Buchanan's Big Score
David Weigel | August 22, 2006, 5:01pm
A Drudge plug, a few controversial passages, and boom - Pat Buchanan's newest book (with his oldest cover) hits #1 on Amazon. Josh Marshall calls it a "xenophobic hairball," but really it's not too different from what Buchanan has been shouting into the dark for years, or what Peter Brimelow made a splash saying a decade ago (before boarding himself up into the VDARE.com sanitarium).
America faces an existential crisis. If we do not get control
of our borders, by 2050 Americans of European descent will be a
minority in the nation their ancestors created and built. No nation has
ever undergone so radical a demographic transformation and survived.
This really is no different than the old Brimelow spiel, although PB always personalized it by noting he didn't want his young son to grow up in this scary, swarthy future Mexamerica.
I'm sympathetic to Buchanan's arguments. It makes no sense to ignore, as our midterm-fearing Congress would like to, the bad law and worse economics that have created the border crisis with Mexico. It makes even less sense to introduce de jure bilingualism in communities surfeited with Mexican immigrants. But this idea hat Mexican immigration will topple the nationhood and traditions of European-Americans is nine parts alarmism and one part B.S.
Can anyone point me to the border towns where democracy has collapsed, supplanted by Latin American-style caudillos? Have Arizona, California, and the rest of the Southwest become less American or less loyal? Restrictionists are too quick to compare America's immigration with that of Europe or of collapsed empires of the past. But it's a false comparison between, say, Muslim immigrants who settle in Rotterdam and refuse to integrate with Dutch society, and Mexican immigrants who go to Catholic mass and long to become American citizens. The former pose a real challenge to a society's stability, but the latter can be sucessfully assimiliated if policymakers want to assimilate them. (Yes, controlling the immigration flow would be the keystone of any successful assimilation.)
I sense some cognitive dissonance at the Wall Street Journal op-ed desk about this, though. Liberal and conservative politics can apparently be transmitted genetically. But culture can't. Anyone able to crack that logic?
(Cross-posted at AS.com.)
Genghis Kahn | August 23, 2006, 4:17am | #
David,
But this idea hat Mexican immigration will topple the nationhood and traditions of European-Americans is nine parts alarmism and one part B.S.
Not entirely, for reasons I explained on a previous thread.
Restrictionists are too quick to compare America's immigration with that of Europe or of collapsed empires of the past.
I think you need to read more history. Past nations have in fact been over run with immigrants. The Middle East is a disaster to this day because it's been similarly over run so many times in history. They've never been able to assimilate, and today I doubt they ever will.
By the time you see clear evidence of disloyalty, it really will be entirely too late to do anything about it.
Mexican immigrants who go to Catholic mass and long to become American citizens.
I live in Tucson and I know lots and lots of Mexican immigrants. I will tell you flat out: they don't necessarily want to become American citizens. They just don't want to live in the El Hell Hole on the other side of the border.
If you get to know these people (I've spent more than a few hours with them), you'll quickly learn that it's just a bit paradoxical to say they're here entirely "by choice".
It's not a choice based on a burning desire to flock to Mother Liberty, or even to become American. It's a desire born of the need to escape from the animals they have running things south of the border.
In fact, they try really, really hard not to become
too American. And they work hard at creating cultural environments where their children will not become too American. Not all succeed, but their communities are becoming large enough these days, that they don't always fail either.....
Your assumption that every immigrant who comes here, just wants to be a good American, is not accurate.
Yes, controlling the immigration flow would be the keystone of any successful assimilation.
Well, all other things aside, I'll take this one statement as evidence that I (if I may be so arrogant) might have made a little progress.
There does have to be some kind of control over the immigrant flow rate. We cannnot allow any number in who wishes to come, at any rate they please, whether or not anybody would care to face this unpleasant truth.
Which is why a "complete open borders" policy is a misnomer, at minimum.
But as James said,
Makes no sense to have mass immigration with a welfare state. All it does is grow the government. About the only libertarian who will admit to this very simple fact is Milton Friedman.
Don't feed me the "let them in and then fix the welfare state" crap. Everybody here knows it's never, ever going to work that way.
Which, of course, the "Open Borders" crowd has flatly refused to address head on. They've got this assinine idea that immigrants have no way of getting a hold of welfare.
The Open Borders people have never talked with Mexican immigrants, I swear. They betray their own ignorance with the things they say. There's a nice, thriving black market for fake IDs and paperwork here in Arizona. Any hispanic can become a citizen today, if you got the cash.
These fake IDs are good enough that the Feds can't tell which are real and which aren't. But don't let that bother you for a second, just keep agitating for all out open borders. We can take anything, we're America. Fuck yeah.
Genghis Kahn | August 23, 2006, 4:42am | #
btw, if anybody is looking for examples of places in the world where immigrant assimilation has been a problem (because there were just too damn many of them relative to the existing population mass), take a close look at the Pacific islands where there were, successively, waves from India and then Muslims, on top of which there's been a perpetual influx of Chinese. Then the Europeans came (and curiously enough, they're the only ones who condemned themselves for doing so and apologized for it after the fact...go figure).
Indonesia and Malaysia come to mind. Stability was achieved in Singapore only by implementation of an Iron Fist policy.
But the Middle East remains the ultimate case en point. Nobody including the Romans has kept it under control without periodically going in and just knocking heads together (and you have to have the guts to ignore the blood while you're at it).
And the ME was NOT a nice, quiet, stable little paradise under the Ottomans, in case anybody is still under that illusion. The Ottomans were willing, and at times did, knock heads together.
