After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (36 page)

Does the World Bank set their welfare checks on the debit side of that spectacular 0.0035 economic growth? Or does that count as valuable long-term investment in the critical economic growth sector of incendiary mullahs? A dependence on mass immigration is neither a goldmine nor an opportunity to flaunt your multicultural bona fides, but a structural weakness.

“Moderate” Republicans often say that the party base represents a declining demographic (too white) and that the GOP needs to do more to reach out to Hispanics and other fast-growing segments of the population.

The argument would seem to assume that this dramatic demographic shift is an entirely natural development. Why, after all, are white guys in decline and Hispanics on the rise?

Because the governing class decided, with the 1965 immigration act and much that has followed, that that’s the way it’s going to be. In the not entirely likely event that the GOP could persuade Hispanics to vote in overwhelming numbers for small government, the Democrats would look elsewhere for new clients—Muslims, say, maybe from Somalia, a nation which, in barely more than a decade, has transformed the welfare profile even of such backwaters as Lewiston-Auburn, Maine.64 “Moderate” Republicans would then argue that the party’s white-Hispanic base was now stagnating, and that the GOP needs to do more to reach out to Lewistan-Auburnistan.

The problem with dissolving the people and electing another is that you’d have to be a genius to pull off such a transformation without any unintended consequences. On the scale and speed with which much of the West has attempted it, you quickly reach a tipping point, in which the cultural capital of a functional nation state has been exhausted and what follows is . . . something else. The particular nature of America’s mass illegal 246

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immigration is almost consciously designed to fracture the republic, and lead to enormous tracts of the country becoming entirely dysfunctional.

For the corporate right, undocumented immigrants mean cheap labor.

For the statist left, they mean dependents—and cheap votes. For sentimentalists in between, it’s an act of ethnocultural penance: hence, the Cinco de Mayo observances in schoolhouses up and down the land. The left are right.

Big Government centralists don’t mind about the costs Undocumented America imposes, because in the main it imposes them on states, cities, and school districts—and thus makes previously self-sufficient branches of government ever more dependent on central authority. And just as Big Government doesn’t care about the impact on local government, Big Business doesn’t care about the impact of illegal labor on small business. This is a recipe for civil strife, if not, ultimately, civil war.

The corporate right wanted open borders for cheap workers in part because the statist left has made American workers too expensive: you can ship manufacturing jobs to cheaper labor overseas, but it’s not so easy with hotel chambermaids and seasonal agricultural workers. Meanwhile, the statist left favored open borders as a way of importing voters: untold millions of poor, ill-educated people with little English would need government services, and untold hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats would need to be hired to service them. And so Big Government grows its base. Most illegal immigrants arrived in the Southwest, where states are not red like the Old South nor blue like the Northeast, but kinda purple—50/50 congressional districts and Senate seats where a few anchor babies here and English-as-a-Second-Language programs there and the Democratic Party can tip the demographics permanently in its favor. In such a world, what happens when the economy nosedives and you have competing groups of poor whites, poor blacks, and poor Hispanics chasing ever fewer jobs and crushing the welfare system through sheer numbers?

The left was smarter than the right: the business class told itself it was importing hardworking families who just want a shot at the American Dream. But welfare mocks the Ellis Island virtues, upending them as easily fall 247

as the shattered Statue of Liberty Charlton Heston stumbled across in the sands of a ruined planet. In an America with ever bigger government and ever poorer people, the dependency rationale for illegal immigration will win out over the business rationale. Seventy percent of births at the San Joaquin General Hospital in Stockton, California, are the so-called “anchor babies” born to illegals.65 In related news, by 2010 Stockton’s school district had a deficit of $25 million.66 Same thing at Dallas General: 70 per cent of newborns are “anchor babies.”67 Seven out of ten isn’t any kind of “minority”; it’s the dominant culture of America’s tomorrow.

