Huntington and Mexico

Enrique Krauze provides some powerful criticisms of Samuel Huntington’s claims about the influence of Mexican immigration on American cultural identity in the June 21 issue of TNR . Huntington argues in his recent book that there is a core American culture, and it is “Anglo-Protestant.” Mexicans, Spanish-speaking and Catholic, threaten that core. But Krauze points out that Protestantism is burgeoning in Mexico: “Today Mexico is 90 percent Catholic, ubt if the trend continues the Catholic population will shrink to 75 percent in less than 30 years.” Further, he claims that there is strong evidence that Mexicans are eager to learn English and function in American society. As for Huntington’s claim that Mexicans have little interest in educational advance, Krauze attributes that primarily to the fact that Mexicans work in fields where skills and knowledge are acquired on the job rather than in school. And he wonders what the picture will look like a few generations down the road, when Mexicans who have settled in the US have the opportunity they now lack to send their children to college.

Perhaps Krauze’s strongest point comes in his response to Huntington’s claim that Mexicans lack a crucial feature of American culture, a Protestant work thic. He points to statistics that show Mexicans are willing to “do any kind of work anywhere” including hard work in agriculture, forestry, fishing, construction, manufacturing. Krauze’s piece, on the whole, is a compelling rejoinder to conservative fears that Mexicans will overwhelm American civilization.