August 26, 2006

Immigration’s State of Emergency

Patrick J. Buchanan is a brave person who loves his country. In his latest book, State of Emergency, he says his country, along with European ones, is rapidly ceasing to exist. Massive unassimilated immigration is changing the cultural and linguistic face of America. Hispanics are taking back the lands seized by the American empire in the 19th century.

Buchanan is correct that no creed can turn a Tower Of Babel into a people. Unassimilated immigration Balkanizes a country. Americans do not like the loss of identity that they are experiencing, but their concerns receive no political attention. The myth of diversity united by a creed prevails.

Buchanan provides many examples of the power of race and tribe, powers that are denied every day in the US and Europe. Highly intelligent far-seeing leaders, such as Enoch Powell and Jean Raspail, were marginalized by elites despite their immense public following.

Unassimilated immigration transforms communities and dissolves connections to our past. Neighborhoods in which people grew up become hostile terrain that they cannot enter. Social organizations disappear. To revisit one’s high school in a class reunion becomes like visiting a foreign country.

America as Pat Buchanan and I knew it was destroyed by the Immigration Act of 1965. This act destroyed the national origins basis of the American population, the essential element of the American “melting pot.” In those days there were American communities. Today there are a variety of Asian communities, Hispanic communities, Muslim communities, black communities, and white communities.

The US used to be an uncrowded land where people could “breathe free.” Immigration has increased population densities and brought pressures on infrastructure, the environment, and water resources.

What can be done? Buchanan agrees that a moratorium on immigration is necessary until the huge number already here can be assimilated.

Another remedy is to realize that there is no such thing as a country without borders. The idea that a country must have immigration in order to be in the global economy is absurd. China is in the global economy, and China has no immigration. Neither does Japan.

Many Americans are puzzled why the Republican Party is so much more concerned with Israel’s borders and Iraq’s borders than it is with America’s borders. The Republicans are busy at work trying to establish hegemony over the Middle East and Central Asia while they permit Mexico to establish hegemony over the American southwest.

This is an amazing disconnect. How does a country that is being erased at home have an empire abroad?

Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.