As for “racist” Arizona, the majority of its schoolchildren are already Hispanic.68 So, even if you sealed the border today, the state’s future is as a Hispanic society: that’s a given. Maybe it’ll all work out swell. The citizenry never voted for it, but they got it anyway. Because all the smart guys bemoaning the irrational bigots knew what was best for them.

To the coastal Eloi, “undocumented immigrants” are the unseen Morlocks who mow your lawn while you’re at work and clean your office while you’re at home. (That’s the real apartheid: the acceptance of a permanent

“undocumented” servant class by far too many “documented” Americans who assuage their guilt by pathetic self-serving sentimentalization of immigration.) But in border states illegal immigration is life and death. A few days after Arizona passed its new law, I gave a speech in Tucson for the Goldwater Institute, and a lady came up to me afterwards to talk about the camp of illegals that’s pitched up on the edge of her land, a few miles from downtown, but where the Federal Government has posted highway “Danger” signs warning the public that travel beyond this point is “not recommended.” My audience member had no choice in the matter: she’s not passing through; this is her home—and, if the Government of the United States is now putting up signs explaining that its writ no longer runs, they didn’t think to warn her ahead of time. So she lies awake at night, fearful for her children and alert to strange noises in the yard. President Obama, shooting from his lip, attacked the Arizona law as an offense against “fairness.”69 But where’s the fairness for this woman’s family? Because her home 248

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is in Arizona rather than Hyde Park, Chicago, she’s just supposed to get used to living under siege? She has to live there, while the political class that created this situation climbs back into the limo and gets driven far away from the intimidation, and the cartel hits, and the remorseless ebbing of U.S.

sovereignty. The fetishization of the Undocumented is a form of class warfare waged against poor whites by Eloi elites who don’t have to live with the consequences of the socioeconomic experiments they impose on others.

As for “the jobs Americans won’t do,” most of them would be more accurately categorized as the jobs American employers won’t hire Americans to do—because, in a business culture ever more onerously regulated, the immigration status of one’s employees has become one of the easiest levers for controlling costs. Why would this change? After all, as the official unemployment climbed to 10 percent and the non-college-educated unemployment rate hit 15 percent and the unofficial rate among blacks and other groups rose even higher, the rote-like invocations of “the jobs Americans won’t do” was affected not a whit. If Americans won’t do them (or won’t be hired to do them) even at a time of high unemployment, maybe
that’s
the problem that needs to be addressed. Instead, to solve an artificially created labor shortage, the U.S. government deemed U.S. immigration law unenforceable and illegitimate. And so the armies of the Undocumented will swell exponentially as Mexico dissolves into a murderous narco-state feeding ever greater northern habits. What is happening on the southern border is the unmaking of America.

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deStiny’S manifeSt

There was a story that zipped around the Internet a few years ago, about a Mexican Air Force pilot who’d supposedly photographed a UFO. North of the border the response to this amazing news, from professional come-dians to website comment sections, was well nigh universal:
Mexico has an
air force. Who knew?
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Ha-ha. Mexico. Third World joke. Actually, two centuries back, it had a bigger military than the United States. Like America, it was a settler society, but older and larger: Mexico City was founded in 1524, and, when Madrid belatedly recognized the independence of “New Spain” in 1821, the city gave its name to a country—and, indeed, empire: Imperio Mexicano. Not as silly as it may sound. Before the Louisiana Purchase, if you’d been asked to predict which settler capital, Mexico City or Washington, would emerge as the seat of power in post-colonial North America, many an analyst would have plumped for the Spaniards. They had an imperialist’s sweep: when they seceded from Madrid, they did so in a “Solemn Act of the Declaration of Independence of Northern America,” which definition stretched all the way north to what’s now the Oregon border and quite a ways south, to Panama. By comparison, the United States seemed a weak and vulnerable territory holed up east of the Appalachians. It was a land economically dependent on exports but with few strategic transportation routes and unable to protect its sea lanes.

