““I have no concerns about the changing racial makeup of the country.” Samuel Huntington, Booknotes, CSPAN, June 13, 2004.…”

I do.

http://www.numbersusa.com

Huntington says he supports immigration (including immigration of Mexicans), but with assimilation.

This argument was a silly attempt to escape from reality ten years ago. So now Huntington comes along and takes us back to the starting point of the immigration debate, and this is considered great progress?

He wants our Anglo-Protestant culture to remain predominant, but has no problem with America becoming a white-minority country. Such a position is not serious. It’s the sort of thing a person might say who has just joined the immigration debate and still has a head filled with unexamined liberal clichés. I haven’t seen his book yet, but from listening to him on CSPAN, I’m getting the clear impression that, apart from his thesis that the culture is more important than the creed, which is important, the rest of his book is a superficial drifting along with conventional thinking.

Hasn’t stopped various liberals and right-liberals from pounding him indiscriminately as a nativist, racist, etc. The current issue of Foreign Affairs contains readers’ letters concerning his immigration essay (an excerpt of the book, I believe). It is fierce stuff; it reveals how deep the hostility to sanity still is among the chattering classes.

I was stuck by the fact that the American Arab Fouad Ajami defending Huntington eloquently.

In an interview with an airhead reporter at the NY Times recently, Huntington admitted, “I grew up in an apartment in Astoria, Queens.” In other words, as far as he’s concerned, the “changing racial makeup” already happened a long time ago.

He’s also an “old-fashioned Democrat”. Not old-fashioned enough!

That is very inconsistent, if Huntington would give us so much information leading to the conclusion that we’ve had immigration, and other racial policies, which tend towards race war, then pretend that assimilation has the power to avert conflict. The average conceptual ability of Central Americans is as far below the majority, as that of the blacks, in this country. How could this not matter? Central American violent crime rates, regardless of environment, are several times higher than those of the majority; how can this be a matter of no concern? If historical identity is as important as Huntington says it is, how can it be malleable, to the extent that assimilation can be efficient enough to make genetics a matter of no concern? Either it is malleable and plastic to assimilationist influences, in which case historical and genetic identity might be of less concern, or it is not plastic to any great extent, in which case Huntington has no justification for publishing his book. He must, on some level, believe that the genetics of the population is of great moment, or how is it a problem to have immigration of any such cohorts of plastic objects of assimilability? The assisted immigration of tropical-adapted populations into the northlands, on the scale of tens of millions, is one of the hugest acts of malice against civilization ever seen. The fact that net public subsidy is used for this mass colonization of the thirld world on these countries, does not involve regarding the populations as equal. The differential value is then being placed on the destroyers of civilization, because it is believed that they will be unimprovable. Mental retardation is normative for the third world tropical populations; how could this have no effect? When is it going to happen that a leader of a European ethnic group is going to say that his people would prosper, if they were allowed to become immigrants in Japan or Korea, because everyone is equal?

Huntington is doing one of two things, and either is bad.

He may simply be lying about what really concerns him, so that he will remain welcome in the faculty lounges of Harvard, which as an institution is firmly committed to the destruction of America.

Or perhaps Huntington actually believes that the racial makeup of the country doesn’t matter, despite all the evidence to the contrary. All those years at Harvard may have destroyed his mind, although I had thought he was one Harvardite who remains capable of perceiving reality (George Borjas is another, but there are very few, I think). Perhaps he believes it is all about the Proposition, despite ample evidence to the contrary that he himself has offered. In that case, is Huntington on his way to becoming a neocon?

Mr. Bolton alludes to an important point about the Mexican/Central American invasion. The new invaders differ significantly from earlier invaders, and the difference makes them even less assimilable than their predecessors. Earlier Mexican immigration to Southwestern states was usually of Northern Mexicans, who as a rule are more European in ancestry, more self-reliant and more enterprising than their countrymen from points farther south. They were also Spanish-speaking and usually somewhat literate. Increasingly what we get today is pure-blood Indians or mostly Indian mestizos from central and southern Mexico and the Central American countries. These are descendants of the Indians the Spaniards handled with such ease, not descendants of the Spaniards. Usually they are illiterate and often do not even speak Spanish - in other words they know no modern, sophisticated language, and have trouble grasping many of the ideas that can only be expressed in such a language. The truth about many of them is that their level of cultural development is closer to black Africans’ than to any Europeans’. These are people who have not assimilated to the Mexican mainstream; what makes anyone think they can assimilate to ours?

I’m inclined to believe that Huntington at least suspects the obvious, even if he is unwilling to say so: we cannot have an Anglo-Saxon culture without a critical mass of actual Anglo-Saxons who insist on preserving it. As far as I can tell, that determined critical mass no longer exists in the United States. I’m not sure it exists even in England. HRS

To Paul Cella: add to the list Ralph Reiland of The American Spectator Online, with an assinine review of Huntington’s book in which he calls him a “xenophobe.” Or perhaps the Spectator just falls under the category of “right-liberal.” A curious publication.

http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=6671

What an unutterably fatuous review Mr. Reiland has produced. Is there even one argument in that entire article? I don’t think so.

