I was reading Oman’s history of the Byzantine empire at the gym today, and this passage struck me as rather timely, in light of my reference to Lombardia during a Darkstream earlier this week:
The empire held undisputed possession of Italy for no more than fifteen years after the expulsion of the Ostrogoths in a.d. 553. Then a new enemy came in from the north, following the same path that had already served for the Visigoths of Alaric and the Ostrogoths of Theodoric. The new-comers were the race of the Lombards, who had hitherto dwelt in Hungary, on the Middle Danube, and had more frequently been found as friends than as foes of the Romans.
But their warlike and ambitious King Alboin, having subdued all his nearer neighbours, began to covet the fertile plains of Italy, where he saw the emperors keeping a very inadequate garrison, now that the Ostrogoths were finally driven away. In a.d. 568 Alboin and his hordes crossed the Alps, bringing with them wife and child, and flocks and herds, while their old land on the Danube was abandoned to the Avars. The Lombards took possession of the flat country in the north of Italy, as far as the line of the Po, with very little difficulty. The region, we are told, was almost uninhabited owing to the combined effects of the great plague and the Ostrogothic war.
In this once fertile and populous, but now deserted, lowland, the Lombards settled down in great numbers. There they have left their name as the permanent denomination of the plain of Lombardy. Only one city, the strong fortress of Pavia, held out against them for long; when it fell in 571, after a gallant defence of three years, Alboin made it his capital, instead of choosing one of the larger and more famous towns of Milan and Verona, the older centres of life in the land he had conquered.
Americans are not going to make Americans 3.0 of Mexicans and the other post-1965 immigrants any more than the Germans, Scandinavians, Irish, Italians, and Jews became Americans 2.0, or the English settlers became American Indians, aka Americans 1.0. In fact, given the adulteration of America 2.0, it would be as reasonable to refer to the much-anticipated Not-White Post-America as New Mexico II.
I was a little surprised by Sarah Hoyt’s recent take on the legitimacy of recent immigration into the United States, given our differences on what is, and is not, American, but provides an effective rhetorical point to demonstrate that post-1965 immigration is, and has been, wrong.
Immigration is like a marriage, because in essence it is a marriage. It is an individual throwing in his/her fate with a people. It is a “and marry our fortunes together” it is a “Wherever thou goest I shall go.” Your throwing your genetic inheritance in with those people. You’re submerging yourself in a sea of them.
There is, at least in Portugal a tendency for emigrants to move to a new country and try to keep their kids from intermarrying/staying there. One of the things we often heard from visiting relatives from other countries was “We have to return before he/she/they start dating.” Nine times out of ten, it didn’t work. In fact, I knew only one case in which it worked, which was a neighbor whose daughter seems to have been kept more or less under house arrest in South Africa, so that when they returned and she attended college with me, she was much older but completely drawers at socializing or dating. She did eventually marry a Portuguese man and she lives in the village, but let me tell you, few parents would go to the extent of abusing their kids just to make sure they “return” to their place of origin.
So, immigration means melding your destiny and that of the people you join.
Now, as above, some immigrants don’t want that/aren’t aware of that. These are mostly economic immigrants, and they’re often buoyed by the fond idea that they’ll return to their place of origin, with the kids, as soon as the kids hit puberty. This is more likely/perhaps only likely for countries you can drive/walk to. There’s something about crossing the ocean that makes that more difficult and Irish and Italians eventually stopped keeping track of whether their kids married in the community.
At any rate, some Mexican immigrants might intend to go back, and some might even do it. And some of the kids of those might come back too after being dragged back to a “home” that was never theirs. Keep that mind.
On the other hand many people getting married don’t intend to have it be forever.
Why do I keep bringing marriage up? Because marriage is the best metaphor for immigration, and because, unlike in immigration, no one doubts that BOTH PARTS TO THE MARRIAGE have a say in it. Or that when one part doesn’t have a say in it, it is wrong.
The American people were lied to by the architects of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act. They never consented to the alteration of the demographic balance, and, in fact, they were told the precise opposite. Which means that the marriage was invalid from the start, and therefore, must be annulled.