jay’s vision of common language, ethic, and purpose, we’ll be able to give that to them — and to ourselves — once again.

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