The American Spectator Online has published my own work, so I will extend to them the benefit of the doubt; but tedious, dreary, lifeless right-liberalism is the proper description for Mr. Reiland’s review.

Having read some of Huntington’s earlier works, I suspect that he is indeed being evasive, as Howard Sutherland suggests. His expressed view does not fit very well with the hard-boiled character of the man who wrote Political Order and Changing Societies. This probably won’t save him from the wrath of his colleagues. The argument that immigrants can be assimilated seems rather pointless when it is clear that most of those who want immigration don’t believe in assimilation. Only the neocons, a few older liberals (eg Arthur Schlesinger) and some paleolibs favor immigration AND assimilation.

I must disagree with Mr. Bolton and Mr. Sutherland on some points relating to the problems of Latin American immigration. (I agree with them on the crucial point of not wanting any!)I am more than skeptical of the argument that Central Americans and/or “tropical populations” are hardly above Black Africans culturally. The Central American area was one of the few places where civilization originated independently, and it is notorious that the Mayans were the most advanced people in the Americas. As for Howard Sutherland’s apparent preference for the Hispanicized: he seems to me to miss the point he makes about the Indians being “easily handled” (By the way, this was not true of the ancestral Aztec and Maya, who fought the Spaniards bitterly.) The Spanish speakers have indeed been the dominant element. Latin America is the miserable mess that it is precisely because it is Spanish. Look at the countries of the “Southern Cone” — whiter than the US by the way — even they, without racial problems like those of the tropical countries, are pigsties by English-speaking and European standards.

To Alan Devine:

The Color of Crime:

“Blacks commit violent crimes at four to eight times the white rate. Hispanics commit violent crimes at approximately three times the white rate,and Asians at one half to three quarters the white rate.”

http://www.amren.com/color.pdf

To Alan Devine:

The Color of Crime:

“Blacks commit violent crimes at four to eight times the white rate. Hispanics commit violent crimes at approximately three times the white rate,and Asians at one half to three quarters the white rate.”

http://www.amren.com/color.pdf

It’s a convenient argument for Huntington to make. You will never get immigration AND assimilation unless you are prepared to essentially defund and outlaw all immigration and ethnic lobby groups who attempt to preserve immigrants in their native culture.

If you want immigration, the best you can hope for is that you diversify your intake, rather than lean on one single source (Mexicans, Muslims) and ensure they are settled away from others of their type. That’s unlikely to happen either, so simply wishing for assimilation is not good enough unless backed up by some serious attacks on people’s right to freedom of association.

Welcome back, Mr. Edwards! How are things down under? I personally have missed your cogent comments on the issues.

That the assimilation concept is even used still amazes me. Aren’t Americans smarter than that? The answer begs the question.

A long time ago, when I was a liberal, I knew that assimilation was not working. I was in high school, and I noticed how blacks hung out together, Asian students (who were smarter than most white students or at least ha consistently higher grades) hung out together and so forth. We didn’t have any illegals in our school at the time, but that soon changed. It was 1967.

Mr. Edwards is on the money when he brings up the “freedom of association” issue. If our government or school administrations or any governming body ever try to manage or dictate “who shall hang out with who”, there will be a revolt. La Raza and the ACLU will be right there to assist. Mr. Edwards’ point is perfect:

If assimilation doesn’t come naturally (and of course, it hasn’t, except for some inter-racial marriages), it certainly won’t come by force. That leaves us where we are today. Mr. Auster’s and others here call for deportation (in another recent thread)—I suppose it would have to be called “mass deportation”—of all illegal aliens and those with expired visas is a huge first step that we must make happen. That MUST coincide with the closing of our Southern Border AND the pursuing of criminals illegal and otherwise who have fled the U.S. for Mexico after committing crimes. Until these things are done, we are in big trouble.

The third world is attacking on an ever-growing scale, because our leadership keeps appeasing them. They can knock down one hundred-storey building after another, and these appeasers will ask how can they get more of those elements into the country. Nothing but increasing intolerance of third-world populations heading this way, will be read as other than an invitation to attack and destroy. Was it a coincidence, that just before 9-11, that the mexicans were being offered amnesty, and again, at the start of the year, another amnesty deal immediately precedes an explosion of attacks on Americans, as in Iraq ?

Some thoughts in response to Messrs. Bolton, Levin and Levine.

Mr. Levin sets out the minimum required to begin controlling our Latin American problem in his 0253 post. All I would add is that we have to attack the demand side as well: prosecute those who employ illegal aliens and pay to have them smuggled here.

