Loading...by Patrick J Buchanan – January 14, 2004
Have Americans, one wonders, fully reflected on what the Bush amnesty portends for the country their children will grow up in?
Consider what Bush is saying with this amnesty for 8 million to 12 million illegal aliens and his “guest workers” program to allow employers to go overseas and hire people anywhere in the world for jobs Americans will not, or cannot take at the wages offered.
He is saying: I cannot defend our border. I will not enforce the laws. I will not send illegal aliens back. And as I cannot stop this invasion of the United States, I intend to legalize it.
Bush is not only rewarding millions of law-breakers and gate-crashers, he is erasing the border with Mexico. Mexamerica is our future. The United States is going to become a giant Brazil. Bush is saying there is no way to stop it – therefore, we must embrace it.
Ethnically and racially, this means an America that is no longer a First World country. Third World people of color will be the majority in two decades. Americans whose forefathers came from Europe, 90 percent of the population in 1960, will be a shrinking minority by 2040. For not only are the birth rates of white Americans lower than those of immigrants, the new immigrants will be from the Third World.
Economically, Bush is throwing American workers – white, black, Asian, Hispanic – into a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest struggle for jobs with foreigners willing to do sweat-shop labor for wages that cannot sustain an American family.
Winners will be the economic elites who will benefit from low prices produced by cheap labor and from having a vast proletariat to do the chores at their homes, country clubs, ski lodges, restaurants, parking garages, vacation spas and yacht basins.
Losers will be American workers who have to compete for jobs with folks for whom $5.15 an hour is pay undreamed of back home in the Caribbean, Nigeria or Mexico.
Politically, our welfare state will explode. The Bush plan will convert America from the middle-class country we grew up in into a nation with a huge proletariat with a rising claim on our tax dollars for more schools, courts, cops, hospitals, parks, roads and prisons.
If you would know America’s future, look at California. In the 1990s, for the first time since the Spanish arrived, California saw an out-migration of native-born Americans, white and black, along with a huge influx of immigrants, legal and illegal.
We are endlessly reminded how wonderful the new America will be as she becomes more diverse. Californians, who already live in that new America, apparently don’t think so. Every chance they get, they vote to chop welfare and deny drivers licenses to illegal aliens. Now, they are deserting the new California beloved of our elites. If assimilation is working, why are Californians voting with their feet and fleeing to Nevada, Colorado, Arizona and Idaho?
“Who cares where people come from?” comes the retort. “The Melting Pot will make them all Americans, as it did the 18 million who came from Eastern and Southern Europe from 1890 to 1920.”
But those were European peoples coming to a country run by descendants of Europeans. They came to a land that enforced assimilation in its schools. They learned and were taught in the same language, read the same books and magazines, went to the same movies, listened to the same radio, went through the Great Depression together and served in the same Army in World War II.
And after the great wave ended in 1920, we had 45 years of low immigration to assimilate and Americanize the children of the immigrants who had come here.
But America’s population has doubled since 1945. Instead of the 16 million people of color we had in 1960 – almost all of whom were black Americans immersed for centuries in American culture – there are 80 million people of color here now, from 100 nations.
Instead of assimilation, we live in an age of racial and ethnic resentments and entitlements, where “multiculturalism” is in vogue and it is “racist” to demand immigrants learn the English language.
But if we no longer worship the same God, honor the same heroes, speak the same language, study the same history, love the same literature or even agree about what is right and wrong, how do we remain one nation and one people?
What do we have in common anymore? If Bush’s ally-ally-in-free immigration policy is embraced, the old America we knew will be nothing more than a global hiring hall and what Teddy Roosevelt called a “polyglot boarding house for the world.”
And if it doesn’t work, there is no going back. It is the end of the America we all loved. Why is President Bush taking this risk with our country?