Have we opposed the Hispanic invasion, or consented to it?
Immigration reformer Brenda Walker submitted an excellent letter to the
Orange Country Register about the
Spanish version of our National Anthem, and I wrote her a note about it. First, her letter:
Editor:
Among the many insults which Mexican nationals have spewed upon the American people, the Spanish version of the Star Spangled Banner is one of the worst. Far from being an attempt to “explain” America to new “immigrants (illegal aliens actually), the song is a smack in the face to the world’s most generous people, particularly when welcoming genuine immigrants. The song is one of many small declarations of war.
Mass legal and illegal immigration is an effective form of asymmetric warfare now being used by Muslims against Europe and by Mexicans against the United States. It accomplishes the final goals of military conquest—settling new lands, acquiring access to more natural resources, expanding a group’s cultural influence, establishing political control—without all the messy warfare.
Americans don’t want Aztlan. We don’t want a bilingual United States. We don’t want an invasion prettied up and called multiculturalism. We don’t want a North American union or any other form of shotgun marriage with Mexico.
We want to keep our own nation with borders and under the Constitution, entirely separate from the hostile country to the south.
Brenda Walker
LA writes:
Dear Brenda,
This is a fine, eloquent letter. I agree with everything you say here, with one exception: your assertion that Americans don’t want invasion, bilingualism, merger with Mexico etc. In real political terms, this is not true. A people are defined politically by what they consent to. For 40 years we have tacitly or explicitly consented to mass non-Western immigration, multiculturalism, the defining-out-of-existence of our culture and nation. Without that consent, none of this would have happened. It is not right, therefore, to act as if the American people are simply innocent victims of something that has been foisted on them against their will. The Mexican invasion legal and illegal has been created by the U.S. government with the consent of the American people. The Mexicans are simply responding to the opportunity we have given them. If we want to change this situation, then we must first admit our own (at least passive) complicity in that, fully acknowledge the errors we have made, and renounce them.
Obviously this does not refer to immigration reformers like us, yet we too are part of the American people, and you were speaking of the American people.
Also, I underscore that opinion polls are not political expression. People’s passive response to a question on the telephone has no political meaning. What people actively express in the public square has political meaning. For example, when conservatives rose up in revolt against the Harriet Miers nomination, that was genuine and effective political action; that was a true expression of public opinion that forced Bush to withdraw her. Had the American people at any point over the last 40 years expressed active and concerted passion against mass immigration of the kind that conservatives expressed against Miers, then it could be fairly said that “Americans don’t want Aztlan. We don’t want a bilingual United States … “ But they didn’t, so it can’t.
Best,
Larry Auster
Brenda Walker to LA:
Dear Larry,
Thanks for your observations.
I must disagree somewhat. While it can be argued that Americans are too politically passive, most have common-sensical views about how the country should be run. On the rare occasion when citizens get to vote about immigration and related issues, they make the right choices, e.g. Props 187 and 209 in California and Prop 200 in Arizona.
Anti-bilingual measures do similarly well. In Prof. Huntington’s book “Who Are We” there is a table (pg 167) showing Language Referenda 1980-2002, in which 11 out of 12 were decided in favor of English.
The problem is that the will of the people is often undermined by unscrupulous politicians like Gray Davis. If Prop 187 hadn’t been scuttled by his back-room treason with Mexico, we would be in much better shape in the struggle to maintain sovereignty.
When there aren’t worthwhile initiatives to be gutted, politicians devise BS laws that sound reasonable but are loaded with loopholes. The 1965 legislation was a snow job. It was sold by creeps like Ted Kennedy as not affecting the cultural mix—a Big Lie necessary because citizens didn’t want millions from inappropriate cultures filling their communities. The 1986 Reagan Amnesty was also a pack of lies, purporting to balance carrots with sticks, but somehow Washington forgot the enforcement part.
So it’s not so much that the American people have been derelict, but the government is far less interested in what they want than was the case half a century ago.
Brenda
LA to BW:
Dear Brenda,
You’re making good points. Clearly what the politicians did to 187 shows that the people did everything they could reasonably have been expected to do, yet it was illegitimately killed.
However, one could add that they then needed to go beyond reason to action, to protests, to illegal protests, and, if necessary, to violence. If the people of California had been like the Americans of 1765 or 1774 or 1775 or 1776, they would have risen up in rebellion against that outrage. But they didn’t. The Boston Tea Party, the stocking of arms in the Massachusetts countryside, these were not legal protests.
All government, even dictatorship, is government by consent, since no government or government measure can survive unless the people allow it to. They can take to the streets if they feel strongly enough, and force the government to abandon an intolerable law, or, as in our present case, force the government to enforce a vitally necessary law. Without the ultimate willingness of a people to go to the streets as an extreme measure, and even to break the law, liberty under law cannot survive.
Larry
Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 27, 2006 05:58 PM | Send