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The choice in the debate over latino immigration
By Ivonne García

During their last debate before the elections, President Bush and Senator Kerry engaged for the first time the topic of immigration. In an October poll, NPR revealed that while the public’s views on legal immigration are less negative than they were shortly after Sept. 11, most Americans are still concerned about illegal immigration and many are uneasy about the overall impact of immigration on American culture.

One debate over the issue of Latino immigration is represented by the opposite stances of Harvard scholar Samuel P. Huntington on one side, and Latino activist and journalist Juan González on the other. In his recently released book titled Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity, Huntington includes a chapter subtitled: “The Mexican/Hispanic Challenge,” in which he claims that Latin American immigration, especially Mexican, “is leading toward the demographic reconquista [reconquest] of areas Americans took from Mexico by force in the 1830s and 1840s, Mexicanizing them in a manner comparable to . . . the Cubanization that has occurred in southern Florida.” Huntington also warns that Mexican assimilation, as gauged by factors that include language, education, occupation and identity, “lags behind that of contemporary non-Mexican immigrants and that of immigrants in the previous waves.”

Huntington strategically quotes Mexican officials and writers to support his stance that Latino immigrants have “backward” Hispanic traits, which are “very different from Anglo-Protestant ones,” such as “lack of initiative, self-reliance, and ambition, ... and acceptance of poverty as a virtue.” I cannot help but wonder why, if we Latinos have all these anti-work ethic characteristics, do we risk life and limb in such large numbers to come to this country to eek out a better life for ourselves and for those left behind. This is true not only of the Mexicans crossing the dangerous border into the United States but also in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory since 1898, which receives an influx of thousands of Dominican “illegal immigrants” each year, who brave the shark-infested waters of the Caribbean for a taste of the “American Dream.”

For Huntington, granting Latinos a totally free rein in this country - a problem he says has been compounded by the establishment of bilingual education, and by businesses’ efforts to gain a piece of our nearly $600 billion collective purse - would be “the end of the America we have known for more than three centuries.” But who exactly is included in this “we” that Huntington refers to? Many African Americans (and other peoples of color) have long charged – some for more than two centuries now – that there are two Americas: one white and one black. And I wonder how many people across this nation, or even in this university, would identify themselves as “Anglo-Protestant,” which Huntington finds is the core characteristic of the American identity (what about the Irish, Italian, and non-Protestant Anglo immigrants into this country?).

Another lens through which to examine Latino immigration into this country is the one provided by González in Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. González draws parallels between the “movement of labor northward” of Mexican, Central and Latin Americans and “the great western trek across the North American frontier” that helped build the U.S. nation. He emphatically points to the fact that, unlike previous waves of immigrants to the United States, Latino migration has been “directly connected to the growth of a U.S. empire,” which during the 19thand early 20th century sought expansion in this hemisphere. In González’s words: “If the United States is today the world’s richest nation, it is in part because of the sweat and blood of the copper workers of Chile, the tin miners of Bolivia, the fruit pickers of Guatemala and Honduras, the sugar cane cutters of Cuba, the oil workers of Venezuela and Mexico, the pharmaceutical workers of Puerto Rico, the ranch hands of Costa Rica and Argentina, the West Indians who died building the Panama Canal, and the Panamanians who maintained it.”

In a fitting rebuttal to Huntington, although González published his book in 2000, the latter states: “We Hispanics are not going away. Demographics and the tide of history point only to a greater not a lesser Latino presence throughout the new century.”

Against the backdrop of this debate, we learned earlier this quarter that Ohio State University has become the largest university in the United States, bigger that the University of Texas, which had surpassed OSU in size in the late 1990s. Simultaneously, OSU President Karen Holbrook announced her vision for OSU to become not only one of the best research universities in the United States, but in the world, a restatement of her view that our institution must exercise a role of leadership in the pursuit of excellence. But being the largest university does not necessarily mean that we are implicitly leaders. If OSU is to become a leading institution in this nation, it must reflect the United States as it is today, not as it was those three centuries past that Huntington is so worried about (three centuries marred with the marginalization of American Indians, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and other peoples of color in this country). Today’s national reality is that Latinos make up nearly 13 percent of the total population, while the Latino community at OSU represents a miniscule 2 percent of the student body.

The question that arises for OSU within the debate over Latino immigration is, which side is this university going to choose? Is our university going to embrace González’s view that Latinos are here to stay and are a positive cultural and economic force to be reckoned with? Or is this university going to go against the national reality, as Huntington would have us do, and hope that we all just disappear? As one of the Latinos at OSU, I hope this university makes the right choice.