Are Mexicans Italians?

ARE MEXICANS ITALIANS?
Richard D. Lamm

One of the most important questions America and the Southwest are faced with is: are Mexicans Italians? Italians were the last immigrant group to come to America under antagonism and suspicion. Prejudice was palpable, discrimination widespread, intergroup relations difficult. Italians 100 years ago, like the Mexican immigrants today, had poor graduation rates, high rate of dropouts, higher crime rates, fewer college graduates per capita and fewer professionals. It seemed for a time that Italians would be a permanent underclass of blue-collar workers.

But the Italians, while they took longer to succeed in the traditional ways, took on the educational and success patterns of the majority community and now they equal or exceed the performance of the majority community. They are among the proudest Americans with family income and professional status higher than the national average. Took longer, but succeeded brilliantly. Are Mexicans Italians?

Samuel P. Huntington, who gave us the perceptive The Clash of Civilizations, has a new book, Who are We? which should be much debated by those who care about American’s future. Huntington states: “The persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, 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.”

All American history is opposed to Huntington’s thesis and is on the side of success of our new immigrants. America has been a powerful assimilating machine, and there have always been doubting xenophobes and good-hearted skeptics. But there are three big differences, which, in my opinion, make a Hispanic Quebec an equally likely scenario. Those three all began with “D”.

Distance: previous generations of immigrants had to come a long way and didn’t have much option to go home. They had to become Americans; today many of our immigrants can go back to their homes for a weekend. The pull to assimilate is considerably less. With dual citizenship they can vote both for Vincente Fox and George Bush.

Diversity: the only way past immigrants could talk to each other and live their lives, was to learn English and assimilate. America has allowed its immigration policy to accept a disproportionate percentage of Mexicans. (See chart) Today over 50% of our immigrants are Spanish speaking and America is backing into becoming a bilingual/bicultural country. I know of no bilingual/bicultural country in the world that lives at peace with itself.

Discontinuity: the history of American immigration is times of large immigration followed by periods of low immigration (war, depression), which gives the new immigrants a chance to assimilate and join our community. Today we take approximately one million legal immigrants and have 9 to 11 million illegal immigrants residing here, with massive numbers of illegals being added year after year. Do we not risk the melting pot becoming a pressure cooker?

I believe that America and the world will have to develop sustainable lifestyles and policies. I am skeptical of mass immigration because one of those policies has to be to move to stabilize the population of the U.S. A second equally imperative agenda is to assimilate and acculturate our newcomers. I suggest that these two issues are among the most important issues facing Colorado and America.