The Death of the West

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  A spirit of separatism, nationalism, and irredentism has come alive in the barrio. The Latino student organization MEChA demands return of the Southwest to Mexico.19 Charles Truxillo, a professor of Chicano Studies at the University of New Mexico, says a new “Aztlan” with its capital in Los Angeles is inevitable, and Mexicans should seek it by any means necessary.20

  “We’re recolonizing America, so they’re afraid of us. It’s time to take back what is ours,” rants Ricky Sierra of the Chicano National Guard.21 One demonstration leader in Westwood exulted, “We are here … to show white Protestant Los Angeles that we’re the majority … and we claim this land as ours. It’s always been ours and we’re still here … if anybody is going to be deported it’s going to be you.”22

  José Angel Gutierrez, a political science professor at the University of Texas at Arlington and director of the UTA Mexican-American Study Center, told a university crowd: “We have an aging white America. They are not making babies. They are dying. The explosion is in our population. They are shitting in their pants in fear! I love it.”23

  Now, this may be Corona talk in the cantina, but more authoritative voices are sounding the same notes, and they resonate in the barrio. The Mexican consul general José Pescador Osuna remarked in 1998, “Even though I am saying this part serious, part joking, I think we are practicing La Reconquista in California.”24 California legislator Art Torres called Proposition 187, to cut off welfare to illegal aliens, “the last gasp of white America.”25

  “California is going to be a Mexican State. We are going to control all the institutions. If people don’t like it, they should leave,” exults Mario Obledo, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, and recipient of the Medal of Freedom from President Clinton. 26 Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo told Mexican-Americans in Dallas: “You are Mexicans, Mexicans who live north of the border.”27

  Why should Mexican immigrants not have greater loyalty to their homeland than to a country they broke into simply to find work? Why should nationalistic and patriotic Mexicans not dream of a reconquista ?

  Consider the student organization MEChA, whose UCLA chapter, a few years back, was chaired by one Antonio Villaraigosa, who came within forty thousand votes of being mayor of Los Angeles in 2001. MEChA stands for Movimento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, the Chicano Student movement of Aztlan. What is El Plan de Aztlan for which MEChA exists? In its own words, MEChA aims to reclaim the land of their fathers that was stolen in the “brutal ‘gringo’ invasion of our territories.”28

  With our heart in our hands and our hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture. Before the world, before all of North America, before all our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlan.29

  In El Plan, “Aztlan belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops and not to foreign Europeans. We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continent.”30 The MEChA slogan is “Por la Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada.” Translation: “For our race, everthing. For those outside our race, nothing.” 31

  MEChA demands U.S. “restitution” for “past economic slavery, political exploitation, ethnic and cultural psychological destruction and denial of civil and human rights.”32 “Political Liberation,” asserts MEChA,

  can only come through independent action on our part, since the two-party system is the same animal with two heads that feed from the same trough. Where we are a majority we will control; where we are a minority we will represent a pressure group; nationally we represent one party: La Familia de Raza.33

  In its constitution, MEChA declares that its official symbol “shall be the eagle with its wings spread, bearing a macahuittle in one claw and a dynamite stick in the other with the lighted fuse in its beak.”34

  MEChA is the Chicano version of the white-supremacist Aryan Nation, only it claims four hundred campus chapters across the Southwest and as far away as Cornell and Ann Arbor. With its rhetoric about a “mestizo nation,” a “bronze people,” a “bronze culture,” a “bronze continent,” and “race above all,” it is unabashedly racist and anti-American. That Villaraigosa could go through a campaign for mayor of America’s second-largest city without having to explain his association and repudiate MEChA testifies to the truth that America’s major media are morally intimidated by any minority that can make out credentials as a victim of past discrimination.

