Domestic Security and Muslim Immigrants

Transcription

1 James Kurth Domestic Security and Muslim Immigrants The major terrorist threat to the United States comes from a particular source and in a particular form Islamic terrorists organized into transnational networks or, as President Bush put it immediately after September 11, terrorists with global reach. These transnational networks provide the appropriate target for the U.S. war on terrorism. They operate in a wide array of Muslim countries (Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, and, at least formerly, Afghanistan) and in a wide array of Muslim communities within Western countries (most obviously, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy). But, as the nineteen hijackers of September 11 demonstrated, the most immediate and direct threat to the United States comes from the Islamic terrorists who operate within the United States itself. The hijackers were Muslim immigrants (fifteen of them from Saudi Arabia) who had entered the United States on temporary visas and had lived here for many months in communities composed of other Muslim immigrants. The facility with which they did so raises the question of the relation between domestic security and Muslim immigrants, and any effective U.S. war on Islamic terrorism will have to engage it. Here I can discuss only two aspects of this question: (1) how Muslim immigrants differ from previous The Journal of The Historical Society II:3-4 Summer / Fall

2 The Journal immigrants to the United States; and (2) how the security measures of the U. S. government toward the Islamic community in America may differ from those directed at other immigrant communities that seemed to provide a base for threats to domestic security during previous wars of world scope or global reach. Immigration and Assimilation: The American Norm As a nation of immigrants, America has welcomed successive waves of immigrants for most of its history. The early waves (up to the middle of the nineteenth century) largely came from Northern and Western Europe; the middle waves (from the 1870s to the 1920s) largely came from Southern and Eastern Europe; and the later waves (since the 1960s) largely have come from continents beyond Europe, especially from Latin America and Asia. In religious or cultural background, the early immigrants were Protestant, joined by Irish Catholics and German Jews after the 1830s; the middle waves were Catholic and Jewish; and the later waves have been Catholic, Confucian, or Hindu. 1 Most Muslim immigrants to the United States have arrived during the past generation, and thus far they form a comparatively small community. Muslim immigrants and their American-born children probably number about two million. Most of these successive waves of immigrants were assimilated into the broader American culture, if only into its least common denominator. Thus the nation of immigrants continually transformed itself into an American nation. Initially, each new wave provoked great anxiety among the already-established Americans, who worried that new groups would refuse to assimilate into America and would remain a nation within a nation, a community of hyphenated Americans with only dual loyalties, if they had any loyalty to America at all. During the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, however, the conjunction of (1) an expanding American economy, which offered ample rewards to those who assimilated; and (2) a vigorous government program of Americanization, which promoted the English language and the American Creed, enjoyed 410

3 Domestic Security and Muslim Immigrants success in dissolving the many ethnic communities into one American nation. 2 The mass immigration from Mexico during the past thirty years could produce an exception to this historical norm of assimilation, perhaps creating a new nation upon the territory of the United States, a sort of Amerexico or a new Mexico, in a much broader and more literal sense than the old state of New Mexico. The future trajectory of Mexican Americans eventual assimilation, a nation within a nation, or some new synthesis in between remains uncertain, and evidence supports each of these hypothetical paths. 3 Muslim immigrants represent a much clearer and more selfconscious exception to this general rule of gradual assimilation into prevailing American culture. Evidence suggests that Muslim immigrants differ from other immigrants with respect to American culture, and the Islamic community remains (and sees itself to be) a nation within a nation. It would be useful to attend to some of the distinctive features of the Islamic world from which these immigrants come. The Dual Nature of the Islamic World: Universal Religion and Ethnic Community At least in appearance, a common faith in Islam obviously unites Muslim countries, and the image of Islam suggests that the Muslim world forms one great Islamic community or nation. It also suggests that this Islamic community must separate itself from other, always inferior communities of other, always inferior faiths i.e., the infidels with myriad teachings, rituals, and customs. 4 Second, this appearance of Islamic unity lies atop a myriad of ethnic or tribal divisions that existed before Islam (especially in Muhammed s own Arabia) and never have been eliminated by Islam. 5 Consequently, one could interpret the Islamic world s intense proclamations of unity as rhetorical compensation for persistent conflict among a multitude of ethnic groups or tribes. Almost every Muslim country represents a multiethnic or multitribal society in which most people act to preserve or promote the interests of their own ethnic group or 411

