Suicide of a Superpower_Will America Survive to 2025?

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  BUENAS NOCHES, USA

  “Mexico does not end at its borders. Where there is a Mexican, there is Mexico,” declared President Felipe Calderón, bringing his audience to its feet in his state of the nation address at the National Palace.66

  Were this the America of a century ago, Calderón’s claim that his country extends into our country would have produced a demand for clarification from the U.S. ambassador. Failing to receive it, he would have been recalled. America was a serious nation then.

  But it has now become a tradition for Mexican presidents to claim extraterritorial rights in the United States. Repeatedly, they have instructed U.S. citizens of Mexican birth and ancestry that loyalty to Mexico comes before allegiance to the United States. In 1995, President Ernesto Zedillo told a Dallas audience of Mexican Americans, “You’re Mexicans—Mexicans who live north of the border.”67 Zedillo brought a Chicago gathering of La Raza to its feet in 1997 by exclaiming, “I have proudly affirmed that the Mexican nation extends beyond the territory enclosed by its borders.”68

  In 1998, Mexico changed its constitution to restore citizenship to Mexican Americans who have taken an oath of loyalty to the United States, an oath that requires the renunciation of loyalty to any other country. Mexico’s goal: reknit the ties between Mexican Americans and their mother country and convince them to vote Mexico’s interests in U.S. elections.

  In June 2004, President Vicente Fox trod Zedillo’s path to the Mexican American community in Chicago, where he declared, “We are Mexicans that live in our territories and we are Mexicans that live in other territories. In reality there are 120 million that live together and are working together to construct a nation.”69 Fox was saying that the construction of his nation, Mexico, is taking place inside our nation, the United States.

  Is this not sedition?

  The following year, Carlos González Gutiérrez, the director of Mexico’s Institute for Mexicans Abroad, asserted, “the Mexican nation goes beyond the borders that contain Mexico.”70 These Mexicans reject the idea of America as a melting-pot nation that has created a new people: Americans. They are caught up in what Schlesinger called the “cult of ethnicity.”

  The new ethnic gospel rejects the unifying vision of individuals from all nations melted into a new race. Its underlying philosophy is that America is not a nation of individuals at all but a nation of groups, that ethnicity is the defining experience for most Americans, that ethnic ties are permanent and indelible, and that division into ethnic communities establishes the basic structure of American society and the basic meaning of American history.71

  Her rulers believe Mexico is a land of blood, soil, and history, and that loyalty to Mexico of people of Mexican blood, be they U.S. citizens or not, supersedes any loyalty to the United States. “I want the third generation, the seventh generation, I want them all to think ‘Mexico First,’” said Juan Hernandez, the dual citizen who headed up Vicente Fox’s presidential Office for Mexicans Abroad and then went to work for John McCain.72

  Hernandez seems to be plagiarizing or channeling Il Duce. In 1929, Mussolini proclaimed, about Italians living in America, “My order is that an Italian citizen remain an Italian citizen, no matter in what land he lives, even to the seventh generation.”73

  Yet a majority of Mexicans agree with Hernandez. A Zogby International Poll found that 69 percent of the people in Mexico believe the first loyalty of U.S. citizens of Mexican descent should be to Mexico.74 Blood ties trump any oath of loyalty to the United States.

  At a Quebec summit with his NAFTA partners, George W. Bush ridiculed fears of a North American Union of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, with a single currency, modeled on the European Union, as a fantasy of conspiracy theorists. “It’s quite comical actually, to realize the difference between reality and what some people on TV are talking about.”75

  Calderón, too, laughed. “I’d be happy with one foot in Mexicali and one in Tijuana.”76 But in his state of the nation address, Calderón was talking about one foot in Tijuana and one in L.A. One wonders if Bush was aware of what his friend Vicente Fox declared in Madrid to be the goal of Mexican state policy:

  Eventually our long-range objective is to establish with the United States … an ensemble of connections and institutions similar to those created by the European Union, with the goal of attending to future themes as important as … the freedom of movement of capital, goods, services and persons. This new framework we wish to construct is inspired in the example of the European Union.77

  Fox was telling Europeans that Mexico’s goal was to erase the U.S.-Mexican border and merge our two nations in a North American Union modeled on the EU. Whether Bush was aware no longer matters. Mexican presidents are open about the end game, for they sense America cannot prevent it, and the U.S. establishment appears unconcerned about American sovereignty.

