“A Nation Without Borders is not a Nation” – Ronald Reagan

IMMIGRATION HISTORY

The great myth of American immigration is that there has always been an open door to the United States.  This is simply not the case. After the declaration of Independence in 1776, immigration remained low until the 1830s, and was mainly European American in origin. The first immigration law of 1790 required newcomers to be “free white persons”. The 1840s saw the first great waves of immigrants, coming from Ireland, a nation gripped in famine, after which there was a lull for some time. Between 1882 and 1917, a number of immigration restrictions against Asians were enacted, essentially barring them from U. S. citizenship. Between 1890 and 1920, there was another great wave of immigrations, mainly from Southern and Eastern Europe. Starting in 1921, however, there were a number of restrictions placed on immigration, and it fell to very low levels for decades. In 1954, the U. S. launched “Operation Wetback”, which repelled a large number of illegal immigrants from Mexico and effectively stopped illegal immigration.

Thanks to low immigration, the swamp of cheap labor was largely drained after the 1920s, and America became a fundamentally middle-class society, and our many European ethnic groups were brought together into a common national culture. By the early 1960s, the nation was almost 90% White, with a distinct Anglo-Saxon, Christian culture. Economic growth was strong, and there was certainly no desire by most Americans for new waves of Immigration or a change in the ethnic balance of the nation.

However, there were various well-funded, persistent and powerful political groups within the US who did seek just such a change. In 1965, a bill was brought before Congress, sold to the public as part of the civil rights legacy and final wish of JFK, who had been assassinated two years prior. The immigration act’s chief spokesman was Senator Ted Kennedy, brother of the slain president. The bill’s sponsors tried to assure a jittery public that it would not fundamentally affect the nation.

Speaking on the Senate floor during the debates, the Senator promised, “First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually…Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset…. Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia…. In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think… It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.”

Although at the time, polls showed 57% of Americans opposed the act, it passed through Congress and was signed into law, and what started as a trickle soon turned into a torrent. Tragically, but also ironically, one of the third world immigrants who arrived after the law was passed assassinated Ted Kennedy’s other brother, Robert.

In hindsight, Kennedy’s triumphant words in 1965 were more prophesy than denial, for the future did unfold just as he promised it would not. The Act resulted in a flood of new immigration from non-European nations that changed the ethnic make-up of the United States. Immigration doubled between 1965 and 1970 and doubled again between 1970 and 1990, the flood continuing to the present day, almost all of it from the third world. Today, U.S. government policy is literally dissolving the people and electing a new one, in the words of the playwright Bertolt Brecht.

POPULATION SHIFTS

European Americans are becoming an ever smaller part of the population as people fleeing Third-World misery pour across our borders.  Another important factor in this decline is the White birth rate, as children are the future of any society. European Americans do not reproduce themsleves, with an average of just 1.87 children per woman by (2.1 are needed for a population to remain stable). On the other hand, Hispanics, the largest minority group, have an average of 3 children per woman, while blacks have 2.13.

If American immigration policy remains unchanged, and white fertility rates stay low, your grandchildren will certainly be minorities in their own country, and you, yourself, have a good chance of living out your last years in a nation that is predominantly non-white. The US Census bureau reports that European Americans will be reduced to minority status by 2042. Whites are projected to continue to decline beyond that date, and by are expected to fall to just 25% of the population by 2090. That would be a very grim reality for our great grandchildren and the generations to come. A hundred years from today, Whites and European culture may well be just furtive remnants on a continent they once dominated.

ALIEN NATION (ABRIDGED)

By Peter Brimelow (1995)

America’s “birthright citizenship” is rare in the world. Even if you are born in a manger, the Japanese, French and Germans say in effect, that still doesn’t make you a bale of hay. Currently, two thirds of the births in Los Angeles County hospitals are to illegal-immigrant mothers. In fact, a whole minor industry seems to have been created, with 15 percent of new Hispanic mothers reporting they crossed the border specifically to give birth, of whom a quarter said that their motive was to ensure U.S. citizen-ship for their child. It is clear that the United States has lost control of its borders in every sense. A series of institutional accidents, of which birthright citizenship is just one, has essentially robbed Americans of the power to determine who, and how many, can enter their national family, make claims on it … and exert power over it. The heart of the problem: immigration. This is because it’s not just illegal immigration that is out of control. So is legal immigration. U. S. law in effect treats immigration as a sort of imitation civil right, extended to an indefinite group of foreigners who have been selected arbitrarily and with no regard to American interests.

In January 1993, a Pakistani applicant for political asylum (and, simultaneously, for amnesty as an illegal immigrant) opens fire on employees entering CIA headquarters, killing two and wounding three! In February 1993, a gang of Middle Easterners (most illegally overstaying after entering on non-immigrant visas—one banned as a terrorist but admitted on a tourist visa in error) blow up New York’s World Trade Center, killing six and injuring more than 1,000!! In December 1993, a Jamaican immigrant (admitted as a student but stayed, illegal status automatically regularized after marriage to a U. S. citizen) opens fire on commuters on New York’s Long Island Rail Road, killing six and wounding 19!!! WHAT’S GOING ON??!!?

Lets examine the education crisis. Americans are used to hearing that their schools don’t seem to be providing the quality of education that foreigners get. Fewer of them know that the U.S. education system is also very expensive by international standards. Virtually none of them know anything about the impact of immigration on that education system.

Yet the impact of immigration is clearly serious. For example, in 1990 almost one child in every twenty enrolled in American public schools either could not speak English or spoke it so poorly as to need language-assistance programs. This number is increasing with striking speed: only six years earlier, it had been one child in thirty-one. My research shows that current immigration:

1. is dramatically larger, less skilled and more divergent from the American majority than anything that was anticipated or desired
2. is probably not beneficial economically-and is certainly not necessary
3. is attended by a wide and increasing range of negative consequences, from the physical environment to the political
4. is bringing about an ethnic and racial transformation in America without precedent in the history of the world-an astonishing social experiment launched with no particular reason to expect success

Many modern American intellectuals are just unable to handle a plain historical fact: that the American nation has always had a specific ethnic core. And that core has been white. In fact, although Pennsylvania was perhaps the least English of the Thirteen Colonies, in 1790 white Americans as a whole were 60 percent English, almost 80 percent British, 98 percent Protestant. (And, of course, some 20 percent of the population were voiceless black slaves.21) It is ludicrously false to say that America’s historic “essential nature” is open-door immigration. Myth-manufacturing of this type amounts to tricking Americans out of their own identity. The plaque on the Statue of Liberty which says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” was placed there in 1881, over a century after the Declaration of Independence.

The U. S. has always had a limited immigration policy. For example, the first naturalization law, in 1790, stipulated that an applicant must be a “free white person.” Blacks became full citizens only after the Civil War. Restrictions on Asians becoming citizens were finally dropped only after World War II. Maybe America should not have been like this. But it was. And there are other differences between current and historic immigration policy:

1. Then, immigrants came overwhelmingly from Europe, no matter how different they seemed at the time; now, immigrants are overwhelmingly visible minorities from the Third World.
2. Then, there was an aggressive public and private “Americanization” campaign ; now, there’s “multiculturalism”-i.e., immigrants are officially not expected to assimilate.
3. Then, there was no welfare state and immigrants who failed often went home; now, there is a welfare state-and fewer immigrants leave.

