RESPUESTA A HUNTINGTON Financial Times 24 de mayo 2004
Henry Cisneros
The writer is founder and chairman of American CityVista and was secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Clinton administration


The central thesis of Samuel Huntington's new book is his claim that "the single most immediate and most serious challenge to America's traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially from Mexico, and the fertility rates of these immigrants compared to black and white American natives". The Harvard professor - famed for his thesis that Islam and the west are doomed to a "clash of civilisations" - now fears that the US will not remain "a country with a single language and a core Anglo-Protestant culture", but be transformed into a nation of two cultures and two languages.

Professor Huntington's polemic - Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity - is the latest expression in a long history of alarms about immigration to the US. As successive waves of immigrants arrived over two centuries - Irish, Italians, Jews, Chinese, Germans, eastern Europeans and many others - all were greeted with protests against their language, appearance, religion, lifestyle and effects on the job market. But Prof Huntington says his analysis is different because the latest wave of immigration is so profoundly different from any before it - and therefore far more dangerous to American identity. He postulates six reasons why the successes of past immigration are irrelevant to the current situation. They are:

Contiguity: the fact that the US shares a porous 2000-mile border with Mexico.

Scale: about half of all immigrants entering the US are Hispanic, so for the first time in US history half of those entering the nation "speak a single non-English language".

Illegality: the high number of Mexican illegal immigrants - 350,000 a year in the 1990s by some estimates - means Mexicans make up some 69 per cent of America's illegal population.

Regional concentration: the proportion of Hispanics continues to grow in the regions where they are most concentrated, notably California and the south-western states.

Persistence: the current wave of Hispanic immigration shows no signs of slowing.

Historical presence: because large parts of the south-west were once part of Mexico, "Mexican Americans enjoy a sense of being on their own turf that is not shared by other immigrants".

Some of Prof Huntington's six points are matters of unarguable fact. Others, such as whether immigration flows will be sustained at the scale of recent years, are matters of conjecture. But it is in drawing his conclusions from these six points that Prof Huntington goes badly off course. As with navigating across a great sea, a few degrees of misjudgment here, a few degrees of miscalculation there and a few degrees of plain old wrong-headedness will in the end bring the ship to a very strange destination. If Columbus had used Prof Huntington's method of reckoning, there would be no US to worry about its immigrant history.

Prof Huntington comes out so wrong because he does not ascribe enough strength to US culture, the attraction of its way of life or the power of its institutions. Immigrants have always come to America because they seek a better life. Each has made a personal calculation that life in the US is better than life in his or her own country and has acted accordingly.

Today's Hispanic immigrants uproot themselves, disrupt the lives of loved ones, confront dangers and face new circumstances not in order to recreate their own country in the US but to learn America's ways of success and progress. In amazingly few years, they and their children adapt language, work practices and lifestyles to the American way. They serve in the armed forces, they pay taxes, they revitalise neighbourhoods, they sustain entire industries.

In characterising these people strictly in terms of their first language or their lack of Anglo-Protestant lineage, Prof Huntington neglects a crucial aspect of Hispanic immigration. Hispanics in the US are younger than the national average age. While Japan, Germany, France and Italy project dramatically slower rates of growth for their populations and labour forces - with worrying implications for their economies - the US is gaining a youthful workforce, new markets and energetic, ambitious young leaders.

In his hand-wringing over the tainting of Anglo-Protestant blood lines, Prof Huntington overlooks the impressive evidence from the most successful US cities that diversity of population is a driving force in the new economy. The interweaving of backgrounds and perspectives contributes to creativity. The convergence of new streams of thought generates economic momentum. Metropolitan areas from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles are experiencing solid population growth, surging retail trade and a huge increase in entrepreneurship because of Hispanic immigration. That immigrant-fuelled diversity is also helping the US build commercial and cultural bridges with other parts of the world.

Prof Huntington's greatest error is to misunderstand the fundamental identity of the US. It is not an identity based on how people look, what language they learnt first or over how many generations they absorbed Anglo-Protestant values. Rather, it is based upon acceptance of the rule of law and of democratic processes of lawmaking; of respect for personal liberty and private property; of understanding the system of free enterprise and adopting the national narrative of striving and accomplishment. It has been my experience that these are the values the newest immigrants accept most enthusiastically. After all, those values are why they took the trouble to come.