Weatherhead University Professor Samuel P. Huntington, no stranger to controversy during his long career, has already been assailed for his forthcoming book, Who Are We.

Over the years, critics of political scientist Samuel P. Huntington have called him a fascist, skewered him as a war criminal and bombed his Harvard office.

Now, with Harvard students and faculty accusing him of xenophobia, Huntington, who is Weatherhead University professor, remains unfazed.

In the March edition of the magazine Foreign Policy, Huntington—who is also chairman of the Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies—warns that a tide of Mexican immigration to the U.S. is undermining “our Anglo-Protestant culture.”

“Unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclaves...and rejecting the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream,” Huntington writes.

Huntington’s latest book, Who Are We, is slated to be published in May, but the excerpts printed by Foreign Policy have already sparked a flurry of criticism on campus.

Leyla R. Bravo ’05, president of Fuerza Latina, says her group is “outraged” by Huntington’s article.

“He is discrediting an entire ethnicity as problematic to the U.S.,” she says. “He is creating a culture of intolerance.”

Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America David L. Carrasco wrote in an e-mail to The Crimson that he “prefers to wait until the full text is available before passing a full judgement, but if these excerpts are representative, the book appears to present a mediocre study, at best.”

Professor of Education and Social Policy Gary A. Orfield calls Huntington’s essay “a disgraceful example of the kind of anti-immigrant attitudes that appear recurrently in American history.”

But Huntington dismisses the attacks.

“If you want to get into slander, you can get into slander,” Huntington says. “Obviously there is nothing racist about it.”

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Who Are We, according to Huntington, “is not a policy-oriented book,” but rather a work aiming to spark “national discussion and debate” over immigration.

He says that America’s ideals of liberty are deeply rooted in the country’s cultural heritage.

“Would America be the country that it had been and that it pretty much still is today if in the 17th and 18th centuries it had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish and Portuguese Catholics? The answer is, no, it wouldn’t. It would be Quebec, Mexico or Brazil,” Huntington says.