Why Hispanic Immigration is Not a Threat to American Identity
Source: American Political Science Association (Perspectives on Politics)

The goal of the study is to test several propositions in the national debate on immigration —put forth by Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington among others—which emphasize the destabilizing impact of Mexican immigration on American national identity. The authors seek to “ground the debate over Huntington’s prognosis…in a sustained empirical analysis of recent immigrants.” The resulting analysis employs data from the U.S. Census and several national and Los Angeles opinion surveys with thousands of respondents.
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The prominent debate about immigration and its consequences today has wide-ranging consequences for immigrants and U.S. citizens alike and is a growing field of research for political scientists. This important study examines the veracity of claims made in the immigration debate regarding threats to American national identity. Contrary to these fears, the authors observe that “the data available now suggest that the rise of a self-sufficient sub-population speaking mainly Spanish…is not a serious threat, and that the privileged status of English as the country’s sole common language remains secure.” They conclude by noting that while predictions about the future always are risky “at present traditional patterns of assimilation appear to prevail” among Hispanic newcomers.

+ Testing Huntington: Is Hispanic Immigration a Threat to American Identity? (PDF; 263 KB)

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 31st, 2007 at 6:41 pm and is filed under Ethnic, Immigration, Mexico, Social and cultural issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.