Assimilation has become a dirty word in American politics, invoking images of people, cultures, traditions forged into a colorless alloy in an indifferent melting pot. Where once the goal of new arrivals was to gain admittance to the American mainstream as rapidly as possible, now ethnic leaders advocate that groups remain separate, that native cultures and languages be preserved intact, and that every effort be made by society to accommodate ethnic “difference.”
Hispanic leaders have been among the most vociferous in this regard, speaking on behalf of a group that now numbers over 22 million. They insist that Hispanic children be taught in Spanish; that Hispanic adults be allowed to cast ballots in their native language, and have the right to vote in districts where Hispanics make up the majority of voters; that Hispanic ethnicity constitute an entitlement to a certain percentage of jobs and college admissions; and that many of these same benefits be conferred on immigrants from Latin America, even those who are in the country illegally. The terrible irony is that these positions, many of which have already been enshrined in policy, fly in the face of the expressed interests of Hispanics themselves, who, like millions of immigrants before them, see their best opportunity for success in assimilating to the common culture of America. The progress they have already made toward that goal stands in danger of being hindered or even halted by the self-perpetuating blindness of their elites.
_____________
Hispanic leadership on the state and national level comes essentially in two forms: organizations like the National Council of La Raza or the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and elected officials. Both claim to represent the Hispanics in whose name they speak, but the claim is dubious, not only in the case of the various organizations, which are obviously not responsible to constituencies of voters, but even in the case of elected legislators. For the simple fact is that, large as population figures are, nearly half of all Hispanic adults in the United States are immigrants, and most of these are not yet citizens.
How, then, do Hispanic leaders achieve and maintain their power? Unable, for the most part, to translate numbers into voting strength, they have attempted instead to gerrymander electoral districts in order to create safe seats. The Voting Rights Act of 1974 has become the vehicle for carving out such districts. In effect, the Act requires proportional representation in elective offices for both blacks and Hispanics. Under court interpretations of the Act, Hispanics are virtually guaranteed the right to districts in which they are a majority of the population, not necessarily of the eligible voters. The result has been the creation of what the political scientist Peter Skerry has aptly dubbed “rotten boroughs, with large and growing numbers of ‘constituents’ unable to vote.”
In Los Angeles County, for example, a court-ordered voting district was created in 1991 so as to give Hispanics a seat on the board of supervisors. Nearly one million persons of voting age live in the new district, which is 61 percent Hispanic, but fewer than 83,000 (about 8 percent of the voting-age population) voted in a hotly contested election for the first Hispanic supervisor. The usual reasons were adduced for the pathetically low turnout—voter apathy, bad timing, etc.—but the best explanation is that the district includes a huge immigrant population, legal and illegal, unable to vote. Whatever the reason for it, the low turnout will undoubtedly be cited in the future as a reason to push still harder for court-ordered proportional representation.
One remedy that has been proposed for the meager participation of voters is to provide election materials in Spanish. In some 375 political jurisdictions, voters are entitled to such materials for all federal elections, and several jurisdictions require Spanish-language ballots for state and local elections as well. The federal requirement, part of the 1975 amendments to the Voting Rights Act, was obtained by means of a disingenuous campaign by Hispanic activists to persuade Congress that an English-language ballot was to Hispanics what the literacy test had been to blacks in the South—namely, a device whose sole purpose was to prevent qualified persons from voting.
In fact, however, as Abigail Thernstrom has documented in Whose Votes Count?, there is virtually no evidence that language has been a significant impediment to Hispanic political participation. While it is true that in some parts of the country Hispanics were (and still are) less likely to vote than either whites or blacks, the problem is not language but the fact that, as then-Senator Barry Goldwater put it during the hearings on the issue, “40 percent of all Spanish-origin persons who were not registered in 1974 reported they were not citizens.”
A no less disingenuous suggestion to boost the numbers of Hispanic voters was put forward recently by Joaquin Avila, former president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund: allow non-citizens to vote. The same idea was floated by another leader, Jose Angel Gutierrez, at a 1990 conference of La Raza. Takoma Park, Maryland, known for its “progressive” politics, is in fact about to become the first jurisdiction to grant voting rights in municipal elections to the thousands of Latin immigrants who live there. And some non-citizens have already been voting even without such “rights.” A 1982 investigation by the U.S. attorney in San Francisco revealed that in nine northern California counties, votes were being cast not only by non-citizens but also by a number of persons who were in the country illegally.
Ethnic politics is an old and honored tradition in the United States, but the rules under which Hispanics now operate—the rules of affirmative action—are very far from traditional. As Skerry notes, “In the past, ethnic leaders were obliged to translate raw numbers into organizational muscle in the factories or at the polls. . . . In the affirmative-action state, Hispanic leaders do not require voters, or even protesters—only bodies.” Hispanics can now be “represented” on city councils, county boards, even in Congress by officials elected by barely a handful of the adult Hispanic population. Hispanic immigrants need not become U.S. citizens for their political weight to be felt; indeed, as the San Francisco incident illustrates, Hispanic votes can be counted even when they are cast by persons who have no legal right to vote—or, in some cases, to be in the United States at all. This is a pernicious situation, unhealthy for Hispanics and for the American political system; the only interests it promotes are those of Hispanic “leaders.”
_____________
If Hispanics are ill-served by their leaders’ notion of political representation, they are positively damaged by those same leaders’ policies in the areas of language and culture. Most Hispanics, for example, accept the fact that the United States is an English-speaking country, and many embrace that fact. According to a Houston Chronicle poll last year, 87 percent of Hispanics believed it was their “duty to learn English,” and a majority believed English should be adopted as the official language of the country. Polls taken in California, Colorado, and elsewhere have come up with similar findings.
