It’s an American tradition, historians agree, to be suspicious of immigrants – legal or illegal.
Southern Europeans. Eastern Europeans. Asians. Latinos.
All were or are groups whose arrival in large waves sparked emotional policy and cultural debates.
Until recently, the debate over the newest immigrants, mostly undocumented workers from Mexico and Latin America, has focused largely on their impact on jobs and public services in border states. But the more recent settling of immigrants around the country and concerns that they are eroding American culture and language has helped fuel the growing state and national calls for reform.
“They (immigrants) are not integrating into the American culture of freedom for all,” said Joy Breuer, an anti-illegal- immigrant activist in Greeley. “Nobody thought it would get this way in Colorado. We thought it was a problem for the border towns, and it’s not anymore.”
While fear of immigrants’ impact on culture has been a constant in American history – Benjamin Franklin once predicted that Pennsylvania would become a German colony – some say the fast-increasing levels of Latino immigrants are different and will soon bring the country to a tipping point.
It’s a notion introduced by Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington, who predicted that the huge numbers of Mexicans coming to the United States would form their own communities and maintain their own language and cultures. Eventually, he said, that would divide the U.S. into two groups, two languages and two peoples.
Other academics, however, say Huntington underestimates the assimilation process.
Dowell Myers, of the University of Southern California, who has studied the influence of Latin Americans on California and Miami, says Latinos largely assimilate by the third generation.
In other communities, he said, “immigration is so recent people haven’t seen it, so they are just imagining this takeover and this separate world,” he said.
The surge is also a new phenomenon for this generation of policymakers, who grew up more insulated from new immigrants than any other generation in U.S. history.
Most lawmakers came of age during a decline in immigration caused by the Depression and World War II. From 1920 to the 1970s, the number of immigrants steadily decreased. It was a time when the U.S. enforced some of its most restrictive immigration policies.
In 1970, there were fewer than 10 million immigrants in the country – less than 5 percent of the population – and almost none of them were undocumented.
Since then, the immigrant population has grown to 35 million, with about 30 percent estimated to be undocumented.
“For most adults over 35 or 40, the country is very different from what they grew up in,” said Jeff Passel, Pew Hispanic Center demographer. “Some of it is race, some is culture, some is language and some of it is just change.”
While many perceive the current wave of immigrants to be unprecedented, demographers say that simply isn’t true.
In 2004, Mexicans accounted for 3.5 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Census Bureau. That compares with the Irish, who in 1860 made up 5.1 percent; and the Germans, who in 1890 accounted for 4.4 percent of the total population. The next-largest group, Italians, made up 1.5 percent in the 1920s.
But the growth in illegal immigrants has nearly quadrupled since the early 1990s. There are an estimated 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants in the country, around 57 percent from Mexico.
By 2050, demographers estimate that people of color will outnumber non-Hispanic whites.
“That demographic prediction has really been to some segments of our society a toll ringing, saying to them, ‘Beware: This change is coming and you are not going to like it,”‘ said Estevan Flores, executive director of the Latino/a Research and Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Denver.
Congress this year has debated proposals that run the gamut from granting legal status to undocumented immigrants already here to making it a felony to be in the U.S. illegally. Colorado lawmakers today begin debating their own proposals.
Past waves of immigration also resulted in sweeping policy changes. The largest wave included 37 million people, mostly European, between 1840 and 1920, when there were no restrictions. Many of those were from Southern and Eastern Europe.
In response, Congress in 1921 approved the “Emergency Quota Act” to limit new immigrants based on the population of that nationality already in the U.S. The policy favored Anglo-Saxon and Northern European immigrants because they made up the largest chunk of the population.
Three years earlier, Congress had passed a law requiring all immigrants to be able to read and write. It also excluded most Asians. Chinese immigrants had already been barred by the Chinese exclusion act in 1882.
Those laws limited how many of the “wrong kind of immigrants” showed up at the ports, said Hal Barron, professor of history at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif.
The “wrong kind” in that era were Irish, Italian, Jewish and Polish. They were not Protestant and were often poor and uneducated. Many did not speak English.
“Nativism in whatever period always looks similar,” Barron said. “It has always been a combination of economic and cultural concerns.”
In 1924, Congress passed another act that worked to prevent any major change in the ethnic composition of the country by allowing five times as many immigrants from Western and Northern Europe as from Southern and Eastern Europe.
According to a study by the Rand Corporation in 2004, the “Mexican inflow differs little from past mass immigration … by the Irish, the Jews and the Italians and that assimilation should be as successful as in the past.”
Those immigrants maintained their languages and ties to their culture. But each group gradually entered the social, political and educational mainstream.
Huntington disagrees. He theorizes that because there are so many immigrants speaking the same language, assimilation slows and eventually stops.
A U.S. census report found that in 2000, 10.5 percent of all people over age 5 spoke Spanish at home, and nearly 13.8 percent of those spoke English less than “very well,” a 66 percent increase since 1990.
Huntington could not be interviewed because of recent heart surgery. But in his writings, he concedes that in the largest immigrant center in the country, Los Angeles, a similar survey had very different results for the U.S.-born second generation.
It found just 11.6 percent speak only Spanish or more Spanish than English; 25.6 percent speak both languages equally; 32.7 speak more English than Spanish; and 30.1 percent speak only English. More than 90 percent of people of Mexican descent were fluent English speakers.
Those numbers back Myers’ theory that assimilation occurs by the third generation.
“You have to focus on the kids.” Myers said. “Basically, the way kids look at it is, Spanish is the old people’s language and whatever the old people do, the kids want to do different, and that is the way every culture is.”
