| America is often described as a country defined by commitment to a creed formulated in the writings of our Founders. But American identity is only partly a matter of creed. For much of our history we also defined ourselves in racial, religious, ethnic, and cultural terms.
Before the Revolution we thought of ourselves in religious terms: 98 percent of Americans were Protestants, and Catholic Spain and France were our enemies. We also thought of ourselves in racial and ethnic terms: 80 percent of Americans at the time of the Revolution were from the British Isles. The other 20 percent were largely German and Dutch.
America is also often described as a nation of immigrants. We should distinguish immigrants, however, from settlers. Immigrants are people who leave one society and move to a recipient society. Early Americans did not immigrate to an existing society; they established new societies, in some cases for commercial reasons, more often for religious reasons. It was the new societies they created, basically defined by Anglo-Protestant culture, that attracted subsequent generations of immigrants to this country.
Demographer Campbell Gibson has done a very interesting analysis of the evolution of the United States’ population. He argues that if no immigrants had come to this country after 1790, the population of the United States in 1990 would have been just about half of what it actually was. Thus, the American people are literally only half an immigrant people.
There have been great efforts in our history to limit immigration. In only one decade in the nineteenth century did the annual intake of immigrants amount to more than 1 percent of the population each year. In three other decades it was slightly over eight-tenths of 1 percent, while in six decades it was less than four-tenths of 1 percent. Obviously immigration has been tremendously important to this country, but the foreign-born population has exceeded 10 percent of our total population only in the seven census years from 1860 to 1930. (When the 2000 census results come out we will be back above the 10 percent level again.)
As I began to investigate the question of immigration, I came to the conclusion that our real problem is not so much immigration as assimilation. Seventy-five or 100 years ago there were great pressures to ensure that immigrants assimilated to the Anglo-Protestant culture, work ethic, and principles of the American creed. Now we are uncertain what immigrants should assimilate to. And that is a serious problem.
As I went further in my research, I concluded there was a still more significant problem, a problem that encompasses immigration, assimilation, and other things, too—what I will refer to as the Mexican problem. Much of what we now consider to be problems concerning immigration and assimilation really concern Mexican immigration and assimilation. Mexican immigration poses challenges to our policies and to our identity in a way nothing else has in the past.
There are five distinctive characteristics of the Mexican question which make it special. First, Mexican immigration is different because of contiguity. We have thought of immigration as being symbolized by Ellis Island, and perhaps now by Kennedy Airport. But Mexicans do not come across 2,000 miles of ocean. They come, often easily, across 2,000 miles of land border.
Our relationship with Mexico in this regard is in many respects unique in the world. No other First World country has a land frontier with a Third World country—much less one of 2,000 miles. The significance of this border is enhanced by the economic differences between the two countries. The income gap between Mexico and us is the largest between any two contiguous countries in the world.
| Mexican Immigration Is Different |
| From a presentation by Peter Skerry to a July 28, 2000 conference on immigration sponsored by the McCormick Tribune Foundation and the Center for Immigration Studies:
The fact is, today’s immigrant stream is much less diverse than the one a hundred years ago. Specifically, Mexican-origin individuals predominate in a way that was not true of any single group at the turn of the last century.
In the immigration wave from the 1870s to the 1920s, for example, the largest single group were Germans, and they constituted about 15 percent of that influx. The second largest group was Russians (many of them Jews), and they constituted 12 percent of that influx. Mexicans, on the other hand, currently make up around a third of our total flow. So today’s inflow is a whole lot less diverse.
Also, the issue of illegal immigration looms here. Something like 40-60 percent of illegal immigrants are of Mexican origin, which clearly is important. It’s also significant that naturalization rates are low for Mexican immigrants—relative to other groups today, and compared to our historical experience.
I don’t see much evidence of divided loyalties among second-generation Mexican-Americans. But being a Mexican-American in the Southwest is simply not the same as being a Pole in Chicago. It’s important to emphasize that Mexicans are concentrated in one section of the United States that was once part of their homeland. Mexicans lost half of their national territory to the U.S. in the Mexican War in the middle of the nineteenth century. Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the Southwest are continually reminded that the region was once part of Mexico, and many of them feel themselves to be a conquered people. This puts them in a very distinctive situation from other immigrants to America.
Peter Skerry is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. |
The second distinctive aspect of today’s Mexican immigration concerns numbers. Mexican immigration during the past several decades has been very substantial. In 1998 Mexican immigrants constituted 27 percent of the total foreign-born population in this country; the next largest two contingents, Filipinos and Chinese, each amounted to only 4 percent. Mexicans constituted two-thirds of Spanish-speaking immigrants, who in turn were over half of all new arrivals between 1970 and 1996. Our post-1965 wave of immigration differs from previous waves in having a majority from a single non-English language group.
A third distinguishing characteristic of this Mexican immigration is illegality. Illegal immigration is overwhelmingly a post-1965 and Mexican phenomenon. In 1995, according to one report, Mexicans made up 62 percent of the immigrants who entered the United States illegally. In 1997, the Immigration and Naturalization Service estimated Mexican illegals were nine times as numerous as the next largest contingent, from El Salvador.
The next important characteristic of Mexican immigration has been its concentration in a particular region. Mexican immigrants are heavily concentrated in the Southwest and particularly in southern California. This has very real consequences. Our Founders emphasized that immigrants would have to be dispersed among what they described as the English population in this country. To the extent that we have a large regional concentration of immigrants, it is a departure from our usual pattern.
Now obviously we have previously had high concentrations of immigrants in particular areas, such as the Irish in Boston, but by and large the immigrants have dispersed to different cities, and those cities have simultaneously hosted many different immigrant groups. This is the case still in New York, where there are many immigrants today, but no group that dominates. In Southern California, though, two-thirds or more of all the children in school are Spanish speaking. As Abe Lowenthal and Katrina Burgess write in The California-Mexico Connection, "No school system in a major U.S. city has ever experienced such a large influx of students from a single foreign country. The schools of Los Angeles are becoming Mexican."
Finally, there is the matter of the persistence of Mexico’s large immigration. Previous waves of immigration fairly soon came to an end. The huge 1840s and ’50s influxes from Ireland and Germany were drastically reduced by the Civil War and the easing of the Irish potato famine. The big wave at the turn of the century came to an end with World War I and the restrictive legislation in 1924.
These breaks greatly helped to facilitate the assimilation of the newcomers. In contrast, there does not seem to be any prospect of the current wave, begun over three decades ago, coming to an end soon. Mexican immigration may eventually subside as the Mexican birth rate slows, and possibly as a result of long-term economic development in Mexico. But those effects will only occur over a very long term. For the time being we are faced with substantial continued immigration from Mexico.
Sustained high levels of immigration build on themselves. After the first immigrants come from a country, it is easier for others from that country to come. Immigration is not a self-limiting process, it is a self-enhancing one.
And the longer immigration continues, the more difficult politically it is to stop. Leaders of immigrant organizations and interest groups develop a vested interest in expanding their own constituency. Immigration develops political support, and becomes more difficult to limit or reshape.
For all these reasons Mexican immigration is unique. What are the implications of this for assimilation?
The answer appears uncertain. In education and economic activity, Mexicans rate much lower than other immigrant groups. The rate of intermarriage between Hispanics and other Americans appears to be decreasing rather than increasing. (In 1977, 31 percent of all Hispanic marriages were interethnic; in 1994, 25.5 percent were.) With respect to language, I suspect Mexicans will in large part follow the pattern of earlier immigrants, with the third generation being fluent in English, but quite possibly, unlike previous third generations, also fluent in their ancestral language.