I don't know at exactly what point the immigration rate becomes high enough to be a genuine problem. But I have no doubt that such a point exists and by the time you reach it, it's near-impossible to turn things back around.
Last point -- look at the size of the unhappy Third World. Roughly a billion in the ME, roughly half of which would like to leave. Add to that the populations of Africa, Central & South America, and Asia. Now assume that maybe 1% of all of them, have both the means and the will to come to the US.
Do you still think it's impossible for us to get over run, with a real Wide Open Door policy? We're talking 1% of many, many billions.
I really don't think it's impossible at all.
Elmo | August 23, 2006, 2:31pm | #
Pat Buchanan has it right, he just left out the part about how it will happen. History has a way of taking it's time, and time takes it's toll, , , , on the unwary.
If anyone here is 50 years old you will remember Haight Asbury, the "flower children" of the 60's, Woodstock, Joan Baez, and that Bill Clinton "didn't inhale", or go to jail. You will also remember that over a hundred of his close associates did go to jail. You may even remember that he left a trail of dead bodies from Mena, Arkansas, where two 16 year old friends, after they were caught by some guards one night watching a C-130 unload marijuana, decided to lay down on a railroad track and commit suicide; how a state trooper's wife traveled over a thousand miles to testify against Clinton, only to jump out of a window the night before; to a park in Washington DC when his own lawyer was found with a bullet in his head and the gun in the wrong hand. Between those events you may recall other dead bodies scattered in several states who had been, before their demise, on the trail of something shady that Bill Clinton was involved with.
How did Bill Clinton escape? One of the last things he did as governor of Arkansas was sign into law a provision that if the first decision on a death was "suicide", then no investigation would follow. The lawyer's "suicide" happened inside the District of Columbia rather than in one of the 50 states. When the Park Police notified the White House of the lawyer's death, Clinton was President and Arkansas law was applied the death, ergo: no further investigation. The gun was still in the wrong hand to have put the bullet in the lawyer's head the way it got there.
Beyond that Clinton had, and still has, a political machine to protect himself. That machine is now manifested in his wife.
How does any of that relate to Pat Buchanan?s State of Emergency? Through the politics of "time".
Admittedly, illegal immigrants, per se, don't present a political threat. But their supporters do. Case in point: Bill Clinton was heart and sole behind the move to allow "drive by" voter registration at Motor Vehicle licensing offices, and gave 60,000 illegals amnesty just before the 1986 elections.
History takes time, remember? As illegals have babies, those babies become American citizens with their first breath, and that anchors the illegals better than anything written down in any document, anywhere. It also makes the babies a minority, with all the rights afforded minorities, and that means education and job preferences. It does NOT mean the babies are red, white and blue Americans. It means they are not required to perform as well, while achieving as much or more through preferential treatment, as their red, white and blue American contemporaries.
Massachusetts has recently voted to allow reduced college tuition to illegals, while refusing the same benefits to Americans. Even the servicemen and women returning from the war in the Middle East get no reduced tuition benefit in Masachusetts.
The Mayor of Los Angeles is an admitted director in "La Raza". La Raza's mottos is "Por la raza, toda, pro todas otras, nada". Simply translated that says, "For the race, everything. For everybody else, nothing".
One of La Raza?s goals is stated in the Aztlan Manifesto. That Manifesto says everything from Costa Rica to Utah actually belongs to "La Raza", and their goal is to return it to it's rightful owners. Not through direct confrontation, but through intimidation if it will work, and through the ballot box if it doesn't.
Maybe some of us remember the signs, when the illegals and their supporters took to the streets a while back. In particular some of the signs said "We are not invaders, we are in our homeland, it was the border that moved, and we are going to move it back".
San Francisco Board of Supervisor member Gerado Sandoval was instrumental in preventing the retired battleship USS Iowa from being placed there. It was to be a monument to the efforts that won WWII, a museum, and a disaster command center in case of earthquakes and/or tidal waves. His own California US Congresswoman, and former San Francisco Mayor, Diane Feinstein was instrumental in getting the Navy to spend 3 million dollars on upgrading the ship for those purposes. Still Sandoval was against the idea. He even went so far as to say we don't even need a military force. When asked how we would defend ourselves in case of an attack he said, "Well, we have the cops".
Who is Gerardo Sandoval? He is the son of illegal immigrants, an "anchor baby" himself, who openly admits having had preferential treatment for education, hiring, and grade performance to get into law school. He practices law on the side in San Francisco and his entire clientele is made up of illegal aliens.
Read the transcript of his comments and/or watch the entire interview video at:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,184951,00.html
I am acquainted with a high school teacher in the Midland/Odessa Texas Independent School Systems. She is the daughter of what we used to call "Wetbbacks". (That is a pejorative term these days, but like a rose, , , by any other name it's still a thorn bush.)
Her job is to teach remedial English to juniors and seniors so they can speak English well enough to graduate. Her attitude is that she'll do it for her paycheck, but only for her paycheck. She says they'll never speak English after the last school bell rings anyway, so why should she make any effort to teach them English in the first place.
There is a website that opposes any border enforcement. One of the entries on it says: "Immigrants contribute 7 billion in social security per year. they earn 240 billion, report 90 billion, and only are reimbursed 5 billion, "where are the 85 billion?"
That is interesting. They make 240 billion, but only report 90 billion. To me that means they already have 150 billion in under-the-table income. Then they complain about taxes on the 90 billion they do report, but they want that back, too.
See it all on: www.nohr4437.org.
History has a way of taking it's time. And time takes it's toll, , , , on the unwary.
Pat Buchanan has it right. He just didn't lay out the details.
