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Mass
Immigration ─It's Effect on Our Culture
Lawrence Auster*
February
2002
The problem of immigration and the
changes it is causing in our culture can be approached from many different
angles. We could speak about the redefinition of America as a multicultural
society instead of as a nation; or the permanent establishment of affirmative
action programs for immigrants based on their race; or the town in Texas that
declared Spanish its official language; or the thousands of Hispanics at an
international soccer match in Los Angeles who booed and threw garbage at the
American team; or the decline in educational and
Environmental standards in areas dominated by Hispanics; or the Hmong
people from Laos who bring shamans and witch doctors into hospital rooms; or the
customs of voodoo and animal sacrifice and forced marriage and female genital
mutilation that have been imported into this country by recent immigrants; or
the pushing aside of Christianity in our public life to give equal respect to
non-Western religions; or the evisceration of American history in our schools
because our white-majority American past is no longer seen as representative of
our newly diverse population; or the vast numbers of Muslims established in
cities throughout this country who sympathize with the Muslim terrorists and
dream of turning America into an Islamic state; or our own leaders who, even
after September 11, keep telling us that the Muslims are all patriotic and
tolerant, keep warning us against our supposed anti-Muslim bigotry, and continue
letting thousands of people from terror supporting countries to immigrate into
America.
At bottom, each of these phenomena and
many more like them are happening for one reason and one reason only – the 1965
Immigration Act which opened U.S. immigration on an equal basis to every country
in the world, rather than, as in the past, favoring our historic source nations
of Europe. Of course many of the recent immigrants from non-European countries
have fitted into America and made good contributions here. It is the
unprecedented scale of this diverse immigration that is the problem.
I could easily devote the rest of this
article to making a detailed case that the post-1965 immigration is indeed
changing our culture in negative ways. But here I want to ask a different
question Why have we Americans allowed this to occur? Why are we continuing to
let it happen? And why, even when we gripe and complain about some aspects of
it, do we feel HELPLESS to do anything to stop it?
Not the Cultural Left But the Mainstream
Many have argued, most recently Patrick
Buchanan, that these things are happening because of the cultural left that
hates America and wants to destroy it. There is no doubt that the cultural left
hates America and wants to destroy it; and there is also no doubt that the left
see mass immigration from Third-World countries as a handy way of achieving
that. But that argument leaves unanswered a more disturbing question – why has
there been no significant opposition to this leftist agenda? Presumably, the
Republican party does not hate America and want to destroy it. Presumably, the
conservative movement does not hate America and want to destroy it. Presumably
conservative Protestants and parents’ groups that have fought against Whole
Language teaching and homosexual indoctrination in the schools do not hate
America and want to destroy it. Yet nowhere among these legions of mainstream
conservatives and the organizations that represent them have there been any
serious calls to reduce this immigration from the non-Western world and the
inevitable cultural transformations it is bringing.
Nor is the fear of political
correctness an adequate explanation for this conservative surrender. Whatever
the power of PC in our society, it cannot account for the fact that tens of
millions of mainstream conservatives ranging from Rush Limbaugh fans to
conservative evangelicals either support the current immigration policy or fail
to speak up against it – even in the relative privacy and safety of their own
organizations.
We are thus left with a remarkable
paradox – that the patriotic and Christian Right supports exactly the same
immigration policy that is supported by the anti-American, atheistic left – an
immigration policy, moreover, that spells the permanent eclipse of the
Republican party and the victory of big government, since most of the recent
immigrants vote Democratic.
Indeed, our conservative Christian
President, when he’s not busy embracing so-called “moderate” Muslim leaders who
are allies of terrorists, wants to expand Third-World immigration even further.
But that’s not all. Unlike Republicans in the past such as Ronald Reagan, who
supported Third-World immigration on the hopeful if naive assumption that the
immigrants were all assimilating, President Bush actively promotes the growth
and development of foreign languages and unassimilated foreign cultures in this
country.