All of the characteristics I have mentioned lead to the possibility of a cultural community evolving in the Southwest in which people could pursue their lives within an overwhelmingly Mexican community, without ever having to speak English. This has already happened with the Cubans in Miami, and it could be reproduced on a larger and more significant scale in the Southwest. We know in the coming decades people of Hispanic origin will be a majority of the people in California and eventually in other southwestern states. America is moving in the direction of becoming a bilingual and bicultural society.
Without Mexican immigration, the overall level of immigration to this country would be perhaps two-thirds of what it has been—near the levels recommended by Barbara Jordan’s immigration commission a few years ago. Illegal entries would be relatively minor. The average skill and education level of immigrants would be the highest in American history, and the much-debated balance of economic benefits versus costs of immigration would tilt heavily toward the positive side. The bilingual education issue would fade from our agenda. A major potential challenge to the cultural, and conceivably political, integrity of the United States would disappear.
Mexico and Mexican immigration, however, will not disappear, and learning to live with both may become more and more difficult. President-elect Vicente Fox wants to remove all restrictions on the movement of Mexicans into the United States.
In almost every recent year the Border Patrol has stopped about 1 million people attempting to enter the U.S. illegally from Mexico. It is generally estimated that about 300,000 make it across illegally. If over 1 million Mexican soldiers crossed the border, Americans would treat it as a major threat to their national security and react accordingly. The invasion of over 1 million Mexican civilians is a comparable threat to American societal security, and Americans should react against it with comparable vigor.
Mexican immigration looms as a unique and disturbing challenge to our cultural integrity, our national identity, and potentially to our future as a country.
Samuel Huntington is Weatherhead professor of government at Harvard and a member of the Council of Academic Advisers of the American Enterprise Institute
|
It was the winter of l997, and I was sitting with two Mexican diplomats in an exquisitely decorated mansion in the hills above Mexico City. They had all the charm and breeding of the Mexican upper classes, but what they were telling me was something very new and seemingly unlikely: the idea that Mexicans in the U.S. and Mexican-Americans should now be allowed to have "dual nationality" in both countries.
| Are Mexicans Melting into America or Not? |
| Adapted from "Our Hispanic Predicament" by Linda Chavez, Commentary, June 1998:
In Los Angeles in February 1998, a crowd of over 91,000 fans, made up predominantly of Latinos who live and work in southern California, gathered for the Gold Cup soccer match between the Mexican and U.S. national teams. They did not come to root for the home team. Rather, they booed and whistled through the singing of "The Star Spangled Banner," and then proceeded to pelt the players on the American team with food, bottles, and cans.
The incident provoked days of coverage in the local media, most of it antagonistic to the Latino community. In one of dozens of letters that appeared in Los Angeles newspapers, a Mexican-American fan himself complained bitterly that he and his young son had been sprayed with beer and soda by fellow Latinos for having had the temerity to display a small American flag. A player on the U.S. team noted that he and his teammates had been treated far better when they played in Mexico City than at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Dozens of other letter-writers expressed their disgust with Hispanic immigrants who were happy to take advantage of American jobs, education, medical care, and welfare benefits while spitting on American symbols.
Were this mini-riot and the reaction to it an aberration, or a glimpse into a disturbing future? To put it broadly, can the United States successfully assimilate its large and rapidly growing Hispanic population, or are Hispanics becoming a permanently aggrieved and volatile minority? By the year 2008, Hispanic-Americans, currently 29 million strong, will outnumber blacks and form the largest minority group in the country. In 50 years, if trends hold, they will make up one-quarter of the total U.S. population. Not since the first decades of this century has the United States experienced so intense and far-reaching a demographic shift.
Thanks to a 1965 change in immigration law that gave priority to relatives of persons already living in the United States, a tide of poorly educated, non-English-speaking Mexican immigrants began to wash over U.S. towns and cities. Their ranks were swollen further by substantial numbers of illegal immigrants.
