Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [47]
U.S. academics who favor less immigration from Latin America have also picked up on this theme. Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We? and Victor Davis Hanson’s Mexifornia , to cite two better-known examples, are both afflicted by the assimilation blues. Hanson, a classicist at California’s Fresno State, says Latinos display a “stubborn resistance” to our culture and that the old Americanization model isn’t working efficiently for the lion’s share of these newcomers. He cites the “sheer numbers of Mexican people who speak poor English, show few professional skills, and are overrepresented in our jails.”
Huntington, a Harvard political scientist, says European migrants a century ago “modified and enriched” America, but today’s Latino influx presents “a serious challenge to America’s traditional identity.” Mexican immigration, he warns, “is leading toward the demographic reconquista of areas Americans took from Mexico by force in the 1830s and 1840s.” Latino immigration, says the professor, “poses a fundamental question: will the United States remain a country with a single national language and a core Anglo-Protestant culture?”
The real question, however, is whether these fears are well founded. Do the facts regarding today’s newcomers square with the popular beliefs and widely held assumptions? For ratings-driven television and radio people, or myopic politicians out to demagogue an issue, or opinion journalists straining to be provocative, perception and reality are often one and the same. Playing up divisions and piling on can be an end to itself, regardless of whether the exercise enlightens the public and moves the debate forward. Again, to paraphrase the proverb, there’s nothing exactly new here. But opponents of immigration have turned ignoring context, historical or otherwise, into something of a virtue, and nowhere is this more evident than in discussions of whether the latest arrivals are assimilating.
The claim, romanticized by Father Time and Tinsel-town, is that prior Asian and European immigrants, from the Poles and the Jews to the Irish, Italians, and Chinese, pretty much checked their ethnic identities at Ellis Island and adopted American culture in no time at all. But Mexicans, we’re told, are totally different, sui generis even.
Hanson writes that the traditional homesick immigrant was “barricaded in his new homeland by thousands of miles of ocean, with little hope of returning to the Old Country every few months, and thus had to deal with Americans.” For the Mexican campesino, by contrast, “the Rio Grande is no ocean, but a trickle easily crossed by a drive over a tiny bridge.” Huntington worries that too many are coming too fast, noting that in the 1990s Mexicans were “over one half of the Latin American immigrants to the United States, and Latin American immigrants were about one half the total immigrants to the continental United States between 1970 and 2000.”
Pat Buchanan, to no one’s surprise, is also deeply concerned about this slow but steady browning of America. “Mexicans not only come from another culture, but millions are of another race,” he says, though Pitchfork Pat probably takes some comfort in knowing that at least they’re not Jewish. Asian and European immigrants might have settled in to ethnic enclaves replete with stores and restaurants where people could speak their native tongue, but some see menace among Mexicans who do the same. “A spirit of separatism, nationalism, and irredentism is alive in the barrios,” says Buchanan. He’s also worried that these immigrants present a physical danger to U.S. natives. If for no other reason, in his view, Latino immigrants should be deported en masse because, he claims, they have a general contempt for the law and are exposing natives to tuberculosis, leprosy, and other Third World diseases. “The first duty of government is to protect its citizens,” he writes in State of Emergency: