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Samuel Huntington is best known for his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, which forecast a global showdown between the West and radical Islam. Now the Harvard political scientist has his eye on another culture clash, this one on a smaller scale and closer to home. In his new bookWho We Are: The Challenges to America's National Identity, which is excerpted as the cover story of the current issue of Foreign Policy, Huntington argues that Mexican immigration is profoundly altering American culture and identity. Half of all immigrants to the U.S. in 2000 were Hispanic, he notes, and fertility rates for U.S. Hispanics far exceed those of U.S. whites (3.0 to 1.8). By 2010, half of the population of Los Angeles is predicted to be Hispanic. The result, Huntington says, is a "most immediate and most serious challenge to America's traditional identity."

To be alarmed by Huntington's book, however, you have to accept four dubious assumptions.

1) There is a coherent American identity. Huntington's excerpt in Foreign Policy begins with a preamble on how America was formed as an Anglo-Protestant nation. Had the U.S. been settled by French or Spanish Catholics rather than British Protestants, Huntington says, "It would not be the United States; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil." As such, Mexican immigration is "a major potential threat to the country's cultural and political integrity."

But by leaving the vague terms "traditional identity" and "cultural and political integrity" undefined, Huntington allows them to sound more meaningful than they are.  In fact, you could say America's WASP character faded during the waves of immigration of European Jews and Catholics at the turn of the twentieth century, or during the countercultural revolution of the 1960s, or throughout the rise of mass culture and the mass media. By now, talking about America's Protestantism sounds quaint; the dominant American values of consumerism, individualism, and belief in human goodness fundamentally contradict Protestant values of self-denial, communalism, and belief in human depravity. Meanwhile, other significant fault lines—between Blue and Red America, black and white America, religious and secular, rich and poor—cast doubt on the notion of a monolithic "traditional American identity" that is prone to topple at the arrival of Mexican immigrants.

2) Whites have dibs on the Southwest. The entry of Southwestern states into the Union was the result of conquest, not birthright. To conceive of Mexican immigrants as aliens in these areas is to ignore history. Huntington acknowledges this fact for the purpose of saying that immigrants think of the Southwest as their home turf that was taken away, and that their growing numbers thus make for "serious potential for conflict." But to gloss over the region's Mexican roots—and the fact the nation's largest city, Los Angeles, has a Spanish name—fuels the folly that whites "belong" in the Southwest and Mexicans are outsiders.

3) Whites are losing power in America.  This is the subtext of Huntington's argument. Because he lets "traditional identity" and "cultural integrity" dangle, Huntington implies that whites are threatened by foreigners. But what exactly is being threatened? What are whites losing? The vast majority of CEOs and Congressmen, for example, are white males. Almost all TV and movie stars are white or black. Huntington says, in a sidebar to the cover story, that the risk of "White Nativism"—a backlash by white males demanding special rights—is high. "As more Hispanics become citizens and politically active, white groups are likely to look for other ways of protecting themselves." Protecting themselves from what? If anything, immigration facilitates the imbalance in society that favors whites. Latino immigrants flip the burgers and burp the babies of rich whites, while Latinos remain entrenched in the lower class. 

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