Undesirable Aliens

Soon after the American Samuel Huntington, a longtime liberal hawk, set the tone for the post–cold war period by predicting a new era of cultural and civilizational clashes, thereby helping recast Islam as the natural enemy of the West, he turned his attention to the problem of Hispanic immigration in his own country and concluded that it posed an even more insidious threat to the survival of the culture that made America great. Careful readers of his Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order could have glimpsed ideas that would later develop into a full-scale treatment of the subject, Who Are We? In that earlier book, Huntington agreed with the Mexican poet Octavio Paz that Mexico is practically an Indian nation, one that is, moreover, insufficiently Westernized.1 But now that Mexicans are pouring across the border with virtual impunity, Mexico has become the United States’ Achilles’ heel. It is the gateway for an unprecedented invasion of the United States, an invasion that poses a mortal threat to the American republic. It is one thing for journalists and pundits to make such claims, but when major scholars like Huntington, whose views often shape policy debates, say them, we know that this is a serious matter indeed.

In Who Are We? Huntington is clear that “the cement in the structure of this great nation”—what’s called the “American Creed”—is the “product of the distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers of America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” a culture whose “key elements” include “the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law, the responsibility of rulers, and the rights of individuals; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create a heaven on earth, a ‘city on a hill.’”2 It is this Anglo-Protestant culture that has separated the United States from much of the world and made it a magnet to immigrants worldwide, and it is to this cultural legacy that Americans should recommit themselves if they want to maintain what has made America an exceptional country. Huntington’s book, then, is about the “continuing centrality of Anglo-Protestant culture to American national identity.” To make sure that his book is not read as a racist tract, Huntington emphasizes that it is the Anglo-Protestant “culture” he is talking about, not necessarily race or ethnicity, two of the four components of American identity that have ceased to be relevant in the modern period.3

To Huntington, America is not the so-called nation of immigrants but “a society, or societies, of settlers,” mostly from the British Isles. The settlers were what historian John Porter called the “charter group,” which very deliberately wanted to put its imprint on the society it sought to found, a society whose tenets later immigrants would have to accept. It was a homogeneous and racist society, too: the American colonists and the British were basically one people, and the Revolution could be read as an argument over who was truer to the best British value of freedom. In this racially exclusivist society, Indians suffered ethnic cleansing or genocide. Slavery was abolished, but the nation remained deeply segregationist until the late 1950s and 1960s. Immigration policies kept the United States a white society until the mid-twentieth century, even though whiteness itself was a shaded category. The Immigration Restriction League, founded in 1894, deemed “Slav, Latin and Asiatic races” inferior to the progressive and freedom-loving British, Germans, and Scandinavians. White America may have been a “melting pot,” as Israel Zangwill titled his play in 1908, but everything seems to indicate that immigrants dissolved into the Anglo-Protestant cultural “soup,” or were tossed in what Horace Kallen once called a “salad,” adding flavor and perhaps texture to the food but not substantially changing the fundamental ingredients.4

America’s Anglo-Protestant worldview unraveled in the later decades of the twentieth century, giving rise to what Huntington calls “deconstructionists,” a movement of elites (including the courts) who read too much into and eventually subverted John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Executive Order 10,925 calling on employers to take “affirmative action” not to discriminate; as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, by changing a protective measure into a militant policy of preferential treatment for minority groups. Because such policies, Huntington notes, go against the deeply ingrained ethos of individual merit, a reversal was to be expected. In a landmark Supreme Court case in 1989, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor worried that such preferential treatment might cause “stigmatic harm.” More recently (in 2003), the Supreme Court outlawed preferential treatment for undergraduate applicants at the University of Michigan but upheld it for the university’s law school, although most Americans were opposed to both. Thus, America remains “deeply divided” over race issues and policies, the debate often pitting liberal elites against the majority of citizens.

Not only race but the English language itself came under siege in the era of multiculturalism, what Huntington describes as “basically an anti-Western ideology.” Courses in Western civilization were changed into courses focusing on non-Western cultures. “At the turn of the century,” writes Huntington, “none of fifty top colleges and universities required a course in American history.” By 1999, many “seniors at fifty-five top colleges” “could not say within a half-century when the Civil War was fought.” In such a multicultural moment, only a sustained terrorist attack could unite the country and weaken the deconstructionists’ antinational agenda.5

For much of American history, assimilation through dispersion across the land (not concentrations in enclaves, as was suggested for the Moriscos by friendlier voices in early modern Spain) was encouraged and considered rather indispensable by the Founding Fathers for the better integration of immigrants into the new society. As Milton M. Gordon pointed out in his book Assimilation in American Life, this process was facilitated by “the numerical dominance of the Anglo-Saxon population” (a situation, as we shall see, that is now changing for the first time in American history).6 New immigrants and immigration laws have further eroded this policy of assimilation so indispensable to successful participation in a republic. To be sure, coming to America then—as it is now—was a major choice, involving a self-selected group armed with vision and fortitude. Atlantic crossings may have claimed the lives of around 17 percent of would-be immigrants (land crossings today still claim thousands of lives), but were 15 percent of those who made it turned back at Ellis Island, as Huntington claims? If one were to take into account Roger Daniels’s history of immigration to the United States, Huntington’s rejection rates certainly seem too high and might more aptly apply to the “other” Ellis Island, the mythically forgotten Angel Island, established in 1910 near San Francisco, eighteen years after New York’s checkpoint came into being, to process mostly Asian immigrants. It was Angel Island that had a rejection rate of 18 percent, not Ellis Island, the gateway to whiter European immigrants, whose average rejection rates were a mere 1 percent throughout its existence.7 Still, Huntington is right to make the point that Ellis Island immigrants were ready-made Americans from the get-go. Although today’s easy transport methods no longer require such fortitude and risk taking, illegal immigrants still fit the bill. “Who but the most eager and hardy can walk across forty or fifty miles of parched desert, dodge dopers, coyotes, and the feds, endure hardship and risk life and limb just to get a job at the other end of a gauntlet of discomfort and anxiety?” asks Geraldo Rivera, in his book HisPanic. “Don’t you want these tough sons of guns on our team?”8

However, new immigrants are more likely to resist assimilation than their predecessors. Neither Muslims nor the new waves of immigrants from Mexico, the Caribbean, and Latin America, in general, identify fully with mainstream American culture. There is little pressure to convert to Americanism, and even business fosters separatist inclinations by catering to ethnic pride and such. Meanwhile, naturalization rates are dropping, although they peak when immigration benefits are threatened; and dual loyalties, including dual or more citizenships (by “ampersands”) are rising, despite the oath of naturalization mandating one allegiance only.9

It is in this context of America’s changing demographics that Hispanics have become the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population. Already “more numerous than blacks,” they are estimated to make up around 25 percent of the population by 2040. In 1998, José replaced Michael as the most popular name for newborn boys in both California and Texas, and “in 2003 for the first time since the 1850s a majority of newborn children in California were Hispanic” (overwhelmingly of Mexican origin).10 With such concentrations of mostly poor Mexican and Mexican American groups having a strong sense of their separate cultural identity, contempt for Anglo-Protestant values, and a vivid memory of past wrongs by the United States against Mexico, including the conquest of Mexican lands, America’s Southwest has turned into a cauldron. In fact, the sociologist Morris Janowitz has argued that “for sections of the Southwest, it is not premature to speak of a cultural and social irredenta—sectors of the United States which have in effect become Mexicanized and[,] therefore, under political pressure.”11 In 1995, the president of the National Council of La Raza was quoted saying, “The biggest problem we have is a cultural clash, a clash between our values and the values of American society.”12 Miami, meanwhile, has been thoroughly Hispanicized by middle-and upper-class Cubans and is now considered either the capital of Latin America or “an out-of-control banana republic,” depending on who is evaluating Miami’s remarkable transformation from a sleepy Anglo town to a dynamic financial and commercial hub.13

Huntington implies in more than one place that America’s cohesiveness relies on the existence of an Other—whether foreign or domestic, Muslim terrorist or anti-Anglo Hispanic. John Updike’s question in his 1990 novel Rabbit at Rest, “Without the cold war, what’s the point of being American?” is a dead serious one, given that the specter of social breakdown and disunity haunts the national atmosphere. It is not race or ethnicity that worries Huntington but the threat of alien cultural traits to the Anglo-Saxon Protestant legacy, the source of all good things in life and unfailing sustainer of the American Dream. It is for this reason that he advocates a global multiculturalism based on homogeneous, well-defined national cultures. It’s an interesting position, one that sounds rather isolationist: “America cannot become the world and still be America. Other peoples cannot become American and still be themselves. America is different, and that difference is defined in large part by its Anglo-Protestant culture and its religiosity. The alternative to cosmopolitanism and imperialism is nationalism devoted to the preservation and enhancement of those qualities that have defined America since its founding.”14

As usual, Huntington’s unadorned, fact-based account of American culture makes much sense; but he never wonders whether the conditions that consolidated American nationalism, which, as he readily admits, involved the dispossession of Indians, slavery, and war making, can still be tolerated in a world that has embraced the American Creed. He also doesn’t consider the country’s integration into the world economy, such as its reliance on oil and foreign investors; or the fact that the United States of America has found a mighty competitor in the “United States of Europe,” as T. R. Reid, a Washington Post reporter, titled his 2004 book; or the fact that there is now, as Jeremy Rifkin puts it, a “European Dream” that is eclipsing the American one.15 Huntington’s call for nationalism all around may seem fair—protectionism and isolationism may help the United States avoid being attacked—but then he fails to take into account the violence embedded in such nationalism, for, as we have seen, there is no national project without its scapegoat(s). Moreover, as Huntington himself accepts, it is the attacks on America, whether real or imagined, that unite the people and keep the deconstructionists and multiculturalists at bay for a while. For Huntington has no illusions about the vital role of war, or at least the fear of an enemy in nation making; yet this approach is no longer a sustainable model for American civilization, particularly given the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the rapid flow of information. Finally, political nationalism might work only if accompanied by economic nationalism, forcing nations to rely on their resources and trade fairly in the global market.

