NewsMax .com
Wednesday, Mar. 17, 2004

In the academic's latest tome, he flashes the warning that the Latinos are coming and are already here, "washing your dishes, looking after your children" and -- along the way -- denuding a once proud, unified country of everything that held it together.

"Will the U.S. remain a country with a single national language and a core Anglo-Protestant culture?" Huntington asks in an essay entitled "The Hispanic Challenge," published in the journal Foreign Policy.

"By ignoring this question, Americans acquiesce to their eventual transformation into two peoples with two cultures and two languages," Huntington wrote.

"The single most immediate and most serious challenge to America's traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially from Mexico, and the fertility rates of these immigrants compared to black and white natives," the professor notes.

"The assimilation successes of the past are unlikely to be duplicated with the contemporary flood of immigrants from Latin America."

Writing about alleged assaults on the American culture is nothing new for Huntington. In 1993, in another work he identified Islam as the biggest danger to global stability.

That year the Harvard academic and one-time member of the U.S. national security council published an essay entitled "The Clash of Civilizations." In it, he reasoned that in the new post-cold war world, the "fundamental source of conflict will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic.

"The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural." He identified Islam, with its population bulge and transnational appeal, as the most likely source of this conflict.

In 1996, Professor Huntington wrote a book with the same title.

With the World Trade Center attacks of September 11 2001, the five-year-old book jumped up to the New York Times bestseller list.

"Racists in America must be having a field day," said the Miami Herald last week. "At long last they have found a world-renowned intellectual to rationalize their resentment against America's rapidly growing Hispanic community."

Since the appearance of the extract, Huntington has kept off the skyline.

"It's only a small part of this book, you know," a member of his Harvard staff told the Guardian. "I wish he wouldn't do this. He writes these things then goes off and leaves me to answer the calls."

Editor's note: