The illegals manifest themselves in L.A.—a miscellany

200,000 mostly illegal-alien Hispanics (one liberal immigration supporter puts the number at 500,000) marched in Los Angeles to protest the serious anti-illegal immigration bill that was passed by the House of Representatives. (The above photo is impressive, overwhelming; but, strangely, the buildings in the center look like a drawing instead of a photo.) Mickey Kaus was there and has interesting observations of both the marchers and the media coverage, among which is this:

Of course the very size of these rallies, when coupled with the pro-illegal immigrant sentiments and the Mexican flags, might hurt the cause of the ralliers. It seems likely to make many non-PC voters think, “Jeez, next year’s rally will be even bigger. We’d better build that wall quick!” …

But it’s more than the size, and it’s more than the ubiquitous Mexican flags (Kaus says: “If you said ‘Mexican flag’ every time you saw a Mexican flag, you never stopped talking”). Even open-borders liberals are impressed by the emerging difference between illegal immigration as a matter of individual choice, and (as brought out in my article, “The Second Mexican War”) illegal immigration as an organized invasion. Glenn Reynolds, a frequently quoted liberal blogger, writes:

I’VE GENERALLY FAVORED OPEN IMMIGRATION, but I find myself feeling less and less that way in the face of mass rallies by illegal immigrants like this one.

Illegal immigrants as individuals just trying to make a better life are sympathetic. Illegal immigrants as a mass movement making demands on the polity are considerably less so…. I think that these marches just made passage of strict immigration laws much more likely.

Meanwhile, as this vast population of illegal invaders assert their control over southern California and the nation, neocons find “good news”—in Iraq. Stephen writes:

Interesting that, the Monday after a march of a million criminal aliens celebrating the annexation of a large part of American soil, and asserting their “right” to more, paging around various conservative websites such as National Review Online I’m greeted by stories agonizing over social issues in Libya and France, and a headline announcing, “More Good News From Iraq.”

You have to understand the emotions here: Mexicans have at long last found a war they can actually WIN. [LA note: See my article, “The Second Mexican War,” where I point out that the Mexicans’ uncontrolled immigration into the U.S., by expanding their power and reach, has put them on a nationalist “high,” making them feel more full of themselves than ever before in their history. Their heightened aggressiveness is purely the result of our weakness.]

Because it’s not a battle based upon the hard fight, fortitude or wise strategy. It’s a battle fought not by stalwart battalions, but by sneak-ins, snickering and shrugging shoulders as they trample 200 years of American rule of law at will. Their weapons are the corrosive infusion of counterfeit and chaos (so particularly toxic to a nation founded on Northern European principles of written order) which has fouled their own homeland, and the same haphazard force of raw numbers which would have assured victory in some ancient blood match prosecuted by clubs and heaved rocks.

It would be hard to imagine a contest for which Mestizo Mexican culture is more perfectly suited than the subjugation of a nation like America by this mass, mindless, lawless influx of humanity.

Or, as I wrote in my 1990 booklet, The Path to National Suicide:

So much for America; if other Western nations continue their openness to Third World immigration, we may be witnessing the beginning of the end of Western civilization as a whole. And this defeat of the West will have been accomplished, not by the superior strength or civilization of the newcomers, not by the “forces of history,” but simply by the feckless generosity and moral cowardice of the West itself.

Meanwhile, the neocon open-borders bully William Bennett, who in the past viciously attacked the supporters of Proposition 187, describing them as anti-American and outside our tradition, but recently seems to have had some second thoughts on the subject of immigration, is having further second thoughts, and even seems to be hinting that he was wrong in the past. David B. writes:

This morning, I caught the last 45 minutes of Bill Bennett’s radio show. You can hear it on the Internet from KRLA 870 Los Angeles from 6am to 9am ET. Bennett discussed immigration throughout this show, apparently. He took a series of callers who seemed to be from families who had come over before the post-1970 group.

One, a Jamaican from Miami, was very critical of Bush’s “jobs Americans won’t do” slogan. He even wants Tancredo to run for President. Others complained that the present group refuses to become American.

Bennett, in typical neocon fashion, qualifies and restates his position while acknowledging the problem. He has changed from a decade ago. Bennett said, “We didn’t see it coming. We had the Emma Lazarus slogan, and didn’t realize what was happening.” Bennett also said that between the GOP’s Big Business types and the immigrant pressure groups, “nothing will be done.” He said, “the mass of the American people want real reform.” Also, “there may be a maverick candidate for president who campaigns on this issue.”

In all, Bennett doesn’t say what he did back in 1994. His audience won’t go along with it. The increasing aggressiveness shown in the Los Angeles demonstration over the weekend has had an effect.

LA writes:

Doesn’t Bennett’s much too belated and partial recognition of reality confirm my political typology of traditionalist, conservative, and liberal? A reactionary or traditionalist recognizes a threat to his society the moment it appears; a conservative only recognizes the threat to his society after the society has been half destroyed; a liberal only recognizes the threat to his society after the society has been completely destroyed, or, in any case, after it’s too late to do anything about it. Why the failure to recognize the threat? Because liberals (and modern conservatives who are also liberals) do not experience their society as constituted of larger concretes such as nation, people, and way of life; they experience society as constituted of a collection of abstract and universal principles; seeing the world only through these abstract liberal categories (e.g., “All people in the world are like us, all people want democracy and freedom, and therefore all people can assimilate into our free democratic society”), they cannot see a threat to their concrete society until it becomes so overwhelmingly obvious that it becomes impossible to ignore. And, since they are liberals, when they do finally see the threat, it is not a rational grasp of reality that causes them to see it, but the experience of being hit on the head by a log. The election of Hamas, the attempted execution of Abdul Rahman, the illegal aliens’ huge march in Los Angeles—these are the logs that are hitting the liberals/conservatives on the head almost every week now.

