Mexicans Are Keeping the Dream Alive

The U.S. Census Bureau last week released official figures from its 2000 head count that confirmed something that almost anyone with eyes and ears must have long ago surmised: There are now a lot of Mexicans in the United States.

In fact, the bureau’s statistics suggest that what we in the media have dubbed the Latinization of the U.S. could just as easily be called its Mexicanization.

Not only are Mexicans the largest ethnic group in California, Texas and other states of the Southwest, they have, over the last decade, become a significant minority in locales where they were rarely found before, from cities like New York to states like Georgia.

As in the border states, these ambitious people were drawn to such far-flung places by the prospect of work that, while often difficult and dirty, paid far more than jobs back home.

Mexican Americans and recent immigrants from Mexico now constitute fully 58.5% of the 35.3 million Latinos in this country, the census found. That is roughly one in every 14 U.S. residents, which puts Mexicans in select company as one of the immigrant groups whose influence transcends cities and even regions to be national in scope. The list would include U.S. citizens of German, Irish and English ancestry, who numbered 58 million, 38.7 million and 32.7 million respectively in the 1990 census (the 2000 numbers are not yet available).

What impact all these Mexicans will have on this country only time will tell, of course. But that won’t stop a few loud Cassandras from trying to make apocalyptic predictions based on their darkest fears or most wild-eyed dreams.

I refer to anti-immigrant extremists who claim, with straight faces and humorless conviction, that the flow of Mexicans into this country is a plot to reconquer territories lost to an expansionist United States in the 19th century. La Reconquista, they have dubbed it on their angry, fearful Web sites.

In all fairness to those fear-mongers, one can find Internet sites where comparably delusional Latinos spin conspiracy theories, spew hateful rhetoric and proclaim a pan-Mexican nation called Aztlan (the name of a vague Aztec myth).

In the end, the only thing the creators of these extreme Web sites accomplish is to feed the paranoia of their counterparts on the other end of the lunatic fringe.

The vast majority of U.S. citizens comes down in the calmer, rational middle, thankfully, because most native-born Americans have at least a vague awareness of the fear and prejudice their immigrant ancestors faced when they first arrived here.

I refer not only to the well-documented bias faced by even “model” minorities like Japanese and Chinese Americans in the 20th century but to less well-known cases.

Consider, for instance, no less an American icon than Benjamin Franklin. In letters to old friends like Thomas Jefferson, Franklin sometimes expressed doubts that the many German immigrants moving into his home state of Pennsylvania in the late 18th century would ever understand, much less absorb, the principles of representative democracy that he, Jefferson and the other founders had written into the U.S. Constitution.

Clearly, this was one of those rare instances in which Franklin was just plain wrong. But, ever the astute businessman, he at least hedged his bets by investing in one of the first German-language newspapers published in Pennsylvania.

I’d like to think that most U.S. citizens feel much the same way about the recent Mexican influx. A bit surprised, and maybe even uneasy, about the sudden prevalence of Spanish in places where the language wasn’t heard before.

But intrigued by the opportunities these hard-working newcomers create for their new communities.

Or perhaps they are concerned about specific challenges like whether public schools are equipped to educate so many immigrant children; yet fully aware that those kids must be educated if this nation is to retain its competitive edge in an international economy in which goods and capital flow freely, and people inevitably follow.

Trying to stop this process of integration--especially along a 2,000-mile common border--is as futile as trying to stop water from flowing downhill.

So let us leave any arguments about doing so to delusional extremists.

The rest of us can read these census numbers as confirmation that the American Dream is alive and well.

The nation is absorbing yet another people into its rich and remarkable mix.