Where the old immigrants all came from Europe, the new are overwhelmingly people of color. But America has never had the same success in assimilating peoples of color.
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Friday, thousands in Moscow, giving Nazi salutes and carrying placards declaring, “Russia for the Russians!” marched through the city shouting racial slurs against peoples from the Caucasus.
In Nigeria, Boko Haram, which is Hausa for “Western education is sacrilege,” massacred 63 people in a terror campaign to bring about sharia law. Seven churches were bombed.
Sunday, The New York Times reported that Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan are suffering “horrific abuse” following last year’s pogrom.
Ethnic nationalism, what Albert Einstein dismissed as “the measles of mankind,” and religious fanaticism are making headlines and history.
Welcome to the new world disorder.
What has this to do with us? Perhaps little, perhaps everything.
In three weeks of my radio-TV tour to promote “The Suicide of a Superpower,” no question has occurred more often than one about the chapter “The End of White America.” Invariably, the question boils down to this:
Why should we care if white Americans become a minority? America, interviewers remind me, assimilated the immigrants of a century ago — Italians, Poles, Jews, Slavs — and we can do the same with peoples from the Third World.
And perhaps they are right. Perhaps the year 2050 will see an America as united as the America of Dwight Eisenhower and JFK.
Yet there are reasons to worry.
First, the great American Melting Pot has been rejected by our elites as cultural genocide, in favor of a multiculturalism that is failing in Europe. Second, what we are attempting has no precedent in human history.
We are attempting to convert a republic, European and Christian in its origins and character, into an egalitarian democracy of all the races, religions, cultures and tribes of planet Earth.
We are turning America into a gargantuan replica of the U.N. General Assembly, a continental conclave of the most disparate and diverse peoples in all of history, who will have no common faith, no common moral code, no common language and no common culture.
What, then, will hold us together? A Constitution over whose meaning we have fought for 50 years?
Consider the contrasts between the old and new immigration. Where the total of immigrants in the “Great Wave” from 1890 to 1920 numbered 15 to 20 million, today there are 40 million here.
In 1924, the United States declared a timeout on all immigration. But for almost half a century since 1965, there has been no timeout. One to 2 million more immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive every year.
Where the old immigrants all came from Europe, the new are overwhelmingly people of color. But America has never had the same success in assimilating peoples of color.
The Indians we fought for centuries live on reservations. And if we did not succeed with a few million Native Americans, what makes us think we will succeed in assimilating 135 million Hispanics who will be here in 2050, scores of millions of Indian ancestry?
We have encountered immense difficulty, including a civil war, to bring black Americans, who have been here longer than any immigrant group, into full participation in our society.
This was a failing that the last two generations have invested immense effort and enormous wealth to correct. But we cannot deny the difficulty of the problem when, 50 years after the civil rights revolution, one yet hears daily the accusation of “racist!” on our TV channels and in our political discourse.
Ought we not first solve the problem of fully integrating people of color, before bringing in tens of millions more?
Another factor is faith. After several generations, Catholics and Jews melded with the Protestant majority. But Muslims come from a civilization that has never accepted Christian equality.
The world’s largest religion now, with 1.5 billion believers, Islam is growing in numbers, strength and militancy, even as Muslim fanatics engage in eradicating Christianity from Nigeria to Ethiopia to Sudan to Egypt to Iraq to Pakistan.
Is it wise to bring millions more into our country at such a time?
Will that advance national unity and social peace? Has it done so in the Turkish enclaves of Berlin, the banlieues of Paris, Londonistan or Moscow?
Here, again, are but a few of the differences between the old and new immigration:
Today’s numbers are twice as large. Where the old immigration stopped after 30 years, ours never ends.
Where the old immigrants were Europeans, today’s are Third World people who have never been fully assimilated by any Western country. Where those arrived from Christian nations, many of today’s come from a civilization that battled Christianity for 1,000 years.
Where Western powers ruled the world in 1920, today the West is aging and dying, and much of the world is on fire with anti-white and anti-Western resentment of 500 years of European domination.
In 1920, Western people were nearly one-third of mankind. Today, Western man is down to one-sixth of the world’s population, shrinking to one-eighth by 2050, and not a tenth by century’s end.
When did the American people assent to our taking this risk with their republic?