Pugnacious pundit Ann Coulter is in the news again, talking about her latest book Adios, America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole. As some might guess, its theme is that our current immigration regime — 85 percent of our immigrants hail from the Third World and Asia — is creating a historically unprecedented demographic upheaval that is changing the face of America. And Coulter, not one to shy away from controversy, has described this change as the “browning of America.”
As left-wing Daily Beast writer Lloyd Grove opines, this is “language that many doubtless will find hair-raising if not downright offensive.” Yet as he also points out, it’s merely a phrase Coulter “adopted as a negative after seeing it bandied favorably on MSNBC.” And, of course, the leftist media would never use such language unfavorably.
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Except, there’s this story: The New York Times recently reported on what it calls the “gentrification” of the Mission District neighborhood in San Francisco (shown in part). Once a mostly Hispanic area, primarily white dotcommers — Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg among them — are buying real estate, moving in, and raising property values. Nonetheless, as American Thinker writes, “Nowhere in this article did the Times ever use the word ‘diversity.’ This is puzzling, because in every other article where they talk about adding more Blacks or Hispanics to a white population, they always celebrate that as the merits of diversity.” But then there’s what the Times does do: It describes the Mission’s demographic change as the “bleaching out” of “the Latino culture that drew them [the dotcommers]” to the district.
Does the Times ever characterize the change in our country effected by the rapid influx of Hispanic immigrants as the “browning out” of the American culture that drew them to United States? This change is called “diversity,” is thought a good thing, and woe betide anyone lamenting it as the “browning of America.” But the Mission District’s increasing diversity is a damnable “bleaching out.”
This contradiction perhaps hints at a deeper truth: People don’t behave as if “diversity” is by definition good — because it’s not. You can increase an area’s diversity as easily by adding 1,000 demons as by adding 1,000 angels. Moreover, the only way diversity could be beneficial is if some groups bring strengths to the table others don’t; another way of saying this is that those groups are in those respects superior. Yet asserting such is also contrary to leftist dogma. So inherent in the Left’s diversity doctrine is that the very group differences the Left says don’t exist, must exist.
Back to the issue at hand, where analogies between national and local demographic changes fail is that Americans have every right to migrate to different areas within their own nation. In fact, as American Thinker editor Thomas Lifson points out, Hispanics originally displaced the first Mission settlers, Jews, Irish, and other mainly white groups. And as he puts it, “Nobody owns a neighborhood forever.”
While one-worlder internationalists might disagree, however, foreigners have no inherent right to move to our country. Yet the type of verbiage many would say should be reserved for the illegal-alien invasion of the United States, the Times favorably quotes in characterizing the Mission situation, writing, “‘It’s a war zone here,’ said Paula Tejeda, a Mission resident who owns an empanada shop in the neighborhood, describing the clash between older residents and newer ones. ‘This is not like the Lower East Side’ of Manhattan, where she used to live, she said. ‘This is happening a lot faster.’”
Interestingly, this is similar to the lament of many who warn of the national demographic upheaval: The rate of migration has exceeded the rate of assimilation. Moreover, multiculturalism has made assimilation a dirty word. As Coulter said to Lloyd Grove, “There was no mollycoddling of immigrants” 100 years ago. “We could say, ‘No. No. You can’t do this anymore. You are an American now. Knock it off!’” Today, immigrants will shout “‘That’s racist’ if you tell them to do things our way, and ‘You can just assimilate to us,’ not the other way around,” she continued.
There are many reasons for this “mollycoddling” of immigrants and for why the Left greatly prefers “browning” to “bleaching.” But the main motivation is simple: political power. Coulter points out that Third World migration provides “Democratic votes,” an assertion Grove calls “her belief.” But it’s not merely a matter of faith. As social commentator Pat Buchanan wrote recently, politically, most of our modern migrants “belong to ethnic groups that vote between 70 and 90 percent Democratic. Their children will bury the GOP.” The Left reveals this little secret, too, during its more honest moments. Barack Obama noted that growing “diversity hinders conservative priorities,” wrote the Daily Caller in February. Congressman Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.) stated recently that amnesty “will decide who is in charge of this country for the next 20 or 30 years.” And Andrew Neather, an ex-advisor to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, admitted in 2009 that the goal of the British Labour Party’s massive demographics-rending immigration was to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.”
And so it is. When pondering immigration policy, we’d do well to remember that in a representative republic, the government doesn’t make the people; the people make the government. And since we face a largely socialist world, one very much to the “left” of the United States, some questions are in order. As I wrote in 2010:
If we imported millions of Scandinavians — who have created the most liberal governments on Earth — would we expect them to magically change their ideology upon seeing American terra firma? If not, why would we expect otherwise with south-of-the-border socialists? If they choose Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales types below the Rio Grande, why wouldn’t they above it? Geography doesn’t change ideology.
Speaking of Scandinavians, they’re sufficiently far left so that their politicians can voice openly what ours only dare whisper. While it was alleged earlier this year that an unstated part of Obama’s amnesty plan is to “take over the host” and “push citizens into the shadows,” Swedish Social Democrat politician, multiculturalist, and immigration-engineer Mona Sahlin was more forthcoming. She unabashedly said in 2001 about her rapidly Islamizing land, “The Swedes must be integrated into the new Sweden; the old Sweden is never coming back.”
And that’s why immigration matters. Because here or in Europe, yesterday or today, for good or for ill, an extinguished culture — and the political system that reflected it — are never coming back.
