After months of agonising, President George W Bush finally announced plans to introduce an additional 6,000 guards along the US border with Mexico.

I know I have been an antsy, Bush-bashing freak for sometime, but this is only true as far as the president's foreign policy goes. When it comes to domestic affairs of the United States, there are areas in which I do find myself concurring with the currently least popular American president in history.

For instance, Bush can be extremely un-neocon on the issue of undocumented persons. In early 2004, he cautiously mulled over some sort of amnesty for the illegals, which alarmed the highest echelon of the government. The opinion-sounding exercise within his administration was abruptly halted, and the plan still-born. I regret this non-starter, but will always commend Bush for his empathy in this aspect.

In its place, Bush and some Republican moderates, including Senator John McCain, came up with a guest worker programme that could provide temporary legal status for some of the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the US, which could lead to citizenship eventually. Still, this was not enough to assuage the fear of their fellow Republicans, who demanded a more restrictive stance.

But the fact that Bush was at one time willing to consider such politically risky and incendiary move shows that he was caught in a dilemma. On one hand, he recognised the tremendous contribution made by the immigrant community and would hope to reward it for its hard work. Hailing from Texas, which shelters one of the largest portions of illegals in the country, the president knows full well how much these hardworking yet undocumented labourers are under-appreciated. The same goes for his brother Jeff Bush, Governor of Florida, another state 'infested' with foreign workers, legal or illegal alike.

But Bush was hamstrung by the so-called White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant (Wasp) middle classes his major constituency - who had grown increasingly uneasy about the presence of the predominantly Catholic and Spanish-speaking migrants in their midst.

Considered a burden

According to the latest findings by the Pew Hispanic Center , which conducts regular surveys on immigration issues, although the Latinos are considered hardworking and family-centered, they are negatively perceived by 56% of the Republican voters to be a burden on the country.

When hundreds of thousands of immigrants took to the streets of Los Angeles on May 1 this year, their effective and powerful political clout and mobilisation shocked the nation. It was a movement to confront the proposed legislation to make illegal immigration a felony. Openly challenging the received wisdom of the US being an English-speaking country, many of the protestors were also singing the American anthem in Spanish.

And this act of defiance was directed at Bush also, who had said a few days earlier that "the national anthem ought to be sung in English, and I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English and they ought to learn to sing the national anthem in English ".

This latest civic unrest in the US is no doubt indicative of a paradigm shift. In his book Who Are We? , the Harvard political scientist Samuel P Huntington argues forcefully that American identity has always been defined in terms of a distinct Anglo-Saxon culture and creed, the key elements of which include the English language, Christianity, religious commitment, English concepts of the rule of law, dissenting Protestant values of individualism, and the work ethic.

In this controversial book, he sees the Hispanic community as shaking the cornerstone of the American nation, although many perhaps are at a loss as to why these industrious, non-English speaking immigrants should inevitably clash with the "Protestant" work ethic per se.

Whereas the previous waves of immigration, be they Afro-American, German, Irish or Asian, have readily embraced this American identity, the true cannot be said of the Hispanic migrants, who in his view are "so hostile or resistant to sharing the common American language, civic rites and virtues upon which our republican self-governance depends", that they constitutes "a major potential threat to the cultural and possibly political integrity of the US".

In short, an epitome of the clash of civilizations.

In addition, Huntington lambasts the academic and cultural elites for denationalizing American politics and rejecting patriotism, and accuses the big international corporatists for putting profits before the country. Believing himself to be on the side of the "Thank God for America" general public, he is dismayed over the globalising forces that erode the loyalty of the elites to the nation.

Painful reality

The recent protests by the immigrants across the US were also characterised by the ostensible absence of the Afro-American participants. This is not surprising. For years, the black community, thanks to its tragic history of slavery, has been a dark spot in the American conscience.

Yet the painful reality over the past two decades shows that many of the three-Ds jobs dirty, difficult, and dangerous have been going to the Latino migrants, who are willing to work longer hours for lesser pay. Their antipathy towards the movement was a natural result.

The day after the Hispanics rallied across the US in support of amnesty for illegal aliens, Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson, a conservative black pastor who campaigns against a more generous and liberal immigration policy, warned that the protests were an attempt to intimidate lawmakers and the citizenry to change the laws to grant amnesty to illegals, and saw any comparison between these "lawbreakers" and the civil rights movement in the 1950s as an insult to the blacks.

As his white compatriots, the Reverend was also enraged by the singing of Nuestro Himno, the Spanish version of the national anthem. Like Huntington, he is unnerved by the prospect of two Americas: One English, the other Spanish.

What remains unsaid is that the black elites are fearful that their historical status as a victimised community would one day be usurped by the newer immigrants. Given the strength of the Hispanics, this could come to pass in a not too distant future.

Over here in Malaysia, I shudder at the thought of singing Negaraku in any language other than Malay. In a country where Tamil and Chinese, despite the sizeable populations who speak these two languages as mother-tongue, are still regarded as bahasa asing, who dares to imagine otherwise?

Meanwhile, if the oil-rich President Bush is dead against singing the Star Spangled Banner in Spanish, how would I be so nave to expect the Mercedes-driving, cigar-smoking Umno leaders who continue to claim to fight for the downtrodden Malays to look benign at a Tamil or Mandarin version of Negaraku ?