  Have we passed the point of no return?

  Steven Camarota, of the Center for Immigration Studies, using Census Bureau figures of a net of 1.25 million legal and illegal immigrants entering and staying in the United States every year, projects a population of 468 million by 2060.78 If immigration policy and law remain constant, the addition alone to the U.S. population in fifty years will equal the entire U.S. population when John F. Kennedy took office. Some 105 million of these will be immigrants and their children. That is roughly the population of Mexico today, the homeland of most of these immigrants.

  When Arizona passed its law authorizing the police during “lawful contact” to determine the status of an individual if there were a “reasonable suspicion” he was here illegally, Calderón charged Arizona with opening the door “to intolerance, hate, discrimination and abuse in law enforcement.”79

  Within days, Calderón was in the Rose Garden with Obama, attacking the Arizona law. When the Mexican president went before the Congress to charge that the law—which specifically prohibits racial profiling—“introduces racial profiling as a basis for law enforcement,” the Democratic side of the aisle that included Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano rose to cheer Calderón’s defamation of the state of Arizona.80

  The Mexican government then filed an amicus brief supporting the Department of Justice complaint that the Arizona law will “interfere with vital foreign policy and national security interests by disrupting the United States’ relationship with Mexico and other countries.”81 The U.S. State Department filed an amicus brief, citing the Mexican brief against our own state of Arizona. In striking down the Arizona law, Judge Richard Paez, an Hispanic who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, cited the Mexican brief and the denunciations of Arizona’s law by almost a dozen countries of Latin America. Foreign opinion now counts in U.S. courts.

  The mass immigration of the last four decades, legal and illegal, exceeds anything any nation has ever known. And these scores of millions come from cultures, countries, and civilizations whose people have never before been assimilated. Not only is our melting pot cracked, it has been repudiated in favor of multiculturalism. Immigrants are urged to keep their language, customs, traditions, culture, and national identity. And the largest cohort comes from a country, Mexico, with an historic grievance against the United States: 58 percent of Mexicans believe the American Southwest by right belongs to Mexico.82

  Nor is assimilation proceeding as it did with the European immigrants. Only 3 percent of young Hispanic immigrants ages sixteen to twenty-five respond “American” when asked to identify themselves. Only 33 percent of second-generation Hispanics—U.S. citizens born here—identify themselves as Americans first. Not until the third generation do 50 percent identify themselves as American. Even then, half prefer to call themselves Latino or Hispanic, or identify themselves by the country that their grandparents came from.83

  CALIFORNIA, HERE WE COME!

  “California is a mess,” writes John Judis, in the opening line of “End State: Is California Finished?” his New Republic essay on
the Golden State he came to know as a student at Berkeley in 1962. After chronicling the disaster area California has become, Judis asks if it can recreate and renew itself. “I have my doubts,” he concludes.84

  Pessimism seems justified and portentous, for, as Judis writes, “California remains America’s state, but it also registers the state of America.”85 We should look long and hard at the wreck of the Golden Land, for California is where we all are headed.