Despite his disclaimers, there is no doubt at all that Huntington’s thesis falls squarely within the long tradition of the American nativist fear and persecution of foreigners and those who are different. It is not for no reason that Aristide Zolberg, the eminent historian of immigration and refugees, comments on the “unimaginative revival of ancient nativist stereotypes such as the inanities of political scientist Samuel Huntington, for whom the latest newcomers are unpromising candidates for membership in the national body by virtue of their biological and cultural inheritance, much as the new immigrants of the turn of the twentieth century were for his intellectual ancestor Henry Cabot Lodge.”16 In fact, one might call Huntington a latter-day Lodge, the Boston Brahmin (1850–1924) who championed Anglo-Saxon supremacy and pushed for the literacy test in Congress to block U.S. entry to lower European races. In his magisterial study of nativism as a component of American nationalism, John Higham described Lodge in terms that could almost apply to Huntington as well:

When Lodge raised the banner of race against the new immigration, it acquired its most dangerous adversary. As Massachusetts’ scholar-in-politics, he dominated both the intellectual and legislative phases of nativism. To this dual role, Lodge’s own interests and values imperiously summoned him; he embodied in remarkable degree some of the major forces underlying late nineteenth century xenophobia. From his precise Vandyke beard to his clipped Boston accent, Lodge was the model of a patrician. He was steeped in English culture—English to the last fiber of his thought, said Henry Adams—in pride of ancestry, and in nostalgia for New England’s past. During the 1870’s he had plunged into a study of the Anglo-Saxons; a thesis on early Anglo-Saxon law brought him the first Ph.D. that Harvard conferred in political science. Secondly, connected with Lodge’s race consciousness was a morbid sensitivity to the danger of extensive social change. He had a lively repugnance for both the rising plutocracy and the restive mob, and he felt acutely the general nativist response to class conflict. By 1888, as a fledgling Congressman, he was pointing to the diminishing supply of free land in the West and the growth of unrest in the East as reasons for restricting immigration. Finally, while attacking immigration in domestic affairs, Lodge was adopting a belligerent stance in foreign affairs. His campaign against the new immigration during the 1890’s interlaced with a jingoist crusade for expansion. Lodge the jingo hated England as much as Lodge the Anglo-Saxon loved the English; accordingly, his diplomatic belligerence took the form of an assertion of American power, his pleas for restriction a defense of the English race. But these and other inconsistencies in the life of the cold, cultivated little Senator were merely logical. They were resolved at another level—in the emotions of nationalism which shaped and guided his career.

Although the Anglo-Saxon tradition in the mid-nineties still swayed few outside of an eastern elite, through Lodge and others around him that elite occupied a position of strategic influence. Both the ideological instrument and the political leadership necessary to bring into a single focus the chaotic resentments against the new immigrant were therefore at hand.17

Huntington’s last two books make it clear that he is not a jingoist or an imperialist in the way Lodge was, but his defense of the Anglo-Saxon cultural model puts him in the company of an insidious nativist legacy of discrimination, racism, and anti-Semitism. The term nativism itself, coined around 1840, could be broad enough to encompass basic patterns of human behavior, but for the Know-Nothings with whom it came to be associated, and later the American Party they founded, the concern was primarily nationalistic. What the American Party stood for, a Know-Nothing publication explained in 1855, “is the principle of nationality. . . . We must do something to protect and vindicate it. If we do not it will be destroyed.”18 This is the principle that animated American nativist movements, as Higham explained:

Here was the ideological core of nativism in every form. Whether the nativist was a workingman or a Protestant evangelist, a southern conservative or a northern reformer, he stood for a certain kind of nationalism. He believed—whether he was trembling at a Catholic menace to American liberty, fearing an invasion of pauper labor, or simply rioting against the great English actor William Macread—that some influence originating abroad threatened the very life of the nation from within. Nativism, therefore, should be defined as intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of its foreign (i.e., “un-American”) connections. Specific nativistic antagonisms may, and do, vary widely in response to the changing character of minority irritants and the shifting conditions of the day; but through each separate hostility runs the connecting, energizing force of modern nationalism. While drawing on much broader cultural antipathies and ethnocentric judgments, nativism translates them into a zeal to destroy the enemies of a distinctively American way of life.19

For centuries, Catholics in Protestant England, and later in the United States, were seen as potential fifth columnists; this view coalesced with the general suspicion of foreign radicals. When New York was drafting its constitution, John Jay, the prominent figure of the Revolutionary generation, wanted to build “a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics.”20 The fear of Catholics and subversives was fanned by the widely held notion that the United States owed its great institutions to the Anglo-Saxon race, a belief that justified expansionism in Texas and California, for instance, but was opposed by people such as James Russell Lowell, who “excoriated Anglo-Saxonism as a hypocritical mask for aggression.” Surely, nativists did occasionally use this argument to defend their cause, but more generally, before Anglo-Saxonism acquired the notion of a racial distinctiveness, it was conceived of more as a national character than a biological fact.21

The Union armies, with their 500 foreign-born soldiers, effectively brought an end to the pre–Civil War nativist strain, and postwar America launched a campaign to import European immigrants to fill its industrial and agricultural needs. Postwar America, in this age of confidence, was also an age of cosmopolitanism, one in which the nation effectively imagined itself as a “cosmic race,” in the expression used in 1925 by the celebrated Mexican writer José Vasconcelos. The country portrayed itself as a beacon for the oppressed and mistreated. “Every true republican,” noted an English visitor in 1866, “has in his heart the notion that his country is pointed out by God as refuge for the distressed of all the nations.”22 But with vast numbers of immigrants rising up the social ladder, a new, subdued, and positive ideology of Anglo-Saxon purity emerged to give solace to elites eager to distinguish themselves from the masses. Here, Anglo-Saxonism acted as a barrier to the vulgar arrivistes, much as the purity-of-blood statute had done for the coveted claim for undiluted Christian descent in sixteenth-century Spain.

By the 1880s, with no more lands to settle across the continent—in 1886, one writer announced in the North American Review that “the public domain of the United States is now exhausted”—hard economic times for U.S.-born workers (the source of all xenophobic attitudes), and businessmen’s fear of radical agitators, the cheery attitude toward immigrants dimmed. Social Gospel leaders started preaching homogeneity as the basis of stability and reform. Strikes and anarchy only intensified the hysteria. Denunciations of “Europe’s human and inhuman rubbish” were expressed in a publication called Public Opinion, and others sounded the same alarm: “Our National existence, and, as well, our National and social institutions are at stake.” Darker immigrant groups, such as Russian Jews and Italians, were seen as a liability for the health of the republic. Italians were not white, a construction boss explained: “An Italian is a Dago,” the lowest of the low. In his seminal study of the tenements of New York, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890), the scholar Jacob Riis confidently said about the Jews, “Money is their God.”23 From the mid-1880s to the late 1890s, the language of nationalism grew more strident. Nativists proclaimed homogeneity as essential to a great nation; “Americanism” was spreading:

Flag exercises, replete with special salutes and pledges, spread throughout the public schools along with agitation for inculcating patriotism. Among well-to-do, status-conscious circles, over a dozen hereditary patriotic societies sprang up in the early nineties to cultivate a keener, more exclusive sense of nationality. Beginning with the Sons of the American Revolution in 1889, these prestige organizations embarked on a round of banquets, receptions, and celebrations. Their principal theme was always the dire importance of perpetuating the pure spirit of one’s ancestors.24

The same attitude was displayed toward foreign governments, as jingoism, “the most aggressive expression of late nineteenth century nationalism,” seemingly swept the country. The slightest faux pas by a foreign national or country was treated as a casus belli:

It is hard to doubt that these bellicose outbursts flowed from the same domestic frustrations that generated nativism. The first harbinger of both jingoism and nativism was Josiah Strong, whose attack on immigration accompanied a grandiose vision of global conquest. Not all jingoes were nativists or all nativists jingoes, but the aggressive psychology of the one and the defensive reaction of the other provided instinctive rallying points for a society dubious of its capacity to compose its conflicts.

