A Nation of WASPs?

In the past it was not difficult to discern the difference between xenophobia and racism. But a Harvard professor, Samuel Huntington, has muddied the waters. In an article for the magazine he helped to found, Foreign Policy, Huntington has conflated the two ugly sentiments. He dislikes all Spanish-speaking people and their descendants in the United States. He finds Mexicans to be the worst, although he doesn't like Cubans either. He writes that Cubans ruined Miami and Mexicans have ruined a large part of the rest of the country. In his view, the growing Latino population will divide the United States into two separate nations, one Latino and the other white. Well, not all white; there are Asians, and he doesn't care for them either. But Harvard professors are different from old-fashioned bigots; they hide their bigotry in xenophobia.

Nativists like Huntington think immigrants are a danger to the future of our country. On the contrary, they are perhaps the only solution to human destiny, which is to grow old and then die. As any actuary can tell the nativists, America is about to run out of the one thing neither xenophobia nor racism can provide: youth. There is no imaginable solution to the problem now other than immigration. The great majority of immigrants are young, including many women in their childbearing years. They are the youth of the world, to borrow a phrase from Rousseau.

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