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What is it that people have to feel, in order to see?
In a 1990 cover article Time magazine published the demographic projections that showed America becoming a white-minority country in the middle of the 21st century. Speaking for myself, that would have been enough to make me see that immigration endangered our nation, our culture, our everything. (It was my own sudden realization of encroaching white minorityhood, around 1982, that turned me into an immigration restrictionist.) But this was not the reaction of most Americans. To my shock and disappointment at the time, the Time piece did not set off a huge national debate on immigration. Since people were not particularly bothered by the bare fact of America’s ceasing to be a white country, they must have assumed that the nonwhites would assimilate, that everyone would get along, and that therefore the changing racial composition would not change our country in any essential way. What this tells is that for most people it’s not the knowledge of changing demographics that wakes them up (assuming that they ever wake up) to the immigration disaster; rather, it’s the knowledge of what those changing demographics concretely mean. It’s the realization that, far from being assimilable into our country, those masses of Third-Worlders, mainly Mexicans, are not like us and in many cases do not like us. It is the realization of the immigrants’ true incompatibility with ourselves, combined with their vast numbers, that wakes people up to the immigration disaster.
So what is the difference between a person who as soon as he learns that America is becoming nonwhite sees this as a mortal threat to our country and culture, and a person who only grasps the threat when millions of angry Mexicans fill our cities and express their intention to destroy America? The difference is that the first person sees the fundamental truth that race and culture matter; the second persons doesn’t see it, and has to be made to feel it before he can see it. Email entry |