Huntington and the Emerging Hispanic Challenge

The late Samuel Huntington published his last work "The Hispanic Challenge" in Foreign Policy in the March/April 2004 issue prior to publishing his last book Who Are We:  The Challenges to America's National Identity.  While his primary thesis received stiff criticism in the contemporary environment (everything from racial insensitivity to elitism was hurled at Huntington), his main points are worth revisiting given the current security threat along the US southern border as a result of the Cartel Wars in Mexico.  According to Huntington's view,

[t]he persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultulres and two languages.  Unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclaves - from Los Angeles to Miami - and rejecting the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream.  The United States ignores this challenge at its peril.

This is an especially troubling viewpoint considering the "on the ground" reality confronting the United States and the spread and scope of the Mexican Cartel War and its violent reach.  Although Huntington's work was published well before the current wave of violence in Mexico, he presents a number of reasons that outline why Mexican immigration to the United States is both unprecedented in American history and how its overall impact is fundamentally changing the culture and identity of the American state.  When the Cartel War violence is viewed through the lens that Huntington presents, a number of disturbing trends emerge, some with serious long-term consequences.

Huntington argues that contiguity of the United States and Mexico allows Mexican immigrants to maintain close bonds of kinship and familial connections within their homeland in a way that other immigrants cannot. 

Contiguity enables Mexican immigrants to remain in intimate contact with their families, friends and home localities in Mexico as no other immigrants have been able to do.

Considering the vast criminal networks that smuggle guns, drugs, people and money back and forth across the US-Mexico border and throughout the continental United States and Canada, one could add drug lords, narco bosses, arms traffickers and corrupt public officials to the list of "families, friends and home localities" that Huntington describes.  The ease of contact that the contiguous US-Mexico border region offers is a perfect breeding ground for the proliferation of cross-border violence.  This reality will make disengaging the Cartel War violence from its cross-border region of support very difficult for Mexican and US law enforcement.

Another issue addressed by Huntington is the scale of Mexican immigration to the United States.  Without getting into specific numbers, it is clear that the immigration pattern in recent years is primarily a story of Mexican immigration.  This presents a unique challenge for that fact that Mexicans not only constitute over 25% of foreign-born immigrants living in the United States but that they also speak a single language.  This is different than other immigrants historically for two major reasons - its size and its cultural cohesion.  According to Huntington, this is the first time in U.S. history where half of the immigrants entering the United States (either legally or illegally) "speak a single-non English language."  This fact makes it easier for criminal networks to exploit common cultural links, integrate more fluidly into expatriate communities, utilize safe-houses and find refuge in communities of similar culture.  Just like in the frontiers of the Global War on Terror, those attempting to combat cartel violence are going to be more easily spotted as interlopers and outsiders.

An obvious concern addressed by Huntington is the regional concentration of Mexican immigrants throughout the American southwest (see inlaid map from the 2000 US Census - counties with a majority Mexican population are in pink).  It does not take a serious leap of faith to understand how this impacts US policy actions aimed at reducing and eliminating Cartel War violence.  This regional concentration does not tell the whole story, however, as Mexican drug cartels have extended their reach far beyond the American southwest, into such locations as Atlanta, Georgia and Seattle, Washington.  It is this very regional concentration along the US-Mexico border that presents an enormous challenge to American law enforcement - namely, Mexican immigrants do not appear to follow the traditional pattern of cultural assimilation associated with other immigrant groups.  According to Huntington,

[i]n the past, immigrants originated overseas and often overcame severe obstacles and hardships to reach the United States.  They came from many different countries, spoke different languages, and came legally.  Their flow fluctuated over time, with significant reductions occurring as a result of the Civil War, World War I, and the restrictive legislation of 1924.  They dispersed into many enclaves in rurla areas and major cities throughout the Northeast and Midwest.  They had no historical claim to any U.S. territory.  On all these dimensions, Mexican immigration is fundamentally different.  These differences combine to make the assimilation of Mexicans into U.S. culture and society much more difficult than it was for previous immigrants.  Particularly striking in contrast to previous immigrants is the failure of third- and fourthgeneration people of Mexican origin to approximate U.S. norms in education, economic status, and intermarriage rates.  The size, persistence, and concentration of Hispanic immigration tends to perpetuate the use of Spanish through successive generations.

This lack of cultural assimilation and regional concentration effectively extends the reach of Mexican drug cartels directly into the continental United States by turning the US-Mexico border region into a safe haven for cartel networks.  This is not to say that just because the border region has a high population density of Mexican residents that all of these residents are favorable or willing to extend support to members of drug cartels, but to overlook the potential for the cartels to strengthen their networks as a result of cultural cohesion throughout the American southwest is naive.

Huntington's most interesting point is the historical presence that Mexicans have on portions of the territorial United States.  This reality can lend legitimacy to the belief that Mexican immigrants have a right to recreate their own unique homeland that lies within the borders of the United States.  Huntington explains it this way:

[t]his trend could consolidate the Mexican-dominant areas of the United States into an autonomous, culturally and linguistically distinct, and economically self-reliant bloc within the United States.

 

Comments

[DRTV]

Thanks, i think you have a strong point about it.

Daniel Ferris