Just off Keeneland Parkway between Dallas and Arlington, there is a quiet neighborhood with rows of neat houses with tidy, landscaped lawns.

In one of these houses, over a plate of homemade chorizo, tortillas and spicy salsa, 44-year-old Felipe Hernandez remembers when he first moved into the neighborhood 11 years earlier.

“There were a lot of white families, but then when more Spanish people and black people moved here they left,” he said. “Now there are only two white families in the neighborhood, and they keep to themselves. I don’t know what they think is going to happen.”

This pattern of ‘white flight’ has been taking place for decades in the United States, first during the migration of blacks into white suburbs and now during the new wave of Latin immigration.

There are almost monthly polls probing the collective psyche of America on immigration, and the results are always steadily split.

Historically when this nation has been at war, as it is now, Americans are less inclined to welcome outsiders.

While border security is a concern, U.S. natives are more and more opposed to immigration because they fear what that change will do to American culture at large.

In April, Arizona became the banner state for nativism by signing a bill making it legal for law enforcement personnel to request I.D. from suspected illegal immigrants and detain them without proof of legal residency.

This law set off countless protests from immigrants and sympathizers in the United States. However, a recent poll on Fox News showed that 59 percent of Americans are in favor of the law. 

In 2009 the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit civil rights organization, reported that more than 324 active groups in the United States believe that immigrants are taking advantage of the United States’ free system and “brown washing” American culture.

Dennis Cordell, associate dean for general education and history professor at SMU, has done extensive research in immigrant communities in Dallas and France. He believes this nativism is unfounded.

“First of all, I think the basic premise that there’s a single American identity that’s been enduring for the last 200, 250 years…is a wrong one,” he said.

“If we asked people what it was to be American in 1790 [it would be] very different from what you get when you ask people today what it means to be an American.”

How does one define American culture?

On one July 4, Americans responded to MSNBC’s question, “What does America mean to you?” The quotes below are just a sampling of the responses:

Not one individual mentioned specific physical cultural indicators like food, language, dress or religion.

“It means so much freedom that I just can’t stand it”;

“Being with my family and breathing fresh air”;

“Equality is one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen”;

“Freedom, diversity, respect and tolerance”;

“If you think things aren’t going right, you can stand up and say it.”

Felipe Hernandez now understands and shares these sentiments, though when he was younger his perception was different.

“My parents made that decision [to move to the U.S] for me. I didn’t. When I was young, America was Rambo, movies and Las Vegas. I didn’t know,” he said. 

He and his wife, Irma, grew up in the central-western Mexican state of Jalisco, one of the most developed states in terms of culture, economics and trade.

Hernandez’s hometown had huge street festivals on Mexico’s Independence day, when families stayed out late and danced all night to Mariachi bands.

Familial relationships were close knit, and life kept pace with the Pacific Ocean.

However, Hernandez’s family found it difficult to maintain the most basic standard of living.

“My grandpa was a farmer, and [when] my dad was younger he started his own business you know, he sold chickens and stuff like that,” Hernandez recalled.

“One day the chicken’s got sick, and he had borrowed some money to buy the chickens, but all the chickens died, and he had to pay [back] all the money,” he continued.

So one of his friends said, ‘You know what, let’s go to the United States. There is better opportunities.’ At that time they were giving visas, like a permit, to come to the United States to work in the fields for six months, and he came so he could pay all the money.”

In more prosperous times, America had always needed more workers to support agricultural industries, and many Mexicans were lured to the United States with the agricultural worker’s visa.

For six months out of the year, laborers could legally enter the United States and work in fields.

However, after one year, Hernandez’s father longed to do something that would allow him to use his hands without the back-breaking labor. A friend in Texas told him about jobs working in air-conditioning repair, so when he finished his six-month stint at a farm in California, he left for Texas and stayed.

Not too long after he transitioned from a legal worker to an illegal immigrant, the U.S. government enacted Immigration Reform and the Control Act of 1986.

