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I mentioned this VDH column about his journeys through the California backcountry in yesterday’s post about immigration waves, but it’s really worth reading just in case you didn’t notice the link:

During this unscientific experiment, three times a week I rode a bike on a 20-mile trip over various rural roads in southwestern Fresno County. I also drove my car over to the coast to work, on various routes through towns like San Joaquin, Mendota, and Firebaugh. And near my home I have been driving, shopping, and touring by intent the rather segregated and impoverished areas of Caruthers, Fowler, Laton, Orange Cove, Parlier, and Selma. My own farmhouse is now in an area of abject poverty and almost no ethnic diversity; the closest elementary school (my alma mater, two miles away) is 94 percent Hispanic and 1 percent white, and well below federal testing norms in math and English.

Here are some general observations about what I saw (other than that the rural roads of California are fast turning into rubble, poorly maintained and reverting to what I remember seeing long ago in the rural South). First, remember that these areas are the ground zero, so to speak, of 20 years of illegal immigration. There has been a general depression in farming — to such an extent that the 20- to-100-acre tree and vine farmer, the erstwhile backbone of the old rural California, for all practical purposes has ceased to exist.

On the western side of the Central Valley, the effects of arbitrary cutoffs in federal irrigation water have idled tens of thousands of acres of prime agricultural land, leaving thousands unemployed. Manufacturing plants in the towns in these areas — which used to make harvesters, hydraulic lifts, trailers, food-processing equipment — have largely shut down; their production has been shipped off overseas or south of the border. Agriculture itself — from almonds to raisins — has increasingly become corporatized and mechanized, cutting by half the number of farm workers needed. So unemployment runs somewhere between 15 and 20 percent.

Many of the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye no different from what I have seen in the Third World. There is a Caribbean look to the junked cars, electric wires crisscrossing between various outbuildings, plastic tarps substituting for replacement shingles, lean-tos cobbled together as auxiliary housing, pit bulls unleashed, and geese, goats, and chickens roaming around the yards. The public hears about all sorts of tough California regulations that stymie business — rigid zoning laws, strict building codes, constant inspections — but apparently none of that applies out here.

But remember, immigration is good for America! No matter what the empirical evidence might lead one to conclude, the important thing is that the theoretical case remains solid.

Thomas Friedman laments American decline:

Former President José María Figueres of Costa Rica has a saying I like: “There is no Planet B” — so we’d better make Plan A work to preserve a stable environment. I feel the same way about America these days. There is no America B, so we’d better make this one work a lot better than we’ve been doing, and not only for our sake. When Britain went into decline as the globe’s stabilizing power, America was right there, ready to pick up the role. Even with all our imperfections and mistakes, the world has been a better place for it. If America goes weak, though, and cannot project power the way it has, your kids won’t just grow up in a different America. They will grow up in a different world. You will not like who picks up the pieces.

This is extraordinarily ironic, coming as it does from an elite Jewish liberal. He quite clearly doesn’t recognize that it is the very causes he has championed for decades, from diversity, equality, and secularization to free trade, immigration, and globalization, that have so weakened America in the manner that concerns him now. While he is correct in saying that a successful and powerful America committed to its core values could again become a world leader, his definition of those core values almost surely includes those values that have proven so pernicious to American success, power, and world leadership.

The North American landmass isn’t going to disappear. There will still be Americans proper – descendants of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who founded the nation on principles derived from the Bible and the Magna Carta – as well as those who call themselves Americans but have no cultural, ethnic, or religious connection to the historical America that is now essentially gone. The results of the great experiment are now sufficiently observable that we can pronounce the failure of the Viral America hypothesis.

It is now clear that one cannot catch Americanism. Just as the Irish, German, Scandinavian, and Italian immigrants never fully grasped the English concepts of liberty and limited government*, thereby transforming what had been a voluntary union of sovereign states into an involuntary empire ruled by a sovereign central government, the subsequent wave of immigration from Mexico and other third-world nations has transformed what had been a rich and powerful empire into an impoverished and corrupt one. Read Victor Davis Hanson’s haunting article on the devolution of central California into third world poverty; it will give you a more clear perspective on what has already happened and what is eventually in store for many communities across the country.

This is not to say that it was ever the intention of the various waves of immigrants to destroy the very haven they sought, it was merely the natural consequence of immigrants bringing their cultures with them, as they always do. And history clearly demonstrates that this is always the consequence when a sufficiently large number of people migrate to new lands. There is a reason that the northern province of Italy is still named Lombardia after the people who settled there after invading in 568 rather than after those they displaced, after all. It does not matter what historical example of mass immigration one examines, the result is invariably the same and it does not matter if the immigration is legal or illegal. The only variable of any significance is the percentage of the population represented by the immigration. Consider, for example, the original English colonists. Did they adapt to the ways of the Indian tribes or did they bring their native English way of life with them and transform the area they inhabited?

This is also not to say that the native population does not undergo its own transformation over time, but the transformations happen much more quickly and to a much greater extent with the arrival of new influences. The adaptation of black ghetto culture by white suburban teenagers following the end of segregation is one of many cases in point. But keep in mind that the point here is not whether the transformation is good or bad, it is only to note that the transformation has taken place and, for better or for worse, the new blended culture is never going to be the same as the one that it replaced.

From the New York Times: “In 1980, the foreign-born population in the United States was about 4.5 million. By 2000, it had reached 11.3 million, bringing the foreign-born population to about 13 percent of the total. In the early 20th century, after the last big wave of immigration to the United States, immigrants had reached 15 percent of the population.”

Therefore, Friedman is wrong as one cannot expect to make America A work when it has been transformed into America A + (M+I2+G+S+J+3). America A no longer exists. This is the B-Ark nation.

*Before anyone gets their panties in a bunch, I invite you to compare the number of Irish, Italian, German, and Scandinavian political philosophers who have written on liberty and limited government with the number of English philosophers who published works on the subject.