This is the unedited text of the first part of my essay in Immigration and the American Future.

In early 2006, as the US Congress debated proposals for stricter immigration, hundreds of thousands Mexican-Americans took to the streets. In the first round of protests, Latino demonstrators waving Mexican flags demanded rights for the illegals and accused conservative Republicans of racism. Mexicans, illegal as well as legal, made an indispensable contribution to the American economy, and yet they were treated with disrespect and hostility. The same arguments appeared in Mexican newspapers. The propaganda had a common source: the speeches of President George Bush, who was widely quoted in Mexico as an advocate for the illegals.

Although conservative commentators in the press criticized the demonstrators, they were far more harsh to the members of Congress who wanted to criminalize illegal entry into the United States. Across the country, however, rank and file conservatives and even some liberals deluged talk radio and newspaper editorial pages with complaints. “Doesn’t anybody care,” argued the conservatives, “that illegal aliens are in fact illegal?” Between the rhetoric of the demonstrators and the rhetoric of their critics, there was and is a broad gap. Part of the gap is the result of the basic disagreement of the two sides; part of it derives from the different loyalties of the two groups—conservatives to their vision of “America the way it oughta be” and the Latinos to their Mexican-American identity. But just as apparent in the attitudes of the two groups was a divergent approach to legal and political questions. For most Americans, the value of law and order and the US Constitution is taken for granted like the self-evident truths proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. For the Mexicans, loyalty to family and nation, love and honor seemed to take precedence over 18th century abstractions about ordered liberty.

Mexico and the United States are quite different countries, and, from the point of view of educated Americans, Mexican culture is a far stranger than, say, the culture of Italy or Poland. Octavio Paz thought Americans instinctively feared the zoot-suited Pachucos who prowled the streets of California cities in the 1940’s, but it is more probable that most middle-class Americans felt the same contempt for the Pachucos as they did for the “low riders” of the 1960’s and 70’s. Every Mexican rights group complains about the racism and bigotry of Anglo-Americans, and their complaints are not without justification. Americans are hardly unique in this respect. There has probably never been a time in human history when members of different ethnic groups respected each other. Greeks despised Romans as crude; Romans despised Greeks as effeminate, and the French and English shared a similar set of prejudices against each other.

A people defines itself in part by rejecting bad qualities it attributes to foreigners. Anglo-Americans display their respect for cleanliness, diligence, self-restraint, and lawfulness by deriding Mexicans as dirty, lazy (until recently), violent dope-smokers. Mexicans return the compliment, making fun of gringos as stiff, unemotional, unspiritual, and sexless. The gringo stereotype is not restricted to ignorant peasants who have never met educated Americans. Carlos Fuentes, Mexico’s most important novelist, has spent a great deal of time in America and speaks flawless English. Despite Fuentes’ many American friends, his fiction still perpetuates the gringo stereotypes. In The Old Gringo , the old American is a joyless writer who comes to Mexico seeking a passionate death, and the beautiful American schoolmarm only finds erotic fulfillment in the embrace of one of Pancho Villa’s officers who feels he can tell her important things because:
“[He] could tell it only to someone from a land as far away and strange as the United States, the Other World, the world that is not Mexico, the foreign and distant and curious, eccentric, and marginal world of the Yankees who did not enjoy good food or violent revolution or women in bondage, or beautiful churches, and broke with all traditions just for the sake of it, as if there were good things only in the future and in novelty…”

Prejudice is rarely one-sided, but the relationship between the two bigotries, American and Mexican, is not symmetrical, or, at least, has not been up till now. For two centuries, Mexico has seen itself in the mirror of the United States, while people in the United States (with a few interesting exceptions) has hardly given a second thought to Mexico.

