Immigration and Affirmative Action

The Immigration Invasion, by Wayne Lutton & John Tanton, Social Contract Press, 1994, 190 pp.

Affirmative Action for Immigrants, by James Robb, Social Contract Press, 1995, 120 pp.

Of all the threats to our national stability, immigration is in many respects the most obvious and ominous. Anyone with the slightest understanding of history and human nature knows that the arrival of large numbers of aliens can dramatically change any society. When those aliens are culturally and racially different from a society’s original majority, change will be profound and probably irreversible.

Non-white immigrants are transforming America. This is obvious in Texas, Florida, New York, and California, which receive the most immigrants, but newcomers are pushing their way steadily into every part of the country.

No healthy society permits this kind of transformation if it can help it. Every non-white nation, including ones like Mexico and China that send huge numbers of their own people to the United States, controls its border with a firm view to keeping aliens out. The urge to protect one’s tribal, racial, or national boundaries is almost as old and almost as strong as the urge to protect one’s family. Every non-white group does this instinctively, without reflection or apology.

White nations appear to have lost this primeval urge. All have officially rejected race as a necessary element of nationhood and some, like Canada and the United States, have even rejected language and culture. Any group, we are told, in virtually any number, can become American or Canadian. The United States, in particular, is said to be an “idea” in which Kurds and Xhosas can participate just as authentically as descendants of the Pilgrims.

This is perhaps the first time since the beginning of history that human groups have taken this view of their own identities. Tribes and nations have always understood instinctively that cohesion requires blood-kinship and shared history, and that membership is not open to all comers. No nation in which this instinct has died can survive against the depredations of nations in which it is still vigorous.

And yet instinct, almost by definition, is not supposed to die. People do not usually have to be persuaded to care for their children or to act in their own interests or to eat. People who do not do these things are so incomprehensible we hardly know how to help them.

Like people, nations or races rarely fail to act in their own interests. When they fail consistently, they are just as incomprehensible as a human being that has lost ordinary urges. This is the tragedy facing Americans who are trying to call attention to the growing demographic crisis. In this country, it does little good to appeal to instincts of national and racial survival because if those instincts were still operating normally, there would be no immigration problem in the first place. White Americans who do not want their children to live in what Peter Brimelow calls an alien nation therefore have the unnatural task of supplying rational justifications for behavior that should be instinctual.

No American, certainly no white American, should have to explain why it is wrong for one sixth of the population of Haiti to be living in the United States. No one should have to point out why it is suicidal to grant American citizenship to the children of indigent Mexicans who cross the border to have babies. And yet, just as we must explain to a man who has lost his appetite that if he does not eat he will die, we must explain to whites who have lost their instincts for racial survival that if immigration is not stopped their nation will die.

The Social Contract Press

Every quarter since 1990, The Social Contract has been building the factual case against immigration. It describes the effects of immigration on schools, the environment, our culture, our language, and our prospects as a nation. It is not usually explicit about race, but it makes every other possible argument against current policies.

The Social Contract has spawned a small publishing company of the same name. It has reprinted the classic (and explicitly racial) anti-immigration novel, The Camp of the Saints, and has published several original titles. Of these, the most significant is The Immigration Invasion, by Wayne Lutton and John Tanton.

This handy, pocket-sized volume is really an anti-immigration handbook, packed with up-to-date information. Part One, called “The Problem,” has chapters on such things as immigrant crime, welfare costs of immigrants, and the impact of immigrants on labor markets and the environment. A chapter on race and culture describes the divisive effect of aliens.

Part Two offers a historical perspective, which starts with a history of immigration law and explains who has been supporting current policies. The book concludes with a firm statement about the moral basis for immigration reform, and includes a reading list and a directory of activist organizations.

