I would like to think that the work of the United Nations or the work of some international body would be facilitated by the growth of international civil society, that the United States, for example, would feel more constrained to sign the Kyoto Accord and get involved in international environmental actions because there is unity among civil societies from Canada, Sweden, China, and so on. But I think US policy is driven by national and not international factors.

What about the effect of the international on the national—for example, the effect of immigration on US civil society?

It is true that immigration of any sort, in any context, is disruptive of preexisting patterns of community. That was true when my ancestors got here in the 1640s from England. They certainly disrupted the local social capital here in New England. They destroyed most of it. Similarly, each successive wave of immigrants has had a disruptive effect. That was true of the last large wave of Russian Jews, Italians, and Poles when they arrived here at the turn of the last century. And it takes time measured in decades, not weeks, for integration to occur. What has happened historically with immigration is that a new “us” or a new “we” has been created. The process that was occurring with Italians and Irish 100 years ago probably realistically took 50 or 60 years to work itself through.

We have moved rapidly in my lifetime toward integration that is not assimilation in the sense of everyone becoming identical. It is not that immigrants have stopped being whatever they were—but that distinction becomes kind of invisible in social terms. By “invisible,” I mean sociologically invisible. That is not yet true of Vietnamese Americans or Mexican Americans moving here because we have not yet created this new more encompassing sense of “we,” and therefore over the next decade or two we will have turbulence associated with that process.

The process of immigration has the effect of isolating everybody a little bit in the short run, but this is not a long-run problem. We have fixed this problem before. The United States has been through this problem before and benefited. Previous waves of immigrants have tremendously enriched the country. Most “American” Nobel Prize winners are themselves immigrants or the children of immigrants. Immigration over the long run is a tremendous asset for the United States. One of the biggest assets we have as a country is that we have learned to manage diversity, which is a big advantage the United States has as compared to Europe, for example.

The most certain prediction that you can make about any modern society is that it will be more ethnically diverse 30 years from now than it is now. This will be true of every place. We are all becoming more diverse. The victory in this race will go to the country or countries that most effectively create out of that mix a new “we.” The United States has a huge advantage because we have done it before. The last time they created a new “we” in Britain was a thousand years ago. The same goes for France, Germany, Sweden, or Italy. These places are going to have a lot of trouble with immigration.

Diversity creates complications in the short run. On the other hand, it is not difficult to figure out how to do this. We have been through waves of immigration before. Fifty years from now, this will be completely solved and it will be wonderful. I would like to accelerate the process so that it will not take 50 years.