Hispanics and the US: A proposal

Yesterday, in major cities throughout the US, there were massive demonstrations by recent immigrants to the country– documented and undocumented– and by their allies, to protest a new set of anti-immigrant laws passed by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. The vast majority of those who participated in the demonstrations were what is known here as “Hispanics”– that is, people coming from places where Spanish is a common lingua franca, though actually for many of these people an indigenous (pre-Columbian) language may well have been their mother tongue. (Check, for example, this language map.)
Veteran WaPo columnist Eugene Robinson, an African-American, wrote today:

White Americans, and black Americans too, are going to have to get used to sharing this country — sharing it fully — with brown Americans. Things are going to be different. Deal with it.
The most important legacy of the histrionic debate over immigration reform will not be any piece of legislation, whether enlightened or medieval. It will be the big demonstrations held in cities throughout the country over the past few weeks — mass protests staged by and for a minority whose political ambition is finally catching up with its burgeoning size. In the metaphorical sense, Latinos have arrived.

He is quite right. The politics of this country will never be the same again. (Eat your heart out, Sam Huntington.)
It is not only the size and nationwide reach of yesterday’s mobilization that indicates to me that this mainly-Hispanic movement is one of seriousness and resilience. There was also the impressive discipline and focus that the participants showed in expressing themselves, this time, as determinedly pro-US.
Last week there were some precursor demonstrations that caused concern among quite a lot of “Anglos” here because many participants were carrying the flags of their nations of origin– a sea of Mexican, Salvadoran flags and flags from other central-American nations.
But yesterday, at all the demonstrations I saw, the overwhelmingly main motif was the US flag– hoisted high, rendered on bandana, painted on people’s faces: everywhere, the Stars and Strips. And the theme was quite focused: a desire to be included. (Sort of the same effect as when participants in the large Hizbullah demonstrations in Lebanon in March 2005 all carried the national flag rather than Hizbullah’s own yellow party banners. The same political smarts, focus, and mass discipline.)
This country of some 292 million people now has an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants living and working here– the vast majority of them people from Mexico and the seven small countries of Central America. And they are not just in the borderlands: throughout the whole country they do the hard work on the construction sites, in the restaurants, in agriculture and a number of other fields in which US employers are just too downright stingy to offer anything like a decent wage that most US citizens would accept.
All US citizens benefit from the lower prices that the presence of the immigrants allows us– though their presence also keeps wages depressed in numerous occupations…
The US-Mexico border is too long, and the wage differential between north and south of it too great for anyone to imagine ever being able to stop the flow of undocumented workers across it altogether… Plus, we’re supposed to have a “Free Trade Agreement” with Mexico (and Canada), though that hasn’t succeeded in providing very much of the promised stimulation to Mexico’s economy.
So here’s my proposal. Why don’t we just forget about continually trying to upgrade the fortifications along the US-Mexico border, and start discussing a vision of a Union of North and Central America that would work more or less like the EU? Including, crucially, with complete freedom of movement of people, goods, and investment from the Arctic North of Canada right down to Panama’s south-eastern border?
(For starters, that border– with Colombia– would be a lot easier to police effectively than the US’s sprawling border with Mexico.)
The population balance would look like this (2003 figures):

Canada– 31.6 mn
USA– 292.3 mn
Mexico– 104.3 mn
Guatemala– 12.0 mn
Belize– 0.3 mn
Honduras– 6.9 mn
El Salvador– 6.6 mn
Nicaragua– 5.3 mn
Costa Rica– 4.2 mn
Panama– 3.1 mn

So there would be a total of around 467 million people involved, just under two-thirds of them (us) being the increasingly ethnically diverse bunch of folks who make up the US citizenry. Around 143 million of the people would be from the eight Hispanic countries. And then there are the 31.6 million people (Anglophones, Francophones, and First Nations peoples) of Canada.
It could be an exciting and very constructive mix! As in the EU, members of all the different groups would need to continue to figure out what their ethnic and cultural identity means to them, and how to preserve and celebrate it. The richer societies of the north should do a lot to invest in helping to build up the conditions of life for the people in the (still reeling-from-conflict) communities of Central America. Indeed, maybe the Central Americans should get together and start demanding reaparations from the US for all the terrible damages the US-inspired wars inflicted on them during the Cold War.
And we in North America would certainly find our society and politics enriched by the energies (including the political organizing energies) of our hermanas and hermanos from the south…
Equally importantly, pursuing this kind of a goal of building up the conditions of life in Central America (and Mexico) could provide a wonderful “purpose” for the US citizenry at the time that it becomes clear that seeking our national “purpose” through the pursuit of military adventures in various places is counter-productive and self-defeating…
One last point. I’m an immigrant in this country. I came here because I married a U.S. citizen, someone born to citizens of (mainly) ethnic-German and Swiss heritage. All of us here except for the “Native Americans” are in one sense deeply illegal immigrants… in that our entry into the country was always arranged and protected through the agency of a clearly colonial venture. Meanwhile, it is clear that the vast majority of the “Hispanic” immigrants here are people of mainly indigenous origins– “brown” Americans, in Eugene Robinson’s words…but definitely, people whose ancestors have been on this continent for a lot longer than any whitefolks have. So in one way, it looks like pure whitefolk arrogance if the English-speaking peoples here are now busy trying to keep them out.
… Well, this is just a suggestion. I’m sure there are plenty of people in Mexico and Central America who would be wary of too close an integration with Gringo-land. But it’s definitely a conversation we all ought to be starting to hold. (And it’s probably a whole lot easier of a conversation to hold than the similar conversation the European nations ought to be having right now with their North African neighbors…. )