American National Identity Case Study: Mexican Immigration to the United States of America through Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity

Abstract

The study aims at exploring the relationship between national identity, multiculturalism, and nativism in the United States of America and focuses particularly on the notion of national identity which has been subject to far-reaching criticism. Recent critiques have suggested that although the notions of national identity may have had a degree of validity in the past, this has now been lost. As a matter of fact, the thesis will take as an issue “How new are the current threats to American national identity?” through shedding light on Harvard’s political scientist Samuel Phillips Huntington’s book: Who are we? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. Samuel P. Huntington argues that the sheer number, concentration, linguistic homogeneity, and other characteristics of Mexican immigrants will erode the dominance of English as a nationally unifying language, weaken the country’s dominant Anglo-Saxon values, and promote ethnic allegiances and identities over a primary identification as an American. Testing these hypotheses with data from a variety of researches, studies, and surveys, the study demonstrates that Mexicans exhibit telltale signs of advanced stages of assimilation, all the evidence reveals a powerful linguistic gravitational pull that has produced conversion to English monolingulism and implosion of Spanish language.......