On the border of disaster? Dan Glaister
In 1993, Harvard academic Samuel Huntington controversially identified Islam as the biggest danger to global stability. Now he is arguing that Latino immigration into the US is destroying the American way of life. Dan Glaister reports
Samuel Huntington is a man with a history. In 1993, the Harvard academic and one-time member of the US national security council published an essay entitled The Clash of Civilisations. In it, he reasoned that in the new post-cold war world, the "fundamental source of conflict will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural." He identified Islam, with its population bulge and transnational appeal, as the most likely source of this conflict.
The world, helpfully, stood up and took notice. An academic storm brewed, which became a media storm. In 1996, Professor Huntington wrote a book with the same title and, with the World Trade Centre attacks of September 11 2001, he had his own personal perfect storm: the book was in the New York Times bestseller list five years after it was published.
A decade on, and Professor Huntington has another theory. In May his new book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, is published. It is clear who the "We" of the title are: Americans, principally white Americans, the dominant majority, glorying in Old Glory, basking in the heritage of the Founding Fathers and the superiority of white, Protestant culture.
But Huntington has a shock for them: the Latinos are coming. In fact, the Latinos are already here, "washing your dishes, looking after your children" and denuding a once proud, unified country of everything that held it together. "Will the US remain a country with a single national language and a core Anglo-Protestant culture?" he asks in an essay entitled The Hispanic Challenge, published in the journal Foreign Policy. "By ignoring this question, Americans acquiesce to their eventual transformation into two peoples with two cultures and two languages." Welcome to Amexica.
"The single most immediate and most serious challenge to America's traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially from Mexico, and the fertility rates of these immigrants compared to black and white natives," he writes. "The assimilation successes of the past are unlikely to be duplicated with the contemporary flood of immigrants from Latin America." The Latinos, to borrow a phrase, are over here, oversexed and will soon be overpaid as well.
"Racists in America must be having a field day," shrieked the Miami Herald last week. "At long last they have found a world-renowned intellectual to rationalise their resentment against America's rapidly growing Hispanic community." The New York Times was rather more circumspect: "Frankly," it noted, "something's a little off in Huntington's use of the term 'Anglo-Protestant' to describe American culture."
Since the appearance of the extract, Huntington has kept something of a low profile. "It's only a small part of this book, you know," says a member of his Harvard staff. "I wish he wouldn't do this. He writes these things then goes off and leaves me to answer the calls."
Huntington's book benefits from propitious timing. With the presidential election due in November, the US political establishment is undergoing its ritual four-yearly bout of awareness that it has a Hispanic population. Pundits have been busy examining the likely impact of the seven million largely Democratic Hispanic voters, the candidates have been brushing up on their Spanish - George Bush's attention-grabbing campaign ad featuring images of the WTC also aired in a Spanish-language version - and the president last weekend welcomed his Mexican counterpart Vicente Fox to his Crawford ranch.
Huntington quotes Fox's claim, presumably not repeated in Texas at the weekend, that he is the president of 123 million Mexicans - 100 million in Mexico and 23 million in the US - as proof that the reconquista is well under way; that the Latinos, and in particular the Mexicans, have no intention of assimilating but instead represent a mass fifth column, intent on dismantling the nation.
The professor assembles an array of circumstantial observations as proof of the impending collapse: Mexico shares a 2,000-mile border with the US, therefore Mexican immigrants will "remain in intimate contact with their families - as no other immigrants have been able to do"; there are a lot of them; they've been coming for a very long time and the torrent of Hispanic immigrants crossing the Rio Grande shows no sign of letting up any time soon; they tend to live in certain areas; and they all speak Spanish.
It is this last quality that most irks Huntington, leading him to make some decidedly unempirical assertions. "One might suppose," he writes, "that, with the rapid expansion of the Mexican immigrant community, people of Mexican origin would have less incentive to become fluent in and to use English in 2000 than they had in 1970." Well, possibly, one might suppose that. From there it is a short, blind leap of faith to the conclusion that "Americans [the good ones, that is, not the other ones] will not be able to receive the jobs or pay they would otherwise receive because they can speak to their fellow citizens only in English."
The spread of Spanish, he argues with an impressive command of the conditional clause, "could, in due course, have significant consequences in politics and government - those aspiring to political office might have to be fluent in both languages ... government documents and forms could routinely be published in both languages ... the use of both languages could become acceptable in congressional hearings ... [and] English speakers lacking fluency in Spanish are likely to be and feel at a disadvantage in the competition for jobs."
He further stirs up the brew with nods to the scale of Hispanic immigration, noting that Hispanics passed African-Americans as the largest minority in the last US census.
It all spells, for Huntington, the end of civilisation. Indeed, the Founding Fathers might as well not have bothered. Huntington goes so far as to imagine what might have happened if the conquerors of America, instead of being white Anglo-Protestants had been French, Spanish or Portuguese Catholics. "It would not be the United States; it would be Quebec, Mexico or Brazil," he concludes.
While Huntington wields an array of surveys and sources to bolster his case, his misanthropic zeal gets the better of him. Hispanic immigrants are reluctant to call themselves Americans, he reports, choosing when asked to refer to themselves by their country of origin. Yet recent studies have found the opposite to be true. Hispanic immigrants have no sense of duty to the US, he tells us. But this doesn't explain the readiness of Hispanic immigrants to serve and die in the US armed forces. There is a disproportionately high representation of Latinos in the US armed forces; the death rates among Latinos in Iraq are even more disproportionate. And Huntington has perhaps not noticed that the commander of US troops in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, is Hispanic.
And, despite Huntington's assertions that they have no interest in becoming "Americans", in his Anglo sense of the word, it is notable how many Latinos, from local politicians to shopworkers, want more than anything else to blend in, to lose themselves in the melting pot.
Perhaps the extract that has been published in Foreign Policy differs from the rest of the book. Perhaps it is Huntington's way of exorcising his demons, of airing his most fanciful and preposterous theories in a pithy, attention-grabbing essay and saving the dull, considered stuff for the book. Perhaps - but then Huntington has a history. He warned the world about the hordes from the east (both Islam and the Chinese came in for a kicking in his 1996 bestseller). Now he has identified the hordes in the south. Why, one wonders, would a Harvard professor, the chairman of that institution's academy for international and area studies, want to take such an apocalyptic, incendiary and patently wrong-headed stance?
It seems he didn't even bother to re-read The Clash of Civilisations before embarking on his latest tome. In the earlier book, he concluded, somewhat perplexingly, that "the cultural distance between Mexico and the United States is far less than that between Turkey and Europe", and that "Mexico has attempted to redefine itself from a Latin American to a North American identity". Either a lot has changed in Huntington's mind in the intervening eight years, or in searching for new sport he simply chose not to worry too much about the detail.