No one knows how many Mexicans and Mexican-Americans reside in the US. There are perhaps 15 million Mexican immigrants (a conservative estimate), a third of them illegal and perhaps 15 million US citizens of Mexican origin or descent, making a total of some 30 million. There are at least 10 million more people from other parts of Latin America. As a percentage of the American population, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans are rapidly overtaking African-Americans (if they have not already done so) as the dominant minority group, and, if current high rates of immigration are permitted to continue, this figure could double in ten years. Given the differential in birth rates between non-Mexican and Mexican-Americans, the United States may be rapidly headed toward a situation resembling Canada’s, which is bilingual, bicultural, and binational. In the worst case, this would produce an armed struggle between the two groups. More optimistically, one might imagine a future United States in which Americans of Mexican descent have been peacefully assimilated.
Conflict or Assimilation?

In trying to predict the future of the US, two important facts have to be kept in mind. First, in the absence of a major shift in immigration policy, Hispanics, particularly Mexicans, will increasingly make up a significant part of the American population. Second, Mexican immigrants are not a blank slate on which pop culture and public schools can engrave some predetermined “American” message. They are a distinct people, who bring with them their own language, culture, and history.

When two cultures come into a long-lasting contact, whether through conquest or migration, several results are possible. The range of possibilities can be broadly characterized as conflict or amalgamation, though the two are not mutually exclusive: In border areas, one culture may imitate much of the other’s folkways without necessarily growing to love the people across the border. Texans on the border have learned to eat Mexican food and pepper their language with Spanish phrases, but they may still express hostility to Mexicans, both individually and collectively. Similarly, Mexicans in Juarez may watch American television, eat at McDonalds, and spend a good deal of the year on the American side of the border, without abandoning their resentments against their wealthy neighbors to the North.
The most dangerous meeting of cultures is the sort of warfare carried on by the Indians of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico with European settlers. For generations the Apache fought with Mexicans and Americans to maintain their very existence. They lost and became marginal players in a country they once possessed, much as Mexicans, after two wars, became marginal players in the northern parts of Mexico that are now American states. One result of immigration, then, is that the dominant (as measured in terms of force, numbers, or cultural vitality) group may annihilate the identity of the other group, either by practicing a literal genocide or by the no less effective method of cultural genocide, which robs a people of its national symbols, history, and identity. This is not to say that such methods are mutually exclusive or 100% effective. The Roman occupation of southern Britain established the Latin language and Roman civilization throughout the territory they occupied, but the Celtic language never disappeared until Anglo-Saxons virtually eliminated, apart from a few place names and stray words, most significant traces of Celtic culture. On the other hand, the invaders might be eventually subjugated by the original inhabitants, as Turks, for example, were eventually dispossessed and expelled from Serbia and Greece in the 19th century.
Even in the most violent conflicts, the conquerors will take women from their conquered subjects and absorb at least some of their culture. To describe this process of mixing, I prefer the word amalgamation rather than assimilation, which assumes that cultural transformation is a one-way process. The classic definition of assimilation was offered by Robert Park and Burgess: “a process of interpenetration and fusion in which persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other persons and groups, and by sharing their experience and history are incorporated with them in a common cultural life.” This definition, incorporated in the 1921 edition of Introduction to the Science of Sociology, is an implicit contribution to the immigration debate that erupted after WW I.

Park was a man of the world, a journalist who had lived in both the East and Midwest and South: He was invited to Tuskeegee by Booker T. Washington to study southern race problems and he had studied philosophy in Germany. He wrote from a depth of understanding of the American people. However, little of the vast, largely unreadable sociological “literature” on assimilation that has overflowed the study of immigration is helpful to any discussion of real world issues. For one thing, few of the social scientists appear to have any idea of what, historically, the American identity (or rather identities) is or are. For one neoconservative pundit, America is defined as the public use of the English language, liberal egalitarian political ideas, and the Protestant Work ethic. Such an ahistorical definition conveniently leaves out large groups, including Catholics, Southern crackers, and traditional conservatives. Fond of graphs and choking on a speciously technical vocabulary of invented terms, they display little knowledge of American history and still less of traditional American culture. They write glibly of immigrants assimilating, without ever considering what it is they are assimilating to, and, when confronted by irredentist natives who do not welcome a massive influx of foreigners, they take no interest in any nativist point of view, which even in the mildest form is condemned as racism.

