The New Americans

by Michael Barone

"Sometime in this century, we are told, the United States will become a "majority-minority" country - that is, a nation where whites make up less than 50 percent of the population. Many believe this signals a fundamental change in America. Does it? Is the Melting Pot a thing of the past?" "Absolutely not, says political historian Michael Barone. In The New Americans, Barone reminds us that the United States has never been a homogeneous, monoethnic nation. He reveals how the new Americans of today can be interwoven into the fabric of American life just as immigrants have been interwoven throughout U.S. history." "Barone demonstrates the startling and important similarities between today's new Americans and nineteenth-century immigrant groups: "in many ways," he writes, "blacks resemble Irish, Latinos resemble Italians, Asians resemble Jews." We need to recognize such similarities and learn from America's success in assimilating earlier immigrants, as well as from the mistakes that were