The Death of the West

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  After Ellis Island, the Democratic party has always been the first stop for immigrants. Only after they have begun to move into the middle class do the foreign-born start converting to Republicanism. This can take two generations. By naturalizing and registering half a million or a million foreign-born a year, the Democrats are locking up future presidential elections and throwing away the key. If the GOP does not do something about mass immigration, mass immigration will do something about the GOP—turn it into a permanent minority that is home to America’s newest minority, Euro-Americans.

  As the ethnic character of America changes, politics change. A rising tide of immigration naturally shifts politics and power to the Left, by increasing the demands on government. The rapidly expanding share of the U.S. electorate that is of African and Hispanic ancestry has already caused the GOP to go silent on affirmative action and mute its calls for cuts in social spending. In 1996, Republicans were going to abolish the U.S. Department of Education. Now, they are enlarging it. As Hispanic immigration soars, and Hispanic voters become the swing voters in the pivotal states, their agenda will become America’s agenda. It is already happening. In 2000, an AFL-CIO that had opposed mass immigration reversed itself and came out for amnesty for illegal aliens, hoping to sign up millions of illegal workers as dues-paying union members. And the Bush White House—in its policy decisions and appointments—has become acutely attentive to the Hispanic vote, often at the expense of conservative principles.

  AMERICA’S QUEBEC?

  Harvard economist George Borjas, who studied the issue, found no net economic benefit from mass migration from the Third World. The added costs of schooling, health care, welfare, social security, and prisons, plus the added pressure on land, water, and power resources, exceeded the taxes that immigrants contribute. The National Bureau of Economic Research puts the cost of immigration at $80.4 billion in 1995.59 Economist Donald Huddle of Rice University estimates that the net annual cost of immigration will reach $108 billion by 2006.60 What are the benefits, then, that justify the risks we are taking of the balkanization of America?

  Census 2000 revealed what many sensed. For the first time since statehood, whites in California are a minority. White flight has begun. In the 1990s, California grew by three million people, but its Anglo population actually “dropped by nearly half a million … surprising many demographers.”61 Los Angeles County lost 480,000 white folks. In the exodus, the Republican bastion of Orange County lost 6 percent of its white population. “We can’t pretend we’re a white middle class state anymore,” said William Fulton, research fellow at USC’s Southern California Studies Center.62 State librarian Kevin Starr views the Hispanization of California as natural and inevitable:

  The Anglo hegemony was only an intermittent phase in California’s arc of identity, extending from the arrival of the Spanish … the Hispanic nature of California has been there all along, and it was temporarily swamped between the 1880s and the 1960s, but that was an aberration. This is a reassertion of the intrinsic demographic DNA of the longer pattern, which is a part of the California-Mexican continuum.63

  The future is predictable: With one hundred thousand Anglos leaving California each year, with the Asian population soaring 42 percent in a single decade, with 43 percent of all Californians under eighteen Hispanic, America’s largest state is on its way to becoming a predominantly Third World state.64

  No one knows how this will play out, but California could become another Quebec, with demands for formal recognition of its separate and unique Hispanic culture and identity—or another Ulster. As Sinn Fein demanded and got special ties to Dublin, Mexican Americans may demand a special relationship with their mother country, dual citizenship, open borders, and voting representation in Mexico’s legislature. President Fox endorses these ideas. With California holding 20 percent of the electoral votes needed for the U.S. presidency, and Hispanic votes decisive in California, what presidential candidate would close the door to such demands?

  “I have proudly proclaimed that the Mexican nation extends beyond the territory enclosed by its borders and that Mexican migrants are an important—a very important—part of this,” said President Zedillo.65 His successor agrees. Candidates for president of Mexico now raise money and campaign actively in the United States. Gov. Gray Davis is exploring plans to have Cinco de Mayo, the fifth of May, the anniversary of Juarez’s 1862 victory over a French army at Puebla, made a California holiday. “In the near future,” says Davis, “people will look at California and Mexico as one magnificent region.” 66 Perhaps we can call it Aztlan.

  AMERICA IS NO longer the biracial society of 1960 that struggled to erase divisions and close gaps in a nation 90 percent white. Today we juggle the rancorous and rival claims of a multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural country. Vice President Gore captured the new America in his famous howler, when he translated our national slogan, “E Pluribus Unum,” backward, as “Out of one, many.”67

  Today there are thirty-one million foreign-born in the United States. Half are from Latin America and the Caribbean, a fourth from Asia. The rest are from Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. One in every five New Yorkers and Floridians is foreign-born, as is one of every four Californians. With 8.4 million foreign-born, and not one new power plant built in a decade, small wonder California faced power shortages and power outages. With endless immigration, America is going to need an endless expansion of its power sources—hydroelectric power, fossil fuels (oil, coal, gas), and nuclear power. The only alternative is blackouts, brownouts, and endless lines at the pump.