A nation, of course, is an interlacing of ethnicity and culture. Individuals of any ethnicity or race might be able to acculturate to a national community. And the American national community has certainly been unusually assimilative. But nevertheless, the massive ethnic and racial transformation that public policy is now inflicting on America is totally new-and in terms of how Americans have traditionally viewed themselves, quite revolutionary.

Pointing out this reality may be embarrassing to starry-eyed immigration enthusiasts who know no history. But it cannot reasonably be shouted down as “racist.” Or “un-American.” Immigration is indeed a very emotional issue for many Americans. Ellis Island is on the point of replacing the Winning of the West as the defining American experience. Anyone who has got into an immigration debate with, for ex-ample, Hispanic activists must be instantly aware that some of them really are consumed by the most intense racial animosity-directed against whites.

Why am I concerned about race? Ah yes. Ahem. The most common, and the most dangerous, reaction. You have to be careful with this one. My son, Alexander, is a white male with blue eyes and blond hair. He has never discriminated against anyone in his little life (except possibly young women visitors whom he suspects of being baby-sitters). But public policy now discriminates against him. The sheer size of the so-called “protected classes” that are now politically favored, such as Hispanics, will be a matter of vital importance as long as he lives. And their size is basically determined by immigration.

“So what? Why do you care so much about race?”

At present, concern about immigration is regularly dismissed as racism. But historically, it has quite often been a progressive issue in America. Labor unions, fearing cheap labor, have been active restrictionists. The American Federation of Labor’s Samuel Gompers, himself an immigrant from England, was particularly critical of the 1890-1920 Great Wave. It is very likely that widespread immigration negatively affects low income natives, particularly blacks. Americans ought to be asked whether they actually desire this massive change.

It is clear that those who create public policy are very aware of the effects of immigration. Henry Cisneros, former HUD secretary happily declared, “These population dynamics will result in the “browning” of America, the Hispanization of America. It is already happening and it is inescapable”. Doris Meissner, Commissioner of the INS confirmed approvingly, “We are transforming ourselves…”.

Annual legal immigration runs between 1 and 2 million per year, counting the 100,000 refugees and the 100,000 applying for political asylum. And the weird workings of the American legal system have made it virtually impossible to expel asylum seekers once they land on U.S. soil. We don’t know how many illegal immigrants there are. The Border Patrol estimates it catches about a third of all illegal immigrants as they attempt to cross the border. Since 1.3 million were apprehended in 1993, this suggests a remarkable 2 to 3 million illegal immigrants may have succeeded in entering the country in 1993. The INS bureaucracy still grinds through its rituals. But the reality remains as President Ronald Reagan described it in 1983: “This country has lost control of its borders. ” “And,” Reagan added, “no country can sustain that kind of position.”

In fact, the entire effort to secure the border against illegal immigration has been haphazard and nonsensical. For example, the federal government has begun installing powerful floodlights along a four-mile stretch of the U.S.-Mexican border, west of the San Ysidro port of entry, where illegal crossings routinely occur. The lighting project was approved in 1992, but it was delayed while experts studied whether the powerful lamps would disturb the nesting habits of the federally protected California gnatcatcher. What’s wrong with this picture?

Every sundown at Virginia Street in San Ysidro, over by Stewart’s Bridge across the Tijuana River or at any of a number of other jumping-off points along the Chula Vista sector of the U.S.-Mexican border south of San Diego, you can see crowds of illegal immigrants gathering – or “staging,” in the language of the U.S. Border Patrol – waiting for dark so they can cross. They are already illegal because many of these staging points are well within U.S. territory. The Border Patrol has been compelled to fall back to a more defensible line. The routine is so well established that vendors regularly arrive to sell the illegals food and drink. It is so blatant that they will openly light fires to keep warm.

The Border Patrol knows to within seconds each evening when the rush will start. It is so predictable that it could be shown live on the nightly TV news – if the national networks in faraway New York City were interested. And up on the ridge, despite the dark, the Border Patrol officers watching through the powerful truck-mounted infrared scope swiveling on its twenty-foot camera tower can quite clearly see any illegal crossings within a five-mile range. They show up as ghostly white figures on a softly glowing screen.

Usually, the illegals start to trickle across in small groups of two or three, dodging through the brush of no-man’s-land. Occasion-ally, however, a large group will simply charge isolated officers and overwhelm them. The Border Patrol calls this a “banzai.” If objects are thrown at the officers, as they frequently are on the border, this is “getting rocked.” The Border Patrol knows, also, that most of the illegals will get through. There are just too many illegals and too few officers.

Yet seeing the border also brings home how easy securing it could be. The new nineteen-mile fence from the coast-a clumsy metal barrier, you can see where the illegals dig under it daily like raccoons-ends in the Otay Mesa; a cruel-looking desert wall. This is terrain you could die in. Some illegals have. Only an estimated 200 to 250 miles of the U.S.-Mexican border are thought to be pass-able at all. The problem is far from infinite.

Similarly, when the dogs start barking in the houses just below while you are watching through the infrared scope, you can actually see the ghostly illegals and their guides filing down the canyons suddenly hesitate and stop. Which provokes a simple question: Why doesn’t the Border Patrol use dogs?

This shocks your young guide. “Have you ever seen a police dog in a crowd?” he says. He thinks the solution, reasonably enough, is to hire more Border Patrol officers.

Well, yes. But, thinking about his reaction, several questions occur. Such as: why is it acceptable to use police dogs on American citizens but not on foreign invaders? And: the dogs don’t have to eat the illegals. They could be trained differently, to hold them – or just to track them. But the real answer is something your guide has told you earlier. The illegals (or at least their professional smugglers) are acutely attuned to U.S. Border Patrol activities. They even time their crossings to coincide with the duty shifts of officers they regard as lazy. To paraphrase the ads for the movie Field of Dreams: if these people hear dogs baying, they will not come.

When the immigrants’ absolute numbers in these localities pass a certain point, their communities achieve a critical mass. Their alien languages and cultures become, at least for a while, self-sustaining. And the natives start asking themselves: “Are we still living in America?” For example, the Cubanization of the Miami area has become legendary. But Cuban immigration since 1960 has been only about 650,000-a fraction of the 19 million legal immigrants who have come to the United States since 1960. The Cuban community in Florida, with its American-born offspring, is probably about 500,000. It has been, however, enough to transform the area.

“For the better!” immigrant enthusiasts say. Maybe-although it would be interesting to know what the Americans living in southern Florida would have said in 1960 … had they been asked. Whether the transformation was for better or worse, however, is irrelevant. The point is this: quite small absolute numbers of Cuban immigrants were sufficient to create this enclave. And the post-1965 immigrant influx has been quite large enough to create many such enclaves-turning America into a sort of Swiss cheese.