I had never thought of matters in quite the way Mr. Bolton expresses in his 0411 post, but it makes sense. A show of weakness emboldens one’s enemies. We have known that at least since Sun Tzu was writing, no doubt long before. Anything short of intolerance and removal of alien invaders (which would mean not only finding and deporting illegal aliens, but ending legal immigration as well) is perceived as weakness by hostile foreigners. A country that cannot take such obvious and basic steps to defend itself must surely be weak and flaccid, and prone to respond in ways that will only please its enemies. This thread is not the place to argue whether the Bush administration’s responses to September 11th have ultimately helped or hindered the cause of global jihad. I don’t know the answer, but there are decent arguments that some of our reactions have been just the sort of thing al-Qaeda might have hoped for. In any case, the facts that we continued to grant visas to Arab men coming to the United States to attend flight schools, that we kept the Visa Express fraud open in Saudi Arabia, that we have done nothing material about border security - even planned to offer amnesties to criminals already here - all indicate a weakened and confused nation that cannot figure out how to defend itself, physically or culturally. To acutely religiously and culturally conscious enemies, such as al-Qaeda terrorists, we must appear both contemptible and risible, despite the massive firepower we occasionally (and usually irrelevantly) bring to bear.

Mr. Levine is right to say that Aztecs fought the invading Spaniards. Mayans resisted to a lesser degree; their civilization, probably the most advanced American Indians created, had long been in decline when the Spaniards appeared offshore. Nevertheless, the story of the Conquest helps make my point. Cortés got to Tenochtitlán with less that 200 men, and accomplished the Conquest with less than 1,000. The population of the Aztec Empire was well into the millions, and Aztec warriors numbered in at least the tens of thousands. Man-for-man, the Conquest was no contest. The same was true later in Peru. That is not an endorsement of the Spaniards’ methods or their colonial stewardship, which was at best mediocre. What the Spaniards singly failed to do was make Spaniards of American Indians and mestizos. They really didn’t try (any more than we tried to make Englishmen of American Indians farther north). One of the reasons the Latin American countries are such basket cases is that the Spaniards (and the Portuguese in Brazil) would give native whites (creoles) no responsibility whatever for the government and administration of the colonies. The result was an irresponsible, often frivolous, local upper caste with no idea how to run a country.

Texas historian T.R. Fehrenbach, in his excellent Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico, attempts to address why the Aztecs were so totally at a loss in resisting the Spanish invasion. He speculated that any civilization (broadly defined) needs millennia to develop to a level approaching modernity, and that American Indian civilization was much younger than that of the Christian West, which in his view drew on civilization going back through Rome, Greece and Israel all the way to Pharaonic Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia. That 4,500+ year progression had by 1500 produced Western nations on the brink of modernity and capable of producing conquistadores and missionaries. Fehrenbach theorized that when Cortés arrived Aztec Mexico had achieved a cultural level roughly comparable to that of Old Kingdom Egypt 4,000 years earlier. I’m not sure that is entirely fair to the Egyptians, but it gives a sense of the culture gap. In their 300 years of rule, the Spaniards did little to close that gap among Indians, and I doubt much has happened in 180 years of independent Mexico to close it either. I stand by what I said: in cultural terms importing the kind of Mexican/Central American we are allowing to break in today makes no more sense than importing Somali Bantu or Hmong, and less than importing more Europeanized Northern Mexicans. (Of course, I don’t want to import any more Latin Americans, whatever their makeup, and believe we should remove as many of those who are already here as possible.)

There is a big difference between Africa and Latin America, one Mr. Levine may have in mind. Latin American countries have modern white oligarchies running them, however incompetently, people who are very different from the mass of the population. Black African countries are run, if at all, by Africans. At the peon level, that distinction largely disappears.

Please forgive the length of this post. HRS

As usual, I agree with David Levin and Howard Sutherland on the practical issues.
Re the Spanish conquests in the Americas: the Aztecs and the Yucatan Mayas actually threw back the first Spanish attacks. The completeness of their later collapse was indeed partly due to the great cultural and technical gap accurately gauged by Fehrenbach, but also was due to disease — lacking immunity to Eastern Hemisphere epidemics, above all smallpox, the Amerind population was reduced to perhaps 1/4 or less of the pre-Columbian total. But I am afraid that Mr. Sutherland hasn’t quite coped with my point that places like Uruguay, Argentina and Chile with white populations haven’t done all that much better, all things considered, than the other Spanish speaking areas. Apart from the undoubted drag of Amerind peon populations, there is just something wrong with the Hispanic version of Western culture.

Mr. Levine,

In my post above, I cited what I believe is a major reason for the societal incompetence of Latin American countries, although I did not link it specifically to your point that the societies of southern South America are largely a shambles, even without huge mestizo and Indian populations. I think the points I make below would also apply to Brazil, but I am not sure if Portuguese rule was as suffocating as Spanish could be.

The Spanish Crown, which was the direct sovereign of all of the Spanish Indies (the political subdivisions were viceroyalties and audiencias directly subject to the Crown), allowed no creoles to hold high political office. All appointments were reserved for “peninsulares,” Spain-born Spaniards without roots in Spain’s American colonies. In addition there were no representative institutions of any sort. This was as true of the colonies around the River Plate as it was of New Spain. To stultify local initiative further, the Crown maintained a monopoly of all overseas trade. The result was a feckless, status-obsessed upper caste with very little sense of responsibility for the development or preservation of their society. For racial and social reasons, they also felt little kinship of any sort with their own societies’ lower orders.

