I recently heard a promo on my local NPR station for a program called “Latino USA”, and it called to mind some of Andrew Stuttaford’s recent posts in The Corner on the subject of Britain and its multicultural problems.

Next time on Latino USA…

The growth of transnational adoptions from poorer countries by Americans exploded during the ’80s and ’90s and now those children have come of age and are asking questions.

We’ll hear one Central American woman’s story of discovery and transformation in the search for her own true identity.

That’s this week on Latino USA.

(My transcription of the promo for program 698.)

I will post a correction after the program airs if I’m mistaken as to how the full story goes; but I’m pretty confident in my assumption that it’s along the following lines:

Update: Meh. The story was much shorter and thinner than I had anticipated. The young woman in question is still only 19, and is just starting to explore the country of El Salvador, from where she was adopted at six months of age; and has just managed to locate her biological family. So most of what I wrote below should be taken as a prediction, a description of the direction she appears to be headed in. If I’d been able to hear the whole program before writing this, I probably would have chosen to go less speculative, and tee off on the host’s repeated and unequivocal description of the subject as a “Central American woman” instead.

The woman in question was adopted from a Central American country, probably as an infant, and was raised by her adoptive non-Hispanic family in the United States. Her teenage struggles with her parents lead her to look for her birth mother, explore the culture of the country of her birth, and experiment with a new, Central American identity. College provided her opportunity, encouragement, and incentive to deepen this immersion in the other culture, while buttressing her rejection of her parents’ culture with the ideology of multiculturalism and grievance. So now, even though she was raised in the same Wonder-Bread-and-Jello world as the rest of us in Middle America, she has discovered that her “true identity” is the one of her birth, in a land she remembered nothing of as a child.

The story is easy enough to describe because I have seen it plenty of times, working close to the front lines of the culture wars as I do. Familiarity does little, however, to ease my worry about this sort of thing. Especially as one reads the stories that Stuttaford and others have linked to about second- and third-generation Muslims in Britain, and how they have come to reject British identity in favor of an Islamist vision of their ancestral heritage.

Now granted, even the hard-core Aztlan crowd is a long way removed—geographically, culturally, religiously, and otherwise—from Islamism and its terror-spawning death cult. Yet the same sort of multi-culti cultivation of foreign “true identities” is going on, supported by major educational and media institutions; and I fear that left unchecked it poses the same existential threat here in the United States as it does in Britain, even if that threat manifests itself in different ways.

I suspect that many, perhaps even most, Americans sense this at some level. That certainly would help explain the current resonance of the immigration issue. The issue of multiculturalism also shows why many of us who remain grateful for earlier waves of immigration can at the same time insist that the current one be sharply curtailed, at least for a while; and also why, while we have no inherent preference for one nationality over another, we find the thought of five million additional Mexicans and Central Americans much more troubling in the present moment than we would five million Chinese, or Russians, or Indians…or even Frenchmen.