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Immigration and the American Identity

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One thing that is becoming more and more apparent to Americans (and Westerners generally) is the demographic transformation that is taking place within their society. The essays contained in Immigration and the American Identity show that this is not a good thing.

If you read this book and remember some of its key messages, you at least won't be surprised at the ongoing changes taking place in America right now and the ones that will happen during the upcoming decades. You may even get lucky enough to share with someone important the truth about this issue.

Contributors to this book include Peter Brimelow, Richard Estrada (who provides an especially interesting perspective on how our immigration policy harms Hispanics), Thomas Fleming, Samuel Francis, Paul Gottfried, Garett Hardin, Hans-Herman Hoppe, John Lukacs, Clyde Wilson, Claes G. Ryn, Chilton Williamson, Jr., and many others. Each of them takes to explaining the immigration issue in a unique and insightful way.

I should also add that this volume isn't one that merely lays out sound arguments against mass immigration. What I mean specifically by this is that pretty much all the essays are multifaceted and display the deep learning of the writers; while reading them, one will frequently come across a passage that doesn't deal with immigration directly but yet hits home as profoundly true. Two examples should suffice.

1. In his essay, "The Broken Promise of American Life," Thomas Fleming describes suburbs as places that have "neither past nor future and offer the worst features of town and country: a dense population without the variety and sights of the city; the boredom of the countryside without either the wildlife or the hard work that gives a savor to rural life."

2. Chilton Williamson, Jr. remarks in "Promises to Keep" that "the United States at the end of the 20th century seems to regard itself as a collective Christ figure, redeeming the world by example and by purity of intention."

Besides arguments that show in a direct way how mass immigration is harmful to America, there are, in my estimation, eleven important points very much related to the immigration issue that are made in this book, arguments that "open borders" ideologues and humanitarian leftists should pay special attention to. One is that America is not merely a set of ideas, a political creed, a political construct, an abstraction, a cheap slogan, or some general principle (such as the "proposition nation" or the "credal nation"); like every other nation in the world, it has had a common ethnicity, history, religion, and language and it has possessed a specific ethnic and cultural content; those are the things that have allowed American political institutions to function as they have and when the ethnicity, religion, language, and culture change, American political institutions will also change - in a major way. Second, (this comes from Richard Estrada) racism is not a good reason for slowing immigration, but spurious charges of racism from the advocates of mass immigration that are designed to choke the immigration debate, one that such advocates cannot win on merit, should not be tolerated either. Third, every nation, not just America, is a "nation of immigrants." Fourth, and this is what the humanitarians need to understand, the United States simply cannot be home to all of the world's poor; failure to accept this simply demonstrates a lack of common sense. Fifth, if the United States does not reduce the immigration flow of destitute masses from the Third World, poverty rates will continue to increase among the very people the humanitarians are trying to help, the immigrants themselves; if you allow too many people in, our country will become like the ones the immigrants are leaving and no one will benefit; if you place some restrictions on immigration, at least some people will be able to benefit. Current immigrants are doing worse than the pre-1965 ones and they are suffering through a housing crisis and extremely high rents, which often force Hispanic households to pay a majority of their income on housing expenses. Moreover, with big businesses exploiting cheap labor, America's native-born middle and lower classes are also becoming poorer and poorer. So, in the end, allowing mass immigration will cause more poverty instead of reducing the current poverty.

Sixth, it is not xenophobic to admire foreigners and wish them well without at the same time wanting to become like them or live with them. Seventh, it simply is not true that constant immigration is America's tradition; rather, intermittent immigration is the American tradition; between the American Revolution and the 1830s and between 1924 and 1965 immigration was greatly curtailed. Eighth, in forming an immigration policy, the interest of America's core population (which doesn't just mean white people, but also blacks and established Hispanics) should come first; thus, immigration should be viewed as a luxury as opposed to a necessity and immigrants should be picked for their skills, just as immigrants to most countries throughout the world are; national quotas should be established, not necessarily on 1920s-like formulas, but in such a way that first priority is given to the population base of the nation. Ninth, most of the proposed limits on immigration that are proposed today are very generous by global standards. Tenth, an ideal world is one that is differentiated into many separate cultures that can develop their own peculiar qualities; in such a world, ideas can be exchanged even when immigrants are not. This globe of villages can endure and enrich our lives in a way that trying to create a peaceful, borderless, and uniform global village, which is an impossibility anyway, cannot. Eleventh, and perhaps most important, American civilization is the product of European-descended peoples and their ideas; the language, the religion, the dominant political institutions, the economic organizations, and the literary, intellectual, and aesthetic traditions that have created American culture have all derived from Europe and its peoples.

As for the direct arguments against mass immigration (legal and illegal), here are some that can be found in the essays:

Mass immigration threatens the common norms of American society; the forces that cause immigrants to assimilate to a culture and way of life of a host society, confidence in heritage and tradition, are increasingly absent from America, and, in short, immigrants sense weakness in the host society; with all this being the case, American culture will be replaced by an assortment of Third World (mostly Latin American) cultures if mass immigration continues unabated.

As America's culture changes, its political arrangements will also change, because political arrangements are expressions of a nation's culture and ethnic content; as Chilton Williamson, Jr. says, mass immigration will eventually cause the submergence of European-American culture and governance in the United States.

Thomas Fleming quotes Thomas Jefferson warning that immigrants often "bring with them the principles of the governments they leave," and whether they abandon those principles or not, adjusting to the American form of government is very difficult; thus, mass immigration will almost undoubtedly undermine America's political tradition; one has to wonder how long it will be until American political candidates are shot after losing elections as is often the case in the Third World.

As a follow-up to the previous point, unbridled pluralism contains nothing (in the words of Sam Francis) with which to prune budding totalitarianism because in acknowledging the legitimacy of even antipluralistic ideas and their expression, it allows immigrants who subscribe to totalitarian ideas to exploit its assumptions and gain acceptance.

Indeed, Jefferson's fears have materialized in the past; the Marxists and Freudians who fled from fascist Europe to the U.S. between 1933 and 1945 have had a deep impact on American society; some may like what they did, but the important point to grasp is that a nation must be careful in admitting immigrants if it wants to maintain the status quo of its culture and political institutions and arrangements as opposed to becoming like the immigrants.

From an economic perspective, the continuing influx of millions of Third World immigrants is causing the wages of citizen workers (including Hispanic-Americans and blacks) to be depressed and often causing them to lose their jobs; in fact, millions of American citizens are unemployed precisely because of the presence of millions of illegal aliens; additionally, the tax burden on natives is enormous, as they have to pay for the education of immigrant schoolchildren as well as the welfare of immigrants and the millions of native-born Americans who don't have jobs because of the massive illegal alien presence; the exploiting of massive, low-wage, low-skill labor is keeping America from modernizing its methods of production; the positive benefit of immigration on the American economy is "quantitatively nugatory" - it achieves no purpose that Americans could not easily replicate for themselves.

Illegal aliens account for extremely high percentages of rapes, burglaries, homicides, and narcotics trafficking

Alien gangs have become a serious problem in contemporary America.

Third World peoples don't care much for protecting the environment, and some of the proof of this lies in the fact that America's most polluted region (at least as of the early 90s) is the border with Mexico; thus, it is unlikely that laws protecting the environment will be left in place once Third World peoples become a plurality in the United States.

Mass immigration is resulting in the overflow of schools and public health facilities.

Third World immigrants are bringing in diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, measles, and whooping cough that are causing serious health problems.