Xenophobia Founded on Faulty Assumptions

By Meredith F. Small, LiveScience's Human Nature Columnist Meredith F. Small is an anthropologist at Cornell University and is also the author of "Our Babies, Ourselves; How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent" and "The Culture of Our Discontent; Beyond the Medical Model of Mental Illness." Her Human Nature column appears each Friday on LiveScience. America has always been a cultural melting pot, but that pot has always been kept at a rolling bubble by the heat of xenophobia. And sometimes it boils over causing great damage. Every generation of citizens, many of them immigrants themselves or of recent immigrant ancestry, is afraid of the next wave of others looking for a better life. The fear has always been that those "other" people, the ones who are invading this country, will pollute the gene pool and degrade the... [read full story]