Follow-up...
Settler nation
Huntington bewails the half-truth that the United States is a "nation of immigrants". Americans' ancestors were not immigrants but Anglo-Protestant settlers who came to the New World in the 17th and 18th centuries to create a new society. "Immigrants came later (1830s) to become part of the society the settlers had created" (p 40). The Anglo-Protestant settler culture and its political and economic freedoms attracted immigrants to America. Settlement was central not only to the nation's formation but also to its internal westward expansion, the "peopling of the frontier".
Liberal beliefs that American identity is defined entirely by political principles of liberty, equality and individual rights is another partial truth for Huntington. Settler Americans enslaved and massacred native peoples, segregated blacks, excluded Asians, discriminated against Catholics and obstructed immigration from outside northwestern Europe. From King Philip's War (1675) onward, white Americans ethnically cleansed "savage", "backward" and "uncivilized" natives. Until 1965, blacks were denied basic liberties and insulted as an inferior class of beings. Up to 1952, Asian immigrants were shunned as "a menace to our civilization".
Core culture
The core components of Huntington's American identity are Anglo-Protestant practices inherited from fragments of English society whence the settlers came. The English language, Tudor governance and Protestantism were the bedrocks from which emerged the "American Creed" (Gunnar Myrdal). "America was created as a Protestant society just as Pakistan and Israel were created as Muslim and Jewish societies" (p 63). Evangelicals and Puritans carved the American national value system - extreme individualism, glorification of work and self-made men. The moralistic dualism of US foreign policy is derived from the same Anglo-Protestant culture that sets right apart from wrong and appropriate from inappropriate.
The United States, a predominantly Christian nation, was always the most religious country in the Western Hemisphere. Throughout American history, the proportion of church members has increased. Sixty-eight percent of respondents in a 1992 opinion poll felt that belief in God was "extremely important for a true American". So-called "de-Christianization" of the country was and is a myth. The US Catholic Church was "de-Romanized" in the late 19th century and adapted to the Protestant environment. American "civil religion", centering on special destiny and a mission to save the world, originates from the Protestant ethic.
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Zigzag path
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For Huntington, the greatest threat to American "societal security" (identity, culture and customs) came from waves of Hispanic immigration. Sixty-nine percent of illegal immigration to the United States is of Mexican origin. Latin American immigrants were reluctant to approximate US norms, especially Mexicans, who remained highly concentrated. Separatist Mexicans engendered the "most serious cleavage in American society" by converting the country's southwest into a "MexAmerica" that has the potential of going the Quebec way.
[E]fforts for not getting Americanized were supported by liberals who claimed that ethnocentrism was dangerous. A "reactive ethnic consciousness" resulted, especially among Mexican immigrants, whose identification with American values was zilch. They grew "increasingly contemptuous of American culture", living "in America but not of it" (p 256).
Non-assimilatory immigrants detrimentally affected the meaning and practice of US citizenship. Naturalization was trivialized into an exercise of claiming government economic benefits. Lacking any requirement of loyalty and nationalism, US citizenship was rendered unexceptional.
Hispanization, in Huntington's assessment, can threaten the political integrity of the US, what with the Mexican Embassy issuing consular cards to illegal immigrants. "The Mexican government, in effect, determines who is an American" (p 282). Congressional contests in the US are fought between opposing diaspora lobbies. Cuban dominance of Miami has transformed the city into an "out-of-control banana republic" with an "independent foreign policy" (p 251).
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