4 The Journal tribe against the interests of others, despite their rhetorical expressions of unity. Very little sense of the public interest (res publica) or the common good exists in Muslim countries; left alone, these groups and tribes would war with each other despite the purported unity of Islam. In most cases, one ethnic group or tribe imposes a peace of sorts on the others and then becomes strong enough to form a state. Given the condition of persistent and pervasive ethnic and tribal conflict, this state will be authoritarian a Hobbesian Leviathan. This pattern of a uni-ethnic state ruling over a multiethnic society clearly exists in contemporary Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan, and some version of it can be found in most other Muslim countries as well. Traditionally, this method of organizing and ruling a Muslim country was known as the millet system (each ethnic community was a millet ). It reached its fullest development in the Ottoman Empire, where the Ottoman Turks provided the state or ruling institution that kept a wide variety of ethnic communities or millets (some Muslim and some non-muslim) operating within one imperial system. A millet often served a distinct economic or social function; the function of the Ottoman Turks was to rule the rest. The Ottoman Empire ended eighty years ago, but its basic pattern lives on in most contemporary Muslim countries, which remain miniature and stunted versions of the old Ottoman imperial system. The members of the different ethnic communities under the ruling state do not see themselves as citizens who enjoy equal rights within one homogenous nation. Instead, they see themselves as distinct tribes or ethnic groups, at most a collection of nations within a nation but not of it, or a nation within an empire. Immigration and Assimilation: The Islamic Exception When immigrants from Muslim countries enter Western countries, including the United States, they bring these conceptions about religious identity and community identity with them. Muslim 412

5 Domestic Security and Muslim Immigrants immigrants cannot assimilate into Western or American culture without betraying their faith. Western culture, especially American culture, once Christian and now largely secular (from the Islamic perspective, it was once infidel and is now largely pagan), simultaneously inspires contempt and temptation for Muslim immigrants, who must resist it with the myriad teachings, rituals, and practices Islam provides. Good Muslims would come to an alien, infidel, pagan Western country, including the United States, only to better their economic condition so they could afford a better life as a Muslim within a Muslim community. America is not their community; it is only an economy. 6 Muslim immigrants would prefer to find a better life within their ethnic or tribal community in their Muslim home country. America, however, offers decisive economic advantages compared to the pervasive economic disadvantages they would face back home, which means they must establish an ethnic community within the alien territory of the United States. This Muslim community constitutes the Islamic millet within a multiethnic American society an alien society ruled by an alien state or institution. For Muslim immigrants, therefore, membership in the Islamic millet is essential while they reside within the alien American political system. To live outside the Islamic millet or to assimilate would demonstrate bad faith. For the Muslim who resides within the United States or any other Western country, one must be a bad Muslim to be a good citizen, or one must be a bad citizen to be a good Muslim. Of course, most Muslims who reside in the United States will not engage in bad behavior or illegal activity. They will, however, hold persistent and pervasive grievances against the United States and American society, and U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East will continually irritate and inflame those grievances. The Islamic millet will provide a supportive environment and a validating culture for the Islamic extremists, even terrorists, who live within it. 413

6 The Journal U.S. Security Measures Against Immigrant Communities: Three Previous Wars of World Scope During the three previous wars with a world scope or global reach i.e., the First and Second World Wars and the Cold War Americans believed that a particular immigrant community constituted a base for threats to domestic security. The Wilson administration targeted the German-American community during World War I with an extensive program of surveillance, detentions, internments, and other restrictions. It pursued a similar program that included extensive deportations during the Red Scare that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, this time targeting Russian Jews and Italian anarchists. The Red Scare caused in part the new and very restrictive immigration legislation of During World War II, the Roosevelt administration interned virtually all members of the Japanese-American community in the Pacific Coast states (but not, significantly, in Hawaii) and then transported them to concentration camps located far inland, where most had to remain for the duration of the war. Most Americans have learned about the internment of Japanese- Americans, but few remember the Roosevelt administration s wartime policy toward the German-American and Italian-American communities. These two communities each numbered in the millions, and they were widely dispersed throughout the United States, which made it impossible to intern and concentrate them en masse. Instead, the U.S. government targeted for internment a small and visible minority (numbering 10,000 15,000 persons) from each community, many of whom had been members of organizations that, prior to the war, had demonstrated friendliness toward the governments of Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. 7 These were the bad Germans and bad Italians. The vast majority of the German- and Italian-American communities were given the choice to be good Germans and good Italians; i.e., to cooperate fully with the American war effort and, on occasion, to identify the few disloyal or suspicious persons among them. We often are reminded of what 414