Today, the United States is the third most populous country on earth, after China and India. Regardless of whether the current level of immigration relative to U.S. population is historically high, it is still high enough to mean that in recent years, the United States has been taking almost half of all the legal immigrants going to the developed world. In other words, half of all the legal immigrants in the developed world are zeroing in on a country with 7 percent of the world’s land surface and less than 5 percent of its population. No wonder the boat is starting to rock.

As we noted above, after immigrants arrive in the United States, they have children too. In fact, in some cases they seem to have children at a faster pace than the native-born Americans. So the true impact of immigration is the proportion of immigrants and their descendants in the American population. Make no mistake: what we are looking at here is a demographic event of seismic proportions. “Oh, but they’ll assimilate,” insist the immigration enthusiasts. “They always have. ” To which the only possible answer is: they’d better.  The post-l 965 immigration is not only much bigger than expected; it is also less skilled. And it is becoming even less so. Even worse, the evidence is that relative lack of skills among the post-1965 immigrants seems likely to be repeated among their children.

But the issue is much more acute today. For the first time, virtually all immigrants are racially distinct “visible minorities.” They come not from Europe, previously the common homeland even for the 1890-1920 immigrants about which Americans were so nervous. Instead, these new immigrants are from completely different, and arguably incompatible, cultural traditions. And, as we have seen, they are coming in such numbers that their impact on America is enormous-inevitably within the foreseeable future, they will transform it.

A white minority is not the only aspect of the ethnic revolution, as Hispanics became the largest minority, replacing blacks. Black political leaders, such as the Reverend Jesse Jackson, seem to think that all minorities are allies and potential recruits to the “Rainbow Coalition.” But, as usual with immigration, enormous majorities of ordinary blacks take a much dimmer view. They quite reasonably worry that the new minorities are rivals out-competing them and muscling in on programs, such as affirmative action, that were originally designed to help blacks alone.

Some would reply, “I think it’s all happened before. Look at us and the Indians!” Many Americans have only a hazy notion even of immigration mythology. They often assume that America’s historic immigration has been larger, more diverse and, above all, much less interspersed with pauses for digestion than it actually was. And, surprisingly often, they start telling you about the Indians. They’re wrong, of course. The whites tended to try acquiring land by treaty with the Indian tribes, rather than just infiltrating. Remember Manhattan Island, bought by the Dutch for sixty guilders (twenty-four dollars) in 1626-a sum that, if the Manhattan tribe had invested it at a 7 percent interest rate, would have by now compounded to over $1.5 trillion. But suppose these Americans were right about the Indians. Well, go ahead-just look at what happened to them.

The Census Bureau reports that in 1990, the US had fallen to 75.6 percent white. That means the percent of Whites had fallen 13 percentage points in just thirty years. And it was still falling-fast.  (Actually, the American official hang-up about race questions is making the “white” category increasingly problematic. Thus the proportion of “European Americans” in 1990 was arguably already a couple of percentage points lower than the Census figure because the Census Bureau counts all Middle Easterners and North Africans as “white.”) Looking at the number of Whites in 2009, we can see that the 1990 Census underestimated immigration, as Whites dropped 12 additional percentage points in just 19 years, to approximately 63% of the population.

As the ethnic makeup of neighborhoods changes, Americans are polarizing geographically. “We are now seeing white flight from whole states and regions,” says William H. Frey, a demographer and research scientist. He calls it “the flight from diversity.” The most dramatic case: California-which is being abandoned by lower-income whites in particular, exactly the group that would appear to be most vulnerable to competition from unskilled immigrants. Much of this white flight is flocking to the intermountain West, which seems likely to emerge as part of America’s white heartland.

How did it all happen? In the words of Lord Melbourne, former prime minister of England, “What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass”. Even now, many Americans still simply do not realize what is causing this ethnic revolution that is transforming their country. They tend to assume that some kind of natural phenomenon is at work – that Hispanics, for example, went from 2.6 percent of the U.S. population in 1950 to 15 percent in 2008 because they somehow started sprouting out of the earth like spring com.

Americans tend to assume this partly because they are, in fact, regularly told that a natural phenomenon is indeed at work. The standard American media treatment of demographic and multicultural issues simply slides right over the role of immigration. Thus Time magazine proclaimed happily in its April 9, 1990, cover story (“What Will the U .S. Be Like When Whites Are No Longer the Majority?”) that the “browning of America” will alter everything in society, from politics and education to industry, values and culture…and that, of course, “it is irreversibly the America to come”. But American immigration policy may be made by commission. Or it may be made by omission. But it is still made in America, by American politicians. In other words: it’s their fault.

U. S. immigration policy was not transformed in 1965 without de-bate. There was a debate. It just bore no relationship whatsoever to what subsequently happened. Opponents of the 1965 bill allowed themselves to be persuaded by advocates of the new legislation that it really enacted a sort of worldwide quota. But this was a deception. The assurances made about the new immigration policy were false. Every one of the assurances given by supporters of the Act has proven false. Immigration levels did surge upward, though Americans were promised they would not. They are now running at around a million a year, not counting illegals. Immigrants do come predominantly from the polyglot third world, almost half from Spanish-speaking nations, enough to establish for the first time permanent Spanish-language enclaves in the United States. Finally, and above all, the ethnic pattern of immigration to the United States did change sharply. In fact, it could hardly have changed more sharply.

Like a Chinese executioner’s sword, the 1965 Immigration Act flashed through the American body politic so fast that nothing seemed to have been altered-until, after a pause, the country’s head fell off. The great statesman Enoch Powell once said, “The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils…At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is probably the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it, deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after.”

And why is it that are we not supposed to notice the impact of immigration now? Because it’s unmistakable: the American political elite-liberal, moderate and conservative-shows every sign of not wanting the subject raised at all. Since the gates were opened, opinion polls have consistently shown that most Americans want them shut again. Recently, they have been wanting them shut even more. One call to action was the landslide victory of California’s Proposition 187, an initiative designed to clamp down on illegal immigrants’ access to taxpayer funding – though the effort was stymied by a liberal judge.

In 1993, a Newsweek poll showed that fully 60 percent of Americans thought immigration levels were bad for the country. A Los Angeles Times poll showed that 86 percent of Californians thought illegal immigration into their state was a “major” or “moderate” problem; 47 percent of them thought the same about legal immigration. An Orlando Sentinel call-in poll showed 95 percent of respondents endorsing a ban on all immigration for a few years. And The New York Times reported an Empire State Survey that showed a solid majority (51 percent) of immigrants themselves thought immigration was bad for the city. Their view was shared by 66 percent of native-born New Yorkers.

Nothing surprising about those immigrant attitudes, incidentally. Immigrants, as Samuel Johnson said about the Irish, are a fair people: they rarely speak well of one another. Immigrants know too much to share the immigration enthusiasts’ romanticism. Similarly, in 1992 the Latino National Political Survey found that the proportion of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans “agreeing or strongly agreeing” that “there are too many immigrants” was actually higher (75 percent and 79 percent) than the proportion of non-Hispanic whites (74 percent).