In a speech in Miami during the 2000 campaign, he celebrated the fact
that American cities are becoming culturally and linguistically like Latin
American cities:
"We are now one of the largest
Spanish-speaking nations in the world. We’re a major source of Latin music,
journalism and culture. …Just go to Miami, or San Antonio, Los Angeles, Chicago
or West New York, New Jersey ... and close your eyes and listen. You could just
as easily be in Santo Domingo or Santiago, or San Miguel de Allende. …For years
our nation has debated this change – some have praised it and others have
resented it. By nominating me, my party has made a choice to welcome the new
America."
As president, Mr. Bush has not only
left in place Clinton’s executive order requiring government services to be
provided in foreign languages, he has started his own bilingual tradition,
delivering a Spanish version of his weekly national radio address. Even the
White House Web site is now bilingual, with a link accompanying each of the
president’s speeches that says “En Español” and points to a Spanish translation
of the speech.
Yet, with the exception of one or two
conservative columnists, these steps toward the establishment of Spanish as a
quasi-official public language in this country have been met with complete
silence on the right, even though opposition to bilingualism used to command
automatic agreement among conservatives. If conservatives are no longer willing
to utter a peep of protest in defense of something so fundamental to America as
our national language, is there anything else about our historic culture they
will defend, once it is has been abandoned by a Republican president?
What all of this suggests is that mass
immigration and the resulting multiculturalism are not – as many immigration
restrictionists tend to believe – simply being imposed on us by the
anti-American left. Rather, these destructive phenomena stem from mainstream
beliefs that are shared by most Americans, particularly by conservatives. Of
course economic and political forces, and the birthrate factor, are pushing this
process in a variety of ways, but on the deepest level the cause is not
material, it is philosophical and spiritual. The reason Americans cannot
effectively oppose the transformation of our culture is that they subscribe to
the belief system that has led to it.
The Credo That Has Left Us Defenseless
What is that belief system? At its
core, it is the quintessentially American notion that everyone is the same under
the skin – that people should only be seen as individuals, with no reference to
their historic culture, their ethnicity, their religion, their race. Now there
is a great truth in the idea of a common human essence transcending our material
differences. But if it is taken to be literally true in all circumstances and
turned into an ideological dogma, it leads to the expectation that all people
from every background and in whatever numbers can assimilate equally well into
America.
This explains why patriotic
conservatives acquiesce in a policy that is so obviously dividing and weakening
our nation. Since the end of World War II, and especially since the 1960s,
conservatives have tended to define America not in terms of its historic
civilization and peoplehood, but almost exclusively in terms of the individual –
the individual under God and the individual as an economic actor. For modern
conservatives, what makes America is not any inherited cultural tradition from
our past, but our belief in the timeless, universal, God-granted right of all
persons in the world to be free and to improve their own lives. Therefore
conservatives don’t believe there can be any moral basis to make distinctions
among prospective immigrants based on their culture.
We cannot say, for example, that a
shaman-following Laotian tribesman, or a Pakistani who believes in forced
marriage, is less suited for membership in our society than an Italian Catholic
or a Scots-Irish Presbyterian. And we can’t make such distinctions because, from
the point of view of pure individualism, our inherited culture does not reflect
any inherent or higher truth, and therefore cannot be the object of our love and
protection. The only value that reflects higher truth and is deserving of our
energetic defense is the freedom and sacredness of each individual. In practical
terms this translates into the equal right of all individuals to make their own
choices and pursue their own dreams, even if we are speaking of tens of millions
of people from alien cultures whose exercise of their individual right to come
to America will mean the destruction of our cultural goods.
In theory, multiculturalism is the
opposite of liberal individualism. In practice it is the direct result of
pursuing liberal individualism to its logical extreme. The 1965 Immigration Act
was not about multiculturalism. No lawmaker said in 1965: Hey, we need
Third-World cultures, we need female genital mutilation in our country, we need
Shiite Islam and Wahhabbi Islam to fulfill the meaning of America. The 1965
legislators voted to open our borders to the world, not because of a belief in
the equal value of all cultures, but because of a belief in the equal rights of
all individuals; the single comment most frequently heard in the Congressional
debate was that prospective immigrants should be chosen solely on the basis of
their “individual worth.” But this noble-sounding sentiment was an illusion,
because, in the real world, most of the people admitted into America under the
new law did not come just as individuals. They came as part of the largest mass
migration in history, consisting largely of family chain migration, and
inevitably brought their cultures with them.