The contrast between Spanish America and the entrepreneurial, often dissenting and largely autonomous English colonial settlements is stark, and it is reflected in how the United States has functioned as a nation and how Latin American countries have turned out. It is not entirely a Catholic v. Protestant distinction. I would argue that Quebec, where French colonists were not as stifled as their Spanish co-religionists, also turned out better than Spanish lands.

The typical unpleasant condition that afflicts Latin American countries is (i) an irresponsible and ineffectual white oligarchy poised atop (ii) severely underdeveloped mestizo and Indian masses. Mexico, our nearest neighbor and greatest social threat, is among the worst (and has been getting steadily worse since NAFTA was signed). Steve Sailer has a good analysis of the Mexican dilemma here: http://www.vdare.com/sailer/mexico.htm, http://www.vdare.com/sailer/mexico_part2.htm and http://www.vdare.com/sailer/mexico_part3.htm. Evelyn Waugh’s 1939 Robbery Under Law (included in this anthology: http://www.commonreader.com/cgi-bin/rbox/ido.cgi?013266) is another good introduction to Mexico’s condition. When I worked there 36 years after Waugh’s visit, little of importance had changed.

Of course, Quebec is being destroyed by militant secularism and multiculturalism, and the United States is embarked on a great experiment to see if one can import a Latin American population and not wind up with a Latin American country. I am not optimistic…

Please indulge a second over-long post. HRS

I think Prof. Huntington is just using an obvious tactic. There may be problems with it in the long run, but it has some advantages as well.

Prof. Huntington certainly knows what we all know: Mestizo immigrants have NO intention of EVER assimilating into Anglo-American culture. He has chosen to focus on the central importance of the core culture and the destructive effects of millions of immigrants not assimilating. Since the Mestizos WILL NOT assimilate one point becomes academic — their presence here must diminish.

But now his opponents are put in the position of denouncing him for nothing more than his defense of traditional American cultural identity, which shows their hatred for the core culture. They’re mostly not arguing that Mestizos are or will assimilate; they’re angry that Prof. Huntington thinks it’s important that they do so, and that our historic culture is worth preserving.

He no doubt understands that race is a primary factor. But he doesn’t want to give his opponents an easy excuse to dismiss his work so he has chosen to sidestep the racial question and say that it’s not a primary factor. Instead he leaves it to his opponents to demonstrate that it IS, as they have indirectly done by branding his work racist when all he is doing is defending the traditional American identity.

I’m not saying I agree with his approach. I would rather see the direct and comprehensive statement made. But I wouldn’t say there’s no merit or efficacy to the tactic he’s chosen to employ. By narrowing the immediate focus as he has, he has revealed much about his opponents AND he has helped steer the debate in a direction that must inevitably run smack into the issue of RACE, with the ancillary issues already decided and the conclusion already foregone.

Very shrewd analysis by Joel. I don’t know if it’s true, but isn’t it pretty to think so?

Also, Mr. Sutherland’s last post, about the Spanish colonial administration, is very informative and makes sense.

The laziness of the “creoles” (Europeans born in the New World) alluded to above has a had a noticeable effect on the onomastics of South American leadership. From O’Higgins to Kubitschek, Galtieri and Stroessner to Menem, Fujimori and Aylwin, a large portion of the political leaders, both civilian and military, have had decidedly un-Iberian surnames. On the other hand, about 40 of our 43 presidents have been primarily Anglo-Saxon. Maybe their immigrant stream has been more carefully selected than ours, but I think the difference really lies in the political talents of the host nation.

One country where Spaniards actually did go native is Brazil. Yes, Brazil. Spain was one of the top half-dozen or so sources of immigrants since indepenence. But, unlike in the Spanish colonies, Spaniards had to work for their keep. Two of the earliest major composers— in a country with as much musical talent as any in the world— were of Spanish stock: Heitor Villa-Lobos and Luiz Gonzaga.

Howard Sutherland’s points about the nature of Spanish colonial administration and its effects are perfectly sound. I would merely point to the nature of the Spanish homeland and its problems as well. To the extent the Spanish settlers as well as the royal administration merely transplanted the practices of the Iberian peninsula, the Latin American countries were in trouble. Mr. Sutherland is also right to bring up the contrast between Quebec and the Spanish American settlements. The
French Canadians did do better despite some royal bureaucracy and the later “beheading” of their society when the middle class elements departed after the conquest, while being strict Catholics. But then, I never suggested that the Catholic nature of Latin America and Spain, cf. to the largely Protestant nature of North America, was the root cause of the problem.

“But then, I never suggested that the Catholic nature of Latin America and Spain, cf. to the largely Protestant nature of North America, was the root cause of the problem.”

Of course, it is an interesting contrast to compare the economic success of Catholic countries to Protestant countries. The problem in modern times is that many countries are largely secular. Do we continue to classify France as “Catholic” and Germany as “Lutheran”, etc.?

