" Even setting aside the kind of mentality revealed in the La Raza memo Kathryn posted last week, which I am willing to believe is a minority point of view among Central-American immigrants, one of the most troubling things about the illegals is their cultural & linguistic uniformity. This is Samuel Huntington's point. It's a new thing in American history. The last Great Wave of immigrants was, well, diverse: Irish, Italian, Armenian, Polish, Jewish,... Thrown together in workplaces and (especially) public schools, they had to assimilate, and of course were encouraged to by the dominant culture. With a great majority coming from a single cultural source, bearing a single language, into a nation whose intellectual elites regard assimilation as a species of racist oppression, the situation is utterly different. If today's Latin American immigrants don't want to assimilate, they really don't have to. Certainly there is nothing like the assimilationist pressure on them that worked on the Great Wave immigrants.
Language is a huge part of having a common culture, and the diverse immigration of the 1800's helped make English a 'must learn' for immigrants so they could not only communicate with native born Americans, but with each other. There isn't that natural need for Hispanic immigrants. As long as they stay together, most can get away with not learning English. Eventually, one of two things will happen. Either Hispanics will more slowly assimilate over several generations instead of the more typical one generation of earlier groups, or we'll wake up one day and realize that the American Southwest is no longer culturally part of America, and if we face that, we are going to be facing a ton of problems. What scares a lot of people is that they can already see the latter happening.
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