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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (256076)	10/18/2005 9:27:00 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Respond to of 1571374

Re: Again Gustav, you have to make a decision. Here you are using an article that argues As Appiah notes, 90 percent of California-born Hispanic children of immigrant parents have native fluency in English and in the next generation only 50 per cent of them still speak Spanish. One more generation and you can forget about Spanish. On the other hand, you claim that the rise of Spanish language stations and advertising signal a new wave of multi-culturism in the US. You need to choose one or the other because you can't have both. You rightly pointed out the knotty issue, namely, Latino immigration into the US. According to Pr S. Huntington, the jury is still out on whether, over the long haul, Spanish-speaking immigrants will blend into the US value system --or spawn an American Québec: July 19, 2004 issue Copyright © 2004 The American Conservative Who Are We? Samuel Huntington’s new book forces a debate on immigration and American destiny. By John O’Sullivan Samuel Huntington’s book was notorious even before the page proofs were sent out to magazine editors for the pre-publication of extracts. Rumors had circulated for at least a year beforehand that the author of The Clash of Civilizations and other distinguished works of political theory was about to produce a book on immigration that was not wholly in favor of it. In fact, while Who Are We? deals in detail with current immigration to the U.S., the book as a whole is about the wider and more important topic of national identity. As we shall see, that is making it more controversial rather than less. Still, the first intimations of controversy were inspired by the astounding prospect of an anti-immigration book from one of the nation’s most respected political scientists and a fully paid-up member of the American establishment. If Sam Huntington broke ranks, then elite support for high levels of immigration might fracture at the very moment that the Bush administration was proposing an open-borders policy. And that would be high politics as well as intellectual controversy. Excitement rose higher when the first extract of Who Are We? was published in Foreign Policy magazine. This turned out, as suspected, to be devoted to immigration—and to a particularly contentious aspect of it. In his book, Huntington argues that post-1965 immigration is very different from previous waves in two significant ways. In the first place, it consists of continuously high levels of immigration. Previous immigration was either low but continuous (e.g., from the Revolution to the 1840s) or a series of high peaks followed by low troughs (e.g., the second great wave of 1880-1920 followed by 40 years of low immigration under the restrictive quotas of the 1920s). Continuous high immigration tends to retard the assimilation of immigrants into the host community and to foster ethnic ghettoes that then accommodate semi-permanent ethnic diasporas. All of these trends will be maximized if the immigration occurs in conditions of official bilingualism and multiculturalism rather than of Americanization. Immigrants will then be less likely to assimilate and more likely to retain ethnic identities and links with home. The second difference is that the new immigration intake is much less diverse than the immigrants in earlier periods. In brief, one half of new legal immigrants come from Latin America—and 25 percent of them from a single national source, namely Mexico. Even in the absence of other factors, this would hinder assimilation. If immigrants speak several languages, they have a clear incentive to master the lingua franca that will help them to communicate both with each other and with the native-born. If they speak one language, however, they are more easily able to continue living in a linguistic enclave that is an overseas version of home, such as Miami, where it is the native-born who feel foreign. That central difficulty in the case of Latinos in general is aggravated in the case of Mexicans by several other characteristics. Again in brief, Mexican Americans are especially numerous—25 percent and rising of the total of legal immigrants. Their numbers are further supplemented because they are the overwhelming majority of illegal immigrants. They come from a nation contiguous to the U.S. with a long and porous border. They are regionally concentrated in the Southwest (as were Cubans in Florida) so that they are more likely to concentrate themselves in linguistic enclaves. They seem likely to keep coming indefinitely—i.e., in the absence of strong official discouragement, the supply of Mexican arrivals is for practical purposes infinite. And finally Mexicans have a historical presence in the region—there are even some who cherish irredentist claims on what they call “Aztlan.” Making these and other points, Huntington concluded that there was a real possibility that the American Southwest might become in time another Quebec —namely, a region of the U.S. where the dominant language and culture would be Hispanic—in a Nuevo United States that would be a bilingual and bicultural society. And as Quebec and Belgium demonstrate in different ways, bilingualism distorts and obstructs democratic governance. It was, of course, this second “inflammatory” theme that Foreign Policy magazine made its front-page lead article. The editors of Foreign Policy cannot be wholly acquitted of coat-trailing here. They know that controversy sells and set out to have the maximum impact. Still, even they were probably surprised by all the results that followed—namely, an article that everyone talked about, superb advance publicity for the book, and a string of insulting and threatening remarks about Huntington—“racist,” “nativist,” “xenophobe,” and the rest—in newspaper columns and FP’s own letters section. Three points emerge in retrospect from these early criticisms. First, almost all the replies simply ignored the vast wealth of social science, census, and polling data that the author laid out in support of his thesis. Huntington has been reproved by otherwise respectful critics for the sheer volume of survey evidence he deploys since it inevitably slows down the book’s readability. But these spluttering and indignant responses justify its presence. They show that the weight of prejudice against his argument is such that he would have been destroyed if he had not armored himself in advance against it. [...] amconmag.com