The Return of Native Americans as Immigrants

“The United States is seeing a resurgence of Native Americans in the form of immigrants who are descendents of North America’s indigenous populations. As Native Americans, they are terrifying precisely because they have a moral claim to cross the borders imposed on their lands, writes NAM contributor Louis E.V. Nevaer.

As the immigration debate rages throughout the nation, the lingering, but unspoken, fear is that illegal immigration from Mexico heralds the return of the Native American.

“The persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages,” Samuel Huntington famously argued in Foreign Affairs magazine in March 2004, unleashing a firestorm of protests among U.S. Hispanics and Latinos. “Unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other 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.””*

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