It is also interesting to compare the development of political and religious freedoms in the two kinds of countries. Suppression of non-Catholic churches by various means continues today in many Catholic countries.

It is supposed to be some great embarrassment to Americans that their forebears engaged in much anti-Catholic rhetoric in the 19th century immigration debates. If we truly want to preserve the Anglo-American heritage, it should be a fair question to ask whether Catholic immigrants fully share and support the key elements of that heritage.

I agree with Joel’s observation, that since Mr. Huntington has assured his attackers that he never meant that race and ethnicity were important, liberals are now left to condemn the notion of preserving a common culture, sans race, etc..

Yet, when one begins to talk about the importance of preserving our historical national culture, liberals quickly insist that we have no common culture to preserve. Surely the liberal can observe that those pouring across our border are intent upon, taking up the slack. That is when my leftist friends say, “Well, as long as the constitution remains in place, who cares?
To those who have lost the instinct to colletively survive, what can you do? Problem is they want to take us with them into oblivion.

Sometimes I think there must be some sort of bizzare, religious like, teleology of cultural suicide behind the multicultural agenda. ie., It would be something like this:This nation of people must pass away as a willing sacrifice, so that “the State” may be borne, pure and purged of any common identity or culture to compete with it’s will. No amount of civil right laws will be enough. I suppose this isn’t a new idea. But since the new populations arriving might not concur with the religion of anti-culture, the anti-culturalist might discover that instead of becoming priests, they end up as mere subjects.

There certainly was a strong tendency, at least until recently, for Protestant countries to enjoy better economic growth and freer institutions than the Catholic ones. But it’s hard to make it stronger than that, for there are serious exceptions. Nineteenth century Belgium, more example, was the second country to industrialize after Britain, and enjoyed the most liberal constitution in Europe for a long period, while the south German states were more liberal than Protestant Prussia. (I am using “liberal” here in the nineteenth century sense, of course!) Of course with modern secularization, and the assimilation of some Protestant attitudes by Catholics and others, these differences have tended to diminish over time.

It was a curious coincidence that Spanish colonization in America, which began under Ferdinand and Isabella, was consolidated under their Habsburg successors. Under the Habsburgs, especially under Philip II, the central power of the Crown of newly united Spain grew and suppressed local autonomy. Local government in Castilian towns had been fairly strong, perhaps less so than in England but more so than in France, but those local power centers were subordinated to the Crown, at times violently as in the Comunero revolts during the years when Emperor Charles V was also King of Spain. Mr. Levine is right; the suppression of local autonomy that characterized Habsburg Spain was carried across, in even more extreme form, to Spanish America. Had the Spanish monarchy developed differently, Spain might have been a very different colonial mistress and Latin America might be a different place today. We’ll never know.

I think Mr. Coleman’s question is fair. The answer is yes and no, I suppose. There are plenty of examples in the major earlier Catholic immigrant groups (Irish, Italian, German, Polish) of people and families that have adopted and supported the key elements of the American heritage, as there are of those who have not. To pick on the Italians, I would offer Antonin Scalia, a devout Catholic, as an example of someone who is faithful to the American heritage. There are plenty of mafiosi in the United States who, I would argue, are not. The difference, it seems to me, is not about their Catholicism, except to the extent that Scalia’s Catholicism helps make him a better citizen than John Gotti was.

Protestantism was the strongest Christian strain in the Thirteen Colonies, but not the only one. In addition to New England Puritans, Pennsylvania Quakers and Scots-Irish Presbyterians there were (earliest of all) Virginia Anglicans - who did not think of themselves as Protestant - and even Maryland Catholics. Because of the way American history has developed, and especially how the Civil War ended, we tend to think of New England Puritanism as the normative starting point for Americanism. It was not the only one. The anti-Catholicism of some 19th century Americans was often a sincere religious dislike of Popery and often a desire not to have their country transformed (I share the latter concern today). Concern about the Pope ruling America was, to put it mildly, misplaced. As a Catholic, though, I must admit that official American Catholicism, with its heedless demands for unrestricted immigration, is largely on the enemy’s side in the culture war … but so are all of those Protestant denominations with roots in America’s founding.

Mr. Cox is right. The anti-culturalists (good term) may think that Latin American invaders will be the foot soldiers of their culture-free State. They will be wrong about that. Most of the invaders are not going to adapt to America’s mainstream culture - although many show a taste for the worst of rap-crap subculture - they wnat to keep their own. Their presence may help destroy our culture, but they won’t be satisfied with no culture. In any case, they are not here for cultural reasons. HRS

Obviously The New York Post shares Professor Huntington’s professed unconcern about the changing racial makeup of the United States. In a piece of immi-prop as inane as anything in The Wall Street Journal, the Post celebrates the immigration-driven explosion in the numbers of Latin Americans and Asians in America, and how it has continued unabated since September 11th, as proof of American superiority and America’s victory over mean old Osama: http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/editorial/23070.htm. If ben-Laden reads the Post, I’ll bet this makes him laugh. Those whom the gods would destroy… HRS

My point about 19th century anti-Catholicism was not that the anti-Catholics were right. The Catholics did indeed assimilate into the culture of religious tolerance within Christendom. However, there was no compelling reason to believe in advance that this would be the case. America took a great risk in admitting Catholics in the 19th century in great numbers; the experiment worked out fine.