Calls to restrict immigration have come from many quarters. Critics of immigration policy now included many Conservatives, some environmentalists, civil rights advocates, Democratic legislators, and a former Democratic presidential candidate, Eugene McCarthy. Those who call for a freeze on immigration are smeared with words such as racism, xenophobia, sourness, etc. Watching Americans struggle with this topic always reminds me of “Dr. Strangelove,” one of the menagerie of characters played by Peter Sellers in the 1963 Stanley Kubrick comic movie Dr. Strange-love. Remember? Strangelove was a German immigrant who advised the U.S. president on nuclear strategy. He would appear to be totally sane and rational, if rather creepy. And then suddenly, in the middle of conversation, his right arm would start to give the Nazi salute and he would start to rant. He would wrestle his arm down and get control of himself. But a few minutes later, it would happen again.

You have to be constantly on guard for a similar sort of explosive reflex when you talk to some Americans about these sensitive topics. They can converse calmly up to a point. Then, without warning, they snap. Their arms start to jerk and the ranting about “racism” begins. These Americans would be deeply hurt by the comparison, of course. But it does convey the irrational character of this Strange-love Syndrome-and the extent to which it has paralyzed debate.  But there is a terrible irony here. For it is at least arguable that the immigration unleashed by the 1965 Act has significantly worsened the plight of American blacks. And that plight, despite the Civil Rights triumph, has deteriorated sharply and shockingly.

The reasons for America’s flawed immigration debate are varied. Beyond any question, cowardice, corruption, and stupidity on the part of politicians and pundits play a major role. But so too does a sincere, if misplaced, moral sentiment-and an honest perplexity in the face of issues that are as difficult as any that have faced a free society. On a human level, the hesitations and evasions of the American elite are all too easy to understand. But not to forgive. No one ever said it was easy to defend a great nation. And this applies as much to civilians as to soldiers. We have come to the point where, “Without fully realizing it, we have left the time when the nonwhite, non-Western part of our population could be expected to assimilate to the dominant majority. In the future, the white Western majority will have to do some assimilation of its own.” These were the words of Martha Riche, former director of the Census Bureau.

Some would ask, “So What? And why would the population’s composition be important? Unless you care about … race?” Race! RACE!! As an immigrant, I was fascinated, once again, to watch the mere threat of an accusation of racism send the native-born Americans scattering for cover like hightailing rabbits. Time and again, this reflex succeeds in effectively crippling all discussion of America’s impending ethnic revolution in particular-and, indeed, of immigration in general. This happens although there are some extraordinary aspects of the impending ethnic revolution that, by any standard, deserve discussion in a democracy. It is unprecedented in history. No sovereign state has ever undergone such a radical and rapid transformation. The answer to the “So What?” reflex is “So why?” Why does America have to be transformed?  What have you got against it?

The argument that “diversity” is a strength, that it creates color-blind societies, is a foolish one.  It is precisely in the most diverse societies that people are the most conscious of ethnicity and race. Once again: ethnicity, and demography, is destiny in American politics. The homogeneous group can afford to be secure in its liberalism toward outsiders. You can see the logic of ethnic politics in a diverse society easily enough. Ethnic identity is always the simplest way to organize support. This is particularly true when it reflects genuine cultural differences, which mean there are even more irritating points of friction to get angry about.

When supreme power in the society is in strong hands, these ethnic differences often remain quiescent. Greek and Turkish Cypriots fought relatively little when Britain ruled Cyprus, for example. The Armenians and Azerbaijanis put up with each other, more or less, when the Caucasus were under the Soviet Union. Trouble began when these imperial umpires quit. Then each ethnic group saw a chance of grabbing power for itself, and saw the threat that its rivals might.

The United States, of course, is not part of a greater empire but is an independent country. Nevertheless, it faces the direct equivalent of being abandoned by an imperial umpire: the breaking of what was called “the racial hegemony of white Americans.” As that white voting bloc is reduced in relative size, ever more intense incentive will be offered enterprising politicians of all ethnic groups, including, perhaps, the almost-majority whites, to whip their own supporters into line in order to marshal their vote. Supreme power in American politics will have come within grabbing range – no longer for any one bloc but for an unstable, jockeying combination of them. This is the situation that some think will diminish “ethnic bigotry.” Actually, of course, it will put a premium on it.

The point at which that “racial hegemony of white Americans” will be broken is not easy to estimate. But foreign experience suggests that the breaking point could come well before whites slip below half of the overall U.S. population. In Canada, although the French-speaking minority has never been much above a quarter of the population, it has been able to dominate national politics for most of this century by voting as a bloc. English-speaking Canadians have been typically so split that federal governments based solely on their support have been elected very rarely, although they have comprised around three quarters of Canada’s population.

To some extent, this sort of ethnic rotation has happened before, in many of America’s cities. Arguably, it began with the Irish displacement of the Colonial-stock Yankees in New York and Boston, confirmed when the first Irish Catholic mayors were elected in 1881 and 1885 respectively. But the ethnic differences the United States confronts now are exceptionally deep-perhaps unbridgeable. Here, too, previous American experience might be suggestive. No transfer of power at City Hall from one European immigrant group to another ever produced anything equivalent to the “white flight” that has followed the election of black mayors in cities like Detroit and Newark.

And now the prize is so much larger-the whole country. This time, moreover, there will be no suburban enclaves to which to flee. All of which leads us to a follow-up question for immigration enthusiasts: While explaining why they want to transform America, supporters of current immigration policy should also explain just exactly what makes them think multiracial societies work.

An important example is the former Yugoslavia, where a chilling and horrid civil war came to pass in the midst of a multicultural environment.  The differences between the Yugoslavs were indeed relatively minor – certainly compared to the differences between the American nation of 1965 and the immigrants who are now arriving. And that’s the point. Those minor differences were still enough to tear the country apart.

Of course, our follow-up question, about whether multiracial societies work, is a fairly shocking one. It’s actually much more shocking than the original question-why do the immigration enthusiasts want to transform America? No one ever thinks to ask that. But asking about whether multiracial societies work is quite obviously a direct challenge to America’s recently established religion. And, since America has been biracial since Colonial times, it appears to imply a pessimistic view of the prospects for black-white harmony – the greatest problem of American life (until the post-1965 immigration).

