Posted on 02/24/2004 10:40:36 AM PST by Cacique
Merry Christmas, BlackElk!
All saints of the Knights of Columbus, pray for us!
Tautology. "Excessive" anything means "too much," and that's always bad. However, the determination of the "excessive" quantity of anything is subjective.
Well, my claim is that with some effort we can be objective whether we our family was American for generations or we just landed here.
My sister works in a large suburban school in Indiana and she will tell you flat out that the Hispanic(Mexican-legal and illegal)kids and their parents she deals with have little interest in or use for education.
The author dismissed this point, but I am not so sure it should be dismissed. Once some of these areas in the SW become overwhelming Hispanic/Mexican what is stop them from voting themselves off the island, and if they do decide to will there be a national will and a Lincoln there to fight the secession?
My guess is that within the next 5-10 years you will see this come to pass in some parts of AZ, CA, NM, TX., and that the national mood driven by the DBM will be to let them leave. Once that damn is breached you can say goodbye to the US as we know it today. The World Left will finally see their dreams realized. America will cease to exist.
I think that any determination of "excessive" has to be subjective, whether our ancestors arrived in 1620 or last week.
"Excessive," to me, means "a level of immigration that is causing disruption to the population that's been here longer." I'm sure my husband's Cherokee ancestors thought that European immigration was excessive long before my Irish folks got off the boat in the early 1800's. And those Irish thought the arrival of Slavs, Eastern European Jews, and Italians was excessive.
And from their perspective, they were as "right" as one can be in a subjective judgment. Various waves of immigration did cause disruption to the earlier-arrived population, just as the influx of Mexicans is causing disruption today.
There is much, of course, that our government could do to discourage the influx and mitigate the disruption. However, they seem determined rather to encourage more immigration and to exacerbate the hostilities between the new arrivals and the present majority population.
Good summary and I share your observations. I was rather disappointed, because I had liked some of Huntington's other work. But this seemed grossly a-historical, a bit hysterical and weirdly aimed at proving that the only "good" American is a white Protestant one. As someone who lives in the oldest town in the US, founded by the Spanish (gasp!) in 1565, I also thought that for a historian he had strange gaps in his history.
They imagine that because of their reasons or motivations that whatever immigration laws there are, these are laws they don't feel they should have to obey.When you cut to the chase that means they have already demonstrated that if they can justify to themselves why they should not obey any given law they should feel they don't have to obey: they will not obey it.
When a person breaks the law they forfeit their rights as a citizen. It is redundant to point out that illegal immigrants never had rights as a citizen. Look at what they are doing with their lives. What they’ve done by entering the United States illegally is shift responsibility for their future to the people of the United States. It's a responsibility we have no choice but to own up to. The list of options regarding what to do about their illegal act is long. Incarceration, deportation… the most cowardly decision of all is to move away. If your neighborhood is going to hell, don't pick up and move away! Clean it up! Do something about it! Quit retreating! This problem cannot be ignored. It appears as though politicians are ignoring illegal immigration because Americans are unwilling to do anything about it.
Why? If American Indians were capable to unite and push out the invaders/settlers when numbers were in their favor it would be OBJECTIVELY a smart and right thing to do.
Same with the later non Protestant immigration, limiting incomers to Protestants (with preference for the British) and relying on already high domestic birthrate would keep USA stronger and longer lasting.
Of course it would be much more boring place and we would not have Godfather movie, but you cannot have everything :(
Probably people like me would not be allowed in, but this should not cloud our judgment.
Do you want America to be a global market place without national identity to end up like Rome which fall apart into separate nations ruled by barbarian tribes?
The oldest city in America is Mexico City - founded long before Columbus. Maybe you would like to move there?
Despite your user name it is you seem to take "a-historical" position. USA is a product of Protestant/British culture. If WASP core disappears USA will not last very long.
Same was with the Roman Republic - it decayed and dissolved when the ethnic Latins who created it lost their demographic strength and cultural identity.
bttt
This problem cannot be ignored. It appears as though politicians are ignoring illegal immigration because Americans are unwilling to do anything about it.My answer to this is as follows: In the willful absence of a government performing its assigned (as opposed to imagined) roles,
"whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annhilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within."... it is therefore incumbent on the People to seek to act through the several States respectively in accordance with the principal that these have "many and undefined powers" (save for a few specifically forbidden to them) to secure their own borders through the reestablishment of proper Militia which have not existed (despite a Constitutional guarantee otherwise) since the establishment of the National Guard.
Ours is not a Catholic country but a country which has mostly treated Catholics quite well. We Catholics have returned the favor by ever refreshing this nation with lean and hungry immigrants often of great talent and determination.
You claim it to be an "OBJECTIVE truth that excessive immigration is bad." Actually, that is the SUBJECTIVE view of the "blood and soil" types who pose as conservatives (Paleo"conservatives" actually). The Rockford Institute has very little to do with actual conservatism. Nor do any other "paleo" institutions. They are collectively a platoon of social eccentrics (think of the Teddy Roosevelt character in Arsenic and Old Lace continually charging up the stairs of his aunts' Brooklyn House under the delusion that he was charging up San Juan Hill) with the foreign policy of old Neville Spineless Chamberlain, the racial enlightenment of the old White Citizens' Council (now the "Conservative" Citizens' Council whose newspaper was edited by the late Sam Francis of "National Renaissance" fame), the social issues and immigration policies of such outfits as FAIR which is dominated by Planned Barrenhood, NARAL and ZPG enthusiasts.