However, we continually have to assess the risk of lack of assimilation with each group throughout time. Muslims and Latin Americans are not assimilating as we would wish, so it is no longer a matter of projecting the future. Rather, we have a few generations of data to examine on the subject.

My point is that we cannot cede the leftist viewpoint on the history of anti-immigration sentiments in the 19th century, i.e. that these were just irrational, bigoted impulses. Examining the state (economic, political, religious) of Catholic nations at the time would have given good reason for concern about the effect on mass immigration from Catholic countries.

Not only that, but the liberal and leftist public commentators have an anti-catholic foreground which has reached unbelievable intensity with the priest-abuse reportage. Imagine that the NYT ran headlines saying:’another public school coach caught molesting’ students, and speculated on the significance of this for the survival of public education, and the incidents turn out to be forty years in the past?Wouldn’t this be considered a scandalous expression of bias? In general the left has an anti-religious and an anti-catholic attitude. The journalistic mentality hates those who speak of timeless universals, and sees them as a particular threat.

In response to Mr. Coleman, and at the risk of offending some VFR posters, I think the anti-Catholic Americans of the 19th century were right to be wary. I am a Catholic (admittedly a convert of WASP ancestry), but I do not believe that “the experiment [of mass European immigration] worked out fine,” as Mr. Coleman says. I believe the results were, for the United States as a nation, decidedly mixed. Bear in mind, in this post I am citing negatives; I do not deny that there have also been many positives.

The United States has not been enriched by the importation of the Neapolitan, Sicilian and Calabrian mafias (nor is it enriched today by the import of their Russian successors). The United States has not been enriched by the style of corrupt machine city politics that are such a feature of cities dominated by Irish and Italian immigrants and their descendants (granted, black Americans and hispanics are learning the game, but they did not invent it). A non-Catholic example, I admit, but the United States has not been enriched by the extreme secular socialist style of politics that Jews from the Russian Empire were so instrumental in bringing to America.

The United States, with the foibles of its original white settlers, their black slaves and the surviving American Indians, had problems enough without importing the pathologies I mention above. We managed to tear ourselves apart in a civil war with almost no immigrant influence in the key decisions, South and North, that led to war (although immigrant Germans were among the most ruthless administrators of Reconstruction and the U.S. Army threw lots of Irish immigrants into the fray).

Mr. Coleman is right that we have to assess the risk associated with granting members of any foreign group entry, and that Latin Americans and Moslems today have already shown an unacceptable resistance to assimilation. My point here is that the defense of immigration one often hears, how well the first great wave assimilated, is a very imperfect one. We cannot know how a United States that had not experienced that wave of immigration would have turned out, but there is no reason to think (certainly not from the point of view of Americans of colonial descent) that it would have been worse than what we actually got. Given the mixed results of the first great wave and the overwhelmingly negative consequences of the second, in assessing the risk we should err on the side of exclusion. HRS

Mr. Cox writes:

“This nation of people must pass away as a willing sacrifice, so that “the State” may be borne, pure and purged of any common identity or culture to compete with it’s will.”

Marx and Lenin thought that first classes must be destroyed, nations will have no value once a new Soviet Man is constructed. Religion is to be destroyed and culture is mentioned only as much as building a new Communist Culture.

Multiculturalists are Leninsts of our time.

An interesting read: Institutionalizing our demise: America vs. multiculturalism
by Roger Kimball.

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/22/june04/america.htm

Kimball’s New Criterion article is very good as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. Kimball even accepts Huntington’s distinction (not original to Huntington) between settlers of America and immigrants to the United States, a distinction that Kimball’s associates in New York probably find borderline offensive. He acknowledges the importance of America’s Anglo-Protestant heritage (to use Huntington’s phrase), but ultimately Kimball seems to cling to the fantasy that as long as we insist on assimilation, we can absorb mass immigration and still prosper as Americans. While Kimball mentions the threat of the sheer number of immigrants today, he says nothing about controlling or reducing them. He seems to see mass immigration ad infinitum as America’s fate.

Kimball is right to set up the conflict as one between America and multiculturalism, but wrong to think that there is any way to preserve traditional America without drastic immigration reform and enforcement. In that respect, Kimball is like Huntington. In both cases, I suspect they are stopping short of saying the whole truth so as not to alienate those in their milieux, Harvard for Huntington, neocon/liberal New York for Kimball. Nevertheless, assimilation is not enough; it never was.

For a better assessment of what the threat really is and how to resist it, see this by our host: http://www.thesocialcontract.com/cgi-bin/showarticle.pl?articleID=1228&terms=. HRS

Mr. Sutherland’s observation that not all immigrants have enriched our country brings up an interesting question:
How is one to measure if the importation of a particular people enrich our nation or damage it?(what word is the opposite of “enrich?”) I suggest that the word is really a moral and value judgment to express agreement with an activity- the re-population by non-whites and/or non-Americans of areas that were formerly white. If this is true, then it would be impossible to ever introduce a people which would not “enrich’ the State. There is one qualification to this thought:White immigrants could not “enrich” us,because they would contradict the value expressed.