But there’s a plain fact to be considered: the evidence that multi-racial societies work is – what shall we say? Not very encouraging. There have, of course, been multiracial societies (strictly speaking, usually multi-ethnic) in the past. Famous examples are the Roman Empire, or the Arab Caliphate, which briefly ruled from Spain to Samarkand in the name of Muhammad. But these were old-fashioned despotisms, not modem democracies.  In modem times, there has been a lot of seductive murmuring about internationalism, united nations, new world orders, and so on. But, meanwhile, the role of ethnicity and race has proved to be elemental, absolute and fundamental. Look at the record, working back from the present:

• Eritrea, a former Italian colony ruled by Ethiopia since 1952, re-volt begins in 1960s, finally splits off 1993.
• Czechoslovakia, founded 1918, splits into Czech and Slovak ethnic components, 1993.
• Soviet Union, founded 1922, splits into multiple underlying ethnic components, 1991. (Some of the underlying components are them-selves promptly threatened with further ethnic fragmentation-Georgia, Moldova.)
• Yugoslavia, founded 1918, splits into multiple underlying ethnic components 1991. (An earlier breakup averted by imposition of royal dictatorship, 1929.)
• Lebanon, founded 1920, progressive destabilization caused by its Muslim component’s faster growth results in civil war, effective partition under Syrian domination, after 1975.
• Cyprus, independent 1960, repeated violence between Greeks and Turks results in military intervention by Turkey, effective partition with substantial ethnic cleansing, 1974.
• Pakistan, independent 1947, ethnically distinct eastern component rebels, splits off after Indian military intervention; 1971.
• Malaysia, independent 1963, political conflict between ethnic Malays and Chinese, Chinese-dominated Singapore expelled, 1965.

And these are just the cases where ethnic and racial differences have actually succeeded in breaking a country up. Many other cases are not yet resolved, because of often-bloody repression. Here’s a partial list: India-protracted separatist revolts by Sikhs, Kashmiris, northeastern hill tribes. Sri Lanka-protracted separatist revolt by Tamils. Turkey, Iraq, Iran-separatist revolts by Kurds. Sudan, Chad-endemic warfare between Arab north, black south. Nigeria-secession of lbo-majority “Biafra” crushed in 1967-70 civil war. Liberia-English-speaking descendants of freed American slaves overthrown by tribal forces 1981, civil war renders more than half the population refugees. Ulster-protracted campaign by members of province’s Catholic Irish minority to force the Ulster Protestant (“Scotch-Irish”) majority to accept its transfer to the Irish Republic. Some of these conflicts have been very violent; over 1 million deaths each in Nigeria and Sudan.

And there’s a whole further category of disputes that are being conducted, mostly, through political means. For example: Belgium – Flemish and Walloon; Canada – French and English; even Brazil – a movement in the predominantly white southern states Rio Grande do SuI, Santa Catarina and Parana to separate from the mixed-race north.

What a record! You would think it would inspire at least some caution about the prospects for multiethnic, multiracial, multicultural harmony within the same political framework. But you would be wrong. The recent record seems to have made very little impression on the American political elite. Indeed, despite all the failed federations and multiethnic mayhem of the past few decades, the most frequent reaction to any questioning of the possibility of multiethnic harmony is still “What about Switzerland?” The recent record just doesn’t count. Its ethnic groups, German, French, Italian and Romansh, are racially identical and culturally very similar.

Unfortunately, much of the American political elite finds the realities of human nature unacceptable. So, through immigration, they insist on making the country’s problems worse – quite unnecessarily. It’s tempting to say that their passionate will to believe in the likelihood of multiracial and multiethnic harmony is noble. At least, they say so themselves. Repeatedly. But what is so noble, or moral, about insisting on gambling the future of a nation on an immigration policy that reflects a patently flawed view of human nature? Particularly when the alternative policy is perfectly practical and moral. Good fences do make good neighbors – in every sense of the word “good.” Because current immigration policy is turning the United States into a multiracial society – not to mention a multilingual, multireligious and multicultural society – with extraordinary speed. To repeat: There is no precedent for a sovereign country undergoing such a rapid and radical transformation of its ethnic character in the entire history of the world. The browning of America will alter everything in society from politics and education to industry, values and culture.

You can see why many people assume immigration must be economically beneficial. Just as they tend to think that the sudden mushrooming of minorities in the United States is a natural phenomenon, they also assume vaguely that immigration must have been ratified by some sort of free-market process. Immigrants must be moving to wherever their labor is best rewarded, as Americans do within the United States. It must be part of what economists call the “efficient allocation of resources.”

Some would say, “You have to accept the free movement of people if you believe in free trade/free markets.” You do? It’s a more radical proposition than appears at first sight. Third World populations are very large and their wage levels very low – Mexican wages are a tenth of those north of the border, and Mexico is relatively advanced. The fact is that a belief in free markets does not commit you to free immigration. The two are quite distinct. If you have free trade, you don’t need immigration. Hence the Japanese have factories in the Philippines rather than Filipinos in Japan.

Third World immigrants tend to be “negatively selected,” which means that because of the way immigration policy is structured, those with lower skill levels have better chances of entering the country. The result is that current immigration lowers the average quality of the U. S. workforce, creating stratified layers of workers, with the newer immigrants usually ending up at the bottom. These immigrants often do not have the skills needed by American businesses, and so they often end up on welfare programs.

By giving birthright-citizenship to all immigrants, immigration policy has created a large loophole for newcomers to gain welfare eligibility. It works like this: the minor “citizen children” of illegal immigrants have the full entitlements of American citizens—for example, to cash payments under the federal Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program. Naturally, their illegal parents collect it for them. And, equally naturally, no U.S. government is going to deport the parents of an American citizen. So having a child in the United States gives the illegal immigrant a secure, taxpayer-funded foothold here. And when the child turns eighteen, it can sponsor the legal immigration of its relatives.

The conclusion is unavoidable: immigrants are assimilating into the welfare system. Immigrants from different countries differ enormously in how likely they are to go on welfare. Cambodians and Laotians show astonishing welfare-participation rates-dose to half (48.8 percent and 46.3 percent, respectively). Vietnamese are above a quarter (25.8 percent). The apparent reason for these extreme welfare-participation rates: many members of these groups are refugees. And refugees are immediately entitled to welfare. And it’s addictive.

For example, in the late 1970s, local church groups in Wausau, Wisconsin, sponsored some Hmong refugees from Southeast Asia. This began a typical chain migration, as the refugees sponsored their own relatives. Today, Hmong comprise almost a quarter of Wausau’s elementary school enrollment and could conceivably become a majority. Some 70 percent of the Hmong receive public assistance-sixteen

times the average for native-born Americans in the county. (Sponsoring church groups must pledge to care for their guests only for thirty days.) Wausau school-district taxes are rising at three times the rate of neighboring districts with few ,immigrants; crime has become a problem; busing is a bitter political issue.

Still, says county welfare official Phyllis A. Bermingham, “This was a rather sterile community, and we needed ethnic diversity.”

Thus, the post-1965 immigrants are less successful economically and more inclined to use welfare. Not only this, but research shows they take more from the various levels of American government than they pay in taxes – immigrants are a net cost to the public purse.