7 Domestic Security and Muslim Immigrants happened to the Japanese-American community, but we do not hear about the Roosevelt administration s program toward the German- American and Italian-American communities, in large part because that program was very successful. Few acts of sabotage the terrorism of the time occurred, and only a few members of those communities had their civil rights abused. During the early Cold War, the Truman administration implemented a systematic program of anti-communist measures, which was reinforced by accusations of disloyalty from leaders of the Republican party ( McCarthyism ). At times, anti-communism seemed disproportionately to target American Jews, and it was a major cause for the new restrictions in the immigration legislation of U.S. Security Measures Against Immigrant Communities: The Islamic Exception Again In the past, the United States willingly implemented vigorous and systematic programs that targeted particular immigrant communities with the purpose of enhancing domestic security. To fight this new war of world scope against terrorists with global reach, will the U.S. government be willing similarly to target the Islamic community in America? Several developments suggest that it will not. Muslim immigrants are a new kind of immigrant to the United States, and the U.S. response (or, perhaps, non-response) to this base for potential threats likely will be new, too. We can begin with almost universal (and correct) condemnation of the U.S. internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. American academic and media elites almost universally condemn the security measures undertaken during the Red Scare and the early Cold War. The ghosts of these security programs of the past will continue to haunt and impede some kinds of security programs in the future. No such ghosts hover over the security measures directed at the German-American and Italian-American communities during the Second World War, but this successful 415

8 The Journal experience is unlikely to provide a model for the Islamic community in America. First, these communities exhibit differences in the status of the identity that defines them. German and Italian were national identities that implicated some aspects of a person s identity but not the deepest ones. Moreover, the Americanization program, with its highly developed American Creed and its rich array of American patriotic symbols and rituals, provided an alternative American national identity to the waning German and Italian ones. Thus members of the two communities simultaneously could be good Germans or good Italians and good Americans. In contrast, many Muslims embrace an Islamic religious identity that touches the deepest aspects (or, given religion s offer of eternal life, the longest aspects) of a person s total identity and can be changed only by the radical process of a conversion to another religion or with the less disruptive but still disreputable process of secularization. Both result in the Muslim immigrant s becoming a bad Muslim. The U.S. government will not undertake a Christianization program to provide an alternative religious identity to Islam, nor will it create a secularization program directed at Muslims. Since American academic and media elites replaced the American Creed with a new ideology of multiculturalism about two decades ago, the U.S. government can no longer undertake an Americanization program. From the multicultural perspective, the Islamic millet in America does not represent a threat to domestic security; it represents the perfection of multicultural ideology. Business elites similarly replaced the recognition of discrete American national interests with a new ideology of globalization about a decade ago. From their perspective, the Islamic millet in America merely provides the natural accompaniment of an inevitable and generally beneficial process of globalization. Together, the ideologies of multiculturalism and globalization have led to the idea that transnationalism provides the best definition of a person s identity in the new postnational, post-modern era