The observation pointed out by mlk about similarity of the agenda of Marxists/ Leninist and the Anti-culturalists is helpful. A reason to hope that, given enough time, the fate of thier experiment might end up in the same ash heap. But by that time, there might not be much left to salvage.

Immigrants can impoverish the country by going on net public subsidy. They can bring the moral standards down, as by committing violent crimes. They can bring the intellectual standards down, by being less literate or intelligent. They can impoverish the society, by taking away from community of values, language or important beliefs in general. Yet the government’s anti-culture insists that immigrants can’t be blamed. Immigrants can’t be blamed for what they do that is bad, because they’re outside morality? If immigrants can’t be blamed, this places them outside of morality. It would require that all of them be banned, if they really are in such a condition.

Allow me also to mention the pro-diversity argument, since it came up implicitly at 4;55. If an immmigrant can be better just by being different; this would apply to every other country in the world, too. Then each country would have to harbor the very worst people in the world, if any immigrant diversity would improve them. All the countries would have the worst population in the world at the same time; but this is a contradiction-in-terms. When we are given a specifically anti-caucasian diversity-value argument, however, that would seem to leave no room to criticize any racism of the past or present. Huntington probably doesn’t want to sound pro-majority or pro-caucasian, but such implications would seem difficult to avoid, if one is to assert the national interest, or that of the citizenry.

“Immigrants can impoverish the country by going on net public subsidy.”

Yes. As I have argued before, more than 50% of the American population is on net public subsidy because of the “progressive” tax system. Therefore, no immigrant who cannot assume an economic position in the 65th percentile within the first few years should be allowed in.

This is probably not a popular argument because most of us don’t want to face the fact that we are parasites in our current system. The statistics that Rush Limbaugh likes to cite: top 1% of earners pay 50% of all personal income taxes; top 20% of earners pay 90%, or something like that, have implications that people don’t want to face.

I’m curious where Mr. Coleman got the figures regarding tax burden vs. value of government benefits received - and how such benefits are valued (other than the obvious direct transfers via food stamps, etc.). How would a proverbial middle-class family of 4 earning $40K/year be on a net public subsidy?

My accountant has a framed copy of the original IRS 1040 form - a single side of 1 page with a top tax rate of 5% (for those who earned more than $500,000 a year). As he likes to say, they’ve been simplifying it ever since!

I haven’t read Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather in a while, but I remember some notable things from it. At one point, Michael Corleone tells his WASP Old Stock girlfriend (and later wife) something like, “My father doesn’t recognize the laws of this country.” Several time in the novel it is stated or implied that Don Corleone is a criminal because he won’t “accept being a fool,” as the people who rule (and founded) the country would have him be.

“How would a proverbial middle-class family of 4 earning $40K/year be on a net public subsidy?”

Simple. Say total taxes they pay, fed + state + sales + real estate + licenses + etc, is $22K (55%). Two kids in an expensive urban public school may consume $20-$25K. And the family still has to contribute something toward defense, infrastructure, police, etc.

Some families in this income category most definetly are not pulling their load.

“How would a proverbial middle-class family of 4 earning $40K/year be on a net public subsidy?”

As a start, their two children will probably be in public schools (about 87% likelihood). That means 26 years of public school expenses. The typical school budget is approximately equal in size to the property tax revenues of the locality. If they make $40K per year, they will probably pay less than $2k per year in property taxes. Assuming they pay such taxes for 50 years, they will pay less than $100K for 26 years of school expenses. They are net welfare cases in this area by a large margin. If you compute the net present value of their tax payments (i.e. consider that they are paying after the fact for much of the education of their children, thus they should be paying interest) they don’t come close to paying for their children’s education. Factor in a small percentage of their consumption of goods because the businesses pay property taxes, and they still don’t come close.

Now, they pay income and sales taxes, as well. A family of 4 making $40K per year with a modest mortgage pays very little in income taxes. As I assume that this family benefits from general government expenditures such as police protection, courts, prisons, roads, national defense, etc., their sales and income taxes have to cover all of their share of these expenses and still have large amounts left over to cover their education expense shortfall. Just as a back of the envelope calculation, there is no way that they are paying their own way.

Coming at it from another angle, the huge excess paid by the wealthy greatly exceeds welfare payments for the poor. Thus, some of the excess taxes paid by the wealthy must be covering other government expenses besides welfare; hence they are subsidizing everyone else besides the wealthy, and that includes the middle class.

Interesting data from Mik abd Mr. Coleman. Around here (in flyover country), the property taxes in reasonbaly decent suburban areas are about 2.5 to 3.5 K per year. For 50 years of property taxes, that adds up to $150K using 3K as an average. The last figure I remember seeing for cost per student of public education, such as it is, was 5-6K per year. 26 years at 6K is 156K - a deficit of only 6K.