  And nowhere has ethnic intimidation been more successful than in the academy. After years of disruptive MEChA protests, the University of Texas has downgraded Texas Independence Day. In 2000, the university held a “private alumni fund-raising event to milk the holiday for money, while according it virtually no public recognition.” 35

  MEANWHILE, THE INVASION rolls on. America’s once-sleepy two-thousand-mile Mexican border is now the scene of daily confrontations. Ranches in Arizona have become nightly bivouac areas for thousands of aliens, who cut fences and leave poisoned cattle and trails of debris in the trek north. Even the Mexican army is showing its contempt. The State Department reported fifty-five military incursions in the five years before the incident in 2000, when truckloads of Mexican soldiers barreled through a barbed wire fence, fired shots, and pursued two mounted officers and a U.S. Border Patrol vehicle.36 Border Patrol agents believe some Mexican army units collaborate with the drug cartels.

  America has become a spillway for an exploding population that Mexico is unable to employ. With Mexico’s population growing by ten million every decade, there will be no end to the long march north before the American Southwest is fully Hispanicized. Mexican senator Adolfo Zinser conceded that Mexico’s “economic policy is dependent on unlimited emigration to the United States.”37 The Yanqui-baiting academic and “onetime Communist supporter” Jorge Castaneda warned in Atlantic Monthly, six years ago, that any American effort to cut back immigration “will make social peace in … Mexico untenable … . Some Americans dislike immigration, but there is very little they can do about it.”38 These opinions take on weight, with Senator Zinser now President Fox’s national security adviser and Jorge Castaneda his foreign minister.

  Under Fox, Zinser, and Castaneda, Mexican policy has shifted to support of the illegals entering the United States. An Office for Mexicans Abroad has been set up to help Mexicans evade U.S. border guards in the deserts of Arizona and California by providing them with “survival kits” of water, dry meat, granola, Tylenol, antidiarrhea pills, bandages, and condoms. The kits are distributed in Mexico’s poorest towns, along with information on where illegals can go for free social services in California, no questions asked. In short, Mexico City is now aiding and abetting an invasion of the United States, and the U.S. political response is one of intimidated silence and moral paralysis.39

  As the invasion rolls on, with California as the preferred destination, sociologist William Frey has documented an out-migration of African Americans and Anglo-Americans from the Golden State in search of cities and towns like the ones they grew up in.40 Other Californians are moving into gated communities. A country that cannot control its borders isn’t really a country anymore, Ronald Reagan warned us some twenty years ago.

  Concerns about a radical change in America’s ethnic composition have been called un-American. But they are as American as Benjamin Franklin, who once asked, “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them … ?”41 Franklin would never find out if his fears were justified. German immigration was halted during the Seven Years War.

  Former president Theodore Roosevelt warned, “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”42

  Immigration is a necessary subject for national debate, for it is about who
we are as a people. Like the Mississippi, with its endless flow of life-giving water, immigration has enriched America throughout history. But when the Mississippi floods its banks, the devastation can be enormous. Yet, by the commands of political correctness, immigration as an issue is off the table. Only “nativists” or “xenophobes” could question a policy by which the United States takes in more people of different colors, creeds, cultures, and civilizations than all other nations of the earth combined. The river is rising to levels unseen in our history. What will become of our country if the levees do not hold?

  IN LATE 1999, this writer left Tucson and drove southeast to Douglas, the Arizona border town of eighteen thousand that had become the principal invasion corridor into the United States. In March alone, the U.S. Border Patrol had apprehended twenty-seven thousand Mexicans crossing illegally, half again as many illegal aliens crossing in one month as there are people in Douglas.43

  While there, I visited Theresa Murray, an eighty-two-year-old widow and a great-grandmother who lives in the Arizona desert she grew up in. Her ranch house was surrounded by a seven-foot chainlink fence that was topped with coils of razor wire. Every door and window had bars on it and was wired to an alarm. Mrs. Murray sleeps with a .32-caliber pistol on her bed table, because she has been burglarized thirty times. Her guard dogs are dead; they bled to death when someone tossed meat containing chopped glass over her fence. Theresa Murray is living out her life inside a maximum-security prison, in her own home, in her own country, because her government lacks the moral courage to do its duty and defend the borders of the United States of America.

