LOS ANGELES — ‘What does it mean to be an American?’ ‘Opportunity,’ says Rosita Romero, a second-generation émigré from El Salvador, lunching at Twain’s Restaurant on Ventura Boulevard in Los Angeles. ‘E Pluribus Hassle – out of many people, one bigger and bigger problem,’ says Brent Uggam, a truck driver from Kansas City, Mo. When a Purdue University professor asked that question of 1,500 adult US citizens nationwide, he was surprised by the response. Despite heated debate over illegal immigration, there is more uniting the country on the issue of national identity than dividing it, says Jeremy Straughn, the sociology professor who oversaw the telephone survey. ‘The reason there is a perception that the country is so divided has more to do with the structure of our political system and the way the two-party system works than in the underlying core beliefs we found,’ he says. For example, there is a wider acceptance of multiculturalism than in the 1920s. ‘This conclusion is very reinforcing of a changed attitude toward multiculturalism now being accepted in the US as opposed to the biases of extreme racial purity of Northern European stock that characterized immigration at […]