By the 1980s, Mexican-Americans were making economic gains. Except among the most recent immigrants from Mexico and among Puerto Ricans and certain other Hispanics where an underclass culture has taken root, the main obstacle in the Hispanic community today is not a lack of economic mobility. The real problem is that, whatever the degree of their economic success, only haltingly are Hispanic immigrants becoming part of the social, political, and cultural fabric of the U.S. The evidence attesting to this is, unfortunately, abundant.
One key indicator is the rate of naturalization. Even after nearly 20 years of U.S. residence, fewer than one in five Mexican-Americans choose to acquire American citizenship. Another indicator is language. As of 1990, three-quarters of Mexican immigrants who arrived in the 1980s still spoke little or no English. About one-quarter of all Mexican immigrants have not learned to speak English even after decades in the U.S.
What these numbers reveal is that many Mexicans straddle two worlds. While living and working in the United States, they listen to news from their native country on Spanish-language radio and TV stations, make frequent visits across the border, and send money back home to the tune of $4 billion a year. They hope to return to Mexico permanently once they have gained some financial security.
As if to muddy the waters still further, the Mexican government has begun to take an aggressive interest in its foreign nationals. Its most visible step thus far has been to adopt a law allowing émigrés and their offspring to apply for an attenuated form of Mexican citizenship, including the right to own property in Mexico and to hold a Mexican passport. As soon as the law went into effect in 1998, hundreds lined up at consulates throughout the United States to apply for the new status, many simply as a way of asserting their Mexican identity.
Linda Chavez is president of the Center for Equal Opportunity in Washington, D.C., and the author of Out of the Barrio. |
"It all started in Chicago six years ago when I was consul there," Amb. Alejandro Carrillo Castro began. "Colombians already had dual nationality, and Mexicans living there came to me and asked, ‘Why not us?’ My first reaction was negative, because to start with, we don’t proudly send Mexicans abroad. But in Chicago, they told me that there was a very good reason that so many Mexicans were not taking American citizenship—and it’s basically an economic reason. Our constitution has provisions that non-citizens cannot own land in Mexico, so they would be forced to give up their land here if they became citizens there.
"I began to think that the answer might lie in having a totally different concept of nationality and citizenship. I began to ask, ‘What would happen if people got voting rights in another country and served in the army there, but kept the possibility of going back to their mother country and holding land as if they were citizens there?’"
Thus was born, in l996 and l997, the idea of "dual nationality."
"But would that mean that Mexican-Americans could actually vote in both countries?" I asked.
The two men exchanged what seemed to me to be an odd and equivocal look. "Well, that wasn’t in the original idea," Amb. Carrillo Castro quickly interjected. "But there is a bill now in the Mexican Congress that would allow that."
"And what about Mexicans in the U.S. being called back to serve in the Mexican armed forces?" I then asked.
"Well, that wasn’t in the original proposition, either," the other ambassador stated quickly, before adding, "But there is a bill in the Mexican Congress that would allow that, too."
Those conversations turned out to be premature—then. For the bills they referred to (largely put up by the Mexican Left), and indeed the entire concept of dual nationality, languished for three years in the Mexican Congress, for the simple reason that the autocratic ruling party—the PRI—knew that Mexicans living in the U.S. would cast their votes massively for the opposition if given a chance.
But then, in July of 2000, Mexico’s modern history erupted in long-overdue and welcome change. After 7l years in power, the relentlessly corrupt PRI was overthrown in free elections that brought to the presidency the fresh figure of Vicente Fox, the tall, vivid, northern rancher who had been Coca-Cola president in Mexico and understood both free enterprise and democracy. Now the drama began to develop rapidly.
When new President Fox swept into Washington this fall, he brought with him the new proposition that the U.S. and Mexico should work toward opening the border completely. Given that there are already 8 million Mexican-born adults living in the U.S. (40 percent of them believed illegal), and roughly 350,000 more coming every year, Fox’s daring proposal took many Americans’ breath away.
