Immigration Vision: ‘Hodgepodge of Folks’
To the editor:
“Over the long term, I’m pretty optimistic,” said President Obama in an interview with Vox, Feb. 9. “And the reason is because this country just becomes more and more of a hodgepodge of folks.” The interviewer had asked the president about polls indicating that he is the most polarizing president since polling began and that the nation is increasingly split on racial issues along party lines. “I don’t think that’s going to last,” says the president. He expanded on his faith in what might be called the hodgepodge-of-folks formula for national success:
“One of the great things about being president is that you travel. . . . Go to Tennessee. It turns out you’ve got this huge Kurdish community. . . . Go to some little town in Iowa and … you see some Hasidic Jewish community. Then you see a bunch of interracial–black and white couples running around . . . in these little farm communities. . . . Latinos in the classroom. . . . People, I think, are getting more and more comfortable with the diversity of this country.”
An eloquent statement of elite America’s multicultural ideal. But beyond the warm portrait the president paints of emerging multicultural America, will the rapid, immigration-driven transformation of America into a mishmash of peoples and cultures actually work? Generously speaking, no. But there will be winner and losers. One sure loser is the white population.
Their dilemma is easily summarized. Multiculturalism as practiced in the West is skewed. It is asymmetrical. It favors the group interests of minorities against the group interests of the white majority, the founding group. Western multiculturalism encourages minorities to organize to pursue their group interests. Typical examples: the Congressional Black Caucus, Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, among myriad ethnocentric minority organizations. Meanwhile, the American establishment suppresses any expression of the group interests of the majority.
This is a glaring double standard that has a profound negative impact on the majority. Just one example: Is there any doubt that immigration policies rapidly dispossessing the white populations in their historic territories in Europe and North America could be aggressively pursued for decades if the majority group had a voice, had the semblance of a defense? The negative impact of unbalanced multiculturalism on the fading white majority–soon-to-be-minority–will be increasingly pronounced going forward.
The start of a solution? A true democratic multiculturalism that recognizes that every racial/ethnic group, including the majority, has legitimate group interests.
Tom Shuford
Lenoir
