Abstract

A Nation of WASPs?

The author argues that immigration benefits the United States. In the past it was not difficult to discern the difference between xenophobia and racism. But a Harvard professor, Samuel Huntington, has muddied the waters. In his view, the growing Latino population will divide the United States into two separate nations, one Latino and the other white. Nativists like Huntington think immigrants are a danger to the future of our country. On the contrary, they are perhaps the only solution to human destiny, which is to grow old and then die. As any actuary can tell the nativists, America is about to run out of the one thing neither xenophobia nor racism can provide: youth. If those who love this country despite its political and social flaws succeed, immigrants and their children and grandchildren and all the generations that follow will enrich the mind as well as the strong back of the United States. Huntington complains of the poor performance of Mexican and Mexican-American children in school, citing the high dropout rate. He does not mention the success of descendants of Spanish-speakers. There is a danger in immigration, but it is not cultural or racial, as Huntington argues. It begins in the suffering of undocumented people limited to work that does not use the skills of mind they could contribute to society.