 |
When
Pat Buchanan ran for president in 1996, he shared with supporters
in Iowa the message he planned to deliver, if elected, to those
who break U.S. immigration laws. It went like this: “Listen,
José, you’re not coming in this time!”
A few months ago, Buchanan released a new book titled State of Emergency:
The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. If you haven’t
read it, save yourself the trouble. Here’s the central theme:
“Boo.” As Buchanan sees it, excessive immigration—
especially from Latin America—is destroying a great country.
Nevermind that, for some of us, the reason this country is so great
is because it draws people from all over the world.
Ironically, one of the reasons that Buchanan is so pessimistic about
America’s future is that it is now home to so many hard-working
people who were brought here by their optimism. What Buchanan sees
as the end, immigrants—whether they come from Pakistan or
Peru or Portugal— see as a brand new beginning.
And Buchanan’s concern isn’t limited just to immigrants
who come illegally. He wants to keep out legal immigrants as well.
He wants a “time-out” on legal immigration until the
country can assimilate those who are already here. He would toughen
asylum laws and cut legal immigration to a few hundred thousand
people annually, limited to only spouses and minor children of those
who are already here.
In his new book, he’s especially passionate about the need
to keep out immigrants from Mexico—even if they come legally—because
he claims they won’t
assimilate and that their first loyalty is to Mexico. Buchanan insists
that what is happening now is “not immigration as America
knew it, when men and women made a conscious choice to turn their
backs on their native lands and cross the oceans to become Americans.”
Instead, he says, what Americans are witnessing now is “the
greatest invasion in history.”
Is he serious? You better believe it.
Buchanan spends an entire chapter obsessing over the question of
what the “Face of America” will look like in 2050, when
demographers predict that a quarter of the United States will be
Hispanic.
He also insists that Mexico has this sinister and elaborate scheme
to orchestrate a reconquista (a reconquering) of the Southwest.
He is convinced that our neighbor wants to retake the Southwest,
a territory that it lost in that land grab known as the U.S.-Mexican
War.
That’s ridículo. Talk like that shows that there are
at least three things that Buchanan doesn’t know much about:
Mexico, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans.
First, Mexico doesn’t want to reclaim the Southwest. Why own,
when you can lease to a third party? Mexican workers in the United
States now send home more than $16 billion annually in remittances,
more than Mexico makes from tourism and almost what it takes in
from the state-owned petroleum industry. Mexico doesn’t care
who controls the Southwest, as long as the dinero keeps flowing
in.
Second, Mexican immigrants in the United States aren’t exactly
the most loyal foot soldiers for the Mexican government. Most of
them are here out of necessity and many of them resent having to
go north in search of jobs, while the politicos and the elites live
comfortably back home. If anything, these are the folks who—if
they were home—would lead a reconquista of Mexico.
Lastly, nor are the millions of Mexican Americans in the United
States exactly on speaking terms with Mother Mexico. That’s
because, somewhere in their family trees, you’ll find a desperate
migrant who Mexico spit out like a mouthful of bad salsa. And, after
generations of assimilation and acculturation and Americanization,
most Mexican Americans become, well, simply Americans.
I hate to break this to Pat Buchanan, but assimilation happens.
Latino immigrants may change America, but America changes the immigrants
right back—especially with regard to language. Consider a
study published recently in the journal, Population and Development
Review. It found that while the children of immigrants had no trouble
maintaining some fluency in Spanish, the language was doomed in
the long run. In the third generation, only 17 percent of Mexican
immigrants still speak Spanish fluently. And in the fourth generation,
it was just 5 percent.
This came as no surprise to one of the researchers who produced
the study. Ruben Rumbaut was born in Cuba and came to the United
States as a boy. He has struggled his whole life with language.
Learning English was easy. It was maintaining Spanish that was hard.
“English is dominant through television, in the schools, in
the streets, everywhere,” he says.
As he watches the immigration debate, Rumbaut must be scratching
his head.
“There’s a lot of nativist rhetoric,” he says.
“It’s fear, and fear doesn’t listen to facts.”
Fair enough. Then we shouldn’t
listen to fear. |
