New Patriots In Our Midst

Here is a tale of the academy that, if you follow its trails, will lead you to learned journals, dense footnotes and multivariate regression analysis. But stick with it. In 1996 Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard University published his enormously influential book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Buried deep in its pages was the claim that there is "some evidence" that "resistance to assimilation is stronger among Mexican migrants" than it was among other immigrants to the U.S. But Huntington offered no supporting data.

Well, he has now. In an article in Foreign Policy magazine, Huntington argues that the nature of Latin American--and especially Mexican--immigration to the U.S. distinguishes it from prior waves. "Many Mexican American immigrants," Huntington claims, "simply do not appear to identify primarily with the United States." Huntington says successful assimilation in the past is unlikely to be duplicated with today's Latin immigrants. "This reality," he writes, "poses a fundamental question: Will the United States remain a country with a single national language and a core Anglo-Protestant culture?"

The article is an extract from Who Are We?, a forthcoming book by Huntington that celebrates the importance of that Anglo-Protestant culture to American identity and attacks those who supposedly undermine it. The book is right to stress that the destiny of Mexican Americans is central to our future. But if you are going to claim that Mexican immigrants don't want to be Americans, your argument had better be watertight. Despite many statistics, Huntington doesn't make his case.