The only question is...

. . . how we welcome them.

"The Hispanic Challenge" by Samuel Huntington (Foreign Policy, March/April 04 issue)

According to my old professor Sam Huntington, not everyone should be welcome here. Sam's new book (sure to be controversial) is titled: Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity. If you think Sam went off the deep end with Clash of Civilizations, you may consider this to be rock-bottom of an otherwise brilliant career.

Let me say first off, Sam Huntington probably goes down as the 20th century's most important political scientist, not to mention one of the most controversial. More personally, he was my favorite professor at Harvard. Frankly, I felt like such a fish out of water there (with class mates like Fareed Zakaria, Andrew Sullivan and Mark Medish, you tend to feel inferior from the get-go), and most of my attempts to speak out in seminars were greeted with complete indifference ("Huh?" was a common response). But Sam was the first andóin some waysóonly prof who seemed to get me, who seemed to be able to hear my voice at whatever unique frequency I was speaking at. His grading of my papers were a revelation to me: someone understands my way of thinking!

So when I criticize the guy, you need to understand it's nothing personal, because I think he is legitimately described as a giant in my field of political science, plus he's a personal hero of mine.

Having said all that, I fear Prof. Huntington has outlived his productive years. The last good book he wrote was about The Third Wave of Democratization. Then he seemed to lose his way in the post-Cold War world, primarily because he seems to fear multiculturalism like the Black Death (no pun intended). In this latest book on how "the persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages" (I quote the intro to the FP article, which is adapted from the book), Sam seems to have lost all perspective on what this country really is all about, instead choosing to cringe at the "brown peril" that seems poised to destroy us.

Sam has become this frightened old white guy from New England who's scared stiff of all those brown Catholics coming up from the south. The ironic part of the article is that he credits all those white Anglo-Saxon Protestants with setting in motion the U.S. that we know today, but then assumes that by letting in too many Latino Catholics, we'll end upóapparentlyóbecoming a racially divided version of Brazil or Quebec.

"Would the United States be the country that it has been and that it largely remains today if it had been settled in the 17th and 18th centuries not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is clearly no. It would not be the United States; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil."

I guess I just don't read U.S. history in the same way as Sam does. While I credit the Anglo-Saxon source code, I see this country evolving so far past those origins that a huge gulf exists today between that European tradition and what we have created here in the U.S. My sense is that Huntington felt okay about the future so long as it centered on the Anglos-Saxon-led West keeping the Slavic and Asian commies at bay, only to become deeply disillusioned and scared when the New World Order that followed seems to favor a globalization-fueled mixing of the races (I say this as someone adopting a baby girl from China in coming months).

The Latinization of America is not only a good thing (opening up our minds and hopefully our nation's membership to Latino societies to our south), it is a deeply necessary thing due to the aging demographics we face over the coming decades. So get used to southern governors who know Spanish becoming president of the United States, because over time that will be the norm.

As I say in the book, "they" are coming no matter what, the only question is how we welcome them. If you listen to Sam Huntington, it is question of danger, but in my mind, it's a question of opportunity. I see a United States that encompasses maybe 75 states by the year 2050, and I see many of those states coming from Latin America. It won't be out of fear but out of logic that we open up membership in these United States once again.