To put the matter another way, when the troubles of the late nineteenth century raised doubts of the nation’s stamina, two short cuts for restoring confidence presented themselves: disunity might be rationalized as a product of foreign influence, or denied by a compensatory demonstration of national virility.25

So noticeable had the mood become that the leading magazine Outlook wrote in 1896 that newspapers “have formed the habit of talking about foreign countries as if to be a true American involved hatred of everything French, English, German, Italian, or Spanish.” In 1893, fear of Catholic armed attacks on Americans, fanned by the nativist press, led to a state of siege in several places across the country. “In Toledo, the mayor, the police commissioner, and others bought Winchester rifles to repel an anticipated invasion,” and “Illinois farmers feared to leave home lest Romanists burn their barns and houses.” Italians were killed, hanged, and, in 1891, lynched in a major mob scene in New Orleans, leading to a “diplomatic crisis” with Italy, whereupon Italians became potential fifth columnists. The “Shylock stereotype” held firm for the Jews. No less a figure than Henry Adams opined that Jews “will completely control the finances of and Government of this country in ten years, or they will all be dead. . . . The hatred with which they are regarded . . . ought to be a warning to them. The people of this country . . . won’t be starved and driven to the wall by Jews who are guilty of all the crimes, tricks and wiles that have hitherto been unknown and unthought of by civilized humanity.”26

War with Spain and a new imperial identity, however, diminished nativist fears at home. The French ambassador in Washington shrewdly noted that Americans were hoping that war would “create a Nation out of the mass of heterogeneous populations.” By this time, the Anglo-Saxon race was confident in its supremacy. “It had no need of an adversary” at home, commented Higham. “Nor could this creed permit serious doubts of America’s ability to incorporate and dominate inferior races. If destiny called the Anglo-Saxon to regenerate men overseas, how could he fail to educate and discipline immigrant races at home? The newcomers, therefore, tended to figure among the lesser breeds whom the Anglo-Saxon was dedicated to uplift.”

So, confidence with its cosmopolitan outlook was back. One popular journalist was sure that “the man of purest American blood is he who has the most cosmopolitan lineage.” Not only that, but a concern for immigrants and their welfare led to the notion that they could keep and celebrate the best of their native traditions; these “immigrant gifts,” as they were called, were the precursors of what we now call multiculturalism. The Englishman Israel Zangwill, who helped Russian Jews settle in the United States, produced The Melting-Pot (1908), a play in four acts enshrining the notion in the public mind and anticipating from the fusion of races a country of supermen. Franz Boas, a Jewish immigrant from Germany and “the leading anthropologist of the day,” concluded in 1911 that children of immigrants were remade in America, and so one could talk about an “American type” and an “American face.”27

Democracy had thwarted notions of racial superiority in the nineteenth century (although democratic change was of no help to blacks, Indians, and others), but a general crisis and new patterns of immigration brought such concerns to the fore, wrapped in the respectability of New England Brahmin Anglo-Saxonism. “The more anxious of the Anglo-Saxon apostles knew that the fault must lie with all the other races swarming to America. Did they not, one and all, lack the Anglo-Saxon’s self-control, almost by definition? So, behind the popular image of unruly foreigners, a few caught sight of unruly races; and Anglo-Saxon nativism emerged as a corollary to anti-radical nativism—as a way of explaining why incendiary immigrants threatened the stability of the republic.” There was even a fear of the “radical races” and socialists following the Haymarket affair of 1886.28

As more foreign-born people settled in New England, a sense of panic so seized its patricians that one, Barrett Wendell, “whose English accent matched his Anglophile interpretation of American literature, was settling into the conviction that his own kind had had its day, that other races had wrenched the country from its grasp for once and all.” The objects of fear and loathing were southeastern Europeans, Italians, and Jews. Francis A. Walker, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a leading economist, and the superintendent of the census in 1870, argued that older patterns of immigration no longer obtained, meaning that easy and cheap transport was bringing to America not the ablest of the natives but the worst, and that, demographically, old American stock was giving way to new, therefore surrendering to “biological defeat” or even “race suicide.” Moreover, imperialism in the Philippines was exposing Americans to different shades of color, leading to a sharpened race consciousness, attacks on birth control, and warnings against “the Latin and the Hun.” (The Latin here is not to be confused with the Latino of our times.) The development of eugenics in England merged with old nativist worries against the immigrant and the fear of biological reversion that was thought to derive from racial mixing. Christianity and democracy were seen as obstacles to these essential biological facts. In this way, Anglo-Saxonism seamlessly merged into white supremacy. Seminal books were published to uphold such theses, and fear of the “lesser” European races—the Alpine and Mediterranean, not to mention the Jews—became common currency.29

Knife-wielding Italians were either criminals or bandits, and Jews were vulgar, “acquisitive barbarians” who had to be kept out of genteel society. Many professions were closed to noncitizens and those who didn’t declare their intention to become citizens (nondeclarant aliens). The State of Michigan, for instance, “prohibited the issuance of a barber’s license to any alien.” So bad was the situation for Italians applying for clerical jobs that they sometimes claimed to be Turkish, among other nationalities, to avoid discrimination! On the West Coast, writers such as Homer Lea, author of The Valor of Ignorance (1909), and the novelist Jack London warned against the “Yellow Peril” and darker European races. Seasoned Southern whites, long exposed to the foreign, gleefully embraced this newfound nationalism and made common cause with the North.30

Anti-Catholic hysteria rebounded in the first decades of the twentieth century. In 1911, a weekly publication titled the Menace was founded in Aurora, Missouri, by one Wilbur Franklin Phelps, to deal with the Catholic threat; by April 1915, its circulation had reached an astonishing 1,507,923. Jews, too, were targeted. Tom Watson, a fiery anti-Catholic crusader, didn’t see any difference in joining an anti-Semitic outburst leading to the butchery of an accused Jew, in Georgia. “From all over the world,” he wrote in 1915, “the Children of Israel are flocking to this country, and plans are on foot to move them from Europe en masse . . . to empty upon our shores the very scum and dregs of the Parasite Race.”31

The racial honeymoon that happily fused the liberty-loving, selfgoverning Teutonic (Germanic) and Anglo-Saxon races came undone during World War I, as suspicion and persecution, both populist and legal, fell on the former potential group of fifth columnists: “Through popular thinking there spread an image of the German-American community riddled with treason and conspiring under orders from Berlin.” The “hyphenated-Americans” represented by German immigrants who continued to teach and publish in their ancestral or native language, and even sought U.S. neutrality in the war, came under attack as the doctrines of “preparedness” (for national defense) and “100 per cent Americanism,” championed by die-hard patriots, condemned dual loyalties. Unity was demanded, required, and enforced by public vigilantism and congressional acts (such as the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918), the internment and registration of German Americans, and even the banning of the German language in public schools. After a quarter of a century of attempts to restrict immigration to the United States to literate people, the measure became law on February 5, 1917. The Anglo-Saxon supremacist lawyer Madison Grant hastily revised his The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European History in 1918 (the first edition had come out in 1916) and reclassified the Germans as Alpines (they had been, together with Anglo-Saxons, Nordic); others saw them as descendants of “Asiatic barbarians.”32

Deportation was now deployed as a “purgative” measure against foreign-born radicals. A. Mitchell Palmer, the newly appointed attorney general in 1919, swiftly launched raids, roundups, and deportations against mostly Russian and east European radicals, more for effect than with the intent of carrying out a careful legal process, but he was stopped by the assistant secretary of labor, Louis F. Post, a liberal who had read Tom Paine as a child and believed in a single-tax system and academic freedom. By 1920, the hysteria had subsided and was even denounced by newspapers. Palmer, undaunted, tried to keep the Red Scare alive in 1920 by announcing that “a gigantic bomb plot and general strike would erupt on May Day.”33 It didn’t come to be.

A deliberate process of Americanization, stressing assimilation through education, seemed at this point a better response to the fear of immigrants than persecution. Yet this nationalist approach ran afoul of racial determinism, as serious periodicals such as the Saturday Evening Post were now asking why society would “try to make Americans out of those who will always be Americanski.” (Note, again, that the language of fear was not Spanish; terms such as Hispanics or Latinos simply didn’t register.) The “tribal Twenties” had arrived.34

The nationalist euphoria stirred by the war led inevitably to a letdown. The onset of a depression, the resumption of immigration, a crime wave (associated with immigrants during Prohibition), and seemingly complicated entanglements at the League of Nations joined old-style nativism with isolationism. Anglo-Saxon nativism reappeared to reassure the confused. Two more editions of Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race came out (in 1921 and 1923), stoking the fears of Nordic “mongrelization” with the inferior Alpines and Mediterraneans. Books with titles such as The Rising Tide of Color (1920), America: A Family Matter (1920), and America’s Race Heritage (1922) echoed Grant’s racial philosophy. Sent to Europe to cover the issue of immigration, a writer for the Saturday Evening Post, Kenneth Roberts, published a book titled Why Europe Leaves Home (1922), concluding that more Alpine and Mediterranean immigration into the United States would produce “a hybrid race of people as worthless and futile as the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and Southeastern Europe.” (Here, Central America makes a brief appearance as a point of comparison.) Eugenics and psychology joined the fray by looking for an Old American type and by devising intelligence (IQ) tests to “find out” that Slavs and Latin Europeans were less intelligent than Nordics, whether native or foreign born:35 “As scientific racism spread downward from patrician circles, it blended with the cruder Anglo-Saxon nativism that was pushing upward from the grassroots of the South and West. The two streams of racial nationalism reinforced one another: the national news magazine Current Opinion wrote about keeping America white with as much gusto as the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan discussed the lessons of eugenics. No one any longer, except possibly some immigrant spokesman, claimed that America’s genius derived from racial mixture.” Even Christopher Columbus was recast as a Nordic!36