  In the 1990s, immigrants and their children were responsible for 100 percent of the population growth of California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and Massachusetts, and over half the population growth of Florida, Texas, Michigan, and Maryland.68 As the United States allots most of its immigrant visas to relatives of new arrivals, it is difficult for Europeans to come, while entire villages from El Salvador are now here.

  The results of the Third World bias in immigration can be seen in our social statistics. The median age of Euro-Americans is 36; for Hispanics, it is 26. The median age of all foreign-born, 33, is far below that of the older American ethnic groups, such as English, 40, and Scots-Irish, 43. These social statistics raise a question: Is the U.S. government, by deporting scarcely 1 percent of an estimated eleven million illegal aliens each year, failing in its constitutional duty to protect the rights of American citizens?69 Consider:

  • A third of the legal immigrants who come to the United States have not finished high school. Some 22 percent do not even have a ninth-grade education, compared to less than 5 percent of our native born.70

  • Over 36 percent of all immigrants, and 57 percent of those from Central America, do not earn twenty thousand dollars a year. Of the immigrants who have come since 1980, 60 percent still do not earn twenty thousand dollars a year.71

  • Of immigrant households in the United States, 29 percent are below the poverty line, twice the 14 percent of native born.72

  • Immigrant use of food stamps, Supplemental Social Security, and school lunch programs runs from 50 percent to 100 percent higher than use by native born.73

  • Mr. Clinton’s Department of Labor estimated that 50 percent of the real-wage losses sustained by low-income Americans is due to immigration.74

  • By 1991, foreign nationals accounted for 24 percent of all arrests in Los Angeles and 36 percent of all arrests in Miami.75

  • In 1980, federal and state prisons housed nine thousand criminal aliens. By 1995, this had soared to fifty-nine thousand criminal aliens, a figure that does not include aliens who became citizens or the criminals sent over by Castro in the Mariel boat lift.76

  • Between 1988 and 1994, the number of illegal aliens in California’s prisons more than tripled from fifty-five hundred to eighteen thousand.77

  None of the above statistics, however, holds for emigrants from Europe. And some of the statistics, on low education, for ex
ample, do not apply to emigrants from Asia.

  Nevertheless, mass emigration from poor Third World countries is “good for business,” especially businesses that employ large numbers at low wages. In the spring of 2001, the Business Industry Political Action Committee, BIPAC, issued “marching orders for grass-roots mobilization.”78 The Wall Street Journal said that the 400 blue-chip companies and 150 trade associations “will call for continued normalization of trade with China … and easing immigration restrictions to meet labor needs … .”79 But what is good for corporate America is not necessarily good for Middle America. When it comes to open borders, the corporate interest and the national interest do not coincide, they collide. Should America suffer a sustained recession, we will find out if the melting pot is still working.

  But mass immigration raises more critical issues than jobs or wages, for immigration is ultimately about America herself.

  WHAT IS A NATION?

  Most of the people who leave their homelands to come to America, whether from Mexico or Mauritania, are good people, decent people. They seek the same better life our ancestors sought when they came. They come to work; they obey our laws; they cherish our freedoms; they relish the opportunities the greatest nation on earth has to offer; most love America; many wish to become part of the American family. One may encounter these newcomers everywhere. But the record number of foreign-born coming from cultures with little in common with Americans raises a different question: What is a nation?

  Some define a nation as one people of common ancestry, language, literature, history, heritage, heroes, traditions, customs, mores, and faith who have lived together over time on the same land under the same rulers. This is the blood-and-soil idea of a nation. Among those who pressed this definition were Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, who laid down these conditions on immigrants: “They must cast off the European skin, never to resume it. They must look forward to their posterity rather than backward to their ancestors.”80 Theodore Roosevelt, who thundered against “hyphenated-Americanism,” seemed to share Adams’s view. Woodrow Wilson, speaking to newly naturalized Americans in 1915 in Philadelphia, echoed T.R.: “A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has yet to become an American.”81 This idea, of Americans as a separate and unique people, was first given expression by John Jay in Federalist 2:

  Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established their general liberty and independence.82

  But can anyone say today that we Americans are “one united people”?

  We are not descended from the same ancestors. We no longer speak the same language. We do not profess the same religion. We are no longer simply Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish, as sociologist Will Herberg described us in his Essay in American Religious Sociology in 1955.83 We are now Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Mormon, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Shintoist, Santeria, New Age, voodoo, agnostic, atheist, humanist, Rastafarian, and Wiccan. Even the mention of Jesus’ name at the Inauguration by the preachers Mr. Bush selected to give the invocations evoked fury and cries of “insensitive,” “divisive,” and “exclusionary.”84 A New Republic editorial lashed out at these “crushing Christological thuds” from the Inaugural stand.85 We no longer agree on whether God exists, when life begins, and what is moral and immoral. We are not “similar in our manners and customs.” We never fought “side by side throughout a long and bloody war.” The Greatest Generation did, but it is passing away. If the rest of us recall a “long and bloody war,” it was Vietnam, and, no, we were not side by side.

