|
|
 |
POLITICA >> Press Reviews | ||||
Menu
|
Politica is a forum for independent analysis of political events around the World |
|||||
Huntington's HispanophobiaSource: Huntington, S.P. 2004. "The Hispanic Challenge" - Foreign Policy. March/April 2004. (http://www.foreignpolicy.com) To a sane reader, the mere title of Huntington's article would be construed as xenophobic or even racist, but let us allow for cultural differences and examine the content in more detail. Samuel Huntington is famous for his paranoid views of geopolitics, and previously rose to fame by 'identifying' the threat of a 'clash of civilisations' between East and West. Of course, it was the East threatening the West, and not vice-versa. Now, Huntington has discovered a new threat to America, a threat from the South. No doubt he will soon realise, as the authors of the famous South Park cartoons did years ago, that the real threat is from the North, and that the Canadians are preparing a full-scale invasion of America, armed with chainsaws and strange accents. But if we are to focus on the Hispanic threat, for a moment, we understand that Huntington's main fear is that the evil Hispanics reject the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream? Now where have we heard about 'Anglo-Protestant' values before? Are we to presume that Huntington is speaking about White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (otherwise known as WASP) values, which were so dear to the Klu-Klux-Klan? Huntington obligingly confirms this hypothesis in the first sentence of his article: "America was created by 17th and 18th Century settlers who were overwhelmingly white, British and Protestant". No doubt it was Protestant charity that led them to trample and eradicate the existing Amerindian civilisations. Maybe Huntington is feeling nostalgic about these glorious Anglo-Protestant values that led successive American governments to undertake genocide of Native Americans on a quasi-continental scale? But since most of the Indians have been wiped out, they have no voice to regret the destruction of their entire civilisation and values by invaders from the East. Indeed, in this light, the true clash of civilisations did indeed take place between East and West, and the East (i.e. settlers of European descent) crushed the West. So it is indeed quite an impressive heritage that modern America must protect against the Hispanic invaders. But somehow, if we are to believe Huntington, a wonderful, brave new America, came out of the Anglo-Protestant creed, which is characterised by the work ethic and cultural integration, where the concept of race has disappeared following the civil rights movements. However, Huntington conveniently reminds us that this civil rights movement only really achieved results in the 1960s. So what happened in the three centuries preceding this? Was the Anglo-Protestant creed going through a remarkably long incubation period? Was it not Black activists such as Martin Luther King who achieved results by challenging the very Anglo-Protestant establishment that Huntington admires so much? Moreover, it is amazing that Huntington can believe that somehow the fight is over, and that Blacks have achieved parity with the whites in terms of equal opportunities. If such is the case, why are a disproportionate amount of Black Americans living in poverty, or ending up in jail, when compared to the White Americans? Far from being disturbed by such a minor contradiction, Huntington has 14 more pages to explore his thesis. The true threat of the Hispanic invasion, he continues, is to the English language. God forbid that America be turned into a multilingual society! Although it is difficult to imagine what is so terrifying in the idea of living in a multilingual country such as Canada or Switzerland, which have among the highest living standards in the World, an enviable social security system, and ridiculously small amounts of violent crime. No, America is better off with one language. And while Huntington is at it, he might as well expel those damn French-speaking Cajun people in New Orleans, ban rap music (definitely not in line with Protestant values) or close down the Reservations that are a constant and unwelcome reminder that Native Americans still exist, and represent…a different culture. But the linguistic argument is not the only element in Huntington's 'analysis'. There are also economic drawbacks to Latino immigration. Here, he recycles the most common argument used by European fascist parties such as Jean Marie le Pen's National Front in France, or the British National Party: if the immigrants would just go away, the wages of low-income citizens would improve. It would be fascinating to see the economic proof of this statement, because in Europe at least, nobody has been able to demonstrate it. In fact, it is well-known that one major reason why immigrants flow into developed countries is that certain job sectors are unable to recruit local manpower. So many immigrants are merely filling gaps, taking on jobs that most citizens of developed countries would prefer not to perform. Like the European Far-Right parties, Huntington also implies that immigrants are a drain on the welfare system. If a good welfare system is an attraction, then most immigrants would flow to Cuba, which has far superior health care for all its citizens than the USA can ever dream of. Moreover, Cubans already speak Spanish, so life would be easier for the new immigrants. In fact, an influx of a predominantly young workforce, with a high birth rate, will help keep the American population young. A young population is one that can support the ever increasing cost of welfare for the aged, who