“The Hispanic Challenge” by Samuel P. Huntington, and replies, in Foreign Policy (March–April and May–June 2004), 1779 Massachusetts Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.

In 2000, Mexican immigrants made up some 27.6 percent of the total foreign-born population in the United States, and Hispanics overall constituted 12 percent of the total U.S. population. Perhaps, in this nation of immigrants, these facts don’t come as much of a shock. But political scientist Huntington, Harvard University professor and author of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) and Who Are We? (2004), writes in the March–April issue of Foreign Policy that the “immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially from Mexico, and the fertility rates of these immigrants” represent “the single most immediate and most serious challenge to America’s traditional identity.”

Marshaling his figures, Huntington suggests that the Hispanics who began to settle in the United States in the 1960s are unlike previous waves of immigrants: They reject “the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream.” Because they come from nearby, many only “visit” the United States to earn money and then return to their home countries; even those who stay tend to concentrate in cloistered communities and not become part of the society at large. As an example, Huntington cites the “enclave city” of Miami—the “most Hispanic large city in the 50 U.S. states.” Faced with the influence of the powerful Cuban-American community, 140,000 Anglos left the city in the decade between 1983 and 1993; by 2000, some 65 percent of the city’s residents spoke Spanish at home. Huntington wonders whether the present state of affairs in Miami is also “the future for Los Angeles and the southwest United States,” where many of the new immigrants have settled.

Because so many Hispanics do not join the societal mainstream, and because their fertility rate is high (3.0 live births per women of childbearing age, compared to 1.8 for whites and 2.1 for blacks), Huntington fears that, both passively and actively, they will weaken the bedrock Anglo-Protestant culture: the English language, the work ethic, “English concepts of the rule of law . . . and dissenting Protestant values of individualism.” Though increasing numbers of Hispanics arrive in the United States each year, Huntington concludes that they will share the American dream “only if they dream in English.”

In the May–June issue of Foreign Policy, critics of Huntington’s views were quick to take exception. “The insistence that American culture is ‘Anglo-Protestant’ is
not only offensive but false,” says Roger Daniels, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. Addressing Hunting­­­ton’s fear of a language divide, Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center, invokes data showing that, among immigrant Latinos, “the transition from Spanish to English is virtually completed in one generation.” As for a cultural division, Tamar Jacoby, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, insists that “we have never demanded that newcomers adopt any particular cultural habits, Anglo-Protestant or otherwise. As long as they adopt our ideas about freedom, tolerance, and equality before the law, we have left them to do as they please in the private sphere.”