This reform granted amnesty to illegal immigrants who had been living in the U.S. continuously before January 1, 1986; through this bill, Hernandez’s father got permanent residency status.

When Hernandez was 11 years old, he moved to Texas with his father.

The rest of his family was in no rush to move to the United States. In fact, he recalls with laughter that his father moved him primarily because he was a trouble maker..

Living in the United States for 33 years, Hernandez, who is a proud American citizen—his citizenship certificate sits in a silver frame in the living room—feels that America represents opportunities for his family, especially for his two girls Irma,4, and Alexa ,8.

The girls, who busy themselves by putting together a My Little Pony puzzle in the living room, speak “Spanglish” at home and English everywhere else.

Hernandez would love for his girls to speak Spanish and English fluently but isn’t concerned that English is their primary language. He is more concerned, like most American parents, with giving them every opportunity he can.

“I tell my daughters, ‘ Get good grades, you can be anything you want to be. You can get a loan from the bank to go to school and do anything.’ Where we come from, we don’t get those choices,” he said. “I’m trying to give my girls a better opportunity, a better life.”

Most illegal immigrants come to the United States to do just that – have a better life, escape poverty and the lack of general freedoms. This doesn’t sit well with some Americans who believe that the United States should enforce the law no matter the circumstances.

Paul Zoltan, an immigration lawyer and coordinator of the Dallas section of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, believes that mentality is what is wrong with the American understanding of the illegal immigrant experience.

“From a very narrow, moralistic standpoint, you can say they are all scofflaws, and whatever happens to them is reaping the harvest from the seeds they’ve sown,” he said.

“I just think that at some point you have to wonder how far we want to go to punish them. It’s almost like cathartic, to turn up the pain, to make them more and more uncomfortable, and less and less secure, knowing full damn well you’d have to dismember some of them before they’d go back; because what they want is work or basic physical safety,” he said.

Dr. Rick Halperin, director of SMU’s Human Rights Education Program also asserts that this argument goes against basic American principles and cultural history.

“It’s pretty paradoxical for a nation of immigrants and for a nation that was founded on people coming here for an idea based on enlightened thoughts of freedom, justice [and] opportunity,” he said.

He also points to what he believes is the root cause of this issue.

“The average American in my opinion doesn’t even follow these issues, they’re generically ignorant of [who] immigrants are, about global geography and world affairs as it plays out day-to-day from around the word. Most Americans couldn’t find three quarters of the world on a map,” Halperin said.

“I don’t have a very solid opinion of the average Americans concept of… human rights or civil rights in this country, we just don’t. There’s no national dialogue of this subject in this country,” he said.

Hernandez believes that freedom is the siren call of America, and that immigrants are not trying to force their cultures on the United States. 

He said his family celebrates Mexican traditions during Christmas, but for the most part, they have absorbed an American way of life.

He agrees with Americans who say that immigrants should learn English and become acculturated. Continuing to allow bilingualism only enables immigrants to cling to their native tongue.

“When you come here to the United States you have to force yourself, so when you put the signs in Spanish, they never do,” he said.

Even older immigrants like his father, who spent more time working to feed his family than going to school to learn English, have to try, he insists.

Zoltan says there are no truer believers of the American way of life than those who chose to be in this country.

“Our culture is a juggernaut. Everywhere else in the world they’re worried about America subsuming their culture, and we sit here and we’re frightened that there are some signs on Davis written in Spanish,” Bolton said.

Hernandez doesn’t think that native-born Americans understand that immigrants just want to live a peaceful American life.

“I’ve seen a lot of racism before, you know; people would say ‘Hey, look at that Mexican.’ Now I can say, ‘You know what? I’m like you, I’m a human being in this country, too. We work double as hard to be here.'”

Even though he is legal, he complains that the media makes it seem as though all Mexicans are illegal and trying to overrun the country and superimpose their culture on Americans.

“Anywhere you go, they see me as Mexican. No matter how we do our hair, or how we look we’ll always be that person. They’re not going to see me like an American; they don’t see me as a citizen,” Hernandez said.