Immigration, Sovereignty, and the Future of the West

The topic on which I have been invited to speak — immigration — is probably the least “controversial” of all the issues dealt with at this conference. While there has been a sustained effort to try to prevent a public debate about this subject, a clear majority of American adults are opposed to the sort of immigration policies that have been in effect here since the impact of the 1965 Immigration Act became clear. Unlike abortion, welfare reform, gun control, balancing the federal budget, or other current issues, immigration policy is not a contentious question. However, there is clearly a gap between public sentiment and public policy in this area.

The Roper poll released at the end of February, 1996, revealed a consensus against high levels of immigration:

• Eighty-three percent of Americans favored a lower level of immigration than the current average of over a million a year.
• Some 70 percent wanted fewer than 300,000 immigrants per year. This view was endorsed by 52 percent of Hispanics, 73 percent of blacks, 72 percent of conservatives, 71 percent of moderates, 66 percent of liberals, 72 percent of Democrats, and 70 percent of Republicans.
• A majority supported even larger cuts, with 54 percent agreeing that annual immigration should be less than 100,000. The Wall Street Journal noted in March, 1996, that a majority of American adults now support a five-year moratorium on all legal immigration. The Roper poll I’ve been referring to found that over a fifth of Americans want no more immigration at all.

As for illegal immigration, the Roper organization found that strong measures to halt it are favored by 78 percent of self-styled moderates, 76 percent of the strongly religious, 77 percent of whites, 82 percent of Protestants, 85 percent of Midwesterners, 60 percent of English-speaking Hispanics, 68 percent of blacks, and 69 percent of Catholics.

The latest results confirm what several decades of polling on the subject have consistently shown, namely, that a majority of the public has never supported the immigration policies enacted by Congress and the Executive Branch.

Opening the Gates

Polling done in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada shows a similar gap between public sentiment and public policy. It is more than merely noteworthy that in addition to the United States these countries are the only ones that today admit large numbers of legal immigrants. They were, at least until recently, the most successful outposts of British colonization.

All four countries opened their doors to large-scale Third World immigration at just about the same time: the U.S. and Canada in the mid-1960s, and Australia and New Zealand by the early 1970s.

In the case of the United States, we have endured over 30 years of uninterrupted mass immigration, with legal immigration averaging around a million people annually, in addition to the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants permitted to settle here every year.

As we all know, prior to the 1965 Immigration Act, the United States was bedeviled with the problems associated with the presence in our midst of a large population descended from natives of sub-Saharan Africa. Since the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, followed by the 1980 Refugee Act, the 1986 Immigration Reform & Control Act (which did neither), and the 1990 Immigration Act (which raised legal immigration by nearly 40 percent) America’s racial problems have only multiplied.

Even before passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, the Kennedy administration took steps to increase immigration from non-European countries by granting quotas to newly independent Asian, Caribbean, and African nations. Kennedy also relaxed restrictions against the admission of aliens afflicted with various contagious diseases, including leprosy and tuberculosis. His administration also sponsored the 1962 Migration & Refugee Act, which gave authority to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to determine the status of refugees, some of whom were then to be admitted to the U.S. Our government deliberately surrendered its rights to define the criteria upon which a certain class of immigrants would be admitted.

Doris Meissner, President Bill Clinton’s commissioner of the Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS), has boasted that “we are transforming ourselves.” No truer words have been spoken by any Clinton administration official. Over 90 percent of legal and well over 90 percent of illegal immigrants are Third World natives. For 1995, the top ten countries of birth for legal immigrants were, in the following order:

Mexico

Philippines

Vietnam

Dominican Republic

China

India

Cuba

Ukraine

Jamaica

Korea

In 1965 there were some 800,000 Asians living in the United States. Over the past quarter-century, some 5.6 million have been allowed to immigrate, which is about 1,100 times more than Senator Ted Kennedy predicted would arrive after passage of the 1965 Immigration Act (he testified that “a maximum” of 5,000 Asians would migrate to the U.S. annually). Including the children of recent Asian immigrants, the Asian population has grown to eight million. Hundreds of thousands more have settled in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.

The Census Bureau reported in March, 1996, that the U.S. had reached a turning point during Fiscal Year 1993-94: The increase in the Hispanic population was greater than that of non-Hispanic whites. This was the first time whites have trailed another group, at least since the 18th century. Census Bureau figures indicate that non-Hispanic whites — the people who used to be referred to as “Americans” — constituted 88 percent of the population in 1960. Thirty years later they had been reduced to 73 percent. By 1990, proportionally, there were fewer European Americans than in 1790.

If trends continue, it is projected that European Americans will be a numerical minority in California in seven years, and in what was once the United States, as a whole, within sixty years.

Internal Migration

Many Americans have quietly packed up and fled the regions where the impact of immigration is greatest. Some have migrated to Washington state and Oregon. Others are moving to the Rocky Mountain region, or elsewhere into the interior, or to such states as Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont that still have large white populations. Demographer William Frey of the University of Michigan has been following this internal migration, and notes that some areas are becoming more homogenous as millions of Americans choose to escape from “diversity.” Whites are not the only ones exiting areas of heavy immigrant settlement; many American blacks are leaving too, with the South being the destination of preference for large numbers.

