After two or at most three generations of life in the United States, all immigrant groups (very much including Mexican-Americans) largely assimilate – learning English, participating in communal life, and clearly identifying more with their American fellow citizens rather than the people of the old country.

5. EVEN THOUGH ALL IMMIGRANT GROUPS CONTRIBUTE TO AMERICAN IDENTITY, THEY HAVEN’T DONE SO IN LINE WITH THEIR PERCENTAGE OF THE POPULATION. As previously noted, more Americans today boast German heritage than British heritage, and yet no one could argue that the culture of the United States contains more Teutonic than English elements.

Despite the inane insistence of multi-culturalists that no one nationality deserves primacy in terms of contemporary American identity, it’s obvious that the earliest settlers from the British Isles played a wildly disproportionate role in shaping the nation. We speak English, embrace British traditions of jurisprudence and politics, even model our great universities on the medieval buildings at Oxford and Cambridge. America’s British heritage isn’t merely “first among equals,” but the obvious standard to which all newcomers have managed to adjust. A simple thought experiment can prove the point: recall (or imagine) traveling to one of the English-heritage nations (Canada, Australia or the UK) and the level of comfort and familiarity you’ll feel during your visit (even if you do have to learn to drive on the wrong side of the road). Then imagine a similar trip to Germany or China or Mexico or any nation of Africa, and you can count a vastly less comfortable culture that would require a far more complicated adjustment for any American, of any ethnicity. U.S. culture owes an incomparable debt to British culture—as David Hackett Fischer makes clear in his altogether invaluable book “Albion’s Seed,” even our sometimes mystifying and profound regional differences mirror the regional differences in England that distinguished and divided the early settlers. Scholars have even traced baseball, perhaps the most sacred of all American cultural icons, to English roots – or to the “city game,” played in London streets even before the first settlement at Jamestown.

Yes, various ethnicities eventually melt down in the “crucible” of America, but the resulting molten metal has been poured into forms and molds shaped long ago in England, Scotland and Wales.

6. THE CURRENT “DIVERSITY” OF AMERICAN LIFE IS REGULARLY DISTORTED AND OVERSTATED. For years, we’ve been subjected to outrageously misleading stories about “minorities” now constituting an American “majority” and about the implacable decline of the nation’s traditional white, Protestant identity. Obviously, those who pontificate in this tone only rarely check the census data. The most recent figures on U.S. racial percentages (from Census Bureau’s 2005 American Community Survey) suggest that 74.7% of us (215.3 million people) identify as “white alone,” 12.1% (34.9 million) say we are “black American,” 4.3% are Asian American, and 7.9% say “some other race” or “two or more races.”

Since Hispanics are (rightly) not identified as a “race,” (after all, movie star Cameron Diaz and baseball star David Ortiz hardly look like they share a racial identity) the 14.5% (41.9 million) who register as Hispanic can count themselves as any race; as it happens, 48% of them say they are “white.”

In other words, the notion that the United States has lost its traditional “white” majority is arrant nonsense: at the time of the Constitution, the population was 80% white, and it’s self-identified as 75% white today.

By the same token, the nation remains overwhelmingly Christian and Protestant, despite the claims of a “post Christian America: 79.8% of census respondents in 2001 identified themselves with one or another Christian denomination. Only 5.2% claimed membership in a non-Christian faith, with Jews (1.4%) the leaders in that group. Only 0.6% of Americans are Muslim, 0.5% Buddhist, and 0.4% Hindu.

The most rapidly growing segment in the survey involves those who say they have “no religion” or else identify as “atheist” or “agnostic” – a group that now represents 15% of the total. Though these irreligious Americans certainly constitute a force worth respecting (after all, consider all the recent bestsellers they’ve produced) they hardly amount to a separate, distinct culture: all the prominent atheist leaders and spokesmen say that non-believers remain largely indistinguishable from the faithful Christians next door, and they honor the same behavioral and communal norms (other than church attendance and Bible study, obviously) as their devout neighbors.

7. THE AFRICAN AMERICAN EXCEPTION. The black community remains the only important sub-group with a long-standing and current claim to a meaningfully separate cultural identity. The circumstances of African-Americans have been irreducibly different from the very beginning – as the only segment of the population that didn’t choose to come here, bore stigmatization as property and sub-human, and survived centuries of mistreatment through vile and violent bigotry. As previously noted, blacks developed a distinctive and separate culture because of their enforced separation for hundreds of years. Nevertheless, African Americans managed to make prodigious contributions to the “Melting Pot” process: what we consider distinctively “American” music evolved largely out of ragtime, blues and jazz which in turn derived from ancient African traditions. In other words, for all their separate and segregated status over the years, blacks have played a huge if often unacknowledged role in the development of the dominant culture.

Moreover, for all the differences between the “European-American” and “African-American” experience, the members of both huge groups remain vastly closer to one another than to compatriots in former homelands across vast Oceans. In his moving book “Out of America,” Washington Post reporter Keith Richburg writes about his experience for several on assignment in Africa, and the inescapable recognition that despite his black heritage he remains far more American than African. In part, the lack of serious African connection may reflect the cruel efforts to erase the cultural legacy of the Motherland by slave holders and other oppressors, but after 400 years on this continent no one could seriously question the American identity of our 35 million citizens of African ancestry. In fact, the spectacular economic and educational progress of so many African-Americans over the last fifty years involves precisely those individuals who’ve made the most enthusiastic embrace of that U.S. identity (in the tradition of the unabashedly and distinctively American Dr. King) rather than affirming separatist notions of Afro-Centrism.

In any event, even among African-Americans—our most distinctive and serious and enduring subculture – there’s never been mass support for the idea of carving out an ethnic homeland (the exclusive province of lunatics like Farrakhan) or repatriation to Mother Africa (only handfuls followed Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” craze or supported white efforts to carve a haven for ex-slaves in Liberia).

This means that despite the disinformation of political correctness, and the regular exaggeration of US diversity, our nation stands little chance of experiencing calls for dismemberment in the tradition of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Canada/Quebec, or even England/Scotland. When America went through a wrenching, supremely bloody struggle to preserve the union, that battle arose out of regional and political rather than ethnic differences (Irish and Jewish Americans, for instance, fought prominently on both sides of the War Between the States).

With relief and confidence, we can follow current events and the various separatist movements in Europe, where true multiculturalism continues to bear its invariably bitter fruit, as we watch the unfolding sorry fate of quarreling Flemings and Walloons in ill-arranged little Belgium, where the beer is stronger than any unifying nationalism and the chocolate’s sweeter than the future.