This abstract approach to assimilation derives, ultimately, from the conviction-as naïve as it is chauvinist–that America is an exceptional country, one not rooted in blood, soil, and kinship, but a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Proponents of this view are quick to label the more old-fashioned view, that the nation is an extended family, as bigotry, but no amount of repetition or rhetorical extravagance can disguise the dangerous logic that is at work. If I love my country because it is mine, I must be loyal to it, even when I disagree with its policies, but I do not necessarily regard it as superior to everyone else’s country, and I have no temptation to say that all other countries, to the extent they are legitimate and worthy of respect, must approximate my own. But that is exactly what the advocates of the “propositional nation” do insist upon. The United States is not only the best nation in the history of the world, but it is a beacon to all mankind, the natural home of all the good and decent people in the world and the enemy to all regimes that deny their subjects equal rights. Thus, by the same argument, a propositional nation is obliged to open its borders to strangers “yearning to breathe free” but also justified in engaging in endless crusades to impose its propositions on the rest of the world.

The old-fashioned patriotism of European nations could and did encourage violent conflicts, but ideological nationalisms of the Communist, National Socialist, and Democratic-globalist types produce a crusading mentality that is ever on the look-out for new threats to eliminate. Since democratic-globalists are always eager to throw the name of Hitler at those who advocate restrictions on immigration, it is worth noting that the Third Reich, eager to fill jobs that had been abandoned by conscripted soldiers, encouraged immigration into Germany.

Violent immigrants may destroy a native culture and identity, as British settlers did in North America. On the other hand, it may be the immigrants who are absorbed, peacefully or not, by their hosts. France in the 19th and early 20th century, received a steady stream of immigrants from Italy, Spain, and even Poland, but the comparatively slow rate of immigration and the power of French cultural institutions (army, schools, Church) did a thorough job of assimilating the new-comers.
More often, however, a small but dominant immigrant group, while establishing effective power, gradually adopts the language and culture of its subjects, particularly when the preceding culture is older and on a higher level. This is, to one degree or another, what happened after the German occupation of France, Italy, and Spain, but not until the standard of living had collapsed and with it much of the cultural proficiency of the Roman world. Medieval Italy was not simply a revival, much less a continuation of the old Roman order. The everyday language was less complex and contaminated with Germanic words; personal vengeance and dueling were acknowledged forms of justice; sanitation, hygiene, and health had collapsed to a primitive level.

There are infinite possibilities to the process of amalgamation. Renaissance Italians, for the most part, were far more like the Romans than like their German contemporaries. English language and culture, by contrast, became a vibrant mixture of Anglo-Saxon and Norman elements. The basic roots of the language are typically Germanic—words like pig and calf, earth and food—while the language of the higher culture (law, politics, the pleasures of the table) are typically expressed in French and Latin—pork and veal, estate and cuisine.

Finally, in some instances, different ethnic groups may live side by side as the French and English have done in Canada, Flemish and French in Belgium, French, Italian, and German in Switzerland, to say nothing of the ethnic patchworks of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or post-colonial states in Africa. Sometimes the coexistence is peaceful, as in Switzerland; at other times one or the other group may long for separation, as in Quebec, Belgium, and Yugoslavia. Sometimes the frictions are sufficient to lead to violence as among Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in Bosnia, Basques in Spain, Hutus and Tutsis in central Africa.

Which scenario will be played out in the event that the Hispanics population becomes a significant minority, say, one fourth or one third of the population? An answer to this question will be determined partly by the circumstances and partly by the outlook of those giving the answer. Certainly, most non-Hispanic Americans, whatever their views on immigration, expect Spanish-speaking immigrants to abandon their language and accept the mainstream “values” of American culture. There are leftists, as well as Chicano nationalists, who oppose assimilation. Some might welcome a reconquest of the territory taken from Mexico, while others speak of the multi-cultural society that will include many cultural alternatives to the white bread Anglo-American tradition.

Assuming, for the moment, that the preferred model is assimilation of immigrants to the “American way of life” and the least desirable would be a Reconquista that results in something like Quebec, what are the most favorable conditions under which a sizable minority can be integrated into the mainstream? There are two sides to this question, defined, roughly, by the border between the United States and Mexico.

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