Guest Column
La Inmigración, Sí. Americanización, No.
- La Inmigración, Sí. Americanización,
No.
By David Romero
Special to Huntington News Network
Will America remain American – with roots, culture, and language reaching back to Anglo Saxon Europe -- when millions of legal Mexican Americans and illegal Mexican immigrants want to be and remain Mexican?
With midterm elections now over, this question will more than likely continue to escape America’s attention as the nation’s ruling elite simply pick up where they left off on illegal immigration. In other words, the sterile debates will continue unabated on border enforcement, amnesty, guest worker proposals, and so on.
But the question or its variant will be scrupulously avoided, since the raising of it would entail breaking a taboo of the new politics of silence as touching race and culture and thereby risk arousing the indignation of the public arbiters of what is acceptable political speech.
Yet, race and culture has everything to do with the unity and character of a nation. America is great in many things, but its continued greatness depends on its citizens being Americans undivided in their allegiance to America. A unity of the many (plures) into one. To avoid the question on race and culture then would be to avoid the threat to America’s national existence posed by the Open Society multiculturalists.
Even more troubling are the manifest circumstances which pointedly indicate that many Mexican Americans at worst support not unity but separatism or irredentism in the "silent reconquista" of America, or at least have divided loyalties decidedly more Mexican than American. In either case, assuming national existence still matters to America’s ruling elite, and that is a suspect assumption, Mexicans en masse are among the worst possible candidates for American citizenship. Open borders advocates and adherents of the melting pot myth may denounce this as racist or at odds with America as a nation of immigrants, but its truth is discovered with but a few facts.
What was characteristic of immigrants and America since its founding no longer holds today. In the history of US immigration prior to the immigration reform act of 1965, most immigrants lived and breathed a desire to be American and to live as Americans. They wanted to speak like Americans, celebrate holidays like Americans, and to love America like Americans. What we see with the Mexican inflow, a phenomenon begun in 1965 when a selective immigration policy was undone by an ill-conceived immigration reform, is a dramatically changed and adversely affected national profile.
First the naked demographics. By years’ end 2004, 40.4 million Hispanics, predominantly Mexican, amounted to 14 percent of the total US population. As such, Mexicans now constitute the largest minority group in America. If present trends in fertility rates and chain migration hold, Mexicans will be the dominant majority displacing by mid-century America’s Anglo European culture. Link: http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/population/001720.html
Mexico is a failed country radically different from the United States. At a bare minimum, it harbors a deep resentment toward the West, preeminently America. But this resentment is overcome by the sheer power of living in a real nation with real economic opportunities. In fact, 40% of all Mexicans (link: http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=52) would, if they could, migrate legally or illegally to the US.
It would be naive to assume, therefore, that Mexicans who find their way to our side of the Rio Grande will necessarily be the "good ones" ready to live productively within the structure of America’s civic institutions. Some will to be sure, but their contributions will be minuscule by comparison to those who will not. The reason for this of course can be traced to an old proverb about one bad apple spoiling the lot.
How many American citizens should be sacrificed to the wanton violence and crime of the drug cartel soldiers who do the bidding of their bosses south of the border? How many areas in American border cities will remain off-limits to Gringos? Look at the crime statistics in the border states and tell those American citizens suffering from violent crime that their government has enacted sound and responsible immigration policies.
Equally naive, if not just illogical, would be to assume that many Mexicans will not be motivated by a Mexican Fifth Column out to remake America. Radically pro-Mexican racist groups may not be a majority, but they are a sizeable and vocal minority that should not be casually dismissed. Revanchist claims that America’s Southwest will become a Mexican northern domain is as demographically possible as it is politically irresistible to Mexico and large numbers of Mexican Americans. The latter, under the aegis of Mexico, need not redraw the map of America, but simply demand the recognition of a "distinct" culture and its language. In other words, just use the Elite’s multiculturalism to undo the American claim to this area.
Evidence of this Fifth Column abounds. A 2002 Zogby poll revealed that 58% of Mexican nationals believe the American Southwest rightfully belongs to Mexico, while 57% felt they had the right to cross America’s borders at will. It is unprecedented in America’s history to be overwhelmed by millions of illegal aliens invading the US who, at the same time, claim they are the rightful owners of a land once theirs and are simply coming home to it, rather than arriving as strangers in a new land and having to integrate or gain acceptance.