Thus, in passing the 1965 Immigration
Act, we did two fateful things. We announced that we had no culture of our own
except for the principle of non-discrimination toward people of other cultures —
and we began admitting millions of people from those other cultures. We started
letting in all these other cultures at the very moment that we had defined our
own culture out of existence.
This delusional act led to the next
stage of our self-undoing. In the late 1970s and 1980s, we began waking up to
the fact that those other cultures were here, that they were very different from
our own, and that they were demanding to be recognized and given rights as
cultures. But at that point, what basis did we have to resist those demands? We
had already said that the only thing that defines us as a people is
non-discrimination toward other peoples; we thus had no justification for saying
that maybe it’s not such a great idea to import people adhering to radical Islam
or Mexican nationalism into the United States. Having cast aside our own
culture, we had no choice but to yield, step by step, to the elevation of other
cultures. This is how America, through an indiscriminate and unqualified belief
in individualism, ended up surrendering to its opposite – to multiculturalism.
Is Immigration Restriction Immoral or Un-Christian?
What has been said up to this point
will offend many conservatives, particularly Christians. For one thing, the
Christian church consists of people of every culture and race, so why can’t a
nation? The answer is that the church is a heavenly organization, it is not
responsible, as a nation is, for the defense and preservation of a particular
earthly society. Mexico and Nigeria, for example, are largely Christian, but in
cultural terms are radically different from the United States.
To believe that all peoples on earth
should join our country is the very idea that God rejected at the tower of
Babel. God said he did not want all men to be united in one society, because
that would glorify human power. If I may presume to say so, God had a more
modest idea of human life on earth. He wanted men to live in distinct societies,
each speaking its own tongue, developing its own culture, and expressing God in
its own way. This is the true diversity of cultures that constitutes mankind,
not the false diversity that results from eliminating borders and coercively
mixing everyone together, which destroys each country’s distinctive character.
Consider how today’s multicultural London has lost much of its Englishness, and
increasingly resembles multicultural New York.
So I would respectfully suggest that
when Christians translate the spiritual idea of the unity of people under God
into the political ideology that people from all cultures should be allowed to
come en masse to America and other Western countries, that is not the
traditional teaching of the Christian church, that is a modern liberal idea,
that is the "Religion of Man," which has been infused into the Christian church
over the past fifty years.
But if this is the case, how can we
reconcile our spiritual unity as human beings under God with our actual cultural
differences? The answer is that in individual and private relationships, people
of different backgrounds can relate to each other as individuals, without
discrimination of culture and ethnicity. But on the group level, on the level of
entire peoples and nations and mass migrations, cultural differences do matter
very much and cannot be safely ignored.
Thinking and Acting Anew
It would therefore be a tragic error to
limit our thinking about immigration to technical matters such as law
enforcement against illegal aliens and security measures against terrorists, as
vitally important as those things are. Beyond the immediate threat of mass
physical destruction, we face a more subtle but no less serious threat to the
very survival of our civilization. As Daniel Pipes writes in the current issue
of Commentary:
"To me, the current wave of militant
Islamic violence against the United States, however dangerous, is ultimately
less consequential than the non-violent effort to transform it through
immigration, natural reproduction, and conversion."
Of course I agree with Mr. Pipes. But,
as I’ve tried to demonstrate, we cannot hope to stop or significantly slow that
immigration unless we abandon this contemporary idea that America is defined by
NOTHING except individual freedom and opportunity – the idea that America has no
particular culture of its own that is worth preserving. Rethinking these beliefs
and rewriting our immigration laws accordingly will not be easy, but if we fail
to make the attempt, we will simply continue sliding, slowly but surely, toward
the dissolution of our culture and our country.
Lawrence Auster is the author of The
Path to National Suicide: An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism, and
Huddled Clichés: Exposing Fraudulent Arguments that Have Opened America's
Borders to the World. Both are published by the American Immigration Control
Foundation. He lives in New York City. This article is based on a speech given
to the Council for National Policy at Dana Point, California, February 9, 2002.
_____
* Used with permission of the Social Contract Press.
The Social Contract, Spring 2002.
Please see original at < http//www.thesocialcontract.com/cgi-bin/showarticle.pl?articleID=1080&terms= >.
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