Scholar Discusses Migration, Cultural Pluralism ichael Wertz, a visiting scholar at Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of International Migration, discussed ethnic self-perception and cultural unity in the United States yesterday in the Intercultural Center. The talk began with a discussion of the 1920s, which Wertz called “an era of unprecedented intellectual inventions.” Wertz described, to an audience largely made up of scholars in the area of migration, the ideas surrounding the development of pluralism and the acceptance of migrants in the United States before and during that period. “Cultural pluralism became a distinctly American concept [at this time],” according to Wertz. Central to the presentation was the formation of an American identity that included the immigrants of the early twentieth-century. Wertz discussed the differences between cultural unity in America and in Europe at this time. In Europe, some groups of people had already been excluded from different national identities, such as the Jewish population, he said. Wertz said that there was a pattern and tradition of discrimination in Europe at this time. This perspective existed to the extent that “America was seen as a betrayal of nationalism,” Wertz said. This betrayal came in the form of American society, which was much newer than European society and thus lacked its established social standards and codes, he said. “The new social standards emerged as an answer to the question, what does it mean to be an American,” he said. “In America, migration altered the relation between the individual and society,” Wertz said. The event was sponsored by the Institute for the Study of International Migration. – Evan Regan-Levine