The Chronicle of Higher Education reports news this morning of a gathering storm of controversy over a new article by Samuel P. Huntingdon, chairman of Harvard’s Academy for International and Area Studies, that will be published next week in Foreign Policy magazine, in which
Mr. Huntington warns that the United States faces the loss of its “core Anglo-Protestant culture” and may soon be divided into “two peoples with two cultures (Anglo and Hispanic) and two languages (English and Spanish).”
He bases his pessimistic prediction on six propositions, each of which the Chronicle says is “controversial”:
- Latin America is geographically contiguous to the United States, which means that Hispanic immigrants need not make a large psychological leap when they migrate there.
- Never before has such a large proportion of immigrants to the United States spoken a single non-English language.
- Never before have so many immigrants come into the United States illegally.
- Latin American immigrants are strongly concentrated in particular regions, which will impede their assimilation.
- Hispanic immigration is likely to persist at high levels, in contrast to European immigration, which was truncated by restrictive legislation and the two world wars.
- Mexican Americans, with some justice, feel that the Southwestern United States, which was torn away from Mexico in 19th-century wars of conquest, is still their territory, and their feeling of ownership will prevent them from emotionally absorbing full U.S. citizenship.
Mr. Huntington concludes by predicting that America may soon become an officially bicultural country like Canada or Belgium, albeit a less successful one, because “the differences in culture within these countries … do not approximate those between the United States and Mexico.”
He also argues that Hispanic activists are foolish to believe that assimilation can proceed in both directions, and that the United States could be successfully Latinized: “There is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English.”
Rodolfo O. de la Garza, a political scientist at Columbia, says Huntingdon’s arguments “more closely resemble nativist ravings than scholarly assessments” because he is far too pessimistic about rates of Hispanic educational progress and acquisition of English. James P. Smith, a Rand economist, said Huntingdon doesn’t adequately distinguish among generations. Andrés Jiménez, director of the University of California’s California Research Policy Center, wrote that Huntingdon’s article is “misinformed, factually inaccurate, inflammatory, and potentially injurious to public policy because of its potential for being used as a further baseless rationalization for anti-immigrant and anti-Mexican politics.”
I wonder if Prof. Jiménez believes that arguments that are “misinformed, factually inaccurate, inflammatory, and potentially injurious to public policy” shouldn’t be published at all. If everyone accepted that standard, there would be precious little published on the race question, no matter who was doing the censoring.
In an interview, Mr. Jiménez said that Mr. Huntington was wrong to suggest that Hispanic families place a lower value on educational achievement than do native-born Americans. He cited a January 2004 study by the Pew Hispanic Center, which found that Hispanic parents are more likely to attend PTA meetings and to help their children with homework than are white or African American parents.
Well, hurrah Latino parents are getting involved in their childrens’ schools.
But it doesn’t translate into higher grad rates, does it?
I grew up in a prediminantly Mexican-American area, in Texas. And I can testify from first-hand, multi-year, multi-generational experience that the prevailing attitude toward education among Mexican-Americans is that it is not valued anywhere near as high as among the various Anglo-Northern-European-American cultures.
What is valued among Mexicans is macho and male virility and female fecundity.
Surprisingly, this attitude is NOT as predominant among recent and first-generation immigrants. It is extremely predominant among 2nd- and expecially 3rd-generation Mexicans.
Culturally, ambition is frowned upon; family is all. If your ambition improves your station above that of the rest of your family, you tend to be ostracized. Therefore, lots of pressure to not stand out or improve.
In my high school graduating class, I was one of 3 Anglos; everyone else was Mexican or Mexican-American (we had some boarders from Mexico). I was valedictorian; the salutatorian told us at graduation that her ambition in life was to become head checker down at the local supermarket. This was considered extremely ambitions for a Mexican girl. Our school counselor actually told me that my interest in going to college and majoring in chemistry or physics would be a problem; after all, what man would want me as a wife if I was smarter and better educated than him? I gave this argument all the attention it deserved (absolutely none), graduated, and never looked back.
I did keep an eye on my fellow graduates, however. The two most successful? One now owns and manages her own day-care center (after she had two children out of wedlock, she had to do something about childcare). The other married well, into the family that owns Pace Foods. Three became teachers, a couple became secretaries (one was Anglo), two were murdered by jealous boyfriends (the other Anglo), and most got married and started making babies within a year of graduation (6 out of 55 were pregnant on graduation day).
Education is not a high cultural priority within the Mexican-American community. Until this paternalistic attitude changes (and I have to fault the Catholic church for playing a strong supporting role in sustaining this attitude), you won’t see increases in the participation of Mexican-Americans in professions requiring a high degree of education.
Can Claire explain why the Catholic Church singled out Mexican-American women for special oppression, while it promoted education for immigrant women of other ethnicities in its schools and colleges?