The Ku Klux Klan, indeed, made a comeback, establishing roots in semirural America and gradually spreading through the Midwest and Texas. By 1923, the peak of its crusading success, it had a membership of “close to three million.”37 Its renewed anti-Catholic zeal reflected the rising movement of Protestant fundamentalism:

The storm of anti-Catholic feeling, for which the Klan proved a wonderfully sensitive barometer, was closely related to the growth of fundamentalism. This militant repudiation of a liberalized gospel and a secularized culture was making itself felt in the closing years of the Progressive era, but only after the World War did it become a major force in American Protestantism. In truth, fundamentalism owed so much to the emotional aftermath of the war that one may almost define it as the characteristic response of rural Protestantism to the disillusion following America’s international crusade. The wartime hope for a new and beatific world had produced nothing but crime, moral chaos, and organized selfishness on a grander scale than before. Surely here was proof that the nation had misplaced its faith, that the only true salvation for a sinful society lay in blotting out the whole spirit of innovation and returning to the theological and moral absolutism of an earlier day. Insistence on a Biblical Christianity naturally sharpened the historic lines of Protestant-Catholic cleavage, but the vigor of anti-Catholicism in the twenties could only result from the affiliations between fundamentalism and 100 per cent Americanism. The fundamentalist determination to fix and purify a Protestant orthodoxy followed the same channels and obeyed the same laws that governed the course of 100 per cent Americanism. Both epitomized a kind of crusading conformity, reacted to a common disillusion, and represented an urge for isolation from an evil world. Who can wonder that the two movements intermingled in rural areas, or that fundamentalism energized a religious version of postwar nationalism?38

Thus, “anti-hyphenism, Americanization, and Palmer raids” gave way to “fundamentalism and prohibition” and eclipsed “the ideal of American nationality as an unfinished, steadily improving, cosmopolitan blend.”39

In March 1919, Albert Johnson, who had been elected to Congress from Washington State in 1912 on a restrictionist platform, took control of the House Committee on Immigration. With a profound hatred for the Wobblies and the Japanese, and impressed by Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race and theories of eugenics (he was elected president of the Eugenics Research Association at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, in 1923), he set the tone for an immigration system that has redefined immigration to this day. Immigration, the director of the National Industrial Conference Board conceded in 1923, was “essentially a race question.” With the election of President Calvin Coolidge, who had already expressed his sympathies for Nordic theories, the stage was set for a bill that, in a compromise with the Senate, established a “national origins” quota, presumably democratically based on the stock of Americans already in the country: “In short, the national origins system offered a direct implementation of racial nationalism and an answer to all charges of discrimination. It gave expression to the tribal mood, and comfort to the democratic conscience.” On April 13, 1924, more than a month before Coolidge signed the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act (which exempted Canada and Latin America from the quota system), the Los Angeles Times announced, “Nordic Victory Is Seen in Drastic Restrictions.” In her superb study of illegal aliens in American history, the Chinese American scholar Mae M. Ngai notes not only that this new policy remapped the world along racial lines, privileging, of course, the northern European, but also that, by setting “numerical limits” on immigration (a policy that has never been fully discarded, even in the liberal Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965), it, in effect, created the “illegal alien” as a new legal entity, a disembodied abstraction, a specter that has haunted the American imagination ever since. The new immigration policy would institutionalize three decades of crusades for racial purity and cultural homogeneity and define the terms of both immigration and citizenship.40

No one who has read John Higham’s Strangers in the Land (first published in 1955), David Bennett’s The Party of Fear (first published in 1988), or, more recently, Roger Daniels’s Guarding the Golden Door (2004), Mae Ngai’s Impossible Subjects (2004), and Aristide Zolberg’s A Nation by Design (2006) could seriously believe that the latest alarm about Latinos is a novel development in America’s destiny.41 The Irish, Asians (such as Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos), south Europeans, Slavs, Jews, and even Germans were all treated at one point or another as lower races and the deadliest menace to the republic. The Chinese were excluded from 1882 to 1943, when the wrath of racism fell as well on loyal Japanese Americans for merely having Japanese ancestry following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Huntington’s expressed fears simply are—they have to be—part of a consistent strain of vilifying difference that has been essential to national unity since the fifteenth century. (Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquez, a Mexican law professor and columnist, has dubbed Huntington “the Stephen King of political scientists.”)42 This phenomenon is what Mark Fiore called in a comic video a case of “migraphobia.”43 That Mexicans cross the border on foot and don’t sail or fly into the country appears to be more a minor detail in the history of American nativism than a new mortal threat. Moreover, one could argue with some justification, as Gregory Rodriguez and Rosa Brooks have argued in the pages of the Los Angeles Times, that not only are the hardworking poor who risk life and limb to remake their lives in the United States central to America’s narrative about its pioneering days, but also such immigrants (whether legal or illegal) tend to be more law-abiding and productive than their rather lazy, native-born counterparts.44

If the American Dream is the product of Anglo-Protestant people, then one might not expect it to last indefinitely, particularly given that the composition of the U.S. population is now radically altered. On July 20, 2004 (the same year Huntington’s book Who Are We? was published), the news agency Reuters reported that a survey found that “Protestants may soon account for less than half of the U.S. population for the first time since the country’s founding,” proving to Tom Smith, director of the National Opinion Research Center, that “the United States is on its way to being a nation of minorities.” The drop may be explained by the fact that Protestants are now calling themselves Christian—which still is an important shift—or leaving religion altogether. The survey found, in 2002, that the number of Catholics remained steady, at 25 percent of the population, whereas the number of those without religion climbed to 14 percent, more than the combined numbers of all non-Christian religions (5 percent).45 By early 2005, Spanish-language newspapers and periodicals with titles such as ¡ahora sí! La Frontera, La Voz, and La Vibra, some featuring venerable Latin American writers like Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes, were coming out at an explosive pace in states such as Texas. Even more poignant, on February 2, 2005, Cuban-born Republican senator Mel Martinez, from Florida, facing cameras and fellow senators, “made his debut speech on the floor in both English and Spanish, telling Hispanic Americans that Alberto R. Gonzales, President George W. Bush’s nominee to be attorney general, is ‘one of us.’” One Senate historian noted that it was the first time in U.S. history that a speech was “made by a senator on the floor in Spanish or any language other than English.” The speech was carried live by Univision and CNN en Español. On May 10, 2006, the Washington Post reported that a new census report showed that “nearly half of the nation’s children under five are racial or ethnic minorities, and the percentage is increasing mainly because the Hispanic population is growing so rapidly.” By November 2007, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that two Hispanic surnames (Garcia and Rodriguez) were among the top ten surnames in the United States, and six were among the top twenty-six. Such facts only confirmed what the renowned demographer William H. Frey had predicted, that by 2016, minorities could make up close to 40 percent of the U.S. population and will most likely be well represented in the highest echelons of the social and political order. These demographic shifts will not necessarily diminish the number of whites, however. Although most Americans will be members of minority groups by 2042, as the Census Bureau projected in 2008, the country will still add another 80 million whites, mostly because many Hispanics identify themselves as such. The country, in other words, will be both white and diverse, and today’s “federally discussed racial categories” will be almost meaningless by 2026.46

It is not surprising at all that as soon as Muslims were contained, politicians turned their attention to Latin immigration. Influenced by Huntington’s thesis, the conservative politician-cum-pundit Patrick Buchanan wrote State of Emergency, a book that sounds more like a Homeland Security advisory than a serious meditation on America’s future in the age of diversity. Buchanan declares that the United States is now facing “an existential crisis” because the country is right now being invaded, even conquered, by third-world people with no desire whatsoever to assimilate. Just as the Moors are reinvading Europe after having been defeated in 1492 (not driven out of Granada, as Buchanan claims), states such as Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California (where whites have been a minority since statehood, in 1849) are bound to be practically Mexican by 2050, because those states are projected to comprise anywhere between 50 and 60 million people of Mexican ancestry. The problem with La Reconquista (as Buchanan calls it) is not only the Mexicans’ different culture and the fact that they are reclaiming lands lost to Anglo imperialism in the nineteenth century (a fact breezily covered in his manifesto) but also, and equally importantly, that the Mexicans’ mestizo or Amerindian race is a major handicap to assimilation. “History teaches,” writes Buchanan, “that separate races take even longer to integrate.” Not only that, but Mexicans and Hispanics, who are introducing crime, gangs, low academic standards, and diseases to the United States, and whose numbers might reach 102 million, or 24 percent of the population, by 2050, will render “Americans of European descent” a “minority in the nation their ancestors created and built.” To espouse a multicultural agenda in the face of such imminent destruction is, in fact, to commit national suicide.47

