Loading...The great American Melting Pot is not melting, as once it did…
If our prime minister believes that 50 years hence. ‘spinsters will still be cycling to Communion on Sunday morning:’ he had best think again. Rather, “the muezzin will be calling Allah’s faithful to the High Street mosque” for Friday prayers.
Thus did the grandson of Winston Churchill, a week ago, call for a halt to the “relentless flow of immigrants” into Great Britain.
A volley of protest followed “The Times of London . . chastised him for … a ‘tasteless outburst,'” reports the New York Times, “[A] lead ing Labor Party politician described his remarks as ‘putrid and racist.’ Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, archly denounced what he described as ‘any intervention which could have the effect of damaging race relations.’.. Downing Street said Prime Minister John Major agreed with Mr. Howard.”
But, on this issue, Mr. Churchill speaks for Europe and its growing concern over the swelling tide of immigration from the East and the Third World, and the impact on the fate and future of the West.
For Mr. Churchill’s remark came just days before France’s interior minister called for “zero immigration,” and only days after Germany voted to amend its asylum law. Mr. Churchill spoke the same weekend a neo-Nazi teenager was charged with arson-murder in that firebombing in Solingen that took the lives of five Turkish girls and women The riots triggered by that atrocity left Solingen’s town center gutted. All over Europe the doors to the East and South are being shut.
Before condemning Germany for restricting asylum-seekers, we ought to remember: Germany is smaller than Oregon and Washington combined, yet is home to almost 80 million people, among them 1.8 million Turks. Still, 167,000 new immigrants arrived in the first four months of this year. (How would Oregon and Washington react to 500,000 immigrants this year?) Moreover, Germany has accepted more Bosnian refugees than all other nations combined.
To their credit, the Germans have coddled neither the neo-Nazi skin- heads, nor the Turkish and leftist vandals–as some Americans did after our L.A. riots that made Solingen look like a panty raid.
But Germany today could be America tomorrow, if we do not address the twin issues of immigration and assimilation.
Consider the change in our own country in four decades. In 1950, America was a land of 150 million, 90 percent of European stock. Today the US. population is 250 million–about 75 percent white, 12 percent black, 9 percent Hispanic, and the balance largely Asian-American.
By 2050, according to the Census Bureau, whites may be near a minority in an America of 81 million Hispanics, 62 million blacks and 41 million Asians. By the middle of the next century, the United States will have become a veritable Brazil of North America.
If the future character of America is not to be decided by our own paralysis, Americans must stop being intimidated by charges of “racist “nativist”, and “zenophobe”–and we must begin to address the hard issues of race, culture and national unity.
Already, California faces yearly fiscal crises due to the soaring cost of services for illegal aliens, perhaps a million of whom walk into the United States every year from Mexico.
And the great American Melting Pot is not melting, as once it did. After decades of heroic effort to integrate blacks more fully into American society, our failures remain as conspicuous as our successes. Racial tension is rising. In the L.A. riots, not only were whites the victims of attempted lynchings, Koreatown was pillaged by blacks and Hispanics. Many of the latter were illegal, as four in 10 felonies in San Diego County are the work of illegals.
While white-on-black crime has become relatively rare (white criminals choose black victims only 2 percent of the time), black criminals now choose white victims, in rapes and muggings, 50 percent of the time.
And demands are growing that our heritage of individual rights be superseded by a new system of racial entitlements. Quotas are routine in government and private business. On college campuses, there are new demands for all-black dorms and all-black cultural centers; blacks, whites, Hispanics and Asians tend to congregate, more and more, only with each other.
Supporters of open immigration contend that Hispanic, Asian and Arab immigrants often bring with them the same strong family ties, respect for authority, and work ethic Americans have always cherished and celebrated.
Undeniably true. But it is equally true that many Third World immigrants are living off public services, and many are going into crime. It is also true that America’s generous asylum laws are being abused. The man who allegedly murdered the CIA workers in McLean, the men a arrested for the World Trade Center bombing, were supposedly fleeing persecution abroad.
America needs to take what some have called a “time out” on immigration: a closing of our southern frontier to invading illegals, by troops if necessary, a toughening of our asylum laws, a cutback on legal immigration to spouses and minor children of those already here.
Looking back down the 20th century, we see that all the great multinational empires have fallen apart. Now, the multinational states –Canada, Czechoslovakia, India, Russian Yugoslavia, South Africa, Ethiopia–are breaking apart. Are we immune to all this?
After a quarter-century of wide open immigration, we need at least a decade to assimilate the tens of millions who have come in. Else, Russia’s fate in the ’90s may be America’s in the new century.