I shudder to think of what Claire would think of this Catholic Anglo. I got married at the end of my junior year at MIT and was expecting my first by graduation. Eleven years later, I am expecting my seventh. My intellect is still getting *plenty* of exercise managing this little herd of people and I fully expect to someday go back to school for further studies and professional work. I see nothing contradictory or patronizing in encouraging education AND family life. But I know some people can never pass up the chance to bash the Church…
I guess I’ll share my own experiences, as they are different from Claire’s.
At my wife’s San Diego area public high school, more than half of the students in her IB and honors classes were Mexican-Americans. Of her three best friends, all Mexican-Americans, one went on to graduate from Stanford and is now in law school, another is pursuing a graduate biology degree at Cornell, and the third is juggling medical school and starting a family.
There were no Latinos or Asian-Americans in my high school, and my graduating class contained only two African-Americans. My best friend from school dropped out of college and now, still without a job at the age of 28, lives at home with his parents (to be fair, he is Jewish and spent his early years in Israel, so perhaps does not embrace Anglo-Protestant values), another close friend has an associate’s degree from community college and works in computer support, and a third friend went to college on an athletic scholarship and now works as a gym teacher and coach.
All meaningless as evidence I know, but so it is with anecdotal, personal experiences.
Generational issue: 70% of the students in my school district are Hispanic. 12% other white, 11% black. Talk about minorities!
Languate issue: 45% of those students do not speak English fluently. many areas of my city have not an English word to be seen or heard, election materials are in Spanish and other languages (I thought only citizens voted). We have radio stations, tv stations in Spanish. Many jobs are not available if you are not bilingual in Spanish. English is imperiled and it certainly seems to me we are headed for a divided, Canadian type polity.
I agree with Nels that anecdotal evidence is pretty flimsy in terms of showing broad trends. Huntington is wrong, American and Mexican/Hispanic cultures have heavily influenced each other for more than a hundred years. I think in a lot of ways Americans relate to Mexican culture more closely than we do Canadian, dispite the (larger) language barrier… aside from hockey that is.
The Thernstroms’ recent book, No Excuses, provides very strong, non-anecdotal evidence that academic achievement by Hispanics (and African Americans) is (and has been) dramatically lower than whites and Asians. More tellingly, the Thernstroms trace this finding through generations–albeit finding some hope of eventual improvement by Hispanics as a group–and conclude that the deficiencies in achievement are largely cultural.
Those with a bent for anecdotal evidence of Mexican influence, the state of Mexican assimilation and California as it is today–which on these matters IS the future–will find Victor Davis Hanson’s Mexifornia interesting and worthwhile.
That link doesn’t work for me. I get a box asking me to register. Can we get a copy of Huntington’s article somewhere?
Also, I think Huntington’s right. Massive immigration from one group is a bad sign for assimilation imo. Massive immigration without assimilation is otherwise known as colonization.
I don’t believe Hispanic parents are more likely to attend PTA meetings or help kids with homework than white or black parents. In the San Jose area, principals and teachers frequently say that one of their problems is that Hispanic parents (especially immigrants) don’t participate in PTA or other school events and are unable to help kids with homework because of language barriers, culture and low education levels. This is a major issue. I can’t figure out how Pew came up with that result.
The study explains its methodology, which to me seem to be fairly standard polling practices of asking a lot of random people a series of questions, rather than relying on anecdotal evidence.
Some of the more notable findings I see are:
* Latino parents feel more strongly than white or African-American parents that their children should attend college
* The number one reason cited by Latinos for Latino students not performing as well as white students is that Latino parents neglect to push their kids to work hard
* Latino parents are more likely to attend PTA meetings and meet with their children’s teachers than are white and African-American parents
* 92% of Latinos say teaching English to the children of immigrant families is a very important goal
* Foreign-born Latino parents are significantly less likely to be involved in or knowledgeable of their children’s education than are native-born Latino parents
* Latinos, especially those foreign-born, are more positive about public schools, as measured by asking them to assign a grade, than are whites or African-Americans
* Latinos are more likely than whites or blacks to give President Bush high marks for his handling of education issues
* Latinos, whites, and African Americans are overwhelmingly (each group is over 80%) unable to answer whether or not “an education reform bill has been passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush”
* Latinos hold more positive views of standardized tests than do whites or African Americans
* Latinos are more likely to support school vouchers than are whites or African Americans
* 68% of Latinos favor affirmative action in universities, compared to 64% of blacks and 27% of whites
I think the Pew report needs to break down the “Hispanic” parents by country or area of origin. Cuban-Americans are much more likely to be involved in the school than Mexican-American parents, for example. Considering that Teresa Heinz Kerry is trying to tout herself as “Latina”, the over-all label doesn’t mean much.
If it’s done by the Pew Hispanic Center, isn’t there some conflict of interest there?
Conflict of interest in the research? Hear, hear!! Facts have always been easily cast aside when the political ambitions of La Raza are at stake. The goal is to keep you quiet until enough illegals get through, and then it won’t matter WHAT you think.
As for the US and Mexico sharing more than Canada politically and culturally, what are you smoking and can I have some?