Posted on January 13, 2018

The Shithole Debate

Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, January 13, 2018

President Donald Trump has been a disappointment in many ways. He’s inspired a fanatical leftist counter-reaction. The racial dissident movement is weaker after his first year in office than it was before he was elected. And the demographic transformation of America continues.

Yet we should not regret his election, for President Trump has the singular ability to reveal truths our opponents would prefer to leave unspoken. Sometimes, he bluntly announces these truths himself. Sometimes, the reactions of his foes speak more loudly than even he ever could. Both phenomena are at work in “Shitholegate,” a media firestorm that despite its crudity has sparked what may be the single most important debate on immigration policy since the Jordan Commission.

According to Senator Dick Durbin, President Trump questioned why the United States continues to accept immigrants from “shithole” Africa countries and Haiti. Senator Durbin took it upon himself to leak these comments to the press, which duly reacted with outrage. “Shitholegate” may be the single largest scandal of President Trump’s administration, at least in terms of media reaction.

It is revealing that Senator Durbin felt justified in releasing comments from a private conversation. Such an action, as Senate Republicans have pointed out, shows Democrats were never serious about negotiating an immigration compromise.

We don’t even know if President Trump used the exact words Senator Durbin says he did, since no Republicans seem to be backing his account, and the White House has denied it. But even assuming Senator Durbin’s account is correct, immediately repeating the contents of a private conversation to hostile outsiders is more than a breach of trust. It makes ordinary conversation impossible, since no one has the right to question orthodoxy, even in private.

Of course, that’s precisely the kind of country we live in today. And, as is entirely typical in these cases, the outrage over “Shitholegate” is over the term the president used, not whether what he said was true or false. Essentially, the President of the United States is being accused of blasphemy — dissenting from the unexamined contention that African nations are wonderful, and immigrants from them benefit us. Every screaming editorial, outraged TV journalist, and expletive-laden tweet can be summarized thus: He’s not allowed to say that.

What makes this maddening is that not only is President Trump right, but the immigration position of his opponents is dependent on his being right. Of course those nations are “shitholes.” If they weren’t, leftists wouldn’t have to argue that their citizens should be allowed to stay in the US.

One of the countries President Trump was supposedly referring to was El Salvador. Because of an earthquake back in 2001, 200,000 Salvadorans — whether here legally or illegally — got temporary permission to stay in the United States. Critics say they should not be sent back to a poor country plagued by gang violence. In other words, even though there is no extraordinary emergency in El Salvador, we shouldn’t send Salvadorans back home because it is, in fact, a shithole.

It was only a short time ago the horrific nature of these nations was used to explain why their citizens want to come here. Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the most prominent open-borders Republicans, called Mexico a “hellhole” in 2013, not to insult Mexico, but to explain why Mexicans want to leave. Likewise, few still pretend that the migrants flooding Europe really are Syrians fleeing civil war. The main reason they come is to escape poverty; their countries are shitholes.

President Trump is actually agreeing with the Left’s analysis. But since he intends to use the argument to limit immigration rather than encourage it, it becomes immoral. Race realists see this game all the time. If Jared Taylor points out America will soon become majority non-white, it is alarmist and offensive. If a leftist does it, it is positive and praiseworthy.

President Trump also says he wants more immigration from Europe, and this has prompted the usual absurdities from the Beltway Right. Erick Erickson, the original “cuckservative,” tells us African immigrants are preferable to “socialist” immigrants from Norway. David French’s wife Nancy complains that the president thinks her adopted Ethiopian daughter comes from a ”shithole” country. Well, if she didn’t, the Frenches wouldn’t have any reason to brag about having adopted her.

Former CIA head John Brennan even claims that “Lady Liberty” and the Founding Fathers are “weeping” over President Trump’s statements. Of course, the Founding Fathers were by today’s unabashed standards white nationalists. As for Haiti, they refused to recognize the Haitian government and Thomas Jefferson called the slave revolt “a terrible engine, absolutely ungovernable,” and hoped France could suppress it. The Founding Fathers, would, if anything, think President Trump was a dangerous egalitarian.

Many commentators assert that regardless of what Americans themselves want, the country will only grow more “diverse.” Mexican President Vicente tweeted that not even the president can say who is welcome in the US and who is not, suggesting that it is illegitimate to limit immigration from anywhere. America therefore does not really exist except as a pile of wealth to be taken by anyone who shows up. It does not have identity, interests, or an independent existence. Therefore, it cannot exercise any discrimination in admitting new residents. A “moral” immigration policy, in this conception, is essentially the death knell for America.

But facts matter, and racial reality asserts itself in the performance of different groups once they arrive. Reason magazine tells us it doesn’t matter where you come from, “it matters what you do while you are here.” Well, most non-white immigrants get on welfare at rates far exceeding that of European immigrants, but this is precisely what we are not allowed to debate. The whole point of the media hysteria is to avoid any discussion of what kind of society Third World immigration brings.

And leftists know this. When it comes to where to live, where to go to school, and where to buy property, leftists, like everyone else, avoid “bad neighborhoods.” Their attempts to pretend they don’t notice differences between neighborhoods and nations is self-discrediting. As Steve Sailer points out, using a “diversity visa” or random admissions for universities such as Stanford would destroy the quality of the university, yet status-conscious liberals pretend these things are good for America.

Even Rich Lowry of National Review scored a victory when he asked Joan Walsh of The Nation if she would rather live in Norway or Haiti. She refused to answer, tacitly conceding his point. When angry liberals say they are going to leave the country if a Republican wins the White House, they say they are going to Canada or Europe. No one says he is going to Mexico, and certainly not Haiti.

October 3, 2016 – Port-au-Prince (Credit Image: © Bahare Khodabande/EFE via ZUMA Press)

Of course, there is a problem with looking at country of origin as the source for immigration. Because of immigration which has already occurred overseas, it is no longer clear who is coming from Britain or France. It is not geography but genetics that predict future performance. Whites from South Africa will perform better in the United States than Senegalese whose passports say they are French. Black Americans, despite being here for centuries, have created cities and neighborhoods that can be characterized as “shitholes,” forcing other Americans to figure out ways to escape them without admitting what they are doing.

If you go by what people do, rather than that what they say, nearly everyone agrees with President Trump. Yet we are witnessing a blunt attempt to shut down debate and police speech in order to promote an open-borders immigration policy. As global demographics change, borders become increasingly necessary. Every person reading this and especially every Third World immigrant knows that Donald Trump has done nothing more than shine a light on harsh reality.

It remains for race realists to explain why it is not only permissible, but moral to resist replacement. Public policy should not be defined by cowardice and hypocrisy. And America was not founded in order to become just another shithole.