represent an increasing section of the population in developed countries. In other words, an influx of young Hispanic migrants will allow ageing Anglo-Protestants to retire earlier, and enjoy a better welfare system. There are no losers here. Another bizarre aspect of Huntington's thesis is that he refuses to let past integration successes to affect his judgement of Latino immigration. He admits that the percentage of total immigrants that were from Ireland between 1820 to 1860 was higher than the percentage of total immigrants that were from Mexico in recent years, and yet he makes no mention of the fact that the Irish migrants were predominantly Catholic. Certainly they spoke English, but their Catholicism must have been a challenge to the Anglo-Protestant creed, and yet Irish immigrants successfully integrated into American society. There is no reason why Mexican immigration cannot, in time, integrate in a similar fashion. Language is only an issue of one wants it to be. Huntington continues by asserting that the key to integration is dispersal of immigrants, and that the tendency of Latino immigrants to aggregate in certain areas reinforces the danger, by increasing their concentration. One might be forgiven for thinking that he is talking about some poisonous chemical rather than human beings. As an example, he cites the fact that Mexicans are concentrated in Southern California, Cubans in Miami etc. Interestingly, these two states were Hispanic until the USA fought its wars against Spain and Mexico. How rude of Spanish-speaking peoples to return to lands that were once theirs! In fact, Huntington himself admits that the Mexicans have a legitimate claim to vast swathes of the southern USA (Texas, New Mexico, California, Nevada and Utah), which were forcibly removed during the Mexican-American wars. His complaints about Puerto-Rican are even more difficult to comprehend, considering that Puerto-Rico is a de-facto American colony. Apparently, this aggregation prevents Mexicans from integrating as fast as other immigrant groups, a statement that Huntington backs up with a series of graphs purporting to show that even after four generations, people of Mexican descent are culturally and linguistically isolated, and still occupy the lowest rungs of society. It seems that because all education is in English, the Spanish-speakers invariably end up with a disadvantage. Maybe, but they are the only Americans who can pronounce words like 'Los Angeles' correctly. Moreover, although it may take more than three generations, the eventual result is that most people of Hispanic descent will be bilingual, by sheer necessity. This may obviously be a disadvantage for white Anglo-protestants who are unable to master a second language, but will provide the Hispanic people with a distinct advantage, and will positively enrich American culture, as all waves of immigration have. So the 'problem' is not the 'cultural and linguistic isolation' of the Hispanic community, as Huntington would have us believe, but the eventual 'cultural and linguistic isolation' of the WASPs. California might indeed become a bilingual state, and there is nothing to fear in that, and should allow it and other states to bloom into truly multicultural societies. In any case, to see the retention of their own culture by Hispanic immigrants would be to assume that it is somehow inferior to the Anglo-protestant creed. In fact, Huntington admits horrible people such as civil rights organisations and "many politicians (Republican as well as Democrat) support the impetus towards bilingualism". Presumably, Huntington seeks to protect these politicians from themselves…And in this respect, he finds himself more right-wing than President Bush, who "celebrated Mexico's Cinco de Mayo national holiday by inaugurating the practice of broadcasting the weekly presidential radio address to the American people in both English and Spanish". Worse, he also admits that there is a trend for bilingual families in Miami to earn more than English-only families (and Spanish-only families). This is an unfortunate rebuff that massive Mexican immigration will leave the Hispanic community lagging behind in economic terms. Indeed, it is more likely that after several generations, most Hispanic families will be bilingual, whilst most English-only families will still be monolingual. Once again, Huntington's true fear is exposed: the dominance of the WASPs is threatened (although Huntington cunningly disguises this phobia by throwing in concerns about the Blacks being at a disadvantage as well). This hardly seems threatening to anybody else, though. A few pages later, Huntington provides ample proof to the contrary when he deals with the example of Miami, where "The Cuban economic drive made Miami and international economic dynamo, with expanding international trade and investment". So Hispanic immigrants are not forced to occupy the lower economic rungs of society after all, nor to cause a drain on local economic resources. This forces Huntington to distinguish different types of Hispanic immigration: the educated Cubans of Miami, and the uneducated, lower-class Mexicans of California (how does that distinguish them from the uneducated, lower-class Irish immigrants of the 19th Century?). Huntington is also forced to reveal his true fear once again: "The Cuban and Hispanic dominance of Miami left Anglos (as well as blacks) as outside minorities that could often be ignored". Once again, the blacks are thrown in to mitigate the xenophobic feel of his sentence. Another "threat" posed by massive Mexican immigration is that the Hispanic migrants are unpatriotic, and do not respect the flag or anthem. This criticism only applies if one