This "blood and soil" dementia belongs in Otto von Bismarck's Germany not in our country or in various little comic opera nations in Europe contemporaneous to Bismarck. The revolutions of 1848 were over questions such as whether mature adult citizens would continue to be told whether and whom they might marry by the local comic opera poohbah such as a German Landgraf (the $64 term for pushy pseudonoble buttinsky). My ancestors in Germany in one family line decided that they would make their own decisions on marriages and other matters with no need for Landgrafs. They came to southern Indiana and farmed with or without "papers." The great-grandmother born to that family married a great grandfather who stowed away on a boat from Germany to Baltimore and was caught and made to work his passage (very likely landing and entering the country "without papers"). No one in my family ever gave a rat's patoot for whether these German ancestors ever had "papers."
I could bore you with the details of the other branches of my family and their entrances to the US very likely "without papers." I won't. I sincerely hope that not a single one paid homage to the bureaucratic pedigree gods and that not a single one had "papers."
My family has not been notably enthusiastic to serve in the military but no one has yet refused service either. My mother's brother was killed in the sinking of destroyer USS Buck off Salerno by a Nazi U-Boat in WWII. My father and all my uncles served in that war as well. A few relatives were in WW I. A few served in the Korean War and Vietnam War. It is their service and not some useless bureaucratic immigration paperwork that ought be the standard of citizenship. A Mexican willing to serve in our military in service to our nation's purposes is far better qualified in citizenship than some whiny anti-American anti-war leftist college professor or faux intellectual whose ancestors have been citizens for generations. The Mexican-American soldier loves the USA as much and as enthusiastically as the leftist or paleo"conservative" despises the USA. The former makes a far better citizen.
The genuine Catholic (like many other good citizens) has little problem with authority. The Roman Catholic Church is all about Authority and submission to it and not at all the Kumbaya communes that claim Catholicism. One's Americanism is more about one's ideology and, often, one's theological views than about one's street address in a mobile society such as ours. Who my grandmother was or what her neighborhood was may be considerably less important in the formation of MY citizenship than what her religion was and what her politics were. For the sake of discussion, she was a hard core Catholic from Cork who was an enthusiast for wars fought in her time, considered herself a liberal Democrat (as defined in about 1915 in Boston in service to James Michael Curley) and a bit feminist but who would have strangled abortionists with her bare hands three-at-a-time with glee. All of that is why immigration of Catholics (real Catholics) to America is a good thing OBJECTIVELY. That applies to many others as well. No one ever designed the United States to be a Catholic nation. The USA will, however, not suffer from becoming a somewhat more Catholic nation than it is now, especially if the incoming Catholics are more Catholic than our domestic ones tend to be. Nor will the USA suffer from becoming, for example, a more Evangelical nation, a more Orthodox Jewish nation, a more Eastern Orthodox nation. If there is any "blood" there, it is one's family and not one's nationality. There is no soil. There is plenty to qualify one as an American in the way of ideas and behavior without wondering whether a Mexican soldier in the US Army had ancestors fighting under Zachary Taylor or under Santa Ana in 1848.
The United States is a dynamic nation with a wonderful, if occasionally flawed, and proud history. The future should be likewise. We are a nation and not a museum. We are homogenized nor pasteurized as a nation. Had we been either, we would be a museum, with a brilliant past and stultifyingly boring present reality like much of what Rumsfeld accurately derided as "old Europe." The amazing thing about "old Europe" is how very much it proves day by day not to have been worth saving. Today, the Japanese are among our closest allies and strongest supporters. With the occasional exception of a Winston Churchill, a Margaret Thatcher or a Tony Blair, Europe (outside of the Vatican) has been generally useless since WW II. They want their own freedom (to some small extent) but don't care about anyone else's. When France falls to Islam, I hope we let them grovel for a few years while we throw the insolent words of Chirac and de Villepin back in their faces before Uncle Sugar comes to the rescue of the French. We should let them know it is the last time we save their useless backsides unless they closely follow our foreign policy and military lead thereafter.
Blood and soil ideology is based on the XIXc German concept of volk - the unity of race and landscape.
The concept of Protestants moving from England to America (into another soil) and combining elements of Common Law and XVIII c constitutional ideas into masterwork of American Republic has not much in common with volkism.
The only thing in common is that there is such thing as existence of distinct societies of unique character which are worthy of being preserved.
Would you rather accept this?
Imagine there's no Heaven It's easy if you try No hell below us Above us only sky Imagine all the people Living for today Imagine there's no countries It isn't hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too Imagine all the people Living life in peace You may say that I'm a dreamer But I'm not the only one I hope someday you'll join us And the world will be as one Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can No need for greed or hunger A brotherhood of man Imagine all the people Sharing all the world You may say that I'm a dreamer But I'm not the only one I hope someday you'll join us And the world will live as one
Or are you for global market place version of homogenized world?
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