Friday, September 24, 2004
http://chronicle.com/daily/2004/09/2004092405n.htm
Mexico City
Samuel P. Huntington, the Harvard professor who has drawn fire this year for arguing that Hispanic immigration imperils the United States, got a frosty reception this week while on a visit to Mexico.
In an article published last spring in Foreign Policy and in a subsequent book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, Mr. Huntington warns of the alleged threat to America's culture and politics by the recent wave of Hispanic immigrants, particularly from Mexico (The Chronicle, February 24). So it is not surprising that Mr. Huntington, chairman of the Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies, was greeted here with hostility.
Mexican newspapers seized on remarks he made during a panel discussion at a business conference in the State of Veracruz. "Illegals: terrorist threat: Huntington," ran a front-page headline in El Universal, the country's largest daily newspaper. Crónica, another daily, led with a quotation it attributed to Mr. Huntington: "Mexicans could transport weapons of mass destruction."
The reactions from prominent Mexicans were equally charged. The governor of Hidalgo State, Manuel Ángel Núñez Soto, called Mr. Huntington a racist and challenged the factual basis for the thesis that Mexican immigrants are a negative presence in the United States. And Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquez, a law professor and political columnist who participated in the panel discussion with Mr. Huntington in Veracruz, dubbed him "the Stephen King of political scientists," alluding to the dire predictions of his recent books.
Mr. Huntington was unfazed. "Who's Stephen King?" he said on Thursday in a telephone interview after returning to Cambridge, Mass.
He added that his statements had been misquoted in the Mexican press to imply that he was singling out Mexicans as a terrorist threat. Instead, he said, he was noting the possibility that a terrorist attack might be perpetrated by people who had sneaked into the United States across the porous border with Mexico.
"They want to sell newspapers, and so they misconstrue things," he said. "I chose my words very carefully because I doubt that they [the terrorists] would be Mexicans. All sorts of people go to Mexico and then come across the border. If this happened, there would be a major backlash in the United States, and we could well see walls going up everywhere."
Mexican academics who attended the conference said Mr. Huntington's remarks were mild in comparison with the text of his book, which was published by Simon & Schuster in May. The thesis that Hispanic immigration endangers American culture triggered a flood of angry rebuttals in the United States and Latin America.
But since a Spanish translation of the book came out this summer, academics have taken a more measured approach in responding to Mr. Huntington. The most recent such effort is El Otro Sueño Americano (The Other American Dream), a compilation of essays primarily by Mexican and Mexican-American academics that arrived in bookstores last week. The book, published by Paidós, criticizes both Mr. Huntington and Mexicans who are prejudiced against American culture.
"To focus on whether a culture is nice or not is really ridiculous," said Fernando Escalante, a sociology professor at the College of Mexico and the book's editor.
Mr. Silva-Herzog, the professor and columnist, agreed.
"I think Mr. Huntington makes us see our own stupidity, such as the prohibition against McDonald's in Oaxaca," he said, referring to a recent campaign to block the American fast-food chain from opening a restaurant in one of Mexico's most historic cities.
Mr. Silva-Herzog, whose column appears in Reforma, Mexico's second-largest daily newspaper, challenged Mr. Huntington to propose solutions to the alleged threat posed by the high birthrate of Mexican immigrants. "What does he recommend?" he said. "That they sterilize the Mexicans?"
Mr. Huntington said he was used to his books' coming under initial attack and then later being hailed as visionary. His 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Changing of the World Order, was at first denounced as inflammatory, but after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it became a best seller. "I expect the same to happen with this one," he said.