Review of ‘Toppling the Melting Pot’
Author examines the role of immigration in building an inclusive democracy
The subject is timely — American immigration policy — but José-Antonio Orosco’s new book, “Toppling the Melting Pot: Immigration and Multiculturalism in American Pragmatism,” looks at immigrants in another period who came to our shores from another part of the world.
The book considers the great pragmatist thinkers on the undulating waves of immigration from northern and southern Europe between 1890 and 1930.
“This is where we get the images of Eillis Island, the huddled masses … coming from this period,” Orosco said in a phone interview.
As we move forward, looking back could shed light on making the nation a more participatory democracy.
“I think the topic is particularly timely, given the recent presidential elections,” he said Orosco, an associate professor of philosophy at Oregon State University.
“In the campaign of Donald Trump, there was a lot of rhetoric about a need for building a wall keeping out immigrants from Mexico. Undocumented or all of them? He didn’t make that clear.”
Orosco noticed a tone of wariness in Trump’s rhetoric about keeping Mexican and Muslim immigrants out, and about registering Muslims who have come into the country.
In the book, he said, he looked at various activists and social thinkers of the early 20th century to learn “what they were saying about immigration and the effects of how these immigrants would affect society and help us define what democracy could be in the United States versus the definition of what democracy was.”
Orosco said the book explores the views on the subject of such social pragmatist philosophers as John Dewey, W.E.B. Dubois, Josiah Royce and Jane Addams.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Orosco said, the public was thinking about how immigrants would affect the nation’s cultural, political and social life in the cities.
Many of these thinkers, particularly Dewey, thought that what was wrong with the “melting pot” concept was that it assumed that to be an American you had to give up your old culture or your Old World identity or confine it to home, Orosco said. The same concept demanded that to be an American you had to speak English and have an Americanized name in public.
“John Dewey,” he said, “thought that was robbing immigrants of their heritage, and heritage is a really important aspect of a person’s life. And that would rob us of the cultural insights to improve our community life together.”
Orosco said the present-day public discussion on the subject doesn’t ask how immigrants could improve our society other than as workers or as people who are potential economic drains.
“We’ve lost the notion that our society could be reshaped or re-formed on being more inclusive, he said.
The chapter of the book that may be the most controversial, Orosco thinks, is the one on labor leader/civil rights activist César Chávez.
The author considers Chávez a social thinker in the pragmatist line.
Chavez’s belief, Orosco said, is that if we understand what democracy means in the Constitution, especially the First Amendment, then undocumented immigrants have the right to participate in the political processes in their communities, including the right to vote in certain local elections.
Several chapters, he said, deal with undocumented immigrants and why they should be listened to and why they have a moral right to stay.
Orosco, a graduate of West Mesa High School, is also the author of the book “César Chávez and the Common Sense of Nonviolence.” UNM Press has released it in paperback.