sees patriotism as a virtue. For those of us who understand patriotism to be a cryptic form of nationalism, the lack of patriotism of Mexican immigrants is hardly worrying. After all, the Bush administration's Patriot Act, and other post 9-11 restrictions of civil liberties were justified in the name of patriotism, as are most wars waged by most governments. Patriotism implies putting one's country on a pedestal, unquestioningly. That the Mexican immigrants question this patriotism is a healthy development for American society. On a similar theme, Huntington laments that the Mexican immigrants are reviving the Hispanic history of the Southern USA. Huntington's attempts at historical revisionism are surprising. The southern USA was once Hispanic, whether he likes it or not. History (or at least a purged, "Anglo" version of History) is a major concern of Huntington's, as when he asks: "Would the United States be the country that it has been and that it largely remains today if it had been settled in the 17th and 18th centuries not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is clearly no. It would not be the United States; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil." As Huntington knows, however, the South of the United States was colonised by Spaniards, and the massive territories (over 2 million square kilometres) of Louisiana, stretching from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississipi, was colonised by the French and Spanish in the 17th and 18th Centuries, until the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 (although the Constitution did not specifically allow the federal government to acquire new territories by treaty, President Thomas Jefferson concluded that the practical benefits to the nation far outweighed the violation of the Constitution). Another amusing Huntington quote appears towards the end of the article: "The transformation of the United States into a country like these would not necessarily be the end of the world; it would, however, be the end of the America we have known for more than three centuries." We are glad to know that it would not be the end of the World. As for the end of the America we have known for more than three Centuries, which America would that be? The America which was built upon the genocide of Native Americans, where slavery was commonplace until the 1860s, which was so united that it underwent a bloody civil war in the 1860s, which still has the death penalty whilst most of the developed world considers this a barbaric punishment, which undertook the massacre of the Vietnamese population on a massive scale, where a system of apartheid against the blacks persisted in the southern states until the 1950s? Ironically, one of Huntington's criticisms of Hispanic culture is that Hispanics are overly focussed on History, whilst the true Americans look into the Future (unless, like him, they are looking back with nostalgia at the America we have known for more than three centuries). Another problem, according to Huntington, is the high fertility of the Mexican immigrants (one wonders if he might be considering a massive sterilisation campaign as a remedy). One sentence in particular is particularly illuminating: "Most immigrants have higher fertility rates than natives, and hence the impact of immigration is felt heavily in schools". I will agree with him that the natives of America are in danger, the word 'native' referring to the Indian tribes whose land was stolen by European and later American settlers. Even worse, Huntington laments the fact that the Mexicans are here to stay, and for once correctly identifies a key issue: "In the long term, Mexican immigration could decline when the economic well-being of Mexico approximates that of the United States. As of 2002, however, U.S. gross domestic product per capita was about four times that of Mexico (in purchasing power parity terms". So in essence, the crime of the Mexicans is to be poor. It just so happens that the USA has played no small part in that Mexican poverty, but that is the subject for another essay. As a consequence
of massive fertility and immigration, "If the spread of Spanish
as the United States' second language continues, it could, in
due course, have significant consequences in politics and government."
The influx of Cuban refugees in Florida has already had a negative
effect on U.S. politics, since this largely anti-Castro population
has been instrumental in the perpetuation of inhuman U.S. sanctions
against the population of Cuba. They also provided the manpower
for the failed 'bay of pigs' invasion of Cuba, sponsored by the
CIA under the Kennedy administration. However, in general, the
massive influx of Hispanic immigrants, with a distinct culture
and language, should gradually improve American politics, by leading
to an increased sensitivity to alternative cultures, which could
eventually lead to a less aggressive foreign policy, and to the
acceptance of diversity as a source of cultural enrichment. To
Huntington, this new, bicultural America is a nightmare, as he
concludes: "There is no Americano dream. There is only the
American dream created by Anglo-Protestant society." Maybe
it is time for Huntington to open his eyes, wake up from the white-dominated
American dream and face the more exciting American reality. After
all, the Americas are overwhelmingly Latin (Over 520 million people
in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Quebec compared to less than
315 million people in the USA and Anglophone Canada, and the gap
is widening). ¡Señor Huntington, en vez de vivir
con miedo, aprenda español y abrace el futuro excitante
y multicultural de los Estados Unidos!
|
||||||
|
||||||