In a recent cover story in Parade magazine, journalist and papal biographer Tad Szulc told Marcelino Ramos, a 59-year-old Mexican immigrant, that "ustedes son el futuro de America."

In case you never took high school Spanish, or have forgotten what you learned, that's Spanish for "you are the future of America." And, the you in ustedes is America's rapidly growing Latino population.

Most Americans are aware of this increasing Latino presence. What they may not be aware of is that, according to the Census Bureau, Latinos already constitute the largest "minority" group in the United States, and that doesn't include the nearly 4 million illegal immigrants or the 4 million American citizens living in Puerto Rico.

And the numbers will get even bigger. Within six years, the higher-than-average Latino birth rate, combined with legal and illegal immigration, will swell the number of Latinos in the United States to 50 million. That's right; more than one in six Americans will be of Latin American origin. The question is: How are these demographics going to change America?

To paraphrase the preacher, there is no end to the writing of books (and articles) about Latino immigration. The problem is that most of those who have written on the subject clearly have an ax to grind. There are studies and counterstudies on whether immigration is economically good or bad for America. However, this is one case where it's much more than the economy, estupido. It's a debate about culture. And here the two sides couldn't be further apart.

One camp views Latino immigration through a color de rosa lens. On the popular level, there are magazines written for and about Latinos where every woman looks like Salma Hayek and every man looks like Jimmy Smits. Every Latino featured is a professional and a pillar of his community.

You read paeans to the strong sense of family and commitment to tradition on the part of Latino immigrants, such as Szulc's article. The not-so-subtle message is "we need these folks to make up for increasing American decadence."

On the policy level, concerns about the large number of Latino immigrants are dismissed with analogies to the huge wave of immigration at the turn of the century. "We absorbed these folks," the authors say; "we can surely absorb the new immigrants."

The other side is, to put it gently, less than enthusiastic about the growing Latino presence. (That sound you hear is my back snapping in two as I bend over backwards to be fair.) Restrictionists such as Patrick Buchanan and Lawrence Auster fret about an America that, by the middle of the twenty-first century, will no longer be majority white. (Of course, I always thought that Spain was part of Europe. But, what do I know?) All of this is getting us nowhere and doesn't begin to tell us how Latino immigration is going to change America.

Before we can answer that question, we need the answers to some other questions: Why are these Latino immigrants coming to America? What has their experience been like? How has America changed them?

Amazingly, few people have bothered to ask the immigrants themselves these questions. That is, until Roberto Suro, a reporter at the Washington Post, interviewed them for his Strangers Among Us: How Latino Immigration Is Transforming America.

Suro, the American-born son of a Puerto Rican father and Ecuadorean mother, has written a sort of "Rough Guide" in reverse. Instead of giving us a guide for visitors, he has produced a guide to visitors. In the process, Suro deconstructs some of the mythology that dominates the immigration debate.

Take, for instance, the oft-heard analogy likening illegal immigration to invasion by a foreign power. After you have read Suro's chapter "From One Man, a Channel," you may find yourself recalling the words of Francois Truffaut in Close Encounters of the Third Kind: "They were invited!"

Suro tells the story of Juan Chanax, a Maya from San Cristobal, Guatemala. Chanax originally came to Houston so that his son, who has since died from leukemia, could receive better medical attention. Chanax eventually found work as a janitor at a Houston supermarket chain.

His hard work and diligence so impressed his employer that the employer began using Juan as a sort of employment agency. As janitorial jobs became open, Juan would send for suitable prospects in San Cristobal. Eventually, immigrants from San Cristobal replaced native-born janitors in the company.

If that was an invasion, then Juan's employers were a sort of fifth column. But the "invitation" isn't limited to employers. In 1986, Congress re formed our immigration laws. The most controversial provision was an amnesty for all illegal aliens who could prove that they had been in the country since before 1982.

In addition, at the behest of agricultural interests, two members of the California congressional delegation, Sen. Pete Wilson and Rep. Leon Panetta, created another amnesty program for people who claimed to have done seasonal agricultural work. This provision alone increased the number of people covered by the 1986 amnesty by 1.7 million.