Such views, though contradicted by more rigorous studies, are, in many senses, part of a chronicle long foretold, a saga that has been unfolding since the Anglo and Latin cultures met in the New World in an encounter so injurious to Hispanics that the Anglo attitude easily qualifies as Latinophobia, a term used by the New York Times in 2006 to condemn nativist hostility to immigrants.48 While Europe is wrestling with its intractable Muslim minority problem, the United States is trying to come to terms with its resilient Hispanic minorities, increasingly seen as unassimilable and proudly attached to their countries of origin and mother tongues. Commenting on the positive aspects of bilingualism in American society, Cristina Rodríguez, a professor at New York University School of Law, notes that because the ancient fears of difference are now mostly voiced through the issue of language, “the Spanish language is to the United States today what the Islamic veil is to Western Europe—the potent symbol around which the assimilation debate turns.” Underlying the fear of immigration in the United States is the assumption that it represents a threat to the “common national culture that sustains the unity essential to our self-government.”49

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that what is happening in both western Europe and the United States is the playing out of deeply embedded notions of race and the superiority of the Euro-American model disguised in the usual formulas of law and order. When I argue that Muslims and Hispanics are sometimes interchangeable (authors including Fallaci, Steyn, and Buchanan, for instance, make that abundantly clear), I mean it literally. There are at least two Hispanics—a Brazilian in London and a Colombian in Florida—who were shot dead in the wake of fears about Muslim terrorists because they behaved suspiciously.50 No one seems to say it, but it is clear that the two had the right (or is it wrong?) profile, such as dark skin and black hair. In a series of quite revealing cartoons posted on the Web site www.HispanicMuslims.com, the conflation of Arabs and Latinos is taken for granted, so much so that Chicago, Brooklyn, and Puerto Rico were bombed in retaliation for the arrest of the suspected terrorist José Padilla.

The easiest way to show that the Anglo disdain for Hispanic immigrants is not merely a technical matter of law and order is through the United States’ treatment of its Latin American neighbors, those who are both geographically and culturally “beneath,” in Lars Schoultz’s suggestive book title Beneath the United States. Covering more than two centuries of relations between the United States and its southern neighbors, Schoultz does recognize that relations are complex, often involving security issues, domestic politics, and economic interests, but one constant is the United States’ entrenched conviction that Latin American culture—a medley of Spanish heritage and Indian backwardness—has made Latin Americans (the progeny of culturally and probably racially defective Spaniards) an inferior species of people. In 1779–1780, when twelve-year-old John Quincy, traveling with his father across Spain, described Spaniards as “lazy, dirty, nasty and in short I can compare them to nothing but a parcel of hogs,”51 he was conveying a perception that would only worsen with the blending of Spanish and Indian traits in the New World mestizos. Though the Spaniards were probably brutish conquistadors, they came imbued, as the Puerto Rican writer Juan Gonzalez shows, with different notions of race, having lived in the hybrid culture of Spain, where the different races had commingled for centuries. So mongrelized was the Spanish population that, according to a historian Gonzalez quotes, “by the fifteenth century there were dark-skinned Christians, light-haired Moors, hybrids of every shape and complexion in Castile.”52 No wonder Francisco de Aguirre, the conquistador of Chile, “boasted that by fathering more than fifty mestizo children, his service to God had been ‘greater than the sin incurred in doing so’” and that by 1800, only a fraction of the Latin American population—3 million out of 13.5 million—was considered white.53

Despite the Hispanics’ differences with Anglo-Americans, many Latin American revolutionaries were inspired by the American Revolution and by the new nation’s Founding Fathers. But U.S. leaders had no interest in Latin America’s revolutionary struggle against, and liberation from, Spain. The editor of the North America Review commented that “We can have no well-founded political sympathy with them. We are sprung from different stocks.”54 Moreover, as a slaveholding society, the United States was wary of the Latin American revolutionary spirit. And for good reason, too: Simón Bolívar, the Liberator, as he is known in Latin America, condemned slavery as early as 1826, and by 1850 that odious institution was abolished in all liberated Latin countries.55

By the middle of the nineteenth century, modern racist ideologies had taken hold of the mainstream Anglo-American imagination. As the United States began to eye Spanish-occupied lands and seek their annexation or domination, it resorted to the old technique of dehumanizing their inhabitants. In the 1820s, the first U.S. envoy to Latin America, Joel Poinsett, wrote home describing Mexicans as “an ignorant and immoral race,” the progeny of the foul miscegenation of Creoles and indigenous natives, a racial mixing that “contributed to render the Mexicans a more ignorant people and debauched people than their ancestors had been.”56 In the 1840s, with the imminent annexation of Texas, a proslavery senator from Mississippi, Robert Walker, considered the new territory a “godsend” that would be the blacks’ gateway to Mexico and the tropics, where they would be among their own, so to speak.57 Sam Houston, one of the founding fathers of the modern state of Texas, had no illusion that Mexicans were equal to Anglo-Saxons. “The vigor of the descendants of the sturdy north,” he stated, “will never mix with the phlegm of the indolent Mexicans, no matter how long we may live among them.” Stephen Austin, another icon whose name, along with Houston’s, adorns a major city in that state, was even more categorical: “To be candid the majority of the whole [Mexican] nation as far as I have seen them want nothing but tails to be more brutes than the apes.”58

It was for the same reasons that northern Whigs opposed U.S. expansion on Mexican lands and even all-out annexation of the whole of Mexico. A congressman from New York, Washington Hunt, argued that to expand would mean to change the nature of the American population: “We must prepare to receive an incongruous mass of Spaniards, Indians, and mongrel Mexicans—a medley of mixed races, who are fitted neither to enjoy nor to administer our free institutions: men of different blood and language, who cannot dwell and mingle with our people on a footing of social or political equality. They must be governed as a colonial dependency, under provincial laws, or else be incorporated into our federal system, to become an eternal source of strife, anarchy, and civil commotion.”59 “There is a moral pestilence attached to such people which is contagious,” echoed the northern Whig senator from Rhode Island, John Clarke, in his argument against the annexation of Mexico, “a leprosy that will destroy.” John C. Calhoun, a proslavery Democrat, repeated that “we have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race—the free white race. To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of the kind of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race. The greatest misfortunes of Spanish America are to be traced to the fatal error of placing these colored races on an equal footing with the white race.”60 In case one thinks that there was a distinction in American politicians’ minds about the difference between Spaniard and Indian in Mexico, the Tennessee Whig John Bell summarily dispelled it. “They are Spaniards who walk the streets and highway, carrying the stiletto under their sleeve, the dagger under the folds of their cloaks, and bide their time. The race [has] deteriorated,” Bell added with prophetic acumen, “but still blood will show itself, at the distance of centuries, when the cup of bitterness overflows, and when the oppressor least expects it.”61

Science, too, lent its powers to this chorus of prejudice. One noted phrenologist, Dr. Josiah C. Nott, foresaw the withering away of dark-skinned Hispanics in the incontrovertible march of the superior white race.62 When Col. Henry L. Kinney, founder of the Texas Rangers, tried to claim about 70 percent of Nicaragua’s land, in 1854, the New York Times enthusiastically gave its full support: “Central America is destined to occupy an influential position in the family of nations, if her advantages of location, climate and soil are availed of by a race of ‘Northmen’ who shall supplant the tainted, mongrel and decaying race which now curses it so fearfully.”63

Violence against such human subspecies was no great offense. The war with Mexico and the atrocities committed against Mexicans were driven by this racist spirit, leading Ulysses S. Grant to admit that it was “one of the most unjust [wars] ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”64 Following the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe, which forced Mexico to cede huge parts of its land to the United States, Mexicans, as one might have predicted, became “strangers in their own land” and, therefore, easy targets for racist assaults.65 In 1855, the Galveston Weekly News of Texas described a lynching in these terms: “Eleven Mexicans, it is stated, have been found along the Nueces, in a hung up condition. Better so than to be left on the ground for the howling lobos to tear in pieces, and then howl the more for the red peppers that burn his insides raw [sic].”66

Latinos are victims of racial violence even today. In 1990, Leonard Cuen, a twenty-one-year-old white man, after drinking and “popping pills,” killed a twelve-year-old Hispanic for fun and was sentenced to a mere two years in jail.67 The Anti-Defamation League has recently documented shocking amounts of violence against Mexicans and Hispanics, including in video games, by white supremacist groups that sometimes combined their hatred for nonwhites with classic outbursts of anti-Semitism. In fact, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an organization that tracks hate groups in the United States, noted a significant surge of anti-immigrant, nativist groups in the period 2005–2007, and the FBI reported increasing crimes against Latinos. Such groups’ influence is so significant that by early 2008, according to SPLC, eighteen states’ houses of representatives had “passed resolutions opposing the ‘North American Union’—an entity [encompassing Canada, the United States, and Mexico] that does not exist and has never been planned, but nonetheless inhabits nativists’ nightmares.”68

The attacks on Latin American immigrants cannot be completely separated from the European genocidal spirit diagnosed by Georges Bensoussan and the history of racism stretching all the way back, for our purposes, to sixteenth-century Spain. By the 1920s, eastern European Jews newly arrived in the United States were described as “abnormally twisted,” “unassimilable,” and “filthy, un-American and often dangerous in their habits” by Albert Johnson, the Republican congressman from Hoquiam, Washington, whom we encountered earlier.69 As the main author of the Immigration Act of 1924, one of the most racist pieces of immigration legislation in U.S. history, which established “for the first time numerical limits on immigration and a global racial and national hierarchy that favored some immigrants over others,”70 Johnson, echoing what was to become a major tenet of Nazi ideology, explained that “our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed.” Johnson concluded with the rather puzzling declaration that “the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races [as if that had ever happened in the past] has definitely ended.”71 In the same vein, the Texas Democrat John C. Box thought Mexicans were “illiterate, unclean, peonized . . . a mixture of Mediterranean-blooded Spanish peasants with low-grade Indians.”72