  Anglos are down to 40 percent of the state population and their numbers are steadily sinking. Hispanics comprise 38 percent of the population and their numbers are rising. Only 27 percent of public school children in California are white.86 In 2007, twice as many children were born to Latinas as to white women, the former rising in one year from 284,000 to 297,000, while the latter fell from 160,000 to 156,000.87

  “Is California Dreaming Over?” ran the headline over a 2009 story by the Associated Press’s Michael Blood. “Michael Reilly spent his lifetime chasing the California dream,” the story began. “This year he’s going to look for it in Colorado.… For him, years of rising taxes, dead-end schools, unchecked illegal immigration, and clogged traffic have robbed the Golden State of its allure.” Reilly is not alone. Between July 2007 and July 2008, 144,000 more Californians left than came in for the fourth consecutive year, a larger loss than that of any state.88

  Although California boasts the world’s eighth largest economy, the state has taken on the aspect of a Third World nation. The Golden Land has the lowest bond rating of any state. The income tax rate has reached 10 percent. As of 2009 the sales tax was 8.25 percent, with counties and cities allowed to impose another 2 percent.89 Reilly’s property taxes in Colorado will not be a third of what they were in California. In a CNBC survey, California was ranked fiftieth among the states in “cost of business,” and forty-ninth in “business friendliness.”90

  In the fall of 2010, David Brooks of the New York Times went to California and came away with the same impression as John Judis. California, he wrote, is “a state in crisis.”

  Eighty-two percent of Californians say they believe their state is heading in the wrong direction.… State growth has lagged behind national growth. Unemployment is at 12.4 percent statewide and at catastrophic levels in the Central Valley. More people are leaving California for Oklahoma and Texas than came here during the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s. Tom Joad is giving up.91

  In its 2010 survey of the best and worst states in which to do business, Chief Executive ranked California dead last, and asked a relevant question: “How is it that the nation’s most populous state at 37 million, one that is the world’s eighth largest economy … that had the highest growth rate in the 1950s and 1960s during the tenures of Democratic Governor Pat Brown and Republican Governors Earl Warren and Ronald Reagan, should become the Venezuela of North America?”92

  The magazine offered this explanation:

  Californians pay among the highest income and sales taxes in the nation, the former exceeding 10 percent in the top brackets.… State politics seems concerned with how to divide a shrinking pie rather than how to expand it.… [U]nfunded pensions and health care liabilities for state workers top $500 billion.… When state employees reach a critical mass they tend to become a permanent lobby for continued growth in government.93

  Bill Dormandy, CEO of San Francisco-based medical device maker ITC, says the “state’s taxes are not survivable.”94 In 2009, when unemployment first rose above 12 percent, the highest since Dust Bowl and Depression days, Sacramento was issuing IOUs.

  When five revenue-raising proposals were put on the ballot, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger pleaded with Californians not to make their state “the poster child for dysfunction.” But, “on May 18th they did exactly that,” said the Economist, as voters “rejected all measures except one that freezes legislators’ pay during budget-deficit years—a ritualised form of venting general anger.”95

  From 2000 to 2008, according to the Census Bureau, 1.4 million “domestic” migrants left California for other parts of the United States, while 1.8 million “international” migrants moved into California from foreign nations.96 A large share of the foreign immigrants are tax consumers while a large share of those leaving California are taxpayers. Hispanics who pick fruit, wash cars, work in kitchens, carry bricks, and clean up buildings do not earn the wages or pay the same taxes as auto and aerospace workers. And as the cost of education, health care, housing assistance, police, and prisons surges, the Mike Reillys and the companies that employ them head back over the mountains whence their fathers came.

  By 2010, one in six U.S. workers was foreign born. But, in California, immigrants accounted for 35 percent of all workers. Ten percent of all the jobs in California, a state with one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation, were held by illegal aliens.97 The fiscal cost to California, local and state combined, has been estimated at close to $22 billion.98

  In June 1998, Mario Obledo, a cofounder of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, said on a radio station, “California is going to be an Hispanic state. Anyone who doesn’t like it should leave.”99 If whites don’t like it, he added, “they should go back to Europe.”100

  Obledo was awarded the Medal of Freedom by Bill Clinton.

