In Mexico visit, enmity greets Harvard scholar

MEXICO CITY -- Ever since the release earlier this year of his book "Who are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity," which argues that Mexican immigrants pose a threat to American culture, Samuel P. Huntington has been the US academic Mexicans love to hate.

So it was not surprising that Huntington, chairman of the Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies, received a hostile reception during a visit this week to the Mexican state of Veracruz.

The Mexican press seized on remarks he made Tuesday during a panel discussion at a three-day business conference in the state, depicting him as alarmist and anti-immigrant. "Illegals: terrorist threat: Huntington" ran a frontpage headline in El Universal, the country's largest daily. Cronica, another Mexico City daily, led its culture section with a quote attributed to Huntington: "Mexicans could transport weapons of mass destruction."

Some prominent Mexicans went further in attacking Huntington personally. The governor of Hidalgo State, Manuel Angel Nunez Soto, called Huntington a racist, while challenging the facts behind the Harvard scholar's thesis that Mexican immigrants receive more than they give back to the United States. And Jesus Silva-Herzog Marquez, a political columnist who participated in a panel discussion with Huntington, described him as "the Stephen King of political scientists," in reference to the dire predictions of his recent books.

Huntington was unfazed. "Who's Stephen King?" he said yesterday, in a telephone interview after returning to Cambridge. When told that he was being compared with a best-selling author of horror novels, he laughed.

Huntington was more concerned by the way he said the Mexican press had misquoted him to suggest he was singling out Mexicans as posing a terrorist threat. Instead, he said, he was noting the potential of a terrorist attack perpetrated by people sneaking into the United States through the porous southern border with Mexico. The remarks were in response to a question during the panel entitled, "The Presence of Mexico in the United States: Imminent Negative Repercussions?" in which he was a keynote speaker.

"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."

Indeed, Mexican academics who participated in the congress said Huntington's remarks were mild in comparison to the text of his book, published in May, and an earlier article that ran in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. In both, he makes the argument that Hispanic immigrants -- a majority of whom come from Mexico -- differ in key ways from other immigrants in their reluctance to adopt what he calls the "creed " of American culture, the set of values defined by the first English colonists.

He cites statistics to show that Hispanics go to school for less time, have more children, and are less likely to learn to speak English than other immigrant groups. The roughly 20 million Mexican immigrants are also unique in that one-fifth of them reside illegally in the United States and in their proximity to their homeland, which he argues makes them less willing to assimilate.

These views have triggered a flood of angry rebuttals in the United States and Latin America. But since the Spanish-language edition of the book came out earlier this summer, academics have taken a more measured approach in responding to Huntington's arguments. The most recent such effort is "The Other American Dream," a compilation of essays by Mexican and Mexican-American academics that hit Mexican bookstores last week. The book is critical of Huntington, but also of Mexicans who are biased against American culture.

"To focus on whether a culture is nice or not is really ridiculous," said Fernando Escalante, a professor of sociology at the Colegio de Mexico, who edited the book of essays.

Silva-Herzog, the political analyst, agrees. "I think Huntington makes us see our own stupidity, like the prohibition against McDonald's in Oaxaca," he said, referring to a recent campaign to block the American fast-food chain from opening a new branch in one of Mexico's most historic cities. Silva-Herzog challenged Huntington to propose solutions to the alleged threat posed by the higher birthrate of Hispanic immigrants, as well as other perceived problems. Huntington cites figures showing Hispanic women have an average of three children, compared with 1.8 for non-Hispanic whites and 2.1 for blacks. "What does he recommend? That they sterilize the Mexicans? That they prohibit Spanish from being spoken on the street?" said Silva-Herzog.