And then Napoleon sold America the port of New Orleans. “I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her pride,” he said, making mischief.71 But the Mexican border was less than 200 miles from the newly American port, and a mere hundred from the expanded republic’s critical artery, the Mississippi River. The wannabe Imperio, for its part, had a problem of its own. The land west of New Orleans, in the Mexican department of Texas, was mostly desert or mountains, and consequently lightly inhabited. So it suited the southern power to let American immigrants settle in this unpromising terrain—“doing the jobs Mexicans won’t do,” one might say. When Sam Houston decided it was time for northern settlers to rebel, the distant imperial capital of Mexico City had a hell of a time just getting troops through to Texas in order even to be able to hold a war. The defeats that left the U.S.-Mexican border where it is now delegitimized New Spain’s ruling class, destabilized the politics of Mexico City for the better part of a century, and led to the squalid and violent polity we know today.

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There are, give or take, 200 countries in the world. If you had 20 million

“undocumented” immigrants more or less proportionately distributed between those 200 countries—Irish, Uzbeks, Belgians, Botswanans—then maybe they would be assimilable, although even then it would be an unprecedented challenge. But borderland immigration is different. In British terms, consider not the rapidly Islamizing East London or Yorkshire, where Muslims are aliens replacing a native population, but think instead of Ulster: when Ireland came under the English Crown, Scots Protestants settled the north. When the south seceded to become the Irish Free State in 1922, the United Kingdom got a land border for the first time in its history.

The loyalists could have had all nine counties of historic Ulster for their Northern Ireland statelet, but insisted on a mere six because they knew they did not have the numbers to hold the other three. And even in the six counties thousands were murdered in the decades ahead. A border settles things, but only conditionally: for Irish nationalists in Fermanagh and Tyrone, the line meant nothing. This was Ireland, not Britain, and they had been there first. That’s how many Mexicans feel about the southern frontier: Arizona is Mexico, not the United States, and it was Mexico first. You don’t have to be a large minority to cause an awful lot of trouble—as the British found out on a small patch of turf where Irish nationalists were outnumbered two-to-one by Unionists. And you don’t even have to believe so fervently that you’re willing to kill and bomb. You just have to believe enough to live it, in your daily routine. In the Arizona of tomorrow, Hispanics will be not a minority but a majority: they will not assimilate with the United States because they don’t need to. Instead, the United States will assimilate with them, and is already doing so, day by day.

In July 2010, Maywood, California, became the first city in America to lay off its entire workforce, including the police and fire departments, and contract out all services.72 It did this because the city was so misman-aged that its insurers canceled the coverage and every alternative provider declined to accept the city’s business. I was interested to discover, via the 2000 census, that the city is 96.33 percent Hispanic. Celebrate lack of fall 251

diversity! What will it be by the time the 2010 census numbers are out?

98.7 percent? Maywood does not seem an obviously Spanish name, and in fact the city was named for Miss May Wood, a young lady who worked for the real estate developers responsible for the original subdivision that led to the incorporation of the city in 1924. If you lived there in the boom years of the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties, you’ll remember a blue collar town with good jobs, a civic culture, and a population that reflected the ethnic mix of the time. Then the jobs disappeared, and the civic culture declined, and Maywood turned 96.33 percent Hispanic in little more than two decades. So much for the melting pot. Today, one third of the population is estimated to be “illegal.”73 I put it in quotations because possession is nine-tenths of the law and in this case there’s no doubt who possesses Maywood. How many other towns will similarly transform, and how fast?

Culture is not immutable. But changing culture is tough and thankless and something America’s ever weakening assimilationists no longer have the stomach for. So go with the numbers: the Southwest will be Mexican, and Washington’s writ will no longer run. The Mexican-American War established the borders of the America we know today. It took a couple of centuries, but illegal immigration has reversed the results of that conflict.

America won the war, Mexico won the peace.

For Eloi America, it’s a short step from ethnocultural penance to ethnocultural masochism. Los Angeles, New York, and other “sanctuary cities”