9 Domestic Security and Muslim Immigrants The constitutional status and civil rights of the respective communities differ. Perhaps the U.S. government could follow the precedent of the Roosevelt administration and target organizations with a demonstrated record of friendliness to America s enemies, now Islamic terrorist networks with global reach. Islamic terrorism, however, often finds a safe haven in friendly mosques, which are difficult to infiltrate or close in the United States. In Muslim countries, mosques, which are relatively off-limits to the regime s repressive measures, have often provided a base for political opposition to the existing political regime. Religious organizations, including mosques, are even more difficult to monitor in the United States, where the elaborate (and appropriate) provisions of the First Amendment protect them. It was one thing for the U.S. government to target the German-American Bund or the Silvershirts in a war against Nazi Germany (the Third Reich). It would have been a very different thing to target the Roman Catholic Church if, by some strange historical twist, the enemy had still been the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (the formal name of the First Reich). It will be no less difficult to target Islamic mosques in the United States in a war against Islamic terrorist networks. The long-standing constitutional protections afforded to religious organizations have been reinforced in recent decades as American legal and judicial elites pursued a rights revolution and imposed First Amendment absolutism. This new legal regime has been a major obstacle to the Bush administration s efforts to detain, interrogate, and deport Muslim immigrants, even those from countries that are known to harbor extensive transnational networks of Islamic terrorists. In summary, a grand coalition of American elites academic, media, business, legal, and judicial has midwifed a new multicultural, globalist, and transnational regime in the United States that makes it significantly more difficult to counter transnational threats to U.S. domestic security than the self-consciously and self-confidently 417

10 The Journal national regime of the past. An American national regime would know how to protect America with an elaborate program comprised of (1) drastic restrictions on Muslim immigration from countries that host transnational networks of Islamic terrorists, (2) extensive deportations of illegal immigrants from these countries, and (3) detention and interrogation of immigrants who have extensive associations with extremist Islamic organizations. Perhaps our new regime will never have to devise its own program for the protection of U.S. domestic security beyond its current random and feckless measures. If the United States suffers no further attacks by Islamic terrorists, then the regime will be vindicated. A new round of terrorist attacks, however, would raise a profound historical question: Can a global, transnational regime, which is committed to a multicultural ideology and therefore open to the Islamic millet, protect itself against a global, transnational network composed of Islamic terrorists who are committed to destroying it by any means? NOTES 1. Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1981); Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, updated and revised edition (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998); James Kurth, Ethnic Conflict at Home and Abroad: The United States in Comparative Perspective, in Murray Friedman, editor, The Tribal Basis of American Life (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), pp Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, revised and enlarged edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998). Samuel P. Huntington examines in detail the American Creed in American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1981). I have discussed it in my The Real Clash, The National Interest, Fall 1994, pp. 3 15; and my The Protestant Deformation and American Foreign Policy, Orbis, Spring 1998, pp Peter Andreas, The Making of Amerexico: (Mis) Handling Illegal Immigrants, World Policy Journal, Summer 1994, pp ; also his Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Michael Barone, The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work Again (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2001). 4. Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Bassam Tibi, Islam between Culture and Politics (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Daniel Pipes, In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power (New York: Basic Books, 1983). Akbar S. Ahmed provides an alternative view of Islam in Islam Today: A Short Introduction to The Muslim World (New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1999). 5. I also have discussed the tribal feature of Muslim countries in my The War and The West, Orbis, Spring 2002, pp On identity in the Middle East, see Philip S. Khoury and Joseph Koutiner, editors, Tribes and State Formation in the 418

11 Domestic Security and Muslim Immigrants Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Bernard Lewis, The Multiple Identities of the Middle East (New York: Scheuken Books, 1999); Dennis P. Hupchick, Nation or Millet? Contrasting Western European and Islamic Political Cultures in The Balkans (Wilkes-Barre, PA: Wilkes University Press, 1994); Fred Halliday, Nation and Religion in the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000). 6. Of course, some Muslims also come to the United States not to make money, but to make mayhem; i.e., the Islamic terrorists, who seek in their own way to become better Muslims. For them, America is only a target. 7. Arnold Krammer, Undue Process: The Untold Story of America s German Alien Internees (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997); Stephen Fox, America s Invisible Gulag: A Biography of German American Internment and Exclusion in World War II (New York: Peter Lang, 2000); LaVern J. Rippley, The German- Americans (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976); Lawrence DiStasi, editor, Una Storia Segreta: The Secret History of Italian American Evacuation and Internment During World War II (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2001); Stephen R. Fox, The Unknown Internment: An Oral History of the Relocation of Italian Americans during World War II (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990). 8. I have discussed the interests that support the ideologies of multiculturalism and globalization in America and the West: Global Triumph or Western Twilight? Orbis, Summer 2001, pp