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By Bernd Debusmann, Special Correspondent Some call it "the browning of America." Others see it as an economic necessity. Hispanics have become the largest minority group in the United States and the target of anger in a national debate over immigration.
The country built and populated by immigrants is wrestling with ways to tighten border controls and weighing the future of an estimated 11 million, mostly Mexican, illegal immigrants.
Fresh protests on behalf of the immigrants are planned for Monday in 60 cities nationwide. Immigrant organizations are calling for a general strike on May 1 to show what would happen in the United States without immigrants, legal and illegal.
Last month, more than a million immigrants took to U.S. streets, angry at a bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives to make illegal immigrants felons and to build a 698-mile wall along parts of the Mexican border.
The huge scale of those protests -- including at least 500,000 people in Los Angeles -- was a departure from the past when fear of being deported made illegal immigrants reluctant to engage in public activism.
"What we are seeing in the streets is a naked assertion of power," Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, said. "This isn't really about immigration -- it's about power."
Immigrant activists prefer to call it strength in numbers -- and the numbers have been rising. So has the use of Spanish, which has become an unofficial second language, found on government forms and the menus of automatic teller machines.
Hispanics, who numbered around 37 million in 2001, overtook blacks as the biggest minority group that year, according to the Census Bureau. The latest figures estimate 40 million Hispanics are living in the United States.
By 2050, according to Census Bureau projections, there will be more than 100 million people of Hispanic origin in the country, almost a quarter of the population.
"Most immigration opponents are loath to admit it, at least publicly, but they are worried that the huge influx of Hispanics will somehow change America for the worse," said immigration expert Linda Chavez, who heads the Center for Equal Opportunity near Washington. "But those fears are unfounded. Some may talk about the browning of America, but immigrants are a net positive."
BIFURCATED SOCIETY?
U.S. history has been marked by divisive arguments over immigration at regular intervals. Anti-immigrant sentiment ran so high in the late 19th century that the government banned immigration from China, arguing that Chinese people were incapable of assimilating into American culture.
Some of those views are echoed in today's debate.
On Friday, the U.S. Senate failed to agree on a bill that would pave the way toward citizenship for 7 million illegal immigrants and introduce a guest-worker program to meet the U.S. demand for unskilled and low-skilled workers.
Many of the arguments in favor of tighter border controls and punishment for illegal immigrants are rooted in a belief that Latin Americans in general and Mexicans in particular are unwilling to assimilate.
"That ... could change America into a culturally bifurcated Anglo-Hispanic society with two national languages," Harvard professor Samuel Huntington says in his book on America's national identity, "Who Are We?"
The last big national immigration debate took place in 1986. It featured many of the same disagreements as today, and resulted in amnesty for 3 million people, mostly Mexicans, who had crossed the border illegally.
To throttle future illegal immigration, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act stipulated stiff sanctions for employers who hired illegal immigrants. The provision was widely ignored. Along the 2,000-mile border with Mexico, capitalist market rules trumped border controls. Illegal crossings rose sharply.
Roughly half of Mexico's population lives on less than $5 a day, according to government figures. In the United States, the federal minimum wage is $5.15 an hour.
"Migration is a question of supply and demand," said Jorge Bustamante of the Northern Frontier College in Tijuana. "Demand in the U.S. for Mexican labor has been growing. The money is better on the other (American) side. That's the main factor."
In March, protesters waving flags from Mexico and other Latin American countries stirred angry reactions from Americans who saw the display as evidence of disdain for American values and loyalty to countries.
Organizers of Monday's protests seem determined to avoid a repetition. "Leave the flags of your countries at home," said messages on Spanish-language radio over the weekend. "Wave the flag of the country by which you want to be accepted."
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