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The Hispanic Challenge

The

Hispanic Challenge
The persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages. Unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclaves—from Los Angeles to Miami—and rejecting the AngloProtestant values that built the American dream. The United States ignores this challenge at its peril.
By Samuel P. Huntington

EDWARD KEATING/NEW YORK TIMES PHOTOS

Huddled masses: Mexican workers gather at the Smithfield hog plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, to celebrate a saint’s feast day in June 2000. They were hired to replace American workers who quit over low wages.

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Foreign Policy

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merica was created by 17th- and 18th-century settlers who were overwhelmingly white, British, and Protestant. Their values, institutions, and culture provided the foundation for and shaped the development of the United States in the following centuries. They initially defined America in terms of race, ethnicity, culture, and religion. Then, in the 18th century, they also had to define America ideologically to justify independence from their home country, which was also white, British, and Protestant. Thomas Jefferson set forth this “creed,” as Nobel Prize-winning economist Gunnar Myrdal called it, in the Declaration of Independence, and ever since, its principles have been

Samuel P. Huntington is chairman of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and cofounder of Foreign Policy. Copyright © 2004 by Samuel P. Huntington. From the forthcoming book Who Are We by Samuel P. Huntington to be published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. N.Y. Printed by permission.

reiterated by statesmen and espoused by the public as an essential component of U.S. identity. By the latter years of the 19th century, however, the ethnic component had been broadened to include Germans, Irish, and...