Tag: immigration

Immigration as ideological weapon

Peter Hitchens admits what was always obvious: the reason the Left has favored mass immigration is because they believed, correctly, that they could use it to politically transform the nation:

The greatest mass migration in our history has taken place…. Our leaders only had to go to Boston, any time in the past five years, and they would have known.

But all our leading politicians were afraid of knowing the truth.

If they knew, they would at least have to pretend to act.

And the truth was, they liked things as they were.

And it was at least partly my own fault.

When I was a Revolutionary Marxist, we were all in favour of as much immigration as possible.

It wasn’t because we liked immigrants, but because we didn’t like Britain. We saw immigrants – from anywhere – as allies against the staid, settled, conservative society that our country still was at the end of the Sixties.

Also, we liked to feel oh, so superior to the bewildered people – usually in the poorest parts of Britain – who found their neighbourhoods suddenly transformed into supposedly ‘vibrant communities’.

If they dared to express the mildest objections, we called them bigots.

Revolutionary students didn’t come from such ‘vibrant’ areas (we came, as far as I could tell, mostly from Surrey and the nicer parts of London).

We might live in ‘vibrant’ places for a few (usually squalid) years, amid unmown lawns and overflowing dustbins.

But we did so as irresponsible, childless transients – not as homeowners, or as parents of school-age children, or as old people hoping for a bit of serenity at the ends of their lives.

When we graduated and began to earn serious money, we generally headed for expensive London enclaves and became extremely choosy about where our children went to school, a choice we happily denied the urban poor, the ones we sneered at as ‘racists’.

What did we know, or care, of the great silent revolution which even then was beginning to transform the lives of the British poor?

To us, it meant patriotism and tradition could always be derided as ‘racist’.

And now the pro-immigrant Left belatedly discovers they have a tiger by the tail that doesn’t give a damn about their careful distinctions between what is useful to them and what is not.  This is par for the course for the Left; the Mensheviks always end up being cast aside by the Bolsheviks. The Richard Dawkins of the world are always happy to foolishly embrace Islam as an attack on Christian culture, if they weren’t too short-sighted to grasp that Islam would prove every bit as implacable a foe as Christianity, they wouldn’t be Leftists in the first place.

Many, if not most, white progressives, libertarians, and conservatives who bought into the Myth of Ellis Island are going to come over to the nationalist side in the next ten years, frightened by the realization that what they celebrated and advocated has come to pass in a very different way than they expected.  But those of us who have always valued nationalist culture and traditions need to always keep in mind that they are, at best, modestly useful allies of demonstrably inferior judgment on such matters.

The Right has a long and sordid history of elevating those who have “seen the light” to be its opinion leaders.  National Review and Pajamas Media is chock full of former progressives, ex-Democrats, and reformed socialists, which is why their positions are so reliably meek, ineffective, and apologetic.  They still want to curry favor with the Leftist institutions they once revered; they simply do not regard the Left with the contempt such organizations and people merit.  Look, for example, at Hitchens’s attack on Enoch Powell in the very article in which he belatedly comes around to accept the essence of Powell’s
position on immigration.

That is why this rush of newly reformed transnationalists cannot ever be trusted or taken very seriously.  They are still the same traitors to their cultures and traditions they have always been, all that has changed is that they are now frightened of what their own actions have wrought and alarmed at the extent to which the transformations they sought are destroying even the aspects of their society they expected to retain.

Even now, the transnationalist right is still trying to finesse an irrelevant difference between illegal immigration (bad) and legal immigration (good).  This is a fool’s game. The fact is that ALL immigration beyond a small and readily absorbed amount is invariably destructive and will always transform the invaded nation into something different than it was before.  Whether the transformation is desirable or not is a separate and debatable matter, the point is that the transformation is definitely going to take place.

GOP pursues strategic suicide

Any party that is dumb enough to bank on that elusive conservative Hispanic vote deserves what it will get:

Republican opposition to legalizing the status of millions of illegal immigrants is crumbling in the nation’s capital as leading lawmakers in the party scramble to halt eroding support among Hispanic voters — a shift that is providing strong momentum for an overhaul of immigration laws.

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a Tea Party Republican, on Tuesday became the latest to embrace a more welcoming approach, declaring to the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants that if they want to work in America, “then we will find a place for you.”

While he never uttered the word “citizenship” and said a secure border must come first, Mr. Paul strongly implied that citizenship would eventually be available to them.

It’s disappointing, but hardly surprising, that Mr. Paul’s conventional, (and in this case, erroneous), libertarian instincts would get the better of his economic and nationalist sensibilities.  America doesn’t need 11 million illegal immigrants working.  It doesn’t need 30 million legal immigrants working, for that matter.  Those who think they do clearly don’t understand supply, demand, and the consequences of increasing supply with regards to price.

One would think that Republicans would learn to rethink their actions any time the New York Times lines up behind them, but apparently one of the key aspects of being a Republican is never remembering what happened last time.

“His new message follows the publication
on Monday of a blistering report from the Republican National Committee
that urged the party’s members to champion an immigration overhaul that
Hispanics can embrace or risk seeing the party shrinking “to its core
constituencies only.””

Ronald Reagan once noted that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left him.  The Republican Party is now in the process of abandoning its core constituencies in favor of an imaginary and alien one.

Because you invaded their country

An Indian man wonders why no British people were willing to intervene when he was being beaten up on a train:

‘Why would nobody help me?’ Father punched in the face 18 times by racist thugs in front of 200 witnesses on a packed tram… and not one person intervened. Prakash Patel, 56, attacked while on a tram in Manchester with his daughter

Can you imagine this happening in the England in which Mr. Patel first settled 30 years ago?  No more than you can probably imagine a German complaining that French civilians didn’t come to his assistance when the French Resistance attacked him.  Meanwhile, Mr. Patel’s daughter is very fortunate that they were Indians being attacked in England and not Swiss being attacked in India.

The bien-pensant can cluck like chickens about how terrible it is that humanity does not suffer invasion of its territories and subjugation of its peoples with all the gentle good humor of lambs being led to the slaughter if they like; they will do so to no avail.  Recall that most still regard Winston Churchill, Davy Crockett, and the men of the USS Arizona heroes for their resistance of failed conquests far less credible than those attempted by Mr. Patel and his third world cohorts. The “racist thugs” of today will be the heroes of tomorrow, just as the multicuturalists thought so well of by the progressives and well-behaved conservatives of today will eventually be considered insane monsters of history in the vein of the Nazis and Communists.

Multiculturalism is worse than murder.  It is even worse than mass murder, being more akin to genocide. It is attempted sociocide.  As for the self-hating fifth columnists who piously mouth PC sacraments like “racists have no place in our society”, I suggest they go and try settling in India or Jamaica or Nigeria so they can discover how the people they are so eagerly welcoming to settle in their country truly feel about racial differences.

It doesn’t matter in the slightest how one feels personally about these matters.  It doesn’t matter how pure-in-heart and anti-racist you believe yourself to be. It doesn’t matter that people of various sub-species and races have lived in relative harmony for ten, twenty, or even one hundred years. Cultural friction, like gravity, always wins in the end. History shows, history makes it abundantly clear, that eventually the cultural differences will trigger sufficient violence to restore the violated borders once more.  It is as completely futile to blame “racism” for the inevitable violence as it is to wage war on “terror”.  Doing so is a fundamental category error.

Immigration is when a small number of foreigners are permitted to settle within a country by the native people.  Invasion is when tens of thousands or more foreigners settle in a country against the wishes of the native people, regardless of whether they happen to be armed or not. Both Europe and the USA have suffered quiet and undeclared large-scale invasions; only now are the natives beginning to wake up and become restless.

And the reason they will become considerably more violent is explained by Mr. Patel himself: “He said he would consider leaving Britain in the wake of the attack were it not for the fact that his family is so well established here.”  In other words, the invaders will not leave until they are forced to do so, as we have seen in India, in Zimbabwe, as we are presently seeing in South Africa, and as we will eventually see in England and the USA.

Now, there is certainly a case to be made that there is no need to harbor any sympathy for the British, considering how they themselves invaded more than half the countries around the world.  But it is blatantly dishonest to pretend the British people are not being invaded against their will, as dishonest as it would be to deny the invasions of the British imperial era.

The honest monohumanist, assuming one can be found, will be inclined to ask “why are you racist?”  To which one can only respond: “on what basis do you assume that this time, for the first time in over six thousand years of recorded history, it will be different?”

The consequences of democratization

It is itself indicative of an educational failure that the inevitable consequence of democratizing anything leads inevitably to mediocrity should prove surprising:

Years ago, school was not for everyone. Classrooms were places for discipline, study. Teachers were respected figures. Parents actually gave them permission to punish their children by slapping them or tugging their ears. But at least in those days, schools aimed to offer a more dignified life.

Nowadays more children attend school than ever before, but they learn much less. They learn almost nothing. The proportion of the Mexican population that is literate is going up, but in absolute numbers, there are more illiterate people in Mexico now than there were 12 years ago. Even if baseline literacy, the ability to read a street sign or news bulletin, is rising, the practice of reading an actual book is not. Once a reasonably well-educated country, Mexico took the penultimate spot, out of 108 countries, in a Unesco assessment of reading habits a few years ago.

One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?”

The concept of group schooling is fundamentally flawed from the start.  But throw in the expansion of the number of students attending as well as the elements of entrenched, self-interested administrative and teaching bureaucracies, and you have a perfect recipe for teaching absolutely nothing of import, regardless of whether you are considering American college students or Mexican elementary schoolers.  It should be readily apparent that the more children attend school, the more mediocre the education that ALL of those children will receive.

It’s not exactly a zero-sum game, but it might as well be.  The more resources that are committed to education, the more the parasite class is drawn to it and the more resources will be diverted away from its primary purpose.

Now lets contemplate the consequences of importing tens of millions of these uneducated quasi-illiterates with zero familiarity knowledge of the Western political tradition and giving them citizenship and the right to vote.  On what planet does anyone possibly think this is going to lead to any sort of improvement in the national well-being?  What is the case for believing this is going to do anything but hasten the decline and fall of the United States?

People sometimes wonder how I can be an open and avowed anti-equalitarian elitist.  To which my response is: precisely how mediocre do you believe yourself to be that you are not?

Rubio will kill the Republican Party

If, that is, he manages to convert enough of the rank-and-file to buy into the Bush strategy based on the conservative Latino voter and support his pro-immigration policies.  A veteran GOP operative explains why Marco Rubio is not the Great Brown Hope for the Republican Party:

“Let me tell you something. The Hispanic voters in Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico don’t give a damn about Marco Rubio, the Tea Party Cuban-American from Florida. You know what? We won the Cuban vote! And it’s because younger Cubans are behaving differently than their parents. It’s probably my favorite stat of the whole campaign. So this notion that Marco Rubio is going to heal their problems — it’s not even sophomoric; it’s juvenile! And by the way: the bigger problem they’ve got with Latinos isn’t immigration. It’s their economic policies and health care. The group that supported the president’s health care bill the most? Latinos.”

However, it is absolutely absurd to think that it is only the GOP’s economic policies that are the primary problem, although they are not popular.  Immigration is destroying it because the USA has been invaded by millions of people who vote to the left side of the political spectrum.  The Republican Party isn’t competitive in Detroit or Los Angeles, and it isn’t going to be competitive anywhere that follows the demographic lead of those two cities.

Which, in this case, happens to be the entire nation.

Rubio isn’t going to save the Republican Party.  He is much more likely to finish it off for good with the help of Barack Obama.

The Left’s reluctant racists

A bien-pensant progressive reluctantly admits that vibrant multiculturalism and immigration has made a reluctant racist of her:

In the Nineties, when I arrived, this part of Acton was a traditional working-class area. Now there is no trace of any kind of community – that word so cherished by the Left. Instead it has been transformed into a giant transit camp and is home to no one. The scale of immigration over recent years has created communities throughout London that never need to – or want to – interact with outsiders.

It wasn’t always the case: since the 1890s thousands of Jewish, Irish, Afro-Caribbean, Asian and Chinese workers, among others, have arrived in the capital, often displacing the indigenous population. Yes, there was hateful overt racism and discrimination, I’m not denying that. But, over time, I believe we settled down into a happy mix of incorporation and shared aspiration, with disparate peoples walking the same pavements but returning to very different homes – something the Americans call “sundown segregation”.

But now, despite the wishful thinking of multiculturalists, wilful segregation by immigrants is increasingly echoed by the white population – the rate of white flight from our cities is soaring….  I, too, have decided to leave my area, following in the footsteps of so many of my neighbours. I don’t really want to go. I worked long and hard to get to London, to find a good job and buy a home and I’d like to stay here. But I’m a stranger on these streets and all the “good” areas, with safe streets, nice housing and pleasant cafés, are beyond my reach. I see London turning into a place almost exclusively for poor immigrants and the very rich.

It’s sad that I am moving not for a positive reason, but to escape something. I wonder whether I’ll tell the truth, if I’m asked. I can’t pretend that I’m worried about local schools, so perhaps I’ll say it’s for the chance of a conversation over the garden fence. But really I no longer need an excuse: mass immigration is making reluctant racists of us all.

It’s not an accident that the loudest liberal voices still preaching the glories of immigration and multiculturalism live in safely lily-white enclaves.  The vocal anti-racist McRapey lives in Bradford, Ohio, which the 2010 Census describes as “98.9% White, 0.2% African American, 0.1% Native American, 0.2% Asian, 0.1% Pacific Islander, 0.3% from other races, and 0.3% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 0.9% of the population.”

Meanwhile, tends of thousands of progressive and pro-affirmative action liberals with children who can’t afford to live in an elite, heavy-security White Zone are fleeing their increasingly vibrant communities for the very communities that their kind have spent the last fifty years decrying.  Their actions speak much, much louder than their words.  And their actions are far more intrinsically racist and segregationist than the words of George Wallace or Enoch Powell ever were.

Immigration in very small numbers tends to strengthen a society.  Mass immigration, on the other hand, is simple invasion and it destroys a society through occupation, disruption, and displacement.

Spengler and the geography myth

In Form and Actuality, Spengler also appears to have anticipated my expressed doubts about the ability of non-Anglo Saxons to correctly grasp, let alone uphold and sustain, the Common Law-based Rights of Englishmen, on the basis of changes in their geographic locations:

“Today we think in continents, and it is only our philosophers and historians who have not realized that we do so. Of what significance to us, then, are conceptions and purviews that they put before us as universally valid, when in truth their furthest horizon does not extend beyond the intellectual atmosphere of Western Man?

“Examine, from this point of view, our best books. When Plato speaks of humanity, he means the Hellenes in contrast to the barbarians, which is entirely consonant with the ahistoric mode of the Classical life and thought, and his premisses take him to conclusions that for Greeks were complete and significant. When, however, Kant philosophizes, say on ethical ideas, he maintains the validity of his theses for men of all times and places. He does not say this in so many words, for, for himself and his readers, it is something that goes without saying. In his aesthetics he formulates the principles, not of Phidias’s art, or Rembrandt’s art, but of Art generally. But what he poses as necessary forms of thought are in reality only necessary forms of Western thought, though a glance at Aristotle and his essentially different conclusions should have sufficed to show that Aristotle’s intellect, not less penetrating than his own, was of different structure from it. The categories of the Westerner are just as alien to Russian thought as those of the Chinaman or the ancient Greek are to him. For us, the effective and complete comprehension of Classical root-words is just as impossible as that of Russian and Indian, and for the modern Chinese or Arab, with their utterly different intellectual constitutions, “philosophy from Bacon to Kant” has only a curiosity value.

“It is this that is lacking to the Western thinker, the very thinker in whom we might have expected to find it — insight into the historically relative character of his data, which are expressions of one specific existence and one only; knowledge of the necessary limits of their validity; the conviction that his “unshakable” truths and “eternal” views are simply true for him and eternal for his world-view; the duty of looking beyond them to find out what the men of other Cultures have with equal certainty evolved out of themselves. That and nothing else will impart completeness to the philosophy of the future, and only through an understanding of the living world shall we understand the symbolism of history. Here there is nothing constant, nothing universal. We must cease to speak of the forms of “Thought,” the principles of “Tragedy,” the mission of “The State.” Universal validity involves always the fallacy of arguing from particular to particular.”

It would be a mistake to confuse Spengler’s historical relativism with modern moral relativism.  Anyone who speaks more than one language is familiar with the phenomenon of the untranslatable word; how much more untranslatable are the concepts that cross temporal, genetic, and cultural boundaries as well as mere linguistic ones? What the Ancient Greeks meant by the term we translate as “barbarian” is very different than our concept of the word, while even words as seemingly simple and straightforward as “African” and “infringed” are today interpreted very differently by people living at the same time within the same political boundaries.

Spengler’s observation underlies the problematic nature of mass immigration in general as well as the total madness of permitting mass immigration from non-European nations in a quasi-democracy in particular.  To expect any respect for the totemic foundations of Western civilization from those whose very structural worldviews are, quite literally, alien, is to defy both logic as well as millennia of recorded observations through history.  And even the modern fear of addressing the consequences of this madness beautifully illustrates Spengler’s point; would the highly civilized Athenians who brutally butchered the Melians for the crime of remaining neutral in the Peloponnesian War, hesitate to act in seeing their agoras overrun by aliens?  Would the Romans, who went to war with their own socii rather than permit them to claim Roman citizenship? Would the Chinese, past or present?

47 years late and 55 trillion short

Larry Auster points out that conservatives never manage to conserve anything, not even the nation they supposedly love so dearly:

As long as there was a chance to stop the immigration and the resulting dispossession of Anglo-European America, the topic was forbidden.
But now that it’s happened, and there’s a sense that nothing can be
done about it, and therefore the identification of the fact that mass
nonwhite immigration is leading to the radical cultural and political
transformation of America does not logically require a call for restricting
that immigration, it’s become safe for Mark Steyn and all the other
despicable conservative cowards to come out from the shadows and say
bold-sounding things like, “Demographics is Destiny.” In the minds of
Steyn and the others, they are not issuing a warning against that transformation, as such a warning would make them racists; they are announcing the victory
of that transformation, combined with impotent little grumblings about
some of its negative effects. After all, what—other than impotent
grumbling—is conservatism about? 

Of course, just because it’s too late to do anything about it easily or peacefully doesn’t mean it’s actually too late for anything to be done about it.  And that is the real tragedy.

Language signals

Dr. Helen notes an interesting point made by the author of a newly published book:

Only in America does the word “frontier” mean freedom, open space and
opportunity. In every other language, the word “frontier” means the
opposite– border, boundary, and fear of the dangers that lurk in in the
strange and the new. 

That’s not insignificant, but potentially more significant is the fact that America is also one of the very few societies foolish enough to forget that the primary difference between “immigrant” and “invader” is one of quantity.  One of the reasons that the historical Greek, Roman, Chinese, and Japanese cultures remained distinct and significant for so long is that their words for foreigner translate to “barbarian”, “barbarian”, “barbarian”, and “round-eyed, red-haired, butter-stinking devil”.

The menace of hope

The NYT smells Republican blood in the water and goes for the kill:

 Funny how quickly some principles collapse when given the right kind of shove. One day, the Republican Party is rock-ribbed restrictionist, dedicated to the proposition that unauthorized immigrants are an invading army of job stealers, welfare moochers and criminals whose only acceptable destiny is to be caught and deported — the border fence forever, “amnesty” never. The next day: never mind. The party suddenly discovers the merits of a working immigration system. Senators like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who once bravely supported bipartisan reform but slunk away late in the last Bush administration, are scratching at the door again, as if the last five years never happened.

All it took was an election in which millions of Latino voters — many of them the wives and husbands, sons, daughters, grandchildren, cousins, co-workers and friends of those despised “illegals” — overwhelmingly chose President Obama over the man who promised to be deporter in chief. They rejected Mitt Romney by 3 to 1, according to exit polls. Asian-Americans did, too. Republicans looked at a changing America, saw a future of decline and irrelevance for the party, and concluded that immigrants weren’t so bad after all.

One more amnesty and we’ll establish the permanent left-liberal majority!  You can almost feel them desperately trying to conceal their glee.  What is remarkable is that they can’t seem to understand that the current travails of Illinois and California are what happens when left-liberals get what they want.  It’s like letting a five year old kid child drive.  There’s going to be a crash, it’s going to be bloody, and everyone is going to blame those who weren’t behind the wheel.

This is much more A Phantom Menace than A New Hope.