Notes on the Reconquest

 The Latin Americanization of the United States?

 By Alejandro Portes


Major and minor immigrations to the
 United States have been routinely
 subjected to a degree of hostility by
the native majority. Though never light or
easy to bear, the victimization of immigrant
groups has varied in degrees from quiet
prejudice to mob lynching and official ex-
clusion from the country. Examples
abound: the anti-German riots in the Middle
West more than a century ago, the Ameri-
can Protective Association created to fight
the Irish, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the
national quota laws to keep out Italians,
Poles and Jews.
 After a generation or two, most immi-
grant groups have managed to adapt in one
way or another to American society. Some
in the second or third generations even join
the perennial nativist chorus against the
latest immigrant minority. Ironically, some
of the groups which were supposed to rep-
resent the greatest threat to the fiber of the
nation, have been held up, two or three
decades later, as exemplary citizens and
contributors to our wealth and culture. This
is the case of the Chinese, barred from entry
before the end of the nineteenth century,
and of the Japanese, excluded from the
land in the 1910s and from property al-
together at the start of World War II. It is also
the case of the Jews, whose children were
kept out of Eastern universities by an arbi-
trary quota system. Every major rise in im-
migration has been followed by the rise of
nativist alarm and movements designed to
keep out the new foreigners. The period
after World War II and especially after the
1965 Immigration Act is no exception. The
exclusionary sentiment has been retailored,
however, to fit the characteristics of the new
immigrants. Two of these are most signifi-
cant: 1) major source countries of immigra-
tion are now located in the Third World,
primarily Asia and Latin America; 2) a sub-
stantial portion of the new immigration
enters the country illegally, a practice un-
common in earlier periods of high im-
migration.

Alejandro Portes teaches sociology at Johns
Hopkins University. His book, Labor, Class,
and the International System, was published in
1981 by Academic Press.


 The substantial rise in the Latin American
population of the United States during the
last two decades does not have its origins in
a continent-wide outflow. The overwhelm-
ing majority of recent Latin American immi-
grants come instead from countries in the
Caribbean basin, including Mexico and Co-
lombia. Despite this geographic homoge-
neity, the factors underlying the inflow are
quite diverse. Their coincidence in time is,
to a certain extent, fortuitous. The Cuban
revolution, which sent the entire prerevolu-
tionary middle class into exile, coincided
with the acceleration of Mexican labor emi-
gration. The Nicaraguan revolution and the
civil war in El Salvador, which are generat-
ing a new wave of political exiles, run paral-
lel with the acceleration of undocumented
labor immigration from the Dominican Re-
public and Colombia.
 It is plausible to argue that these diverse
forces of out-migration have common
roots in the particular style of hegemony
exercised by the United States over the re-
gion. The diffusion of consumption expec-
tations bearing no relation to the economic
possibilities of the majority generated both
discontent and migratory pressures. US-
supported regimes frequently employed
their resources to entrench privilege and
further oppress their populations. When in
trouble, they looked North for salvation.
When finally defeated, the formerly domi-
nant classes moved en masse to the coun-
try on which they had depended. Even in
less oppressive situations, the predominant
model of development continuously in-
creased economic inequality, driving popu-
lar masses out of the land and then out of
the country altogether. From this perspec-
tive, recent Caribbean immigration to the
United States may be seen as part of a his-
torical dialectic whereby a particular form of
global hegemony turns on itself, with unex-
pected and often disruptive results.
 This interpretation is, however, partial.
Before it is recast into the themes of the
"alien invasion" or the "latinization of the
United States," a look at the figures is in
order. From 1890 to 1920, the peak period
of pre-World War II immigration, 18.2 mil-
lion immigrants were admitted to the
United States. This figure included 3.8 mil-


lion Italians, 3 million Russian Jews, and 3.1
million Poles and others from the eastern
reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Total immigration during those 30 years
represented 17.1 percent of the US popula-
tion in 1920. Italians alone accounted for
3.6 percent. Not all immigrants stayed,
however, so that by 1920, first-generation
foreigners represented 13.2 percent of the
population. Economically active immi-
grants arriving in 1900 added 1 percent
more workers to the American labor force.
Five years later, they added 3 percent and, in
1908, 4 percent. In 1910, immigrants repre-
sented 21 percent of the entire civilian labor
force.
 These figures can be compared with
those from a similar 30-year period,
1948-1978. During this time, 9.5 million
immigrants were admitted to the United
States. Mexicans were the single largest na-
tional contingent with 1.4 million registered
entries. The West Indies, including Cuba,
the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and the
rest of the Antilles sent another 1.2 million
permanent immigrants. If all legal immi-
grants who came to the country remained
in it, they would represent 4.6 percent of the
total population in 1978 or one-fourth of
the corresponding figure in 1920. Mexican
immigrants alone would represent less than
1 percent. In 1970, the foreign-born were in
fact 4.7 of the total population or about one-
third of what they were fifty years before.
Economically active immigrants arriving in
a given year never added more than three-
tenths of one percent to the country's labor
force. The figure is about one-tenth of the
contribution made by immigrant workers in
the 1890-1920 period.
 These numbers can be immediately
challenged by pointing out that the bulk of
immigration to the United States at present
is not legal, but undocumented, and that
most illegal immigrants come from Mexico
and other Caribbean countries. The point
would take us into a discussion about the
size of the illegal inflow, a tired exercise by
now. Estimates have ranged from the mil-
lions, figures frequently quoted by re-
strictionists, to the few hundred thousands,
a figure reported by a large study recently
completed by the Mexican government.


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