Or do we really think that America is immune from that which has afflicted Canada with its Quebecers? Other indicators are no less revealing. Shortly after 9/11, when America’s moral clarity and patriotism were visibly high, the Pew Hispanic Center reported that only 21% of Mexican American citizens considered themselves first and foremost as American; 54% considered themselves first and foremost as Mexican, while 24% indicated they were Hispanic or Latino. That only one out of five Mexican American citizens think of themselves first and foremost as American is shocking enough to be the final argument closing off any further debate about rewarding illegal aliens with amnesty or pathways to citizenship.
Many Mexicans may like America, work in it, pay taxes, and serve in its armed forces, but they will just as stubbornly adhere to their native language and culture. Mexican Americans typically don’t think of themselves as denying allegiance to America because they don’t think of themselves as an American in its cultural sense but as American in its Latin American sense. Mexicans are Mexicanos, Chicanos, Latinos, Hispanics or, finally, Mexican-American, but seldom simply American. To be an American is to be White, a Gringo -- a derogation no self-respecting Mexican will abide.
It’s all about racial and national pride; unfortunately it is not for the Latino about US national pride. Hence, a duality of commitment exists and is reinforced by America’s proximity to Mexico and the former’s willingness to promote bilingualism. As millions of Mexican Americans straddle and easily transit two countries joined by contiguous borders, there is simply no overarching necessity to become American when they can remain Mexican. The Mexican government itself, long engaged in irredentism, has leveraged its hold on Mexicans in undermining their allegiance to the US by granting dual citizenship to all Mexican Americans, whether naturalized or American born citizens of Mexican ancestry.
None of this is lost on Mexicans in America, lured as they are by the Mexican government to retain their loyalties and cultural ties to their native country which "cares" about them. Just how much Mexican Americans are more Mexican than American and have more attachment to Mexico than any attachment they may have to the United States was illustrated by the pro-immigration marches earlier this year. Hundreds of thousands massed on America’s streets, many waving Mexican flags, shouting insults and displaying obscene gestures against the US.
Americans were treated to a similar view of Mexican hatred in February 1998, at a soccer match between the US and Mexico in Los Angeles. A crowd of 91,000 fans, predominantly Mexican, booed the American National Anthem, pelted the US team with bottles, cans and garbage, and beat up Mexicans who dared to cheer for the American team. Similarly, in 2004, the US Olympic soccer team was playing Canada in Mexico, and again the fans jeered at the National Anthem, only this time they passionately chanted “Osama! Osama!” These rancorous displays clearly indicate something wrong, not so much with Mexicans – who are clearly being what they want to be – but with America’s ruling elite who have shown no interest in Americans wanting to be and remain what they are.
Aware of this indifference, Mexican illegals and Mexican Americans are energized by America’s weakness in refusing to take itself seriously as a great nation and instead remaining blindly committed to national suicide via massive immigration. Americans have no desire to be morphed into another nation’s likeness, certainly not Mexico’s.
But to date, the US government has shown no interest in protecting the original character of the United States as a uniquely white Christian republic with origins in the European West. US citizens are demoralized by a sell out of America’s birthright for a bowl of pottage, specifically a poor man’s pottage offered by low wage employers who have persuaded many a pliant politician that what is good for business is good for America, as if corporate profits (not to mention low value added industry profits) are what it’s all about. For a race and culture which carved out a nation unequaled in Western civilization, the choice is clear. The United States remains either a distinct nation or it becomes what it never was or what it was never meant to be: a universal nation, an open society. In effect, a non-nation.
_________________________________________________________ - David Romero is a conservative writer, and an adjunct community college instructor in history and philosophy. He lives in Arizona with his wife Dawn and has taught history and philosophy at Eastern Arizona College and Chandler-Gilbert Community Colleges. He is a second generation American of Mexican ancestry who earned an MA in Biblical Studies & Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, Calif., was ordained an Episcopal Priest, and recently resigned his orders to become a Roman Catholic. He served in the US Navy in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq War (1988) and in Operation Desert Storm (1990-91).
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