Urban public schools are notorious, frequently upping the cost-per-student to 8 and even 12K annually in some locales where the NEA controls everything. Of course, property taxes are typically higher in such places as well. The nearest large city to me, St. Louis, is a textbook example. The number of middle-class homeowners in the old ethnic neighborhoods (German, Irish, Italians) has declined pecipitously, leaving the children of underclass blacks and, increasingly, immigrants from Bosnia and Mexico to populate the public schools. These children more often than not live in subsidized housing, and the parents certainly pay no taxes apart from sales taxes. (I’m uncertain if the owners of such Section 8 housing have to pay property taxes or not, as the program is funded with federal dollars.) Even middle-class blacks have left the city itself for the northen suburbs. The few remaining middle class nieghborhoods are hammered for property taxes along with those businesses not fortunate enough to have the right connections in City Hall.

An improbable headline: State Aggression Multiplying Parasite Lineages______________________________________________________________________________________________ Hopefully, no one would use the everybody does it, why can’t we, argument. It is not a moral one, and especially when not everyone does it. Immigrants are more than twice as likely to have children in public school, as the general public. Census.gov, ‘facts for features’, ‘back to school’, 8-8-01, reports 10 million enrolled from less than 30 million immigrants. The remainder of the population has 40 million in public school, from a population of over 250 million, which is fewer than one in six. The reason for this disproportion is that immigrants are more than twice as likely to be in the age cohorts in which are found nearly all the parents of public school-children. Worse, the immigrant does not have older relatives who have long paid taxes in this country very often, but citizens very commonly do. If one’s older relative is a longtime net taxpayer, the lineage is less likely to be on net public subsidy, but this situation is not likely with immigrants. It shows hostile intent, to want to parasitize the citizenry in this way.

“The last figure I remember seeing for cost per student of public education, such as it is, was 5-6K per year.” That figure is far out of date.

The point I made was that in my county, the property tax revenue was approximately equal to the school expenses. I know this from actual examination of the budget summaries for my county. In other localities, the revenue is obtained in higher or lower proportions from property taxes. If you live in a place where property tax revenues average $3K per year, then I submit that either (1) this is not the 50th percentile in terms of income, which is what we were talking about; or (2) property taxes are higher than needed to pay for school expenses and are used for other expenses as well, in which case the school deficit for the median family is higher than he thinks.

If Carl wants to continue to argue this point, he will need to do his homework and start posting actual numbers. I have done the number crunching for my own county in detail in the past, and I am not pulling inaccurate numbers out of the air. The median income family with two children does not pay its way through public schools.

The figure for ‘01 is $410 billion, for k-12 public schools, according to census.gov, facts for features, back to school, 8-11-03. Dividing this by 51 million, yields a little over $8,000. Current costs are up, from an additional million or more students (from Mexico?), and from inflation, to (recalling NYT figure) $8400 per student today. This is affected by the high expenditures (over 10k), in NY, DC and several other wastrel jurisdictions. Comparing to national ‘median personal income’ of around 22k, it is clear that average and below-average incomes are very likely to be on net public subsidy. Yet how could this excuse the foreigner for jumping in on this plundering? I thought the diversion of public funds to the foreigner was included in the definition of treason. Why do traitors rule? I say it is also because the bright people find it very difficult to resist the temptation to believe that they have the superior ideas, and all they need is to get power or influence, to do good for their inferiors. Our constitution has counteracted this tendency in the past; but the culture needs to reinforce it, so that the will to power is effectively resisted.

I’m not implying that Mr. Coleman simply made up figures out of whole cloth. It’s been a while since I looked into this issue and was really wondering where the income point is at which one would cease getting a net subsidy in terms of taxes paid vs. benefits received.

As Mr. Bolton pointed out in his most recent post, the median personal income is $22K. Therefore, even if my original idea that the middle class family of four who earned $40K was not getting a net subsidy (which seems increasingly unlikely), Mr. Coleman’s central point (that a majority of the population is being subsidized) would still hold true.

Such a situation is disasterous poltically, for it means an ever expanding federal state to provide for the ever-increasing demands of the recipients. We appear well on our way to complete socialism. I can’t remember who penned the remark that democracy would last only as long as it took the voters to realize they coulf vote themselves largesse from the public treasury, but we are seeing this happen before our own eyes now.

Carl is right: progressive taxation means that at least 50% of the people can figure out that if they vote in favor of a larger government, it is not primarily at their own expense. They are voting to have someone else pay for it. This is the death spiral of a democracy.

If nation and its loyalties are of no value, then why doesn’t our cosmopolitan compassion send most of the physicians to where they are needed in the tropics, if the succoring of need is to be set above loyalty to nation? But if these superior loyalties are acknowledged, even for America, how is it that it is more or less censorable, to accuse officials of treason, who divert our tax money to the foreigner?

Which sage said, once the doors to the public treasury have been thrown open, they will never be closed again except with gunpowder?

(Whoever it was, he’s evidently been banned from Google.)