Some would say, “But immigrants are going to bail out the Social Security system!” This is a favorite claim of immigration enthusiasts. It works like this. Social Security is not really an insurance system: it’s actually a direct hand-over, via the government, from working Americans to retired Americans. The benefits that retired Americans receive far surpass the value of their earlier payments. While working Americans far outnumber retired Americans, as they do while the Baby Boom generation is in the labor force, the system teeters in balance. But what happens when the Baby Boomers retire-and the succeeding Baby Bust generation is all that’s available to support them? “IMMIGRANTS!” say the immigration enthusiasts. Of course, they are being irresponsible (not for the first time). What happens when the immigrants retire? More immigrants? And the spectacle of poor young workers of color being taxed to support rich old white retirees is a social San Andreas Fault in English, Spanish or anyone’s language.

It is also the case that U. S. immigration policy results in decreasing the per capita income of the nation. While the total GDP rises, the average standard of living drops. This happens because the wages received by immigrants are far below the national average. This outcome is supported by the research of Professor Richard A. Easterlin, writing in the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups.

This is the specter haunting the United States in 2050 – that the American population may be 30 percent larger than it would have been without immigration; but its overall national income may be little greater than it would have achieved anyway. Just spread thinner. Over a more strife-torn society.

In fact, the specter may already be visible. As we have seen, immigration has exploded since 1965. But overall economic growth has slowed. The United States grew at an average rate of 4 percent in the immigrantless 1950s. In the quarter century from 1969 to 1993, with immigrants, its average growth rate has been just 2.5 percent. Oddly, American economists have made very little effort to measure the overall economic benefits of immigration. But the answer seems to be clear: immigration doesn’t contribute that much to economic growth. Some important points:

• In 1992, the economic surplus generated by immigrants and accruing to native-born Americans was very small: about 0.2 or 0.3 percent! In an economy whose long-run average annual growth is about 2 percent anyway!! Within the normal mar-gin of error for economic projections-so it may be, for practical purposes, infinitesimal!!!
• The overall economic surplus generated by immigrants and accruing to native-born Americans might be very small – but immigration might very well be driving down wages for native-born workers. The ugly implication is that the American elite’s support for immigration may not be idealistic at all, but self-interested – as a way to prey on their fellow Americans, lowering wages and increasing profits.

Some might say, “We need immigrants to meet the looming labor shortage/do the dirty work Americans won’t do.” This is far from convincing, given persistent high levels of unemployment among some American-born groups. These groups, after all, obviously eat. Unless they are all criminals, they must be living on government transfer payments.

There is also some evidence that economic insecurity, for example the insecurity caused by job com-petition, motivates people to restrict family size. So, if immigration increases job competition, particularly for entry-level jobs, it could be indirectly suppressing the reproduction of native-born Americans. Ironically, this echoes the “Walker Thesis” that immigrants tend to replace rather than reinforce the native population.

Another strong argument against immigration increasing a nation’s wealth is the extraordinary economic success of Japan since World War II. Despite its population of only 125 million and virtually no immigration at all, Japan has grown into the second-largest economy on earth. GDP (Gross Domestic Product-the measure of an economy’s size preferred by some international agencies) is up nearly ten times since 1955, and is now about perhaps half that of the United States, which has barely tripled in the same period. And Japan almost no immigration whatsoever.

The way immigration enthusiasts have handled the Japanese counterexample tells you a lot about the one-way American immigration debate: they ignore it. Americans, after all, worry a lot about Japan. Acres of books have been published about How the Japanese Do It. (Is it management? social organization?) But no attempt is ever made to look for lessons in Japan’s immigration policy.

Immigration also has cultural consequences. Francis Fukuyama is a sophisticated commentator who acknowledged that there is a Christian Anglo-Saxon core to America. But he argued that American culture was actually being reinforced by the strong “family values” of Hispanic immigrants. Others noted scathingly that the data show Hispanic “family values” are another immigration enthusiast’s myth – Mexican-American out-of-wedlock births, for example, are more than twice the white rate, at 28.9 percent, and they suffer from a whole host of other social dysfunction. For example, “the United States is in the grip of the third of three great crime waves,” writes Ted Robert Gurr, professor of political science at the University of Maryland. Criminal aliens – noncitizens who commit crimes – accounted for over 25 percent of the federal prison population in 1993. They represent its fastest-growing segment.

Many of these criminal aliens are routinely deported to their home countries. A 1991 study found that only half of these “deportable aliens” had been returned to their country of origin . . . and over 40 percent of the “deportable aliens” had already been rearrested in the United States for further crimes. (An average of about two crimes each, as a matter of fact.) Not only was this deportable group highly criminal, with a lifetime average of six arrests each, but some of them had clearly just turned around and come straight back to the United States after deportation – in itself a felony.

Crime is apparently some of the “dirty work” that some of the post-1965 immigrant groups are positively anxious to do – more violently, particularly in the burgeoning drug business, than the Mafia ever was. There are several such new “mafias,” each with its own special-ties: Colombians (cocaine); Mexicans (marijuana, auto theft, alien smuggling); Hong Kong Chinese (heroin, alien smuggling); South Koreans (prostitution) … and even lesser-known communities like the Chaldeans, Iraqi Christians whose heroically run convenience stores in the Detroit ghetto are reportedly centers of criminal activity (narcotics, gambling, coupon fraud).

Another remarkable description of an ethnic mafia appeared in the spring 1993 issue of Social Contract magazine. David Simcox, a senior fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, reported that

U.S. law enforcement officials estimate an incredible 75 percent of the 100,000 Nigerians now in the United States are involved in “an impressive and innovative variety of fraud schemes” using extensive countrywide networks. Cost to the United States in 1989: some $1 billion. Nigerian specialties: immigration and citizenship fraud; bank and credit card fraud; welfare fraud; insurance fraud; heroin. (The State Department estimates that 35 to 40 percent of all heroin entering the United States is imported by Nigerians).

Immigration also has public health consequences. For example, tuberculosis was once the leading killer in the United States, but was virtually extinct by 1970. Now it is surging, largely because of immigrants from regions like Latin America, where the disease is endemic. Other diseases on the rise include leprosy, measles, Cholera, malaria and dengue fever.

Immigration also has a significant effect to the political balance of the nation. Many immigration enthusiasts are reluctant to admit that a shift in the distribution of political power is even a theoretical possibility. So it is worth emphasizing: there are plenty of cases of immigrants and their descendants threatening a country’s political balance. As a glance around any of their meetings will tell you, the Republicans are the party of the European American majority; the Democrats are the party of the American minorities. On the face of it, immigration looks good for the Democrats. The more minorities, the better their chance of locking in the presidency. And, if present trends continue, there will be a lot more minorities indeed. In addition, immigrants can be a source of political muscle exerted by other nations. Every major Mexican political party has opened offices in California. The plain fact is that this is a rational strategy for the Mexican elite. They can dump their poor in the United States – and become the tail that wags the geopolitical dog.

Another consequence of immigration is creating a less than perfect union. According to Teddy Roosevelt, “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism . . . . The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities”. Some might say, “this is a matter for other nations. America is exceptional. ” But is America exceptional enough? As an analogy, we’ve all seen a speeded-up film of the cloudscape. What appears to the naked eye to be a panorama of almost immobile grandeur writhes into wild life. Vast patterns of soaring, swooping movement are suddenly discernable. Great towering cloud formations boil up out of nowhere, dominating the sky in a way that would be terrifying if it were not in real life so gradual that we are barely aware that anything is going on. The process of cloud formation mirrors how national problems form.

