Italian Americans, Today's Immigrants, Multiculturalism, and the Mark of Cain

In an article in the June 1993 issue of Commentary, the influential social commentator, James Q. Wilson cites the southern Italian family system as an example of such systems that are socially and politically dysfunctional because they are "amoral," and therefore a model that Americans should avoid. Where found, America should erase them as fast as possible. In an exchange of letters on the issue of today's immi? gration in the August 1993 issue of the same journal, Peter Brimelow cites, and Francis Fukuyama accepts, the theory that the "amoral famil ism" of certain non-WASP immigrant groups is the cause of past and present organized crime in the U.S. Brimelow explicitly adds "Iraqi Christians," Mexicans, and other of today's non-European immigrants to the Italian immigrants of yesterday. Fukuyama says "it is probably appropriate to compare present-day Mexican immigrants to the sev? eral million southern Italians of peasant background who flooded into the United States," and cites the theory of amoral familism as the point of comparison. The thesis of amoral familism comes from a 1958 book by Edward C. Banfield, The Moral Basis of A Backward Society, in which the author asserted that people in southern Italy had no community or social moralities, only loyalty to their families' short-term interests. In the summer of 1992, a speech writer for the then candidate, Bill Clinton, called me to ask for help. Clinton was to give a speech before an Italian American group in Washington, D.C. The candidate, I was told, wanted to pay tribute to Henri (Enrico) Tonti, the 17th century Italian who explored the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River for the king of France. Clinton knew that, at the turn of the century, Italian immigrants in Arkansas named a town they founded there Tontitown. They had to defend it from the violent raids of nativist bigots. I passed over this last point at the start of what turned out to be a cordial phone discussion. As we talked, I learned that mentioning Tonti and Tontitown was the only thing of substance specifically about Italian Americans that