Avoiding the Issue

WHEN Linda Chavez remarked recently that America’s fast-expanding immigrant population presents “great challenges” to this society, she was, if anything, understating the case. Adding to the already profound social disarray in this country, the continuing influx of well over a million legal and illegal immigrants per year, 90 per cent of them from Third World countries, is feeding a host of cultural ills that may well prove incurable: the loss of a common language, common literature, and common national identity; the dismantling of the common American citizenship in favor of group rights and quotas based on race; the decline of skill levels and the development of a permanent two-tier society; the growth of “victimology” and the demonization of white men as oppressors; the overwhelming of basic social institutions, particularly schools and law enforcement, in southern California, Florida, and elsewhere; the effective loss of U.S. sovereignty to foreign based criminal gangs in places like New York City’s Washington Heights; murderous interracial conflict in the major cities, as exemplified by the L.A. riots. Underlying all these problems is the steady decline of Americans of European descent from majority toward minority status, with the concomitant redefinition of America as a “multicultural” nation—an oxymoron if there ever was one.

Whatever one’s opinion on the subject, large-scale immigration is clearly a phenomenon of the most far-reaching consequences for this country, demanding the closest scrutiny. Yet, while there have been some moves in Congress to restrict illegal immigration, the conservative and Republican establishments have shunned frank discussion of the negative effects of legal immigration. Most remarkable has been the unyielding denial by many conservatives that the massive Third World immigration they support is fueling the multicultural fragmentation they abhor. Why?

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Lawrence Auster

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WHEN Linda Chavez remarked recently that America’s fast-expanding immigrant population presents “great challenges” to this society, she was, if anything, understating the case. Adding to the already profound social disarray in this country, the continuing influx of well over a million legal and illegal immigrants per year, 90 per cent of them from Third World countries, is feeding a host of cultural ills that may well prove incurable: the loss of a common language, common literature, and common national identity; the dismantling of the common American citizenship in favor of group rights and quotas based on race; the decline of skill levels and the development of a permanent two-tier society; the growth of “victimology” and the demonization of white men as oppressors; the overwhelming of basic social institutions, particularly schools and law enforcement, in southern California, Florida, and elsewhere; the effective loss of U.S. sovereignty to foreign based criminal gangs in places like New York City’s Washington Heights; murderous interracial conflict in the major cities, as exemplified by the L.A. riots. Underlying all these problems is the steady decline of Americans of European descent from majority toward minority status, with the concomitant redefinition of America as a “multicultural” nation—an oxymoron if there ever was one.

Whatever one’s opinion on the subject, large-scale immigration is clearly a phenomenon of the most far-reaching consequences for this country, demanding the closest scrutiny. Yet, while there have been some moves in Congress to restrict illegal immigration, the conservative and Republican establishments have shunned frank discussion of the negative effects of legal immigration. Most remarkable has been the unyielding denial by many conservatives that the massive Third World immigration they support is fueling the multicultural fragmentation they abhor. Why?