American Xenophobes Need Mexican Immigration Facts, Not Fences

The U.S., the world’s premier immigrant nation, has slipped into one of its periodic bouts of xenophobia, complete with single-issue presidential candidates and congressional funding for a high-tech fence along its 2,000-mile (3,200-kilometer) border with Mexico.

This debate is as pointless as it is emotive, Los Angeles Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez argues in “Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds,” a book that traces more than 300 years of Hispanic influence on North American culture and politics.

Drawing on reams of facts, figures and forgotten history, Rodriguez, a Mexican American who grew up in Los Angeles, plants an idea that becomes difficult to dislodge: Because “Hispanicity continues to absorb rather than exclude the cultures it encounters,” he writes, Hispanic immigration is forcing the U.S. to reinterpret the purpose of the “melting pot” to include racial as well as ethnic mixing.”*

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