What surges toward the United States from the south is not a “caravan,” it is an invading force.
Mothers who take money from leftist activists to drag their children on for thousands of miles in front of cameras are not brave, they are mercenary.
Men who tear apart metal barriers and cry, “Donald Trump is the antichrist,” are not “just looking for work,” they are looking for a fight and are daring anyone to stop them.
Just as well, I would refer the “free market” fearmongers, who insist that America needs a constant influx of fresh “diversity” as tribute to satiate the Invisible Hand, to Chilton Williamson Jr.: “You could ‘prove’ to me that, without the immediate transference of the entire population of Hong Kong to the state of California, the United States would be in a major economic depression by the middle of next year, and I would still be against transferring it there.”
Yet even as we scramble to address the threat before us, another rears its head. There is now a second mob 2,500 strong organizing to march on the United States.
Some still wonder, incredibly, what is the worst that could happen should we simply welcome them all among us?
Just before his death, Murray Rothbard broke away from supporting open borders in an article called “Nations by Consent: Decomposing the Nation State.” As the Soviet Union collapsed, wrote Rothbard:
it became clear that ethnic Russians had been encouraged to flood into Estonia and Latvia in order to destroy the cultures and languages of these peoples. Previously, it had been easy to dismiss as unrealistic Jean Raspail’s anti-immigration novel The Camp of the Saints, in which virtually the entire population of India decides to move, in small boats, into France, and the French, infected by liberal ideology, cannot summon the will to prevent economic and cultural national destruction. As cultural and welfare-state problems have intensified, it became impossible to dismiss Raspail’s concerns any longer.
What did Americans think Mexico was up to, when it began printing manuals to help illegal aliens enter the United States? At least now we know for certain that the governments of Latin America are making more money than ever before on remittances—all at the expense of American citizens.
What do Americans suppose Augustin Cebada of the Brown Berets meant when he said: “Go back to Boston! Go back to Plymouth Rock, Pilgrims! Get out! We are the future. You are old and tired. Go on. We have beaten you. Leave like beaten rats. You old white people. It is your duty to die . . . Through love of having children, we are going to take over.”
Better yet, what do Americans suppose Mario Obledo, former California Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under Governor Jerry Brown, and founder of MALDEF (the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund) meant when he said: “California is going to be a Hispanic state. Anyone who doesn’t like it should leave. Every constitutional office in California is going to be held by Hispanics in the next 20 years.” And people who don’t like such demographic changes, according to Obledo, “should go back to Europe.”
Our failure to distinguish between people who came to this country truly to be part of it, to assimilate into Anglo-Protestant culture, and those now marching toward our border, has only encouraged a generalized enmity and eliminated any distinction between myself and hostile foreigners soon to be at our gates. This road, history will show us, is pitched with blood.
After Spanish Christians successfully drove Muslims from their lands in 1492, many Muslims left, but many more remained. Though they promised to behave themselves, they colluded with Turkish and North African Muslims to stage revolts within the country, while Spain’s enemies attacked from without. After the Spanish government put an end to these revolts, the decision was made to integrate Muslims with the rest of the population. Muslims were given a choice: convert to Catholicism or leave. Some left, but many stayed and claimed to have converted, known then as “Moriscos.” But many, however, continued to practice Islam in secret, refused to assimilate, and maintained contact with Turkish and North African Muslims. They eventually staged more insurrections, destroying churches, and beheading and burning Christians.
In the end, the Spanish government decided to expel all of the Moriscos. Caught up in the expulsion, however, were those who were faithful Catholics and patriotic Spaniards. In Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote there is an account of the expulsion, as told by a patriotic Morisco who acknowledges that most of his fellow Moriscos were hostile to Spain.
And what forced me to believe this truth was that I knew what vile and foolish intentions our people had, and it seemed to me it was divine inspiration that moved His Majesty to put such a bold resolution into effect. Not that we were all to blame, for there were some who were solid and true Christians. But these were so few that they couldn’t compare with those who weren’t, and it would have been unwise to keep enemies in one’s own house, like sheltering a serpent inside one’s shirt. So, with good reason we were punished with the sentence of banishment—which seemed soft and easy in the opinion of some, but to us it was the most terrible sentence that could be given to us. Wherever we are, we weep for Spain, where we were born, after all, it’s our native country.
The compassion of the Spanish up until the expulsion was admirable, but too many of the Moriscos never actually assimilated, and it proved calamitous for everyone in the end—especially for those Moriscos who truly loved Spain and were faithful Christians. The price of misguided “compassion,” then, is paid most dearly by those it is intended to help.
There can be no more illusions about what is at stake. As Chilton Williamson noted in his 1991 column, “we are no longer a young, powerful, restless, and inexhaustibly optimistic society capable of surmounting great difficulties and eager to accept all challenges, in particular idealistic ones.” Inked during the first stages of our culture wars, Williamson wrote:
Today we are a very different country from what we were in the 19th and early 20th centuries: middle-aged at least, perhaps prematurely old. We are no longer restless, we are bored and tentative; we are not optimistic but increasingly (and with good reason) the opposite; we have lost confidence in our heritage, our traditions, and above all perhaps our faith. This does not mean that we will necessarily adopt other traditions and other faiths; it does mean that we will have less and less of ourselves to offer peoples whom we would assimilate to the remnant of an indigenous culture. We know this. And so do the people who have recently appeared among us.
If we cannot assert our right to exist as an Anglo-Protestant civilization, then why should we expect foreigners to assimilate or have any respect for us?
The president could commit troops to the border to stop the incoming mob in its tracks, but it would not matter if Americans lack the cultural courage to demand that the line be held, that their civilization be preserved. Why? Because we live here and it’s our house. We don’t need a better reason than that.
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