Then, of course, there are the Cubans of Miami, whom we literally invited as a way of embarrassing Castro and his Soviet patrons. As Suro points out, no other immigrant group has been rendered the kind of assistance provided Cuban immigrants, especially those who arrived prior to 1980.

Okay, so we invited them. That still doesn't tell us anything about how Latino immigration is transforming America. Unfortunately, the subtitle promises more than Suro can deliver.

What Suro does best is to tell us how America is transforming the immigrants, not the other way around. For instance, there's Imelda, the 15-year-old daughter of Mexican immigrants living in the Magnolia section of Houston. We first meet Imelda on the night of her quinceanera, the Latino equivalent of a "sweet sixteen" party. Her parents couldn't be happier.

The next day, Imelda announces that she's pregnant, dropping out of school, and moving in with her boyfriend. As she told Suro, her parents would yell "act like a Mexican girl," to which she would reply, "I'm here now, and I'm gonna be like the other kids."

Likewise, the Maya immigrants discussed earlier now have a problem with their kids joining street gangs such as the Southwest Cholos. Like Imelda's parents, they have learned that coming to America means that your kids be come Americans, for good and for ill. This effect of American culture on their children has Juan Chanax and others thinking about returning to San Cristobal.

What these stories and others make clear is that America is in no danger of being a larger version of Miami. The children of these immigrants are assimilating as fast as they can get to Old Navy or The Gap. Still, many people aren't re assured by any of this. Something, they seem to be saying, is different this time around.

They're right. Part of the problem is the timing of the Latino migration. America has changed in two important ways since the earlier waves of immigrants arrived here. First, we've seen a weakening of what Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus have called "mediating institutions," such as churches, fraternal organizations, and labor unions. At the turn of the century, not only were these institutions stronger, they were often organized along ethnic lines.

These groups helped ease the transition between the old country and the New World. For instance, they helped new arrivals get jobs and learn to speak English, and even taught them the basics of American citizenship. It goes without saying that the ensuing century has seen a decline in these very institutions.

The second change involves American identity. Contrary to the assertions of some conservative commentators, American identity has never been ethnically defined. Yes, there was a time when a majority of Americans could trace their ancestry to the British Isles, but that hasn't been true in more than a century.

Instead, Americans have been bound together by a set of moral and political values. Some of them were rooted in the Western Christian tradition; others owed more to Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke. Whatever the case, they provided the basis for an American identity that allowed people to both maintain close ties to their ethnic roots and transcend the parochialism that these ties might produce.

Well, that has changed. If there is a moral consensus in America, I can't discern it. And in the absence of this moral consensus, politics has become, in the words of Alasdair MacIntyre, civil war carried on by other means.

While the immigrants obviously are not the cause of this fragmentation, it isn't unreasonable to ask whether they are going to make problems worse. Not likely. While many Latino activists have embraced the kind of identity politics that exacerbates this fragmentation, they are in a race with demographics that they can't win. Currently, more than 40 percent of all Latinos marry non-Latinos. (Two of my siblings and I have contributed to this trend.)

But even more than demographics, they are also fighting a losing battle with American popular culture, which has emerged as the great homogenizer. Notwithstanding the images you may have seen on television of young Mexican Americans marching under a Mexican flag to protest Proposition 187, the children of most immigrants are like Imelda, eager to throw off Mexico (or Cuba, El Salvador, etc.) and put on America, which means embracing our popular culture.

Of course, this is an impoverished vision of what it means to be an American: Madonna, the Backstreet Boys, and Leonardo DiCaprio instead of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. But it's undeniably American, and the kids of these Latino immigrants want it.

I come back to the question: How are these demographics going to change America? Well, my neighbors have no trouble pronouncing "Rivera," and people have no trouble with the idea of Salma Hayek or Jennifer Lopez as examples of American beauty. But, in the end, I suspect that the Latino immigrants, and their children, are the ones who will do most of the changing.

Roberto Rivera is a Wilberforce Fellow at Prison Fellowship.

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