Will 'Transnationalists' Redefine What It Means to Be American?

Dec. 7, 2005 — -- The United States is often described as a "melting pot" that absorbs immigrants from diverse lands and blends them into something we call Americans. They may be Latin, or Russian, or Italian when they arrive, but given enough time they, or at least their children, become just like the rest of us.

That may have been true in the past, but it is less so today, according to a growing body of research. Modern technology ranging from jet aircraft to the Internet has made it possible for new immigrants to hang on to their past, and what we see is not necessarily what we get.

They are called "transnationals," a new buzzword that has embroiled many experts in controversy. The experts can't even seem to agree on its definition, much less whether it is a good thing.

But few dispute that something very fundamental has changed. It's different from internationalism, which chiefly concerns global commerce, in that transnationals are immigrants, or their offspring, who maintain a very personal relationship with the land and the culture from whence they came.

As their numbers grow many other things will change, including what it means to be a nation.

"The era of nation-state societies successfully keeping themselves distinct has now been eclipsed," sociologists Roger Waldinger and David Fitzgerald of the University of California, Los Angeles, concluded in a recent study.

But that doesn't mean America is any less, just because the country has a growing number of residents who feel loyal to both the United States and the country of their family's origin, says Elizabeth Stone of Fordham University, who has spent decades studying the stories of families who immigrated to this country in search of a new life.

It's a personal issue for her. Her grandparents came from Sicily, and she has found much evidence that they were driven to assimilate in the grand tradition of the melting pot.

"One of the best stories was how my grandmother named the family cats George Washington and Abraham Lincoln," because she wanted to be known as American, Stone says.