on the Buchananites’ idea that we should side with Muslims against the secular Westerners who published the Muhammad cartoons, I wrote:
. Here are two sections from a slightly updated, unpublished version of the pamphlet. The format of
is a series of pro-open borders arguments followed by my responses to them.
“Immigrants—particularly Asians—are strengthening America, since they have traditional values and are more family-centered and hard-working than Americans. A majority of Asians voted against a gay rights ordinance in San Francisco. That shows Asians are good for conservative values.”
Even if it were true that Asians all have “conservative” values (and there is much evidence to suggest that they do not) the notion that Asians will bail us out with their superior discipline or morality is based on a deeply cynical assumption: We Americans are so degenerate that we are no longer a viable people. So let’s not even try to restore our moral and cultural vitality. Let’s just depend on endless transfusions of “non-decadent” peoples to keep us afloat.
The first problem with this should be obvious. If good moral qualities can be preserved among us only by bringing in strangers from foreign cultures, then America is already finished. We have given up on ourselves, and are simply letting other people take our place. At least they’ll keep the economy going.
The second problem is less apparent. Since we Americans are doing nothing to reverse our own decadence, the newer Americans, particularly the fabled Asians, are becoming part of that decadence. Asians carry no magical immunity against the moral and spiritual rot that has affected Westerners. Many of their young people, having absorbed our ultra-democratic culture, are becoming just as slovenly and self-regarding as our own. I once attended Sunday services at a “conservative” Protestant church on Manhattan’s East Side, where the young, well-educated congregation was about half white and half Korean. To my surprise, congregants of both races were dressed in a style more suited to a sports event than a religious service—jeans and T-shirts, shirts worn outside pants, even baseball caps. There is little evidence to suggest that Asian-Americans, of whatever class, are raising the cultural level of their white American counterparts, or that whites are raising that of Asians. Multicultural America does not mean some higher civilizational blending of East and West—it means Asian-American young women who talk like Valley girls. (Significantly, an increasing number of Asian immigrant families have been moving back to their homelands in recent years because the parents have become alarmed at the disordering effect America was having on their children.)
The belief that immigrants from non-Western cultures can morally improve Americans is a by-product of the ideology of democratic universalism. Modern conservatives, and particularly neoconservatives, seem to believe that moral behavior is a kind of universal essence that can be transfused from one culture into another simply by placing the two cultures side by side within the same borders. Obviously the world does not work like that. Moral values, while they have a universal dimension, cannot be embodied or transmitted apart from common membership in a particular tradition—apart from the shared faith, habits, and institutions of a particular people. The cultural differences between immigrants and Americans thus raise an insuperable obstacle to the neoconservative-moralist argument. If, as I pointed out earlier, the “values-carrying” immigrants are assimilated into our culture, they will lose the moral values that are supposed to improve the rest of us. But if they remain culturally separate from the larger society, their values will have no effect on us in any case. Does the presence in Brooklyn of tens of thousands of Hasidic Jews, the most sexually straightlaced people on the planet, have any “uplifting” effect on their underclass black neighbors? Does the abstemious lifestyle of the Amish people in rural Pennsylvania improve the morals of the white yuppies who tour the Amish country on their weekend jaunts? By the same token, can anyone seriously believe that millions of Muslim or Buddhist immigrants will reinvigorate the moral and religious traditions of decadent Westerners?
So even if it were true that immigrants from non-Western cultures had superior morals (i.e., family cohesion and sexual restraint), that would do nothing for the rest of us. Their values—the total fabric of shared understandings, habits and loyalties by which they order their lives—do not become our values; and in many instances their values (e.g. amoral familism, shamanism, forced child marriage, and female genital mutilation, not to mention jihad and shariah) are antithetical to our values.
“America is based on ideas, not on ethnicity.”
