THE NEW AMERICANS: How the Melting Pot Can Work Again.

By Michael Barone. Regnery. 338 pp. $27.95

Sometime in the past year or two, American politicians awoke en masse with a terrible hangover on the issue of immigration. Policy had been dominated by restrictionists, who warned that a brown or yellow or multicolored tide was about to change the character of the nation, if not destroy it entirely. Gradually, though, the shrill voices of Pat Buchanan and Pete Wilson faded, the role of immigrants in the economic boom became clear, and legislators began amending or repealing the anti-immigrant statutes put on the books just a few sessions earlier.

Now, with the Immigration and Naturalization Service under orders to clean up its act, and new amnesties and guest worker programs under serious consideration, the tone of the popular debate has come full circle. Instead of books denouncing the rise of "alien" influences and blaming immigrants for everything from Los Angeles traffic jams to Chesapeake Bay pollution, we have books extolling the contributions of immigration to American life and values.

A political commentator best known as the coauthor for the past three decades of The Almanac of American Politics, Barone sensibly debunks "the notion that we are at a totally new place in American history, that we are about to change from a white-bread nation to a collection of peoples of color." On the contrary, "the new Americans of today, like the new Americans of the past, can be interwoven into the fabric of American life. . . . It can happen even more rapidly if all of us realize that that interweaving is part of the basic character of the country."

Barone compares three groups of what he calls "new" Americans—blacks, Latinos, and Asians—with three ethnic groups that predominated among immigrants a century ago— the Irish, Italians, and Jews. Interesting, even compelling, Barone’s construct produces a number of useful insights about upward mobility and assimilation. Past and present have, in some respects, uncanny parallels. But there is also a major flaw in the approach. The African Americans of whom Barone writes have, for the most part, been in America far longer than almost anyone else he discusses, including most of the "white-bread" people. He acknowledges the problem early on, and then lamely dismisses it "for the purpose of this book."

Despite that weakness, many readers will enjoy Barone’s rapid, hold-on-to-your-hat histories of life in America for five of the six groups covered here. (His chapter on Asians seems cursory; perhaps he ran out of space, time, or interest.) The encyclopedic knowledge he has gained while visiting every congressional district in the country adds depth and flavor to his stories, though his periodic swipes at such policies as affirmative action and bilingual education seem gratuitous.

The book may not live up to its subtitle, but it does provide a reassuring reminder that "the United States has never been a monoethnic nation." The American majority is made up of an ever-shifting coalition of many minorities. And yet, remarkably, out of that relentless change there emerges a unique and enviable stability.

—Sanford J. Ungar