March 20, 2004
Bashing
Immigrants Academically?
By Domenico Maceri/HispanicVista.com
Although America is a land of immigrants,
the relationship between those who have
just arrived and those who have been here
a long time has never been easy. The myth
is that America welcomes immigrants. The
reality is that in difficult times,
immigrants are blamed for many of the
country's ills.
It has happened in
the past. And it continues to this day.
The ethnicity may have changed but the
feelings toward immigrants repeat those
of the past.
These days it's
Latinos, and particularly Mexicans, who
receive the brunt of anti-immigrant
feelings. You hear it on talk radio and
read it in letters to the editor of many
newspapers.
Now, unfortunately,
even academics are beginning to fall for
the myth that immigrants are a threat.
Victor Davis Hanson,
a professor of Classics at California
State University, Fresno, and Samuel P.
Huntington, a scholar at Harvard
University, have written on topics that
exacerbate anti-immigrant and more
particularly anti-Mexican feelings.
Hanson is the author of Mexifornia
(2003). Huntington wrote an article
entitled "The Hispanic
Challenge" in a recent issue of Foreign
Policy Magazine.
Both authors see
Hispanic and particularly Mexican
immigrants as a danger to American
values.
Hanson believes in
the melting pot and is discouraged by the
massive influx of immigrants which he
sees as changing the state of California
for the worse. He writes
about "a growing despair
and uncertainty over how to assimilate
new arrivals." For Hanson, Mexicans'
proximity to their home country makes
them different from other immigrants who
were separated by oceans and had little
choice except to assimilate.
Huntington rehashes
some of the same themes. He sees Mexican
immigrants endangering the "cultural
and political integrity" of the US
because of the "immense and
continuing immigration." Unlike
earlier immigrants, Mexicans won’t
assimilate because they’re
"comfortable with their own culture
and often contemptuous of American
culture."
Unlike immigrants of
the past, Hispanic immigrants retain
their language, according to Huntington.
However, he acknowledges that more than
90% of second generation Mexican
Americans speak English.
There is little
doubt that both scholars vilify
immigrants, yet they are not the first to
do so.
Attacking immigrants
regardless of their country of origin is
an American tradition. The German
language and Germans were seen as a
threat in the late 1700s.
Henry J. Gardner,
the governor of Massachusetts in the
middle of the nineteenth century, saw the
Irish as a "horde of foreign
barbarians."
Other immigrants
such as Italians, Eastern Europeans,
Jews, and Asians were seen as diluting
American culture in the past two
centuries.
All of these
concerns proved wrong. America was able
to integrate ethnic and religious groups
from all over the world.
The same thing is
happening with Latinos for anyone who
looks seriously at the matter. A study by
Gregory Rodriguez of the National
Immigration Forum, for example, found
that when it comes to assimilation —
defined as learning English, home
ownership, and intermarriage —,
Latinos assimilate as fast as other
ethnic groups.
Like other
immigrants, Latinos lose their parents
and grandparents' language after a
generation or two. Many of the students
struggling in my college Spanish classes
have Hispanic surnames.
Of course, some of
these Latinos who struggle to learn
Spanish will eventually learn it because
Spanish is very valuable in the US given
the continuing immigration. The value of
Spanish in the world also makes it a
desirable language to learn.
It is also desirable
that Spanish-speakers and other
immigrants maintain their ancestors’
language while at the same time learn the
common language of our country.
Hanson and
Huntington are, however, stuck on
monolingualism. To be American for them
means speaking English and only English.
If you speak another language, you
suddenly become suspect and will cause
the country to Balkanize and break apart.
That’s
poppycock, of course. If you know more
than one language, you become very
valuable to our country.
In spite of the
difficulties immigrants face in coming to
our country, they'll continue to do so
because the US offers opportunities which
are not available elsewhere. As the kids
and grandkids of these immigrants
assimilate, they'll look back at their
ancestors in awe. They will be perceived
with the same heroism as yesterday's
immigrants.
Hopefully, as
Latinos become fully integrated into
American culture, they will not repeat
the mistake of looking at new immigrants
with the disdain their ancestors had to
endure.
===================================================
Domenico Maceri (dmaceri@hotmail.com),
PhD, UC Santa Barbara, a contributing
columnist to HispanicVista.com (www.hispanicvista.com),
teaches foreign languages at Allan
Hancock College in Santa Maria, CA.
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