The modern conservative view of America, that it is not a nation in the traditional sense but an ideological project for the democratic transformation of humanity, has implications that many conservatives have scarcely realized. If “the West is based on ideas that transcend race and ethnicity,” as historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has put it, then there is the implication that the West can only fulfill its deepest spiritual potentialities by ridding itself of its historic racial character and ceasing to be white. As I argued recently at FrontPage, this project can only be pursued by means of a leftist double standard in which everything historically white about America (including the white majority itself) is put down and despised while everything non-white is raised up and lauded. If America is “a country where nationality has nothing to do with ethnicity,” as Patrick Glynn of the American Enterprise Institute has written, then America can only realize its “true” nationhood by divesting itself of the European peoples who created the country in the first place.
Thus, without intending it or realizing it, modern conservatism turns out to be as anti-white in its own way as multiculturalism. Multiculturalists say that the essence of America is diversity—which means that America must become multiracial, multicultural, and, inevitably, anti-white. Conservatives say that the essence of America is universal ideas, not ethnicity—which means that America must become multiracial, multicultural, and, inevitably, anti-white. As proof of this unintentional alliance of conservatives with multiculturalists, many conservatives today continue to support mass non-European immigration, despite the fact that under the Grutter v. Bollinger decision, the more non-whites there are in America (due to immigration), the more anti-white racial quotas there must be to assure that all our institutions reflect our rapidly changing racial demographics.
An implicitly anti-white message can also be heard in the “values” argument for immigration. In terms of such conservative values as family cohesion, moral restraint, and productive energy, the conservative immigrationists portray immigrants as not merely equal, but superior to the existing American population. The enthusiasm for immigrants frequently spills over into something resembling idol worship, as seen in this manifesto by William Bennett and Jack Kemp in The Wall Street Journal:
America’s immigrants are a net positive gain economically. They tend to live in strong, stable families; possess impressive energy and entrepreneurial spirit; have a deeply rooted religious faith; and make important intellectual contributions to the nation. Most come to America in large part because they believe in traditional American ideals. Their achievements and contributions are worth celebrating, not demeaning or denying.
In Kemp and Bennett’s ecstatic treatment, the immigrants—a heterogeneous collection of people from all over the world—have been transformed into a homogenous mass, so stuffed with virtues that they hardly seem human. They have all the good qualities that we Americans are said to lack. We are decadent, in need of their almost miraculous powers. So there is nothing for us to do but “celebrate” them, and keep on lashing ourselves. In the rhetoric of some Christian conservatives, Third-World immigrants are agents of salvation, even though we (white) Americans don’t seem to be worth saving. Here is the way Fr. Benedict Groeschel of the New York Diocese responded to the problem of irreligion in America:
The only hope is the growing number of non-Anglos who, in the United States, are much more religious. [Emphasis added.] In 1983, fewer than 50 percent of Americans felt that religion was “very important” in their lives. Now [in 1994] it’s up to 57 percent. That reflects the decline in the numbers of upper and middle-class Anglos and the influx of Hispanics, Asians and Filipinos.
The only hope for sinful America is—more non-white immigrants! Instead of trying to save the souls of his fellow (white) Americans, Groeschel simply wants to replace them with Third-Worlders—a very strange idea of Christian charity.
Sometimes the bias in favor of non-Europeans is masked by a concern for some race-neutral idea such as economics. The late open-borders advocate Julian Simon used to argue that all immigrants, whatever their background and skills, help the U.S. economy, and he consistently refused to place any limit on the number of immigrants the U.S. should receive. It turned out, however, that the motive for Simon’s extreme position may have had less to do with economics than with his feelings about racial diversity. “Perhaps a few words about my tastes are appropriate,” he once wrote. “I delight in looking at the variety of faces I see on the subway when I visit New York,” adding that he got tears in his eyes when telling people about New York’s immigrant groups. Simon’s sentimentality about immigrants had implications that were not necessarily harmless. Since, as he admitted, he derived an emotional catharsis from the ever-increasing diversity of our society, he would positively prefer an America that was less and less white. It was his preference for racial diversity, at least as much as his ideas on economics, that fueled Simon’s utopian crusade for unlimited immigration.