  If America is about anything, it is freedom. But as Theresa Murray says, “I’ve lost my freedom. I can’t ever leave the house unless I have somebody watch it. We used to ride our horses clear across the border. We had Mexicans working on our property. It used to be fun to live here. Now, it’s hell. It’s plain old hell.”44

  While Theresa Murray lives unfree, in hellish existence, American soldiers defend the borders of Korea, Kuwait, and Kosovo. But nothing is at risk on those borders, half a world away, to compare with what is at risk on our border with Mexico, over which pass the armies of the night as they trudge endlessly northward to the great cities of America. Invading armies go home, immigrant armies do not.

  WHO KILLED THE REAGAN COALITION?

  For a quarter of a century, from 1968 until 1992, the Republican party had a virtual lock on the presidency. The “New Majority,” created by Richard Nixon and replicated by Ronald Reagan, gave the GOP five victories in six presidential elections. The key to victory was to append to the Republican base two Democratic blocs: Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern white Protestants. Mr. Nixon lured these voters away from the New Deal coalition with appeals to patriotism, populism, and social conservatism. Success gave the GOP decisive margins in the industrial states and a “Solid South” that had been the base camp of the Democratic party since Appomattox. This Nixon-Reagan coalition proved almost unbeatable. McGovern, Mondale, and Dukakis could carry 90 percent of the black vote, but with Republicans taking 60 percent of the white vote, which was over 90 percent of the total, the GOP inevitably came out on top.

  This was the Southern Strategy. While the media called it immoral, Democrats had bedded down with segregationists for a century without similar censure. FDR and Adlai Stevenson had put segregationists on their tickets. Outside of Missouri, a border state with Southern sympathies, the only ones Adlai captured in 1956 were Dixiecrat states later carried by George Wallace.

  Neither Nixon nor Reagan ever supported segregation. As vice president, Nixon was a stronger backer of civil rights than Senators John F. Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson. His role in winning passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was lauded in a personal letter from Dr. Martin Luther King, who hailed Vice President Nixon’s “assiduous labor and dauntless courage in seeking to make Civil Rights a reality.” 45

  For a quarter century, Democrats were unable to pick the GOP lock on the presidency, because they could not shake loose the Republican grip on the white vote. With the exception of Lyndon Johnson’s landslide of 1964, no Democrat since Truman in 1948 had won the white vote. What broke the GOP lock on the presidency was the Immigration Act of 1965.

  During the anti-Soviet riots in East Berlin in 1953, Bertolt Brecht, the Communist playwright, quipped, “Would it not be easier … for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”46 In the last thirty years, America has begun to import a new electorate, as Republicans cheerfully backed an immigration policy tilted to the Third World that enlarged the Democratic base and loosened the grip that Nixon and Reagan had given them on the presidency of the United States.

  In 1996, the GOP was rewarded. Six of the 7 states with the largest numbers of immigrants—California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Florida, and Texas—went for Clinton. In 2000, 5 went for Gore, and Florida was a dead heat. Of the 15 states with the most foreign-born, Bush lost 10. But of the 10 states with the smallest shares of foreign-born-Montana, Mississippi, Wyoming, West Virginia, South Dakota, North Dakota, South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, and Arkansas—Bush swept all 10.