  He was wrong about where departing Californians are going, but Obledo was not wrong about who inherits the Golden State. Two centuries after gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill and the Bear Flag Republic joined the Union, in 2042, Hispanics will outnumber whites, Asians, and African Americans combined, and will be an absolute and growing majority of all Californians.101

  Nor will Hispanic immigration end in 2042. For if California is no longer the paradise over the mountains for Americans, it is a far, far better place for Mexicans than is Mexico. A third of those entering the country illegally head for California. As the Americans leave, Mexicans come. State bankruptcy and a debt default appear inevitable, with California ending up like those Third World nations that rely upon regular cash infusions from the IMF and the World Bank.

  The National Immigration Survey is a huge federal study of the U.S. immigrant population. Poring over NIS data for his Harvard dissertation, Jason Richwine, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, discovered that on the Wechsler tests, which measure basic knowledge, auditory recall, vocabulary, arithmetic skills, and comprehension, the children of Hispanic immigrants average a score of 82, seven points below the average score of Hispanic citizens.102

  Now, an IQ test is no absolute predictor of whether one will succeed in life, but it is a reliable predictor of academic performance. And with an illiteracy rate of 23 percent among California’s adults, the highest in the nation, and one third to one-half of its Hispanic high school students dropping out, and those that graduate reading and computing at seventh, eighth, and ninth grade levels, one cannot be wildly optimistic about the future of the Golden State.103 Her schools, once among the nation’s best, are now, measured by dropout rates and academic achievement, among the nation’s worst. In late 2010 came news that Latinos, at 50.4 percent, had become a majority of all pupils and students in California public schools.104

  Los Angeles, which is what most U.S. cities will look like in forty years, is the most diverse city on earth. Among its scores of thousands of gang members, a war of the underclass is under way. In 2005, the Supreme Court ordered California prisons to end thirty years of segregation. But in the jails and prisons of the City of Angels, where the Aryan Brotherhood, the Black Guerrilla Family, and the Mexican Mafia are at war over drugs and turf, integration kills. In August 2009, a riot lasting eleven hours erupted in the Chino correctional facility “along racial lines,” wrote the New York Times, citing prison officials, “with black prison gangs fighting Latino gangs in hand-to-hand combat.”105 Some 250 prisoners were injured, and 55 hospitalized. Much of the prison was burned and destroyed.

  In June 2008, Lee Baca, a Latino raised in East Los Angeles and the elected county sheri
ff for a decade, wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times titled, “In L.A. Race Kills.” “We have a serious interracial violence problem in this county involving blacks and Latinos,” wrote Sheriff Baca:

  Some people deny it. They say that race is not a factor in L.A.’s gang crisis; the problem, they say, is not one of blacks versus Latinos and Latinos versus blacks but merely one of gang members killing other gang members (and, yes, they acknowledge, sometimes the gangs are race-based).

  But they’re wrong. The truth is that, in many cases, race is at the heart of the problem. Latino gang members shoot blacks not because they are members of a rival gang but because they are black. Likewise, black gang members shoot Latinos because they are brown.106

  Of the hate crimes committed in Los Angeles by Hispanics against blacks, fully 78 percent are said to be “gang-related,” while 52 percent of those committed by blacks against Hispanics are considered gang-related.107

  As there is no bad history, indeed, no history at all between blacks and Hispanics—no slavery or Jim Crow in Mexico, no African American role in the war that cost Mexicans half their country—what explains this mutual hatred other than race?

  But if race explains gang killings by Hispanics of African Americans and the reverse, violence within minority groups, as between the Crips and Bloods of yesterday, is also burgeoning. In December 2009, the New York Times reported on the proliferation of gangs on Indian reservations.108 The Navajo Nation has seen a tripling of gangs from 76 to 225 in twelve years. Among the Oglala Sioux on Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, 5000 young males are involved with 39 gangs. “Groups like Wild Boys, TBZ, Nomads and Indian Mafia draw children from broken, alcohol-ravaged homes … offering brotherhood, an identity drawn from urban gangsta rap and self-protection.”109

  Abandonment and fatherlessness, generating a lifelong search for family, community, identity, and protection, are behind the proliferation of gangs among minorities, including now young Asians whose parents remain the most law-abiding of U.S. citizens.