1812 The Key to Celebrating Immigrants and Their Thriving
The United States now officially has a crisis at her southern border. The first incident involving an attempt by Latin American caravanners to bum-rush the border has taken place. When a hundred or more managed, with very little trouble, to get past Mexican countermeasures,it took American deployment of tear gas to stem the flow.
As was acknowledged here last month (“Is Immigration About Making Americans or Facilitating Enclaves?”), this wasan eventuality which was both predictable and fundamentally unavoidable, a product of human nature. It has become more and more clear however, that human nature itself need not have forced the situation to be either predictable or unavoidable.
It is not unreasonable to link our border crisis and the constant undermining of sane immigration policy to the profound consequences of an apparently massive ignorance by the American public of basic civics and accurate history. It is also more than that. As a result, we are experiencing an impotence that occurs when a people surrender themselves to a multicultural fragmentation foisted on them in the name of, of all things, the common good.
Mike Gonzalez included one of the best summaries of civics history in a 2016 essay (Patriotic Assimilation Is an Indispensable Condition in a Land of Immigrants). Itis worth noting: “The expectation of an emotional attachment to the unchanging principles of a nation’s founding,and to the parchments in which they were codified, was uniquely American.” He then quotes G. K. Chesterton – “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.” Gonzalez sums it up this way, “Among all nations of the world at the time, then, the newly formed United States was to be the only one not instituted along hereditary ethnicity or as the result of strategic dynastic marriages.”
It should be of great concern that America has, after such a revolutionary beginning, already been seduced by the principles she recognized at her founding as so threatening. It is incredibly important to realize that that seduction has not been accomplished through a natural maturative process of the people themselves. The history is clear.
Gonzalez is useful again. He documents what he calls the Balkanization of America. It began with the totally justified civil rights struggles of the 1960’s. In 1961, 96 years after the end of a civil war fought to free all black Americans from slavery, 95 years after the 13th Amendment imbedded it constitutionally, and 93 years after the 14th Amendment mandated civil rights to every single citizen, President John F. Kennedy still felt compelled to issue Executive Order 10925 which established “affirmative action[s]”in color-blind, not race-preferred, government hiring.
It took just one decade for that momentous step to be hijacked and deformed. Over the years, through a burgeoning federal regulatory state and a pro-active court system, Americans were officially segregated into classes. It took very little time after that for the Marxist philosophy of the oppressed versus the privileged to take root. Now America finds herself being torn from within by intersectionalism and hard-core multiculturalism.
In terms of immigration and assimilation of new Americans, our present condition is the heart of the crisis. Only the irrationality of identity privilege, “intersection”, and multiculturalism would deny a self-evident fact that a just society or free republic cannot survive, cannot maintain its integrity, outside of, as Alexander Hamilton wrote, “…the energy of a common national sentiment: on a uniformity of principles and habits.” George Washington wrote that newcomers needed to “get assimilated to our customs, measures, and laws: In a word, soon become one people.” This is the key to celebrating immigrants and to their thriving.
The choices that have to be made are, but should not be difficult. They were summed up in 1997 by the Jordan Commission chaired by liberal Democrat Barbara Jordan. Understanding that assimilation is vital to national integrity and survival, their report offered 11 strangely familiar recommendations,among them being strong border control, better detention, no chain migration, no amnesty, and stringent naturalization rules.
For almost fifty years, the United States has been unmaking Americans. We are well on our way into a wholly unsustainable social/administrative confederation of racial, ethnic and sexual enclaves – Balkanization. The current border crisis is another opportunity to face the threat head-on or allow destabilization to take its final toll.