American political leaders reacted cautiously. President Clinton, while welcoming the Mexican President effusively, stated that "We have borders, and we have laws that apply to them, and we have to apply them, and so do the Mexicans." Then he added, "But I think over the long run our countries will become more interdependent." Vice President Al Gore praised Fox for his "big ideas, very large ideas," but also rejected the idea of open borders, at least for today. Texas Govenor George W. Bush said he believed that curbs on the entry of illegal aliens should be strengthened, insisting, "We’ve got to do a better job of enforcing our border."
It would seem, then, that this dramatic (some would say outrageous) idea of Fox’s will simply be put aside. But the idea has its advocates. For instance, before the two Mexican ambassadors proposed the "dual nationality" bill that they described to me in 1997, they went to the U.S. State Department. The idea was enthusiastically encouraged by American diplomats. Already, Peruvians and Colombians have dual voting rights in the U.S. and "at home."
After years of actively forbidding and indeed prosecuting dual passports, the U.S. now allows and even encourages them.
Devaluations of American citizenship have been underway for some time now. The Clinton-Gore administration is applauded in pro-immigration circles for avidly pushing through the minting of l.3 million new citizens in the summer of 1996, for example, with the full intention that these new "other-ethnic" citizens would vote for them that November. (In one August ’96 ceremony in Chicago, new citizenship certificates were handed out directly from cardboard boxes to 11,000 immigrants at Soldier Field.) This "Citizenship USA" program went down in the history books for waiving FBI background checks on at least 75,000 men and women, with the result that a high number of those naturalized turned out to be criminal felons. Most of the instructions that caused the Immigration and Naturalization Service to bypass its own rules and regulations came directly from Vice President Gore’s office. To the contrary, while Texas Governor George W. Bush has been a friend to Mexican-Americans and new immigrants, his policy towards illegal immigration and border control would be tougher and more traditional.
It’s not possible to have a harmonious, stable border," says Vicente Fox, "if we don’t solve the economic gap where a worker in Mexico earns $5 a day and a worker in the United States earns $60 a day…. What I propose here is that we build up a plan, an intelligent, creative, innovative plan, whereby we look for economic convergence." Specifically, Fox calls for a development fund through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) similar to the $35 billion-a-year European Union development fund which has subsidized jobs and incomes in the poorer countries of Europe. With U.S. grants and sound economic policies in Mexico, Fox insists, the huge income gap between the U.S. and Mexico could be erased in ten years.
One must ask: Is this realistic? Is Mexico really developing so fast that the U.S. could soon afford to have the same casually open borders as the U.S. with Canada?
The answer: Not exactly. In fact, Mexican average wages are actually lower today than they were in 1975. One-sixth of the country lives on $1 a day. Inter-American Development Bank figures report that during the 1990s inequality increased more in Mexico than in any other Latin American country. The substantial growth rate of 5.1 percent a year over the last four years, with manufacturing employment growing by 3 percent a year, simply has not trickled down broadly enough. University of Southern California professor Abraham Lowenthal, a long-time friend of Mexico’s, recently stated that Mexico has been falling behind in education and that it risks "permanent marginality" compared to other developed nations. He asks whether the country’s leaders can develop "the attitudes, expectations, and practices that are necessary for democratic politics?"
Meanwhile, in the United States, studies indicate American poverty levels are closely related to new immigrants who are not "making it." A recent report by the Center for Immigration Studies shows that "each wave of immigrants has a higher poverty rate" and warns of a "foreignization of poverty in America." At the same time, the National Academy of Sciences predicts that the record levels of immigration to the U.S. from 1970 onward will account for two-thirds of U.S. population growth between now and the year 2050.
Given the abysmal levels of citizenship training taking place today, and with ideas of dual nationality and even dual citizenship spreading, assimilation is often not taking place as it ought. Within our lifetimes, America could become a "nation" that is more like a piece of real estate inhabited by large numbers of disparate people who have no commitment to, or reverence for, the country’s original principles.