  We remain “attached to the same principles of government.” But common principles of government are not enough to hold us together. The South was “attached to the same principles of government” as the North. But that did not stop Southerners from fighting four years of bloody war to be free of their Northern brethren.

  In his Inaugural, President Bush rejected Jay’s vision: “America has never been united by blood or birth or soil. We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our background, lift us above our interests, and teach us what it means to be a citizen.”86 In his The Disuniting of America, Arthur Schlesinger subscribes to the Bush idea of a nation, united by shared belief in an American Creed to be found in our history and greatest documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysburg Address. Writes Schlesinger:

  The American Creed envisages a nation composed of individuals making their own choices and accountable to themselves, not a nation based on inviolable ethnic communities. For our values are not matters or whim and happenstance. History has given them to us. They are anchored in our national experience, in our great national documents, in our national heroes, in our folkways, our traditions, and standards. [Our values] work for us; and, for that reason, we live and die by them.87

  But Americans no longer agree on values, history, or heroes. What one-half of America sees as a glorious past the other views as shameful and wicked. Columbus, Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and Lee—all of them heroes of the old America—are all under attack. Those most American of words, equality and freedom, today hold different meanings for different Americans. As for our “great national documents,” the Supreme Court decisions that interpret our Constitution have not united us; for forty years they have divided us, bitterly, over prayer in school, integration, busing, flag burning, abortion, pornography, and the Ten Commandments.

  Nor is a belief in democracy sufficient to hold us together. Half of the nation did not even bother to vote in the presidential election of 2000; three out of five do not vote in off-year elections. Millions cannot name their congressman, senators, or the Supreme Court justices. They do not care.

  Whether one holds to the blood-and-soil idea of a nation, or to the creedal idea, or both, neither nation is what it was in the 1940s, 1950s, or 1960s. We live in the same country, we are governed by the same leaders, but can we truly say we are still one nation and one people?

  It is hard to say yes, harder to believe that over a million immigrants every year, from every country on earth, a third of them breaking in, will reforge the bonds of our disuniting nation. John Stuart Mill warned that “free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion necessary to the working of representative government cannot exist.”88

  We are about to find out if Mill was right.

  SEVEN

  THE WAR AGAINST THE PAST

  “To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots.”1

  —Alexander Solzhenitzyn

  How does one sever a people’s roots? Answer: Destroy its memory. Deny a people the knowledge of who they are and where they came from.

  “If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are,” said Ronald Reagan in his farewell address to the American people. “I am warning of the eradication of … the American memory, that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit.”2

  In the Middle Ages, Ottoman Turks imposed on Balkan Christians a blood tax—one boy out of every five. Taken from their parents, the boys were raised as strict Muslims to become the fanatic elite soldiers of the sultan, the Janissaries, who were then sent back to occupy and oppress the peoples who had borne them. For a modern state the formula for erasing memory was given to us by Orwell in the party slogan of Big Brother, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”3

  Destroy the record of a people’s past, leave it in ignorance of who its ancestors were and what they did, and one can fill the empty vessels of their
souls with a new history, as in 1984. Dishonor or disgrace a nation’s heroes, and you can demoralize its people. The cause of Irish independence was crippled by the revelation that the great Charles Stewart Parnell was living in adultery with the wife of Captain O’Shea. Baseball almost did not survive the Black Sox scandal of 1919, when popular hero “Shoeless Joe” Jackson was found to have taken money from gamblers and his team had thrown the World Series. The loss of faith was caught in the kid’s lament, “Say it ain’t so, Joe!”

  Richard Nixon’s New Majority was shattered by Watergate and the resignation of a president and vice president who had carried forty-nine states. The success of Nixon’s enemies in ousting from office a hated adversary became the archetype for the “politics of personal destruction,” the defeat of causes by disgracing their flawed champions. It has become standard operating procedure in American politics.

  CULTURAL MARXISTS UNDERSTOOD this. Their Critical Theory was a prototype of the politics of personal destruction. What the latter does to popular leaders, Critical Theory does to an entire nation through repeated assaults on its past. It is the moral equivalent of vandalizing the graves and desecrating the corpses of its ancestors.

  Many of the institutions that now have custody of America’s past operate on the principles of Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth: drop down the “memory hole” the patriotic stories of America’s greatness and glory, and produce new “warts-and-all” histories that play up her crimes and sins, revealing what we have loved to be loathsome and those we have revered to be disreputable, even despicable. Many old heroes have not survived the killing fields of the New History. Ultimate goal: Destroy patriotism, kill the love of country, demoralize the people, deconstruct America. History then will no longer unite and inspire us, but depress and divide us into the children of victims and the children of the villains of America’s past.