A correspondent in Southern California writes:

I was in LA today on business. The roads leading into downtown LA were jammed. Hordes of illegals were walking in many blocks from the rally site. I was in Exposition Park, some distance from the Civic Center and there they were, in their white shirts, others with emblazoned T-shirts, one bozo had the emblem of a Mexican guerrilla group on it.

Anyone who thinks that this mass of humanity is going to self-deport if we “just enforce our laws” is living in a dream world. We are far, far past that point.

Frosty Wooldridge was on the radio last night predicting massive bloodshed in the country within several years. I fear he’s correct.

Asked if he saw many Mexican flags, he replies:

I didn’t see all that many Mexican flags.. I saw more American flags than Mexican, but everyone was in white. Obviously, Mexican media and the churches played a big coordinating role. It was astonishing that when I was in Exposition Park where the Olympic Coliseum is located, even on Exposition and MLK Blvds. you could see the hordes walking to the rally site. This is a heck of a good hike from the civic center.

Local talk radio is cackling down here. The anger and desperation are evident in the voices of the callers. What to do? I send my faxes and make my phone calls. Do they hear us? Are they too frightened to resist? One gets that impression.

The plague has come to my street. Mexicans bought the house next door. You cannot believe the level of noise and disrespect they show to the neighbors. I had to call the police the weekend they moved in. Last week, I politely asked them not to be out yelling and playing music in the middle of the night. Response? They’ve toned it down but taunt me by always making sure to speak at the top of their voices near my bedroom window when they think I’m trying to sleep. My yuppie neighbors, my anchor of normality on the street, put their house up for sale within 72 hours of these bozos moving in.

The earth shakes…the volcano rumbles.

LA writes:

Meanwhile, over at NRO, that bellwether of inside conservative opinion, David Frum (who once told me that America’s history of racial discrimination requires us to keep our borders open to mass immigration), wonders at a president, his former employer, who “tells visitors to the White House that party opposition to [his amnesty for illegal aliens] is based on irrational fear, ignorance, and prejudice. (Just like Dubai! Or for that matter, Harriet Miers.)”

Jeff, the former (very long ago) hard leftist, more recently hippie counterculturalist, and forever Dylan fan, writes from England:

Subject: THE TITANIC SAILS AT DAWN

The apparent huge size of the American pro-illegal immigration rally is more great news; like 9/11, like 7/7, like the Muslim “kill the cartoonists” responses and like the “kill the Christian Rahman” responses, these varied bigger than life attacks on the West and Judeo-Christians in general are the only possibility to clarify the threats for the “mainstream” in both America and Western Europe.

They may just spur that mainstream to possibly wake up in time to BEGIN to respond to these threats to our countries and civilisation. Of course, some of these attacks by our enemies are horrible and tragic and many people have died because of them, a fact that brings great personal sadness to me. But what other way will awaken the mainstream, who have been in a “coma” regarding the threats to their countries and civilisations. Unfortunately, it has to get so much worse before it gets better. Of course, there are so many threats to America and Western European civilisation(s) at the same time that it is hard to know which one to deal with first. Islamic terrorism and violence, “ethnic” violent crime, general moral breakdown, out of control illegal immigration from numerous groups around the world, out of control legal immigration, out of control family breakdown, out of control sexual promiscuity and HIV, out of control welfare dependency, out of control political correctness, out of control multiculturalism, the list is endless. Some of the threats are from external enemies, others are within. The more severe the attacks on our civilisation are (externally and internally), the more there is a chance that we will awaken to defend it. It is tragic that the situation has reached that drastic point but as they say, “truth hurts.” Bring it on. BRING IT ON! Jeff (England)

A reader writes:

Your correspondent in Southern California writes: “The plague has come to my street. Mexicans bought the house next door. You cannot believe the level of noise and disrespect they show to the neighbors.”

People in other parts of the country, now comfortably aloof from the reality of what is happening to us in California, should be aware of this, and what to expect when the Mexicans reach their neighborhood.

Illegal immigrants of the Mestizo background do not “move into” a neighborhood of Anglos, nor “take up residence,” as we understand it. They CLAIM TERRITORY. They are acting out an imperative that runs as deep in that culture as does the reflex to migrate opportunistically once the latest nest has been fouled to the point of being uninhabitable.

Emissaries from primitive Mexican pueblos arriving in a quiet American neighborhood can be counted on immediately to unleash a brash onslaught of high-profile, in-your-face behavior. This is not just a clash of different lifestyles. It’s a message—an aggressive display to assert the taking and holding of “turf.”

Some residents also interpret it, perhaps correctly, as an informal broadcasting of “notice” to Anglos to begin looking for another place to live. Whatever the case, it is unlike what one will experience from ethnic groups of almost ANY other origin than Mestizo Mexicans. I have lived among recently arrived East Africans, Armenians, Vietnamese, and South Americans.

But nothing compares to what happens to your quality of life when that first multi-family delegation of illegal Mexican nationals “claims” a single-family house on your block. If all you get are their inevitable pit bulls wandering the streets unleashed, live ammunition fired into the air to commemorate parties, and all-night bonfires with window-rattling music, count yourself lucky.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 27, 2006 02:13 AM | Send