[Mb-civic] Can You Say, 'Bienvenidos'? - Eugene Robinson - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Can You Say, 'Bienvenidos'?
<>
By Eugene Robinson
The Washington Post
Tuesday, April 11, 2006; A21

White Americans, and black Americans too, are going to have to get used 
to sharing this country -- sharing it fully -- with brown Americans. 
Things are going to be different. Deal with it.

The most important legacy of the histrionic debate over immigration 
reform will not be any piece of legislation, whether enlightened or 
medieval. It will be the big demonstrations held in cities throughout 
the country over the past few weeks -- mass protests staged by and for a 
minority whose political ambition is finally catching up with its 
burgeoning size. In the metaphorical sense, Latinos have arrived.

In the physical sense, of course, Latinos have been arriving for many 
years, and in huge numbers. In some cities they have sought and achieved 
political power -- if there were such a thing as "the capital of Latin 
America," arguably it would be Miami. As a presence in national 
politics, however, Latinos have been much less influential than their 
weight in the population would suggest.

That just began to change.

Half a million people marched in Los Angeles, another half-million in 
Dallas, and hundreds of thousands elsewhere yesterday. The fact that so 
many undocumented immigrants came out of the shadows, giving up their 
anonymity to denounce legislation threatening their interests, wasn't 
the most remarkable thing. More significant was that so many fully 
enfranchised Latino citizens joined them.

What happens next won't look like the civil rights struggle that African 
Americans waged -- the nation's two biggest minorities have different 
histories and face different issues, and anyway it's a different era. I 
doubt that any single Latino leader will emerge, or even any single 
leadership group. And the advance won't be linear or continuous, because 
much of the Latino population lacks full citizenship and thus can't vote.

When I was in Phoenix last week, I talked to advocates of a 
round-'em-up, kick-'em-out policy on illegal immigration who predicted 
the protests would spark an Anglo backlash. Maybe it will, but everyone 
should remember that demography is destiny: Given the youthfulness of 
the Latino population, xenophobes could construct an Adobe Curtain along 
the length of the Mexican border next week (they'd probably use Mexican 
labor) and the political strength of Latinos in the United States would 
still continue to grow.

There are economists, I realize, who argue that illegal immigration -- 
mostly from Mexico -- has depressed wages for unskilled labor, to the 
detriment of low-income, native-born African Americans and whites.

Other economists disagree, and in any case the effect is somewhere 
between negligible and small. There's no reason employers can't be 
required to pay a living wage to every janitor, whether his name is John 
or Juan.

But I don't think the immigration debate is about economics anyway. It's 
about culture and it's about fear.

Among other things, it's about this voice-mail message: " Para continuar 
en español, oprima el numero 2 . To continue in Spanish, press 2."

Many Anglos in Phoenix and elsewhere were surprised by the size of the 
protests two weeks ago, but the demonstrations were coordinated and 
publicized in the open, on Spanish-language radio. Latino immigrants in 
this recent wave, whether they intend to stay permanently or just work 
for a while and go home, are learning English but also keeping their 
Spanish -- and the fact is the United States now has a de facto second 
language. That seems to frighten a lot of people.

Some academics, such as the Harvard University political scientist 
Samuel P. Huntington, have warned that unchecked Latino immigration is 
bringing with it alien cultural values -- that somehow the 
Anglo-Saxon-ness of the country is threatened. But that ignores the fact 
that America has been shaped by successive waves of immigration going 
all the way back to the Pilgrims, and to the first African slaves. The 
country has proved that inclusiveness, adaptability and change are the 
keys to unparalleled success. Why on earth pull up the drawbridge now?

Maybe the real fear is more visceral than that. Maybe it's that you 
don't have to extrapolate immigration and fertility rates very far into 
the future to see an America in which minorities -- Hispanic, African 
and Asian Americans -- are a majority. To put it another way: an America 
in which whites join the rest of us as just another minority. That's 
already the case in our two most populous states, California and Texas, 
according to the Census Bureau, with others including New York, Arizona 
and Florida likely to follow soon.

Don't freak out, folks. It's not the end of the world. You might ask 
your black neighbors for advice on how to cope.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/10/AR2006041000987.html?nav=hcmodule
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