Let’s start with a definition. What is a “nation-state”? It is the political expression of a nation. And what is a “nation”? It is an ethno-cultural community – an interlacing of ethnicity and culture. Invariably, it speaks one language. In his recent book Pandaemonium, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan even used this rigorous definition, in an effort to capture both culture and ethnicity: a nation is “a group of people who believe they are ancestrally related. It is the largest grouping that shares that belief.” Some American commentators, for various reasons, find the idea of a nation’s common ethnicity deeply distressing. They regularly denounce references to the subject as “nativism’: or “tribalism.” As a result, Americans who confuse basic terms in this way must inevitably also get confused about what a nation-state is, what its function is, and what it requires in order to survive. Specifically, they will tend to think that America is a purely political idea, with no particular ethnic or cultural content at all. Lets go back and review some facts:

1. At the time of the American Revolution, the white population in the Thirteen Colonies was 60 percent English, 80 percent British, 98 percent Protestant.
2. The United States population would still be at about half its current level if there had been no immigration at all after 1790.
3. As late as 1960, nearly 90 percent of the U.S. population was European, the great bulk of it closely related, from the British Isles, Germany and Italy.

As we can see, America has always had a central cultural and ethnic core. This is changing only now, and we have only theories on whether it will succeed. Some attempt to depict the United States as becoming a “Universal Nation”, with no dominant ethnic group or culture. But even on its face, this is a contradiction in terms. A nation cannot be universal because it is, of its essence, specific – ethnically and culturally. What language is this “universal nation” going to speak? How is it going to avoid ethnic strife? Dual loyalties? Collapsing like the Tower of Babel?

As Jesse Chickering wrote in 1848 of his diverse fellow Americans: “English laws and institutions, adapted to the circumstances of the country, have been adopted here …. The tendency of things is to mould the whole into .one people, whose leading characteristics are English, formed on American soil.” What is unusual in the current American immigration debate, however, is that Americans are now being urged to abandon the bonds of a common ethnicity so completely and to trust instead entirely to ideology to hold together their state. This is an extraordinary experiment, like suddenly replacing all the blood in a patient’s body. History suggests little reason to suppose it will succeed. The political form of the Estados Unidos Mexicanos is essentially that of the United States of America. But the content is Mexican, and the result very different. Conversely, the universalisms of Christendom and Islam have been long ago sundered by national quarrels. Which is why Shakespeare has King Henry V say, before the battle of Agincourt, not “we defenders of international law and the dynastic principle as it applies to my right to inherit the throne of France,” but “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…”

John Jay’s first essay in The Federalist Papers, written as part of the campaign to get the Constitution ratified, began by laying down as an axiom that it was precisely America’s ethnic and cultural homogeneity that made the great experiment possible. This is what the founders such as Jay meant when they referred to “one united people…a band of brethren”.

Some hundred years later, Theodore Roosevelt in his Winning of the West traced the “perfectly continuous history” of the Anglo-Saxons from King Alfred to George Washington. He presented the settling of the lands beyond the Alleghenies as “the crowning and greatest achievement” of “the spread of the English-speaking peoples,” which he saw in explicit terms:

“… it is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.”

It’s important to note that Roosevelt was personally a liberal on racial matters-particularly in the context of the 1890s, when the “Jim Crow” laws imposing segregation were being enacted, by his Democratic opponents, throughout the South. He believed that those “aboriginal owners” ‘could and should be raised to the standards of the “dominant world races.” He proclaimed that an individual of any race who could win admission to the “fellowship of doers” would be superior to a white man who failed. Of course, his language is unthinkably crude to our more delicate ears. But the balance he was trying to achieve, between ethnicity and culture, standards and tolerance, was daring and difficult.

Going even further back, we have Alexis de Tocqueville’s works. His analysis still has relevance is a tribute to his America’s powers of assimilation and cultural transmission. De Tocqueville actually had a very low opinion of the immigrants he did see. He noted that in big cities they formed part of a “rabble more dangerous even than that of European towns…[they] carry our worst vices to the United States without any of those interests which might counteract their influence.” He blamed them for recent riots in New York and Philadelphia. And he predicted that it would be through the big cities “and the nature of their inhabitants” that the American Republic would perish. (Aaargh!)

The Irish too came to the United States from what was still basically a premodern agricultural society, Through-out the nineteenth century, they displayed social pathologies strikingly similar to those of the contemporary American black ghetto: poverty, disease, violence, family breakdown, drug addiction (alcohol in those days) and, perhaps not surprisingly, virtually no inter-marriage. Slowly, over generations, America changed the Irish-and they changed themselves. Today, in terms of measures like income, education and political affiliation, Irish Americans are more or less in-distinguishable from the mainstream, into which they have extensively intermarried. Another important fact is that there were significant lulls after the first two waves of immigration, where the latter was pulled up for a time, to allow immigrants to be absorbed. “Pulling up the ladder” – this is exactly what Americans did with the Great Restriction of the 1920s, as described in another of those helpful lines that some immigration enthusiast uses in every immigration discussion.

Is the United States still capable of absorbing immigrants? Let’s be clear about this: the American experience with immigration has been a triumphant success. It has so far transcended anything seen in Europe as to make the application of European lessons an exercise to be performed with care. However, note that American immigration is being subsidized. Some public subsidies to immigrants are direct, like welfare. Others are indirect, such as the wholly new idea that immigrant children should be taught in their own language. This effectively transfers part of the cost of immigration from the immigrant to the American taxpayer-and to the American schoolchild.

I still do not feel that the immigration debate is completely forthright. Look at what The Wall Street Journal typically described as “the bedrock fact” underlying the immigration experiment: “America’s white majority is shrinking, both in relative size and importance.” The truth, of course, is that America’s white majority is NOT “shrinking.” In fact, in absolute numbers, it is still growing. But it is being inundated, quite deliberately, as a matter of public policy following the 1965 Immigration Act. And worth real contemplation are the final lines of the story. The Wall Street Journal’s starry-eyed hack, one Dennis Farney, is in a discussion class entitled “The American Dream.” Let me quote this:

“The students, as diverse as their America is diverse, are gathered around a conference table. And their visitor [i.e., Farney] asks: sup-pose they were to grade the American civilization, grade it just as their professor grades them? How would they grade America? It is freshman Jona Goong, a Hawaiian of Chinese ancestry, who says it best. “If I were to grade America,” she says, softly, “I would give it an incomplete”.

An “incomplete”? I would give America an “A”.