Interestingly enough, the 1910 and 1920 censuses classified Mexicans and their children as “foreign white stock,” but this strange-sounding category was hastily revoked and the Mexicans became “non-white” in the 1930 census. For Mexicans, as for Asians, race and ethnicity were now “conjoined,” turning U.S. citizens into permanently condemned aliens.73 Most immigration laws didn’t really apply to Mexicans, who were allowed to come into the country to work in agricultural fields as braceros, even to work in aircraft industries, and then were violently uprooted and “repatriated” back to their homeland when their labor or presence was no longer needed.74 In June 1954, when the country was in recession, the Immigration and Naturalization Service commissioner, Joseph W. Swing, a former army general, launched “Operation Wetback” to stop “the hordes of aliens facing us across the border,” lowly workers who threatened to invade the United States.75 (Wetbacks were aliens who did not come through the officially sanctioned bracero program.) This episode is described by Juan Gonzalez as “one of the darkest periods in immigrant history”: “Brutal dragnets were conducted in hundreds of Mexican neighborhoods as migrants were summarily thrown into jails, herded into trucks or trains, then shipped back to Mexico. Many of those abducted were American citizens of Mexican descent. The government, ignoring all due process, deported between 1 and 2 million Mexicans in a few short months.”76 To no avail. As white European immigration to the United States began drying up in the middle of the twentieth century and nonwhite immigration, particularly after the 1965 Immigration Act, increased exponentially (mostly through “chain migration,” or the family reunion provisions), the lily-whiteness of the country was being irrevocably altered. (Some anti-Hispanic immigration advocates go so far as to read the 1965 act, which broadened the racial and ethnic pool of admissible immigrants, as Hitler’s revenge on the United States!) Obviously, Hispanic immigrants, particularly Mexicans, constituted a major part of these new demographics.77

In 1980, Time magazine predicted that the 1980s would be the “Decade of the Hispanic,” and Foreign Affairs (where Huntington’s essay on the clash of civilizations first appeared before it grew into a book) drew attention to the fast-growing numbers of Hispanics. Five years later, Richard Lamm, then governor of Colorado, published a book called The Immigration Time Bomb, warning against the threat to Anglo culture from Hispanic immigration. The following year, the 1986 Immigration and Reform Control Act, making it a crime to hire illegal aliens, securing the border, and giving preferential treatment to the Irish, was passed.78 By the 1990s, Pat Buchanan was running for president on an anti-immigrant platform, and in 1995, Peter Brimelow, a British expatriate, published his book Alien Nation to warn against the alien threat, unprecedented in scale, to his adopted “white nation.” Just as Samuel Huntington has been compared to Henry Cabot Lodge, Brimelow was seen as “the new Madison Grant.” Not surprisingly, that same year, a judge in Texas described a Mexican American mother’s speaking Spanish to her five-year-old as child abuse.79 Meanwhile, the passage of California’s Proposition 187 in 1994, a “patently unconstitutional” law denying basic services to illegal immigrants, meant that Hispanic-looking citizens would be subjected to scrutiny, since how was one to tell the difference between a legal and an illegal citizen? The popular support for Proposition 187 emboldened President Bill Clinton to sign, in 1996, “a series of draconian new laws meant to sharply reduce legal and illegal immigration and speed up deportation of those the government deemed undesirable.” Looking back at the rapid succession of immigration reform bills and laws in the past twenty-five years, culminating in the legislative uproar of recent years, one might add, Gonzalez marks 1980 as the start of the third major nativist backlash in U.S. history.80

Such (racial) views of Hispanics also explain U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America, as well as the reason that policy almost invariably results in flows of immigrants north. It is this “mind-set,” as historian Schoultz put it, “that led President Monroe to announce his Doctrine, that pushed President Polk to declare war against Mexico, that inspired President Roosevelt to wield a Big Stick, that induced President Wilson to teach the Latin Americans to elect good leaders, that prompted President Kennedy to establish the Agency for International Development, and that led President Bush to call Nicaragua’s President an unwelcome dog at a garden party.”81 On the takeover of Mexican lands in 1848, Theodore Roosevelt explained that “it was inevitable, as well as in the highest degree desirable for the good of humanity at large, that the American people should ultimately crowd out the Mexicans from their sparsely populated Northern provinces.”82 As late as 1964, historian Richard Morse declared that “Latin America is subject to special imperatives as an offshoot to postmedieval, Catholic, Iberian Europe which never underwent the Protestant Reformation.” Latino inferior traits included harsh and strange human laws and “the difficulty of collecting income taxes; the prevalent obligation to pay fees or bribes to officials for special or even routine services; the apathy of metropolitan police toward theft and delinquency; the thriving contraband trade at border towns; the leniency toward those who commit crimes of passion—all the way down to the nonobservance of ‘no smoking’ signs on buses and [in] theaters.”83 In the same year Morse’s ideas were published, the academic and development specialist Lawrence Harrison traveled to Costa Rica to help Hispanic nations “get better” and came back years later convinced that Hispanic culture simply didn’t lend itself to the benefits of peace and prosperity, a view he shared in books such as Underdevelopment Is a State of Mind: The Latin American Case (1985). After an intensive study of two hundred years of interactions between Anglos and Latin America, Lars Schoultz summed up his findings thus: “As we have sifted through nearly two centuries of dispatches from Latin America, the Alliance [for Progress] pattern has appeared with striking regularity: U.S. envoys undertake to help Latin Americans change their ways. Latin Americans resist. Envoys become frustrated. And, when their frustration becomes acute, either they call in the Marines (or create something like the Nicaraguan Contras), or they go home and write a memoir about Latin America’s culture.”84 As John Perkins puts it in his Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, when economic hit men fail to extort extravagantly lucrative contracts for American corporations from the leaders of Latin American and other poor countries, “a more malicious form of hit man, the jackal, steps to the plate. And if the jackal fails,” as happened in Iraq, for instance, “then the job falls to the military.”85

When Oriana Fallaci thinks of Europeans as “natives,” “indigenous,” or even “aborigines” overtaken by Muslim fascists, and Michelle Dallacroce, the American head of Mothers against Illegal Aliens, unhesitatingly describes the Hispanic influx into the United States as “genocide” (see the introduction), we get a clear sense of how Islamophobia and Latinophobia are part and parcel of the fear of annihilation that is imperceptibly seizing the white Euro-American imagination. Fallaci’s contempt for Islam is matched only by her dislike of Mexicans. She felt “disgust” for the latter’s demonstrations against HR 4437 and confessed that she’d have a hard time deciding on who was worse, Muslims or Mexicans. “If you hold a gun and say, ‘Choose who is worse between the Muslims and the Mexicans,’” she confessed to a journalist, “I have a moment of hesitation. Then I choose the Muslims, because they have broken my balls.”86 Mark Steyn goes even further by placing the Muslims who orchestrated the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the larger universe of undocumented (Mexican and Hispanic) aliens: “If you’re looking for really deep ‘root causes’ for what happened that day [9/11], you could easily start with America’s failure to nation-build in Mexico.” Because the United States intervenes only occasionally in Mexico and other Latin American nations and doesn’t stabilize them fully, the entire world literally “lives next door now.”87 When Tom Tancredo, the Republican representative from Colorado, was running for president in November 2007, he aired a television commercial in Iowa showing “a hooded terrorist in a shopping mall” to warn against the “20 million aliens who have come here to take our jobs” and against Islamic terrorism.88

Fear of immigrants—not just Muslims or Latinos—is now a fact of life in most of Europe, including Russia. On October 22, 2006, the London Observer’s main article was the government’s planned move to block the immigration of Romanians and Bulgarians into Great Britain, once both nations joined the European Union in January 2007. Stories had been circulating for months about how such immigrants would “overstretch Britain’s schools and hospitals, drive down wages on building sites, as well as threatening a violent crime wave and even a new HIV epidemic.” On the same day the Observer article appeared, the New York Times published two reports on the growing climate of nativism in Russia and the persecution and murder of non-Russian minorities, such as the Chechens and Georgians.89 Armed vigilantes calling themselves the Minutemen, meanwhile, kept an eye on illegal migrants crossing into the United States over the Mexican border, and the American president signed a bill to build a seven-hundred-mile fence, leading to complaints from Mexico’s outgoing president, Vicente Fox, and the president-elect, Felipe Calderón, as well as from the Organization of American States.90

