HISPANIC IMMIGRATION: ASSIMILATION OR SEPARATION?by The unprecedented growth in the U. S. Hispanic population over the last ten years has drawn a great deal of attention from serious scholars of immigration as well as the popular press and media. Samuel P. Huntington, a distinguished Harvard University political scientist in Who are We?:The Challenges to American's Identity (Simon Schuster. NY,2004) and a number of monographs written under the auspices of the Center for Immigration Studies, have raised the question about whether this immigration experience will mirror that of earlier groups. Will it be similar to that of Italians, Irish, Poles, and Jews and be accompanied by Americanization or instead result in a new kind of immigration experience with the development of Hispanic enclaves that would constitute a kind of “nation within a nation”? Clearly the growth in the Hispanic population over the last ten years and its projected increase is beyond that of previous immigrant groups. The numbers of Hispanic immigrants has increased from 9.3 percent of the total population in the 1990 Census to 11.4 percent in the 2000 Census. The largest population growth will be of people of Hispanic origin (who may be of any race). Hispanics are projected to increase from 35.6 million to 102.6 million, or 188 percent BY 2050. Their share of the nation's population would nearly double, from 12.6 percent to 24.4 percent, overtaking African-Americans at 13.6 percent and Asians at 8.2 percent. Due largely to the growth in the Hispanic population, by 2050, non-Hispanic whites will decrease from the current 69.4 percent to 50.1 percent of the total population. There is no doubt that Hispanic immigration constitutes something new in the history of groups seeking to live and work in the United States . The first is, of course, language. Despite varying dialects and usage, all Hispanics share a common language. With that language also come shared customs, historical experiences, and religious identity. Furthermore, Hispanics are never that far from the home from which they came. Continued contact with the home, family, and friends of origin is easy to maintain possibly weakening the patriotic ties and corresponding loyalty to the United States. For example, the Pew Hispanic Center reported in November 2003 that six million immigrants from Latin America sent money to their families back home, primarily to Mexico and El Salvador. These remittances are estimated to come close to $30 billion making it the largest remittance pattern in the world. As Robert Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center put it, “These remittances are the expression of profound emotional bonds between those separated by a border. They also represent a new kind of integration among nations undertaken not by trade negotiators but by ordinary folk to assuage their economic woes.” Moreover, like other immigrants past and present, Hispanics settle where there are others of their own culture, and often country of origin. For example, large cities such as Miami are becoming more Hispanic in language and culture than the rest of the area around them or the state as a whole. California , for example, has gone from a Hispanic population that was 26 percent of the total in 1990 to 45 percent of the total in 2000. Although the United States and its place in the world has changed rapidly and dramatically particularly in the 20 th century and certainly since the last large wave of European immigration, the predominant model for assimilation if that of Americanization or the adoption of a primary American identity and exclusive American citizenship as has been applied to earlier immigrants. However, in the new world of globalization, more varied definitions of American identity may emerge that nevertheless yield the same loyalty and commitment to American values that it did in the past. Although Hispanic immigration brings with it some unique differences from previous immigrations, not all the data concerning assimilation is bleak. A number of the findings of the 2002 National Latino Survey conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center point to some optimistic trends. Even though assimilation seems to be taking longer than for previous immigrant groups, it appears that by the third generation most Hispanics both consider English as their dominant language and identify more as Americans than with their country of origin . TERMS LATINOS USE TO DESCRIBE THEMSELVES
PRIMARY LANGUAGE AMONG LATINOS
Excerpted from Chart 2, National Survey of Latinos As one of America's premier scholars of immigration, Nathan Glazer, recently wrote, the road to assimilation of America's new immigrants maybe different than in the past, but it will nevertheless lead to the same place. “Today, as in the past, there are many empirical tests of whether immigrants have become American: how well they speak English, whether they live among their own group or in an integrated community, how much education they have, the kind of occupation they hold, how much they depend on welfare, whether they become citizens, whether they vote, who they marry and so on. By most of these tests, there is no significant evidence that today's immigrants are much different from yesterdays. They still enlist in our armies and fight in our wars. They still become American citizens. They still learn English, work and pay taxes.” Assimilation Today: Is One Identity Enough? in Reinventing the Melting Pot, ed. by Tamar Jacoby (Basic Books, NY,2004) While the fears of a Hispanic nation within the broader American nation may have some foundation in the peculiar features of Hispanic immigrants, the real division may not be one of identity, but social and economic . Worries about a Hispanic nation within the nation have a parallel in America's history with that of race. In the Kerner Commission Report written after the riots of the summer of 1967, the commission declared that the country was in fact two nations, one white and one black. Thirty-one years later, Andrew Hacker titled his book documenting the re-segregation of American blacks, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (Charles Scribner, NY, 1992). While it is nevertheless true that blacks identify with the American creed and Anglo-Protestant culture, the real division between the black community and other Americans has to do with race, class, and income. This is most likely the path of the new Hispanic immigrants as well: American identity without American success. |