Do we have a moral obligation to be the destination for the world’s poor? Pierre-Joseph Proudhon said something that deserves to be remembered: “If all the world is my brother, then I have no brother. ” This is a succinct statement of the impossibility of rational and meaningful moral action if our responsibilities are viewed as limitless: – the condition that Garrett Hardin calls “promiscuous altruism.” While we’re on this subject of the morality of immigration, let’s ask a question of our own: if immigration is such a moral imperative, why don’t the Mexicans/Chinese/Indians/Koreans/Japanese (fill in any of the other recent top-ten suppliers of immigrants to the United States) allow it? Turnabout is fair play, isn’t it? Don’t say: “These countries already have enough people.” The United States already has more than all of them except mainland China and India. The sad fact is that the world is laughing at America.

In former presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy’s terms, America has to stop being a colony of the world. The implications are shocking, even frightening: that Americans, without feeling guilty, can and should seize control of their country’s destiny. The example of South Africa, with its former White elite being ethnically cleansed, should be a sobering one. Americans might see some relevance to their country’s current plight in the dire warning of Deuteronomy 28:43-44: “The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low. He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him; he shall be the head and thou shalt be the tail”.

What, then, is to be done? America needs another time-out from immigration. It needs an-other pause for digestion, to match the Great Lulls of 1790-1840 and 1925-65. If America is to have a future, immigration policy must be shaped by these five principles:

• The United States must regain control of its borders – over both illegal and legal immigration.
• Immigration must be treated as a luxury for the United States, not as a necessity.
• The costs of any immigration should fall on the immigrant, not on native-born Americans .
• Any immigration must meet a fundamental test: What does it mean for ‘The National Question”? Will it help or hurt the ability of the United States to survive as a nation-state-the political expression of that interlacing of ethnicity and culture that now constitutes the American nation?
• Illegal immigration must be ended at whatever cost, at the first line of defense: the border.

The American nation of 1965, nearly 90 percent white, was explicitly promised that the new immigration policy would not shift the country’s racial balance. But it did. Race is destiny in American politics. Its importance has only been intensified by the supposedly color-blind civil rights legislation of the 1960s – which paradoxically has turned out to mean elaborate race-conscious affirmative action programs. Any change in the racial balance must obviously be fraught with consequences for the survival and success of the American nation. It is simply common sense that Americans have a legitimate interest in their country’s racial balance. It is common sense that they have a right to insist that their government stop shifting it. Indeed, it seems to me that they have a right to insist that it be shifted back.

Essentially, a nation is a sort of extended family. It links individual and group, parent and child, past and future, in ways that reach beyond the rational to the most profound and elemental in the human experience. Americans have every right to decide who will be a part of their national family. America’s immigration system is broke and needs fixing. A generation ago, anti-Vietnam War demonstrators wittily retorted to the prospect of the military draft: “Not with my life you don’t!” Now, we might reasonably say to advocates of this new ad-venture: “Not with my child’s future you don’t!”

The mass immigration so thoughtlessly triggered in 1965 risks making America an alien nation -not merely in the sense that the numbers of aliens in the nation are rising to levels last seen in the nineteenth century; not merely in the sense that America will become a freak among the world’s nations because of the unprecedented demographic mutation it is inflicting on itself; not merely in the sense that Americans themselves will become alien to each other, requiring an increasingly strained government to arbitrate between them; but, ultimately, in the sense that Americans will no longer share in common what Abraham Lincoln called in his First Inaugural Address “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle field and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth stone, all over this broad land…” And that when the time comes to strike those chords, no sweet sound will result.

THE RISKS OF BECOMING A MINORITY

When a population group becomes a minority in a nation, they are taking a serious risk, placing their well-being in the hands of other groups. If the majority ever decides to turn against them, there is little they can do to stop it. Historically, minority groups have been oppressed by the majority of each nation. This is typical around the world and throughout history, even in the United States.

One example of minorities that are in conflict with the majority government is the Mexican state of Oaxaca, home to several indigenous minority peoples, who live in grinding poverty. Over time, the Oaxacans have suffered from government corruption, mismanagement and electoral fraud, which have turned the state of Oaxaca into a cauldron of social unrest. This simmering unrest sometimes comes to a boil. The last time was in 2006, when widespread protests and strikes had escalated into a six-hour running battle, where protesters armed with gasoline bombs and rocks sent the fully-armed police running for cover.  Following this, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators descended on government buildings to demand the expulsion of federal police and the resignation of the Mexican governor.  The situation is still not resolved, elections are still widely suspected of fraud, and the corrupt Mexican government continues its repressive policies against the Oaxacans.

Another nation that is being ethnically replaced is Tibet, where Communist China is moving in large numbers of low-income native Chinese. Tibet has been under the thumb of China since the 1950s. Ever since the Communist occupation, native Tibetans have been beaten and imprisoned, and Tibetan women have had forced abortions and sterilizations. There are currently almost a thousand political prisoners in Tibet. There is, right now, no freedom of religion, speech or the press in Tibet, due to the Communist occupation. The Communists have engaged in deforestation in Tibet and dumping of nuclear waste from their own country. Tibet’s holiest lake, Yamdrok Tso, is now being drained by the Communists to use for a hydroelectric power facility. Tibetans have been forbidden to practice their religion (Buddhism), and have been imprisoned simply for displaying a picture of their religious and national leader, the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959; he resides in India where he is with the rest of the Tibetan government in exile, hoping one day to return to a free Tibet. In the meantime he and other expatriate Tibetans work for the freedom of their country.

Another minority group is the Kurds, who are spread through Iran, Iraq and Turkey. International observers have noted their plight as persecuted minorities. “Kurds in Iran have long suffered deep-rooted discrimination. Their social, political and cultural rights have been repressed, as have their economic aspirations. Kurdish regions have been economically neglected, resulting in entrenched poverty. Forced evictions and destruction of homes have left Kurds with restricted access to adequate housing. Parents are banned from registering their babies with certain Kurdish names. The use of the Kurdish language in education is frequently thwarted. Religious minorities that are mainly or partially Kurdish are targeted by measures designed to stigmatize and isolate them. [Discrimination] denies Kurds equality in employment and political participation”.

The dispossession of any people is profoundly immoral. And like the Tibetians, Kurds and all other peoples, European Americans have a right to exist and a right to maintain their national culture and traditions. We also have a right to our historic nation and a secure future for our children. Dr. Kevin MacDonald, professor of Psychology at CSU Long Beach, has written extensively on the crisis facing European Americans. Dr. MacDonald notes that if Whites allow themselves to become a minority, they will be in a relatively powerless situation — at the mercy of people with festering historical grudges. The historical memory of Blacks in America is also especially bitter, and Mexicans and Asians have their own axes to grind. History is full of terrible tragedies where minority groups have been oppressed, ethnically cleansed or worse. Later, you will learn of the desperate plight of Whites in Zimbabwe and South Africa, and their fate under non-White government.

History tells us it is extremely risky for any ethnic group to hand over control of its destiny to others, in the hope of a future multicultural utopia. Observing world events today does not give much confidence in a rosy multicultural future when Whites cease to have the power to assert their interests. Clearly, our political leaders are playing a dangerous game allowing European Americans to be dispossessed of their nation. Is this a gamble that you would risk for your children and grandchildren? Is it responsible or moral for any nation to take such risks, when the stakes are so high?