With Every Mistake by Gwynne Dyer

Author:Gwynne Dyer [Dyer, Gwynne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-37583-4
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2005-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

WAITING FOR THE CANADIAN HORDES

March 15, 2004

Dr. Samuel P. Huntington, chairman of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and co-founder of Foreign Policy magazine, is like a dog that has only one trick: we’ve all seen it before, but he won’t stop doing it. We’re going to have to stop giving him biscuits.

Dr. Huntington’s trick is to identify some alleged new threat to US security, dress it up in academically respectable language and inflate it to bursting point. He did it in 1993 with his essay “The Coming Clash of Civilizations” and recycled it as a best-selling book in 1996; but now it’s time for a new threat. This time it’s the Mexican hordes coming from the south. In the most recent issue of Foreign Policy, he poses the questions: “Will the US remain a country with a single national language and a core Anglo-Protestant culture? (Or will) Americans acquiesce to their eventual transformation into two peoples with two cultures (Anglo and Hispanic) and two languages (English and Spanish)?”

Don’t confuse Dr. Huntington with the foul-mouthed bigots who usually rant on about the Mexican Peril: his usual habitat is Harvard University’s dreaming spires, not some down-market drinking establishment on the wrong side of town. But his article “The Hispanic Challenge” is a trailer for his new book Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, and one suspects that his definition of “We” does not include African-Americans, Muslim Americans or Mexican-Americans. In fact, it doesn’t really even include Catholic Americans.

Dr. Huntington is not exactly predicting that Mexican-Americans will grow into a permanent Spanish-speaking minority as important as French Canadians in Canada, with a territorial base in the Southwest, a culture that profoundly diverges from the traditional white, Protestant culture of the United States, and the political clout to impose bilingualism nationwide. He’s just warning about it, that’s all (and he’s too cunning to court charges of extremism by suggesting specific policies to avert this dreadful fate).

It would be a waste of time to go through his arguments piecemeal, but a couple of examples will convey the style. He admits that the share of Mexican immigrants in current US immigration is lower than that of Irish immigrants in the period 1820 to 1860 or of German immigrants in 1850 to 1870, but insists that the danger is greater now because Mexicans won’t assimilate.

Then he quotes a study showing that more than 90 percent of second-generation Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles speak fluent English and that over 60 percent of them speak either no Spanish or worse Spanish than English, but promptly frets that “with the rapid expansion of the Mexican immigrant community, people of Mexican origin would have less incentive to become fluent in and use English in 2000 than 1970.” Yes, they might, but where’s your evidence? There is none; just false parallels, unsupported conclusions and a lavish use of the conditional mood.

Yet, there is more to Huntington than cynical careerism; you sense a genuine cultural and racial panic in what he writes.

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