Americans sense these problems. Polls in 1998 showed that 30 percent of the public doesn’t believe the United States will exist as a nation in 100 years. Twice as many Americans over 65 say we share a common civic culture as those under 18. "There are no terms of commonality," states University of Chicago professor Jean Bethke Elshtain, "so even things like coalition politics become impossible. This means that immigration presents nearly insuperable obstacles. Assimilation and acculturization to what?"
Mexico’s politicians want the U.S. as an "escape valve" for their own failures in the realms of economics, politics, and law enforcement. Mexico’s head of state says he is the "president of 118 million Mexicans." Since there are only 100 million people in Mexico, that means that he is effectively claiming to represent Mexicans within the U.S. as well. He acknowledges "it is our obligation to better the quality of life and the living conditions in Mexico," but rhetoric is cheap, change is hard.
Meanwhile the U.S. is not very far along in thinking through what it needs to do about Mexican immigration. It refuses to see that a mere one-third of Mexican immigrants to the U.S. are becoming "Americans," that today’s citizenship process is a sad joke, and that America is becoming a dangerously Balkanized country. Who is inspired by a divided nation? Who will fight and die for fellow citizens of dual nationality?
Vicente Fox actually did America a favor. He raised in stark terms questions of what we are doing to ourselves.
Georgie Anne Geyer is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Americans No More.
| Mexican Immigrants Can Be Good for America |
| By Barbara Curtis
Brown and weathered, the men wait on a certain corner just outside our town. In winter they jam their hands in pockets for warmth. In summer they mop their brows with bandannas. Eyes fixed on the road, scanning for pickups or vans, they scramble into those that stop, ready for a day of digging, weeding, hauling—the work no one else seems to want.
I find much to admire in their risk-taking, their hopeful endurance of hardship, their eagerness to work hard and well. Maybe it’s because I grew up a poor white girl with an empty spoon myself: depending on buses, carrying groceries for a nickel, going hungry now and then. Maybe it’s because my husband and I now head a family with plenty, thanks to our living in a country where hard work is rewarded.
On Labor Day 1985, in our pre-plenty days, I hustled up and down these beautiful hills north of San Francisco myself. One baby in a stroller, another on my back, a bag of flyers for my husband’s tree service hanging from a shoulder. The contrast between the well-off families splashing in their pools and my husband and me laboring on Labor Day made the work bittersweet. The sweetness came from believing that if we worked hard we could succeed too.
And we did. But it wasn’t just our own hard work that made the company we named Mr. Trees a success. In the beginning, our workers had names like Ernie, Michael, John, Frank—and we encountered nightmarish problems ranging from habitual absenteeism to heroin addiction. Our equipment was stolen, broken, left behind. We despaired of finding productive, stable, and dependable employees.
At the time, more and more Hispanics were moving into northern California, and many were applying for jobs with Mr. Trees. My husband had learned it was more difficult to reform a prima donna with good skills and bad attitude than it was to develop a novice worker already possessed of good character. From then on he hired and trained only men who wanted to work.
This strategy paid off. Fifteen years later we now have a staff we would never have imagined—consistent, capable, and concerned, with names like Francisco, Jose, Felipe, Lorenzo, Juan, Jacobo, Artemio, Paco, and Higinio. They’re hardworking, honest, and full of purpose.
Some Mexican immigrants I’ve met don’t want to become citizens because they see too many problems in our culture. These are not people who are in favor of free-for-all sexuality, irreligious schools, teen abortions without parental notification, the steady erosion of morality.
On one level, today’s great influx of Hispanics has the potential to give our country’s tired ethics and jaded morality a boost. The key is to avoid the liberal largesse which works to encourage their dependence on the state, erode their traditional values, and feed a grievance mentality. A conservative counter-program would offer things like school vouchers to encourage competence and mainstreaming while strengthening family autonomy. The question is, can we Americanize new arrivals in language, citizenship, and economic behavior, without eradicating the old-fashioned virtues that they bring as their most valuable contribution to our society?
Barbara Curtis is a California writer. | |
