Multiculturalists are fond of saying, “We’re a nation of immigrants” when the United States is actually, as is any healthy country, a nation of citizens. But if current trends continue, we may become a land of disparate and divided immigrants and not really a nation, which involves far more than a political boundary drawn on a map.
New information released by the Census Bureau shows that there are now a record 42.1 million immigrants and illegal migrants in this country; this means the two groups together comprise more than 13 percent of our 320 million population, the highest figure in 105 years. Moreover, the total im(migrant) population has exploded by 1.7 million just since 2014 — with 740,000 people pouring in from Mexico alone.
With such out-of-control migration and the resulting demographic and cultural upheaval becoming ever more obvious, immigration has quickly been elevated to the number-one issue in the 2016 presidential campaign. In fact, businessman Donald Trump has become the GOP frontrunner simply by voicing the immigration concerns of millions of previously voiceless Americans.
With our record migrant population growing against the backdrop of another record — almost 94 million Americans are no longer in the labor force — many citizens are asking: Why are we importing foreign workers when many of our own countrymen are jobless? Is this just Wall Street trampling Main Street for corporate easy street? And it’s not just the low-skilled left in the lurch. Abuse of the H1B-visa program is allowing companies to replace high-skilled citizens with foreigners; in fact, some businesses (such as Disney) throw salt in the wound and actually force the pink-slipped Americans to train their own replacements.
Yet a country does not live on bread alone, and it is the deeper issues — that the rate of migration long ago exceeded the rate of assimilation — that makes many lose sleep. As pundit Pat Buchanan wrote just yesterday, using Europe as a warning and an example of a larger trend:
Will the West endure or disappear by the century’s end as another lost civilization? Mass immigration, if it continues, will be more decisive in deciding the fate of the West than Islamist terrorism. For the world is invading the West.
A wild exaggeration? Consider.
Monday’s Washington Post had a front-page story on an “escalating rash of violent attacks against refugees” in Germany, including arson attacks on refugee centers and physical assaults.
Buried in the story was an astonishing statistic. Germany, which took in 174,000 asylum seekers last year, is on schedule to take in 500,000 this year. Yet Germany is smaller than Montana.
How long can a geographically limited and crowded German nation, already experiencing ugly racial conflict, take in half a million Third World people every year without tearing itself apart and changing the character of the nation forever?
Do we think the riots and racial wars will stop if more come?
The reality, though, is that Europe is merely following America’s lead. And while it’s certainly unfashionable today to talk about problems inherent in demographic upheaval, none other than liberal icon and “Lion of the Senate” Ted Kennedy tacitly acknowledged such problems. Just consider comments he made when pushing the nation-changing Hart-Celler Act, also known as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965:
First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same….
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….
The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. 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.
Note that Kennedy didn’t defend the bill by saying, “Our strength lies in our diversity” (that line was conjured up only when the demographic upheaval became too obvious to deny); he never said it would be a good thing. Rather, accepting the supposition it could be problematic, he claimed it would never happen.
Also note that whether or not Kennedy was lying, history now informs that every one of his reassurances was an untruth. Approximately 250,000 immigrants a year entered the United States before Hart-Celler; about 1,000,000 annually (not counting illegals) have come since it was passed. Ethnically, those of European descent constituted almost 90 percent of the 1965 population; today they’re 63 percent and falling. This is because — again, contrary to Kennedy’s claims — Hart-Celler created a situation in which 85 percent of our immigrants hail from the Third World and Asia. As for inundation “from any one country,” 33 percent of our legal immigrants and 50 to 60 percent of illegals come from Mexico, 64 percent of American Hispanics have origins in that nation, and 34 million Mexican descent people live in the United States — more than one-quarter the population of Mexico itself. And the same phenomenon is evident with respect to El Salvador.
This one-nation inundation matters because it threatens the development of a nation within a nation. As University of Edinburgh professor Stephen Tierney wrote in his 2007 book Multiculturalism and the Canadian Constitution:
In a situation in which immigrants are divided into many different groups originating in distant countries, there is no feasible prospect of any particular immigrant group’s challenging the hegemony of the national language and institutions. These groups may form an alliance among themselves to fight for better treatment and accommodations, but such an alliance can only be developed within the language and institutions of the host society and, hence, is integrative. In situations in which a single dominant immigrant group originates in a neighbouring country, the dynamics may be very different. The Arabs in Spain, and Mexicans in the United States, do not need allies among other immigrant groups. One could imagine claims for Arabic or Spanish to be declared a second official language, at least in regions where they are concentrated, and these immigrants could seek support from their neighbouring home country for such claims — in effect, establishing a kind of transnational extension of their original homeland in their new neighbouring country of residence.
Moreover, as Professor Tierney also warned, the problem “is often compounded in situations where the immigrant group has historic claims against the receiving country. … For example, in the Mexican-United States case.”
Compounding the problem further is that since 46 percent of legal immigrants and approximately 75 percent of illegal migrants are Hispanic, they can ignore traditional U.S. institutions in favor of alternative Spanish-language ones. As to this, note that for the first time ever, Spanish-language network Univision topped all other stations (including the “Big Four,” ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox) in younger-demographic ratings in the July 2013 sweep period.
Most significant, however, is not how new immigrants vote with the remote but how they vote at election time. Upon being naturalized, the Third World and Asian groups constituting 85 percent of our immigrants vote for socialistic candidates by a margin of 70 to 90 percent. In contrast, the GOP derives almost 90 percent of its votes from the shrinking European-descent population. Thus, it’s clear why the American Left seeks to maintain our immigration policies and porous southern border: They are importing their voters.
And this explains why Barack Obama allegedly has a plan to use new illegal aliens as “seedlings” to develop a “country within a country” and push “the citizens into the shadows.” It’s the old principle: If you can’t get the people to change the government, you change the people — fundamentally.
Photo of London: Tarquin Binary~commonswikiTarquin Binary~commonswiki