Yet Hispanic leaders have consistently advocated public policies aimed at allowing Hispanics to function indefinitely in their native language. Nearly two-thirds of all first-grade students from Spanish-speaking homes receive reading instruction in Spanish in public school; 72 percent of them receive oral-development instruction in Spanish. This stands in marked contrast to the practice of non-English-speaking children from other ethnic backgrounds, only 8 percent of whom receive reading instruction and only 16 percent of whom receive oral-language development in their native language.
Nor is bilingual education the only area in which efforts have been under way to forge a separate Spanish-language “track” in American public life. Ballots and election materials, as we have seen, are another. And some Hispanic leaders have gone still further to promote what they recklessly refer to as “language rights” in the courts and through legislation. One such proposal would amend civil-rights statutes to add language to race, color, gender, and national origin as a basis upon which it would be forbidden to discriminate—this, despite the fact that unlike the other four qualities, which are immutable, language is learned, and on that basis employers have generally been given broad discretion to discriminate among employees. Hispanic civil-rights groups have also sued employers for demanding that employees speak English on the job. In at least one instance (Yniguez v. Mofford), a federal court in Arizona found for the plaintiffs, declaring that a government worker has a constitutional right to use Spanish in the performance of his official duties (and thus striking down a recently passed amendment making English the official language of government in Arizona). The case is now on appeal.
It is important to stress that the purpose of “language-rights” proponents is not to protect the right of individuals to speak whatever language they choose in private—a right no one is disputing—but to promote the use of a language other than English in public activities. The former mayor of Miami, Maurice Ferre, went so far as to boast in 1982 that “Within ten years there will not be a word of English spoken [in Miami] . . . one day residents will have to learn Spanish or leave.”
“Language-rights” proponents have another aim in mind as well. Like previous immigrant groups, most Hispanics do want to preserve their own language and culture. This is a responsibility which, again in the manner of other immigrant groups, they are perfectly prepared to shoulder themselves. Here too, however, their leaders have adopted a more radical stance. What these leaders want—and increasingly are getting—is the maintenance of Hispanic language and culture at public expense, with all that that entails by way of dependency, bureaucratization, and loss of control by those presumably being benefited.
It is instructive to compare today’s leaders in this respect with yesterday’s. At its founding in 1929, LULAC, the oldest Hispanic civil-rights group still in existence, was a decidedly assimilationist organization. Only U.S. citizens could become members, and Spanish was not used in the official proceedings. In its declaration of aims (unchanged to this day), LULAC includes among the duties of members the following:
To foster the acquisition and facile use of the official language of our country that we may thereby equip ourselves and our families for the fullest enjoyment of our rights and privileges and the efficient discharge of our duties and obligation to this, our country.
Today, few Hispanic organizations on their own promote English—or civics—classes for Latin immigrants. Instead of imbuing immigrants with a sense of the importance of acquiring and adopting the common English language, Hispanic leaders place greater emphasis on retaining Spanish, and thus encourage Hispanics to remain separate from the culture in which they reside.
_____________
The same deleterious mindset permeates the thinking and activity of Hispanic leaders in the field of education. These leaders like to point out how poorly schooled Hispanics are; high-school dropout rates, for example, are said to be in the range of 50-60 percent for the Mexican-origin population. The purpose of such exercises, of course, is to win more and bigger government programs. Yet the analyses themselves are often suspect, failing to differentiate between new immigrants and native-born; the latter have in fact made important strides in closing the education gap, at least at the secondary-school level, and are even approaching non-Hispanic whites in their high-school graduation rates.
It is true that beyond the secondary level Hispanic education seems to be stalled. Even though, thanks to affirmative action and federal student aid, it is now substantially easier to go to college than it was twenty or thirty years ago, the proportion of Mexican Americans graduating today is unchanged from forty years ago, and most Hispanic students who enroll in four-year colleges do not complete the degree. Yet government can only do so much in promoting higher education for Hispanics—or any group. Only a substantial commitment to education on the part of this generation of Hispanic parents can make a difference, and that commitment is one that will entail personal sacrifice—just as it has done for generations of poor and immigrant parents.
Unfortunately, it is just this idea of personal sacrifice, or rather the ethic of self-help and advancement which underlies it, that the politics of the Hispanic leadership aims to subvert. Hispanics have been urged to adopt instead the ethic of entitlement—the belief that jobs, advancement, even political power should be theirs by reason of their status as official “victims.” Among the bizarre effects this leads to is an investment in victimization for its own sake. Ethnic leaders have a positive interest in showing that Hispanics are, as the head of one organization put it, “the poorest of the poor, the most segregated minority in schools, the lowest-paid group in America, and the least educated minority in this nation.” To succeed at the entitlement game, Hispanics must continually establish their failure.
This is a spiritually corrupting exercise, and it has already begun to set Hispanics not only against other groups who are in competition for the limited slots set aside by affirmative-action programs, but even against one another. Recently, for example, a group of Mexican American firemen in San Francisco challenged the right of two Spanish Americans to participate in an affirmative-action program; the claim was that the Spanish Americans, with their European roots, were unlikely to have suffered discrimination comparable to other Hispanics. It was even recommended that a panel of twelve Hispanics be established to certify who was and who was not Hispanic. Such are the outrages to which the politics of entitlement leads.
Ultimately, entitlements based on victim status rob Hispanics of real power—the power that comes by overcoming disadvantage through one’s own efforts. Millions of Hispanics have been seeking empowerment and equality by just this route; they are assimilating and being absorbed into the American mainstream. But to do so they must act in defiance of Hispanic leaders, who obstinately cling to policies designed to keep them permanent strangers in their American home.
