Structural conditions made US immigration politics less intense than Europe’s in the 1990s

Evidence

The immigration issue came to the fore somewhat later in the United States than it did in Europe and did not generate quite the same emotional intensity. The United States has always been a country of immigrants, has so conceived itself, and historically has developed highly successful processes for assimilating newcomers. In addition, in the 1980s and 1990s unemployment was considerably lower in the United States than in Europe, and fear of losing jobs was not a decisive factor shaping attitudes toward immigration. The sources of American immigration were also more varied than in Europe, and thus the fear of being swamped by a single foreign group was less nationally, although real in particular localities. The cultural distance of the two largest migrant groups from the host culture was also less than in Europe: Mexicans are Catholic and Spanish-speaking; Filipinos, Catholic and English-speaking. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 539

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that US assimilation ‘historically developed highly successful processes’ — contested then and now, and Huntington’s own thesis elsewhere worries about a Mexican-Chicano fault line, creating tension within his own framework.
• XREF: Connects to the chapter on the cultural divide US-Mexico (Chapter 4), where Huntington treats Mexican immigration as a civilizational fault line — making this paragraph’s confident assimilationism self-contradictory.