Blacks Clashing With Hispanics—While Whites Sleep
03/06/2003
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One of the underestimated benefits of mass immigration, the Open Borders Lobby likes to tell us, is that it imparts a fascinating diversity to an otherwise drab, boring, and tedious white Anglo-Saxon civilization.

You probably could not have fooled William Shakespeare with that argument, but it seems to work well enough on many Republicans.

In any case, aside from the patronizing racism the argument conveys, it doesn't seem to be true. Almost every major conflict in the world today, from the Middle East to the Caribbean, seems to center around ethnic, racial or religious differences.

Thanks to mass immigration into this country, we may soon enjoy the same kind of conflict here.

A series in the Washington Times last week about the impact of America's newest—now largest—minority group, namely Hispanics imported because of immigration, suggested just that.

The main theme that reporter Steve Miller perceived in the three long stories he wrote on the subject was that neither Hispanics nor blacks are very happy with each other. [Washington Times Three part series by Steve Miller: Part I Welcome to the neighborhood, Part II: Mutual mistrust, Part III: Suspicious minds]

In South Central Los Angeles, only one of the many areas and regions Mr. Miller surveyed, the predominant feeling among those few blacks who remain in the neighborhood is that "They took our homes and our schools," as one black resident complained. "They," of course are the Hispanics who have largely displaced the blacks in the area that was the center of the 1992 "Rodney King" riots.

Hispanics, for their part, are not exactly shy about saying they're glad the blacks are gone.

"Two years ago, nobody could walk around here and be safe," a Hispanic resident told Mr. Miller. "It was half blacks. But then the Spanish people moved in. Now it is safe."

Well, not entirely. Even though, as Mr. Miller reports, during the last 10 years "much of the black population died or left, sometimes headed for prison," Hispanic gangs moved in where black gangs had once ruled. The same man who complained that blacks made the area unsafe also told Mr. Miller about his children telling him that "that black and Hispanic gangsters were beating up the unaffiliated Hispanic kids..."

Today, Mr. Miller concludes, "the new arrivals also carried a crime wave of their own in the form of Mexican street gangs, which still run rampant. The mix of black and Hispanic gangs, each violently guarding territory, continues to make South Central a war zone."

But it's not just South Central that's a war zone as a result of mass immigration. The war zone seems to extend all over the country, especially where blacks and Hispanics confront each other.

In Memphis, Hispanic gangs moved in when black gangs "overwhelmed" local immigrants. "It's really tough to convince Latinos that blacks aren't all bad," the "Hispanic Outreach officer" of the local police force says. "They will talk to [white officers] or me, but they won't even talk to a black officer."

David Cortez, a 22-year-old immigrant who spent two years in jail for shooting a black, told Mr. Miller, "Just give us three or four years, and we'll take over. There will be more of us."

Blacks at least, if not the Open Borders lobby, know he's on to something.

As for blacks, they see no reason to welcome a population that takes their jobs for lower wages and competes with them for political favors from largely white politicians. "Why should we be in coalition with some group that wants to outnumber us?" asks Shannon Frank Reeves, head of the Oakland, Calif., NAACP.

In Georgia black legislators opposed a bill that made Hispanics an official "minority." One lawmaker argued that since there was no history of discrimination against Hispanics in the state, there was no reason they should be eligible for minority privileges.

In Dallas, blacks defeated a plan to give Hispanics a school district that would have reduced the number of blacks on the board by one. "They wanted to put more blacks with the Hispanics," says a black clergyman who opposed the plan. "Now why would we let them do that?"

Mr. Miller recounts similar stories of racial conflict all over the country from California to North Carolina. Everywhere the lesson is obvious: If you think gang warfare and racially driven politics make the drab and dull white civilization of Shakespeare, Beethoven, Michelangelo, and Jefferson more interesting, then mass immigration that turns a homogeneous society into a multiracial one makes a lot of sense.

But there's also another lesson to Mr. Miller's series. For both blacks and Hispanics, immigration is about who's got the numbers, pushing out, taking over.

Whatever their vices and virtues, they understand the interests of their own groups and work (and often fight, literally) to pursue them.

Whites don't—which is why we have mass immigration into this country at all.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

[Sam Francis [email him] is a nationally syndicated columnist. A selection of his columns, America Extinguished: Mass Immigration And The Disintegration Of American Culture, is now available from Americans For Immigration Control.]

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