  Among the states with the most immigrants, only Texas has been reliably Republican, but now it is going the way of California. In the 1990s, Texas took in 3.2 million new residents as the Hispanic share of Texas’s population shot from 25 percent to 33 percent.47 Hispanics are now the major ethnic group in four of Texas’s five biggest cities: Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and El Paso. “Non-Hispanic Whites May Soon Be a Minority in Texas” said a recent headline in the New York Times.48 With the Anglo population down from 60 percent in 1990 to 53 percent, the day when whites are a minority in Texas for the first time since before the Alamo is coming soon. “Projections show that by 2005,” says the Dallas Morning News, “fewer than half of Texans will be white.”49

  AMERICA IS GOING the way of California and Texas. “In 1960, the U.S. population was 88.6 percent white; in 1990, it was only 75.6 percent—a drop of 13 percentage points in thirty years … . [By 2020] the proportion of whites could fall as low as 61 percent.”50 So writes Peter Brimelow of Forbes. By 2050, Euro-Americans, the largest and most loyal share of the electorate the GOP has, will be a minority, due to an immigration policy that is championed by Republicans. John Stuart Mill was not altogether wrong when he branded the Tories “the Stupid Party.”51

  HISPANICS ARE THE fastest-growing segment of America’s population. They were 6.4 percent of the U.S. population in 1980, 9 percent by 1990, and in 2000 over 12 percent. “The Hispanic fertility rates are quite a bit higher than the white or black population. They are at the levels of the baby boom era of the 1950s,” says Jeffrey Passel, a demographer at the Urban Institute.52 At 35.4 million, Hispanics now equal African Americans in numbers and are becoming as Democratic in voting preferences. Mr. Bush lost the African-American vote eleven to one, but he also lost Hispanics two to one.

  In 1996, when Clinton carried Latino voters seventy to twenty-one, he carried first-time Latino voters ninety-one to sit.53 Aware that immigrants could give Democrats their own lock on the White House, Clinton’s men worked relentlessly to naturalize them. In the year up to September 30, 1996, the Immigration and Naturalization Service swore in 1,045,000 immigrants as new citizens so quickly that 80,000 with criminal records—6,300 for serious crimes—slipped by.54 Here are the numbers of new citizens in the last five years of the Clinton presidency.

  1996 1,045,000

  1997 598,000

  1998 463,000

  1999 872,000

  2000 898,31555

  California took a third of these new citizens. As non-Latino white registration fell by one hundred thousand in California in the 1990s, one million Latinos registered.56 Now 16 percent of the California electorate, Hispanics gave Gore the state with hundreds of thousands of votes to spare. “Both parties show up at swearing-in ceremonies to try to register voters,” says Democratic consultant William Carrick.
“There is a Democratic table and a Republican table. Ours has a lot of business. Theirs is like the Maytag repairman.”57 With fifty-five electoral votes, California, home state of Nixon and Reagan, has now become a killing field of the GOP.

  VOTING ON REFERENDA in California has also broken down along ethnic lines. In 1994, Hispanics, rallying under Mexican Hags, opposed Proposition 187 to end welfare to illegals. In the 1996 California Civil Rights Initiative, Hispanics voted for ethnic preferences. In 1998, Hispanics voted to keep bilingual education. Anglo-Americans voted the other way by landslides.

  Ron Unz, father of the “English for the Children” referendum that ended state-funded bilingual education, believes the LA riot of 1992 may have been the Rubicon on the road to the balkanization of California.

  The plumes of smoke from burning buildings and the gruesome television footage almost completely shattered the sense of security of middle-class Southern Californians. Suddenly, the happy “multicultural California” so beloved of local boosters had been unmasked as a harsh, dangerous, Third World dystopia … . the large numbers of Latinos arrested (and summarily deported) for looting caused whites to cast a newly wary eye on gardeners and nannies who just weeks earlier had seemed so pleasant and reliable. If multicultural Los Angeles had exploded into sudden chaos, what security could whites expect as a minority in an increasingly nonwhite California?58

  EXCEPT FOR REFUGEES from Communist countries like Hungary and Cuba, immigrants gravitate to the party of government. The obvious reason: Immigrants get more out of government—in free schooling for their kids, housing subsidies, health care—than they pay in. Arriving poor, most do not soon amass capital gains, estates, or incomes that can be federally taxed. Why should immigrants support a Republican party that cuts taxes they don’t pay over a Democratic party that will expand the programs on which they do depend?