Every chapter is both a good introduction for people who are not aware of the immigration problem and an up-to-date reminder for people who are. Each page seems to offer its bit of intellectual ammunition. Almost a random selection turns up such nuggets as this:

• Twenty-nine percent of immigrants from Vietnam are on welfare while 3.9 percent of those from Switzerland are.
• The average cost of an uncompensated admission of an illegal alien to a publicly-supported hospital is $4,700.
• Fifty-five percent of the Chinese over age 65 who have come to the United States since 1980 are on welfare (as opposed to nine percent of native-born Americans). Many are well off but give their assets to their children so as to qualify for handouts.
• After the 1994 California earthquake, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s no-questions-asked compensation policies were so generous that there was a surge of illegal immigration just to take advantage of it.
• It costs the state of California $2 billion a year to educate illegal alien school children, who are seven percent of the school population.
• Fifty-three percent of all the refugees who have settled in California since 1973 are on public support of some kind.
• In New York City, entire professions have been colonized by aliens and are essentially closed to Americans.
• Over three million illegals have taken advantage of the 1986 amnesty.
• Welfare agencies welcome immigrants because they increase the need for welfare.
• More than half of all faculty in American universities under the age of 36 are foreign-born.
• In Denver, although whites are 80 percent of the population, 57 percent of criminal gang members are Hispanic and 36 percent are black.
• Illegal immigrants, who cannot (yet) vote, are counted for Congressional and other districting purposes, so non-whites can often be elected to office with a much smaller number of votes than whites need.
• The mafia has been pushed out of the heroin trade by Chinese, Israeli, Nigerian, and Mexican gangs.
• Foreign gangs are virtually impossible to infiltrate because of language and cultural barriers.
• Nearly one million Arabs now live in America, and are lobbying for racial preferences. Almost all arrived since 1965.
• More than one quarter of the inmates of federal prisons are aliens.

The Immigration Invasion shapes a mountain of facts into a well-organized argument for strict limits on immigration. It is written in careful, non-provocative language, and is an excellent book with which to waken slumbering instincts. It is priced low enough to be bought in bulk, and deserves wide circulation.

The Cruelest Blow

Of more specialized interest is James Robb’s monograph, Affirmative Action for Immigrants, which is not an ordinary, type-set book but a bound, double-spaced research paper.

Few of today’s racial lunacies are as infuriating as racial preferences for non-white immigrants. A weak, but not completely preposterous case can be made for compensating the descendants of former slaves, but there is no possible justification for discrimination in favor of immigrants. Affirmative action has expanded so smoothly from its original clientele to include virtually all non-whites, only because racial preferences are part of a larger view of American society that is increasingly anti-white.

Mr. Robb is surprised to discover that no one in government seems to know whether there is a legal basis either for including non-white immigrants in affirmative action programs or excluding them. Apparently the issue has never been litigated, most probably because no employer who operates preference programs has ever turned away a Nigerian or a Mexican simply because he was not a U.S. citizen. Many companies care more about filling government-mandated racial quotas than about hiring Americans.

In an investigation of the extent to which affirmative action accounts for the large number of foreign students and teachers at American universities, Mr. Robb has come across what is perhaps the one occasion on which a major institution actually gave the matter any thought. Stanford University had long had strong financial incentives to persuade academic departments to hire non-whites, but discovered in 1993 that more than half of its non-white faculty were foreign-born. It finally occurred to someone that a native of Senegal might not be the most effective “role model” for a black from Chicago. Stanford therefore decided to restrict its racial preferences to American citizens.

The new policy was greeted with derision and talk of lawsuits. Stanford promptly backed down and, according to a spokesman, “tried to avoid resolving these questions.” It is surprising that American-born non-whites have not made more trouble over policies that work to their disadvantage by widening the field of available quota-fillers.

The Stanford fracas is only one of the absurdities that Mr. Robb chronicles. Unfortunately, he takes the saccharin position that racial preferences for aliens are wrong because they take jobs from deserving American non-whites; he doesn’t seem to mind anti-white discrimination. Nevertheless, this is probably the only serious treatment available of what is nothing less than a national outrage.