By Tim Wildmon | AFA President

How many of us have had this experience? You are at a hotel and you need soap or shampoo or towels. So you walk down the hall where the cleaning lady’s roll cart is and you either (a) take what you want while she is changing the sheets or (b) stick your head in the door and tell her that you are about to take some items from her cart because you feel somewhat like you are stealing if you don’t. But, inevitably, the woman is Hispanic and doesn’t speak English. Maybe she understands the words "towel" and "soap," but that’s about all. She smiles warmly and nods her head.

Happens every day hundreds of times in the U. S. because the Hispanic population is growing rapidly and the majority have not been assimilated into the mainstream of American culture and language is just one of the challenges. But the problems and potential problems are deeper.

Here is how Samuel P. Huntington, chairman of the Harvard University Academy for International and Area Studies, opens his piece titled "The Hispanic Challenge" in Foreign Policy magazine, March/April issue: "The persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages. Unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclaves – from Los Angeles to Miami –and rejecting the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream. The United States ignores this challenge at its peril."

Mexican immigrants constituted 27.6% of the total foreign-born U. S. population in 2000. In addition, there were an estimated 4.8 million illegal Mexicans living in America in 2000.

Many Hispanics are taking jobs that other Americans will not take, or at least at wages other Americans will not accept. That is the conventional wisdom anyway. They are hard workers and are thankful to have a job that pays well in comparison to what they can earn in Mexico.

It is interesting to read what Huntington writes about the genesis of what has traditionally constituted American culture and our way of life. Again, this is from a gentleman who is one of the higher-ups at Harvard, not exactly a bastion of conservatism. He cites the Declaration of Independence and its principles as "an essential component of U.S. identity."

He writes, "Most Americans see the creed, i.e. The Declaration of Independence, as the crucial element of their national identity. The creed, however, was the product of the distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers. Key elements of that culture include the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law, including the responsibility of rulers and the rights of individuals; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try and create a heaven on earth, a ‘city on a hill.’ Historically, millions of immigrants were attracted to the United States because of this culture and the economic opportunities and political liberties it made possible.

"Contributions from immigrant cultures modified and enriched the Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers. The essentials of that founding culture remained the bedrock of U. S. identity, however, at least until the last decades of the 20th century. Would the United States be the country that it has been and that it largely remains today if it had been settled in the 17th and 18th centuries not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is clearly no. It would not be the United States; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil."

In America – while our founding was dominated by Protestants – Catholics and Protestants have worked together over the years to make our nation a great country.

But have you ever looked around the globe and wondered what it is that has separated our nation from the rest of the world in liberty, progress, wealth, education and opportunity? Why has the American experiment not been duplicated elsewhere in the world? Because no other nation has been founded on a distinctively Christian worldview, and the values that flow from it.

Huntington argues that if we don’t do more to assimilate the ever-increasing Mexican population coming into America – and if Mexican Americans don’t demonstrate more interest in learning English and blending in with the rest of America – then we will, in effect, have two nations in the same country within the next quarter century.