Expulsion continued to be contemplated for Muslims, in both Europe and the United States. By stating that “the central question now facing Europeans and Muslims is not whether Islam can be expelled from European soil, as during the Spanish Reconquista six centuries ago, or whether the Muslims can be totally assimilated in European culture,” the introduction to a book titled Islam, Europe’s Second Religion implied that expulsion is still part of the vocabulary of nationalism and an option for the intractable Muslim question in the West.91 Although authors such as Fallaci, Steyn, and Buchanan would have us believe that the fear of Islam is the outcome of shifting demographic patterns and stubborn refusal of assimilation, the same fears were expressed earlier in the twentieth century not to defend Europe’s fragile culture of secular liberalism but to denounce the culture of the Enlightenment that had dimmed the passion of Christian faith. In 1938, for instance, when Islam had virtually no presence in Europe, the Anglo-French author Hilaire Belloc wrote that

millions of modern people of the white civilization—that is, the civilization of Europe and America—have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past. . . . Anyone with a knowledge of history is bound to ask himself whether we shall not see in the future a revival of Mohammedan political power, and the renewal of the old pressure of Islam upon Christendom.92

Even more intriguing is Europe’s rediscovery of its Christian roots in the wake of fears about Islam today. No less a philosopher than the leftist German Jürgen Habermas has proclaimed that “Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.”93

In the United States, too, there has been talk of expelling Muslims. A New York Times report on a Christian blog provides a revealing glimpse into the fusion of deeply entrenched anti-Muslim biases and anti-immigrant resentment. On August 10, 2006, during the Israeli-Hezbollah war, bloggers wondered whether getting rid of Muslims from the United States might be the optimal solution to their nagging problem. At 11:50 a.m., one blogger, named “Resting in Him,” opened the discussion by writing, “I know this is extreme, but am I wrong in thinking that we should close our borders to Muslims and [evacuate] a few who are already here? In fact, I’m wondering if all Muslim mosques, which are a haven for perpetrating hate against us, shouldn’t be closed down.” That afternoon, another blogger, called “Werner,” acknowledged that the war was indeed against Islam, but asked, “Have you thought through the logic of this? How many Muslims are American citizens? . . . Should we force them to wear a little red crescent badge? If you can outlaw and deport Muslims then you can do the same to any religion or faith. The way to defeat Islam is to share with them the Gospel.” After some debate as to whether such removals would be constitutional, one “Ole Shosty” wrote, at 8:59 p.m., “No one is suggesting they be subjected to the horrors of concentration camp, or beaten and arrested on site. But what would be wrong with at least an immediate cessation of all incoming Muslims/Arabs, and perhaps a watch list or even eventual deportation of those in the country?” About an hour later, “Livin’4Him” revealed the twin motive in the anti-immigration movement: “My daughter works at a 7-Eleven store and her boss is Muslim and he’s not exactly the nicest person to work for. We just haven’t had any good experiences with them.” Thus, in the course of one day’s blogging, the reasons for anti-Muslim bias shifted from politics and religion to typical resentment of the immigrant’s economic success.

On the same day that the Times published this blog conversation (and the story of a one-eyed Minuteman), the Washington Post reported that the fate of India’s Muslims—around 13 percent of the country’s 1.1 billion citizens—already discriminated against in the professions and increasingly under suspicion since 9/11, is becoming more precarious. A pharmacist from the prosperous Nayanagar district in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) put it this way: “I am a Hindu and I sit and eat together with the Muslims in the next shop. They are not terrorists, they are my friends. But I’ll be honest, there is a growing feeling that there is a fight in the world between the West and Muslims. And even here, some people say it’s good if Muslims are being killed; the fewer left the better.”94

Although it is true that the history of Islam in the West and the cultural differences between Latinos and Anglos must be taken into account in any analysis of the contemporary impasse over identity issues in Europe and the United States, it is even more significant that the status of minorities in the modern world is a feature of the post-Reconquista period; it has been universalized over time and has become a fundamental feature of the modern and postmodern world orders. The current language of Islamophobia is informed both by old prejudices and rivalries and by the post-9/11 environment. For example, anti-Muslim sentiments were disproportionately high in countries such as Denmark before the 2005–2006 cartoon scandal erupted into global view. In the Netherlands, too, the scene of high-profile scandals such as the murder of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004, an official report published on April 11, 2006, reproached politicians for fanning an unjustified “aversion” to Islam by associating isolated acts with the whole Muslim community. “When a Dutch vegan murdered the gay right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn, the distinction between a criminal and his dietary tastes remained sharp,” wrote Corey Robin in the Nation, “but when Mohammed Bouyeri, a Muslim with dual citizenship in the Netherlands and Morocco, murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, a leap was instantly made from a lone assassin to an entire religion and region.” This climate has allowed the Far Right in France to take aim at Islam in all sorts of ways, some even charging the Algerian liberation movement, which is fighting against French colonialism, with “genocide” against the French people.

What, for instance, could explain the “veil mania” that has seized European politicians, when the number of girls and women wearing head scarves, much less the infamous niqabs or burqas, is so negligible as to be socially unnoticeable? What justifies the acrimonious politicking over the issue of the veil in French public schools during much of the 1990s and beyond, when empirical data show that the number of girls wearing hijabs in school, together with the conflict this mode of dress engenders, has actually declined? As the Sorbonne professor Esther Benbassa comments on the panic over the veil in France, how is one to seriously believe that “approximately 1,500 veiled girls could threaten the Republic”? Islam does pose serious cultural challenges in Europe, but the threat of Islamism is exaggerated. A recent comprehensive study of Muslim communities in Europe showed that no more than 400,000 Muslims held or were passively sympathetic to fundamentalist views, and most Muslims fitted into the general and historic patterns of integration. Polls have shown that the vast majority of Muslims in France and the Netherlands prefer a republican secular system. Pascal Mailhos, director of the French intelligence services, has estimated that there are only 200,000 practicing Muslims in France, with no more than 5,000 suspected of belonging to “fundamentalist Salafist groups.” Even France’s widely covered riots in November 2005, the nation’s “worst public order crisis since the popular revolts of 1968,” were not the first skirmish in Islam’s long war on Europe, as fearmongers of Eurabia insinuated. Mailhos told Le Monde that the riots had nothing whatsoever to do with “radical Islam.” As the distinguished professor Philip Jenkins notes, they were more about racism and exclusion. Two years later, in November 2007, new riots erupted in another suburban region of Paris for similar reasons. Had there been no 9/11, one might not have associated such riots with Islam, for fear of Islam had been a fringe concern until then. When Jean Raspail published The Camp of the Saints, an account of Europe’s takeover by immigrant hordes, in 1973, Islam was not a major concern at all.95

Jenkins’s study of religion in Europe shows that, for all the alarm about a dying Europe and a fast-rising Muslim population, in no European country, nor in Europe as a whole, do Muslims exceed 5 percent of the population. Moreover, as many former Communist states (with practically no Muslim presence) are incorporated into the European Union (EU), the additional 60 million people or so further erodes the percentage of Muslims in the continent as a whole. Even now, Muslim population percentages in Europe are significantly lower than those of minority groups such as African Americans and Hispanics in the United States. If Albania or the states comprising the former Yugoslavia are admitted into the EU, the rates may be affected further. In any case, Muslims are expected to account for 8 percent of Europe’s population (excluding the former Soviet states) by 2025 and about 25 percent by 2050. Even if Turkey and Morocco (other longtime applicants) were eventually to be incorporated into the EU, the minority percentages would still be tolerable and would pose no threat to Europe’s cultural identity. Not only would most of the immigrants’ children be totally assimilated but there would be fewer of them: the fertility rates in North African countries, the main source of Muslim migrants to Europe, are falling so sharply that some are matching France’s own low fertility rates. The British Office for National Statistics reported in 2005 that the country’s nonwhite population had declined by 0.1 percent, ceding ground to Chinese immigrants.96 Finally, even if Europe’s Muslim minority were to grow and become more assertive, it would only help revitalize and expand European Christianity, as Jürgen Habermas’s statement most dramatically indicates.

Because many of the facts do not lend themselves to the doomsday scenarios depicted by detractors of Islam, Vincent Geisser, author of La Nouvelle islamophobie (2003), suggests that it is not “lived Islam” that is the target of new Islamophobic policies, measures, and intellectual discourse (of the Left and the Right, and of Muslims, too) but an imaginary Islam, one that exists only as a vague, shapeless fear, much as the Jew did in previous decades and centuries: a sinister and invisible schemer bent on destroying the pure nations and high civilization of Europe. For the term Islamophobia, as Benbassa astutely remarks, conflates all Arabs in France under a religious designation, even if many of them have nothing to do with religion at all. Pretending to be a fear of Islam, Islamophobia is in fact a racist ideology that excludes the North African Arab simply for being North African. In other words, Muslim immigrants today are the embodiment of the Moors of old, as Fallaci clearly asserted in her diatribes against Muslim immigrants.97 They are the Moriscos (and Jews) who, despite conversion, cannot overcome their biological origins. The historian Joan Wallach Scott is right to deduce that the panic over the scarf and “the negative portrayal of Islam in France” are part of an attempt to reestablish the mythical and universal pillars of French identity, which have foundered in an age of global turbulence, massive demographic shifts, and widespread cultural mixings.98

Similarly, the history of American immigration is one long tale of sorrow in which non-English and, later, non–northern European whites were deemed inferior species of the human race and excluded by one nativist policy after another. For the Latinos of today were the Asians of yesterday, who themselves had been the Africans and, before them, the natives of the land—all considered at one time or another unsuitable to be part of the American community of (white) virtue. The very Hispanics who sang the U.S. national anthem in Spanish during their proimmigration rallies on May 1, 2006, across the country also broadcast Neil Diamond’s song “America,” evoking the epic journey of an earlier wave of undesirables. “That song,” explained the singer, “tells the immigrant story. It was written for my grandparents and the immigrants who came over in the late 1800s, the Irish, Jews and Italians. But it’s the song for the modern-day Latino coming as well.” The same song had been adopted by Michael Dukakis in his 1988 campaign for the presidency, and if it ever comes to be replaced by Ricardo Arjona’s “Mojado” (Wetback), the idea would still remain the same.99

Times, certainly, are a-changing. In The War of the World, Niall Ferguson outlines what looks like an inevitable future of a declining Western empire, rising Asian powers, and global demographic shifts that will make the Muslim presence in Europe an incontrovertible fact. Such “ethnic confluence, economic volatility and empires on the wane” are the “fatal formula” that often leads to atrocities against alien groups. “No historian of the twentieth century,” Ferguson warns, “can overlook this huge—and ongoing—secular shift.”100 Similar scenarios, with different outcomes, are envisaged by James Kurth, the Claude Smith Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College, who foresees Europe and the United States breaking down into at least two civilizations, one of besieged, isolated Europeans and Anglos, the other of violent Muslims and Latinos. The impacts of Islamic immigration in Europe and of Hispanic immigration in the United States are not quite analogous, but the differences are ultimately not that significant:

It is probably too much to predict that in the Anglo nation there will be a widespread fear of some kind of Latino terrorism, although young Latinos in the United States may learn from their Islamic counterparts in Europe. It is quite plausible, however, that there will be Latino urban riots and mob violence. And it is very likely that there will be a widespread fear of Latino crime. Gated communities, which are already widespread in the southwestern United States, could become an even more central part of the Anglo way of life, the distinctive architectural style and urban design of the Anglo nation.

The Western nations that have reached these new explosive demographic realities, Kurth adds, are in fact no longer nations.101

Although I think that predicting such apocalyptic outcomes tends to oversimplify the complex processes of history and group assimilation, the influx of Muslims and Latinos into bastions of European and Anglo supremacy vindicates John Bell’s nineteenth-century warning that “blood will show itself, at the distance of centuries, when the cup of bitterness overflows, and when the oppressor least expects it.” When Muslims are excluded from the benefits of full citizenship, many resort to their religious orthodoxies, often based on imagined and heavily edited histories, thereby further exacerbating the tensions between the two camps. I am not sure yet about the Hispanic response to their treatment. Christianity cannot be the answer, for that religion (particularly as the old antagonisms between Protestantism and Catholicism have faded) is the common legacy of many people on both sides of the border, the aliens and antialiens, mestizo Mexicans and white Buchanans. Moreover, to claim a Latin heritage (as distinct from an Anglo one) is to resort to yet another imagined cultural category, one that excludes America’s indigenous people and Africans, who can’t claim any racial or cultural affiliation with the motherland Spain or with France, which invented the designation of Latin America “in the course of a dual diplomatic offensive against the United States and Spain.”102

Perhaps it is sufficient to say that, by their mere presence in Europe and the United States, Muslims and Hispanics are asserting their rights in a globally distorted economy, one that continues to favor the conquistador nations and marginalizes the conquered. As we shall see in the conclusion of this book, the idea of undesirable aliens in a global economy makes very little sense. Sergio Arau’s 2004 film A Day without a Mexican, about the panic that seizes California when its entire Latin population vanishes for a day, is a comic reminder that xenophobic bravado is bad for the economy and the strength of the society anti-immigrants want to defend. With the economy in a shambles and upper-middle-class gringos left to fend for themselves, the absence of Mexicans in California leads even the most hardened nativists to reconsider their stance. By the time the Mexicans reappear, the border patrol agents are so grateful that they hail the first illegal immigrants they catch as heroes.103 It is doubtful that major state economies would do as well if they didn’t rely on the contribution of undocumented workers. In 2004, such workers added almost $18 billion to the economy of Texas and “sent $420 million more to Austin in taxes than they received in state services.” “Simply put,” Roger Daniels notes in his history of American immigration, “the nativist approach to immigration, which sees it as a threat, is not only illiberal but, if adopted, could be disastrous to the entire economy.”104

Two years after A Day without a Mexican was released, Tahar Ben Jelloun, the celebrated Moroccan writer and commentator on immigrant affairs in France and Europe, wrote “Le Dernier immigré” (The Last Immigrant), a short story about the expulsion of the last Arab immigrant from France and its consequences. At first, the French breathe a sigh of relief at not having to endure the odor of spicy cuisine or strange North African customs. However, this euphoric moment is soon followed by an irreparable sense of loss, beginning with the right-wing, anti-immigration movements, which have lost the very foundations of their political platform. Whole occupations are left unfilled, too, but the coup de grâce is the erasure of Arab words from the French language, including dictionaries, leaving gaping holes in France’s cultural traditions. Soon, the French realize that, just as Arab ideas and words had entered their culture without border controls or visas, the expelled immigrants should also be allowed to return, to restore what in essence are France’s hybrid traditions. The head of state appears on national television and gives a bilingual speech that begins and ends with the greeting “Asslâm alikoum” (Peace be upon you) and bombastic salutes to both France and the Maghreb—in Arabic.105

Perhaps no recent artistic production brings together the fear of Islam and Mexican immigrants better than the Academy Award–winning film Babel (2006), directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu.106 Richard and Susan Jones, a white couple from San Diego, leave their two children with a Mexican nanny to travel in Morocco, hoping to patch up their troubled relationship following the sudden death of their third child. While the couple is on a tourist bus driving through the isolated villages of the Atlas Mountains, a Moroccan shepherd aims his father’s new rifle at the bus, mostly to try out its shooting range. When a bullet hits Susan Jones, the shooting is quickly elevated to a terrorist incident, leading to the besiegement of the boy’s family and the death of his brother. Because this dramatic event keeps the Joneses away from home, the Mexican nanny takes the two children in her care to Tijuana to attend her son’s wedding. On the way back, a series of incidents leave her stranded in the desert. She eventually seeks help from the U.S. Border Patrol, upon which she is found to be illegally in the country and ordered deported back to Mexico, even though she has resided in the United States for sixteen years. Thus, an incident involving an American in a Muslim country leads to the deportation of a Mexican woman in California. I am not sure to what extent this meaning was intended, but the film clearly connects the fear of Islam and of Hispanics, as we see heavily armed law enforcement officers chasing shepherds in Morocco and immigrants in California.

Fiction—in film and in print—is thus giving us the chance to imagine what might happen if we succumbed to the passions that were supposed to unite Spain in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and to preserve the cultural purity of the nations that were inspired by King Ferdinand’s Machiavellian model. There was no cultural purity or political unity then, let alone in the twenty-first century, when the tentacles of globalization are constantly forcing people and cultures into and out of the same geographical spaces. To believe that the fences that are now being built across the globe to keep illegal immigrants or threatening neighbors at bay is a solution to our fears and failed neighborly policies is to delay thinking about new solutions to our demographic realities. Fences, whether on the edges of or within nations, “stand as sentinels to unsolved problems, such as economic disparity, inadequate law enforcement, and ethnic and religious hatred,” comments the Christian Science Monitor.107 When the world is supposed to be reveling in its globalization, such “walls of shame,” as Juan Goytisolo, the eminent Spanish writer, called them in relation to the Berlin Wall, remind us that we are still beholden to archaic notions of identity and security that do nothing but exacerbate our collective suffering.108 To be sure, well-educated professionals roam the globe in the comfort of jet seats and world-class hotels, but the poor are condemned to confinement and even death. For those who are determined to cross borders will not be stopped by walls, barbed wire, or mighty oceans. The European trawlers that empty Senegalese waters of their fish stocks leave few income options to the Senegalese fishermen and other young people who embark on perilous journeys across the ocean with the hope of reaching Spain’s coasts. This may explain why a popular saying in Senegal (in French and Wolof) is quite explicit about those who sail to Spain illegally: “Barcelone ou barxax,” meaning “Barcelona or death.” As one Sudanese from Darfur explained to a reporter in 2007, dying while trying to reach Europe by sea from Libya was no worse than staying home: “We were already dead when we were in Sudan and Libya. If we died on the boat, it’s all the same.”109 Similarly, no fence would deter Mexicans trying to cross the border, as a Mexican corrido has it:

Now they are putting up barriers in front of us so we don’t return

but that is not going to block us from crossing into the United States

We leap them like deer, we go under them like moles.110

Like his fellow desperate immigrants from other continents and nations, one Mexican said, “Prefiero morir que seguir con la miseria que tengo allí” (I’d rather die than continue living miserably back home).111

Even if all immigrants were deported and the border were sealed, would social and economic life be one iota better than it is now for native (white) Americans? asks Roberto Rodriguez.112 The only outcome of such an expulsion would be finding yet another group to blame for the nation’s social ills and fragmentation. Given the escalating tragedies produced by fences and unequal opportunities, it would be far better and more consistent with our liberal aspirations to imagine a world in which all humans moved and worked freely on a planet that was deeded to no one.