Those who stay behind are increasingly huddling inside walled and gated communities, which have been springing up in coastal areas, especially in California, Texas, and Florida. This follows the abandonment of our cities by the white majority, sparked by forced integration of public schools in the early 1960s, and which accelerated after the race riots of the mid-to-late 1960s. To my knowledge, never before in history has a majority population simply picked up and left behind the equivalent of trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure, homes, museums and other public facilities, which they have then had to rebuild in new communities.

Problems Associated With Immigration

It is no wonder that the American public has grown increasingly troubled about immigration policy. This unease is well founded; immigration, both legal and illegal, is contributing to a host of national problems.

• Impact on Jobs: We now admit as many or more people than the net number of new jobs created every year in the economy. In 1996, 3.5 million Americans turned 18. The Labor Department projected that around 1.2 million net new jobs would open. In addition, a million legal immigrants and several hundred thousand illegal immigrants were likely to be admitted.

In 1995, in the area of professional employment, the software industry needed about 40,000 new workers — far fewer than the 51,000 new computer science graduates leaving our universities. Yet the number of foreign computer programmers granted work visas exceeded 30,000. Prof. Norman Matloff of the University of California at Davis reminds us that only 1 out of 56 recipients of the computer industry awards for technological advance have gone to immigrants. All the rest have gone to U.S. natives, giving the lie to the view that immigration is necessary for innovation. Silicon Valley wants to hire foreign nationals because they are willing to work for lower salaries in exchange for the chance to live here. Sun Microsystems has publicly admitted that it hires low-salary foreigners.

• Crime: Around a quarter to a third of the federal prison population in any given year is made up of the foreign-born. The FBI reports that 57 percent of the recent increase in juvenile and teen-age crime is accounted for by Hispanics. Foreign criminal syndicates are flourishing, led by Chinese Triads, Japanese Yakuza, Jamaicans, Nigerians, etc. The California Attorney General warns that his state has been invaded by the “Russian” Mafia (members of which entered the U.S. under the special Jewish refugee program).

Dominican drug lords in New York City are so powerful that they were able to obtain the conviction of Joseph Occhipinti, the head of the INS Organized Crime/Drug Enforcement Task Force in Upper Manhattan, on charges of conducting illegal searches of drug dens operating out of bodegas (Hispanic grocery stores). Occhipinti served seven months of a 37-year prison term before President George H.W. Bush commuted his sentence. Staten Island Borough President Guy Molinari is convinced that the dedicated INS crime fighter was framed and convicted on the basis of perjured testimony of alien drug dealers.

• Welfare Costs: Welfare use by immigrants is rising, even as it is declining for Americans. Immigrants use welfare at higher rates than native-born Americans, and at much higher rates than white Americans. George Borjas of Harvard University reports in the May 1996 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics that taking ally types of welfare together, immigrants have a 47 percent higher use of such programs — 20.7 percent versus 14.1 percent of the U.S. population as a whole. Immigrants are more likely than Americans to participate in practically every means-tested program.

Prof. Borjas reveals that the overall “welfare gap” becomes even wider if immigrants are compared with non-Hispanic, white native-born households, with immigrants being almost twice as likely to receive assistance — 20.7 percent versus 10.5 percent. In California, immigrants make up 21 percent of the households, but consume 39.5 percent of the benefit dollars. In Texas, 8.9 percent of the households are immigrants, and receive 22 percent of the benefits. In New York state, immigrants constitute 16 percent of the households and receive an estimated 22.2 percent of the benefits. Not only do immigrants use welfare programs at a higher rate than Americans, but a higher percentage remain on welfare more or less permanently.

Donald Huddle of Rice University estimates that the “immigrant deficit” — what the 24.4 million legal and illegal immigrants who have settled in the United States since 1970 will cost in excess of taxes they paid — is averaging $60 billion per year and growing.

It should be remembered that any immigrant welfare usage goes against the intent of immigration laws going back to colonial times, and our first federal immigration laws going back to colonial times, and our first federal immigration laws passed in the 19th century. Those likely to become a “public charge” are not supposed to be admitted.

The Clinton administration recently had the INS define mental, physical, and developmental disabilities as “expanded exemptions” for naturalization applicants. This exempts certain “disabled” persons from the requirements of English literacy and knowledge of United States history if the person is unable to comply because of a physical or mental disability. U.S. citizenship is now to be granted to another class of people who should not be permitted to land on our shores in the first place.

• Environmental degradation: Water tables are dropping in such high-population-growth states as Florida, California, Texas, and Arizona. The benefits of the Clean Air Act have been largely canceled out by the immigration-fueled population increases. Wildlife habitats are threatened as never before by a population that is surging — thanks to recent immigrants and their offspring, not to a “baby boom” touched off by pre-1965 Americans.

• Balkanization: This becomes ever more likely, as real Americans flee from parts of what was once their country. In Miami, Floria, for instances, as soon as Hispanics became a majority, they repealed the Official English Amendment that required the use of English in local government documents and procedures. A revived Aztlan Movement (seeking to establish a new, all-Hispanic nation in the Southwest) has re-emerged. As the Mexican-American politician and sometime California State Senator Art Torres put it in 1995, Proposition-187 (a California ballot initiative to deny welfare to illegal immigrants) was the “last gasp of white American.”

Huddled Masses

The U.S. government has allowed certain Third World countries to export large segments of their populations here. Since the early 1980s, one fifth of the population of El Salvador has moved to Americas, as has one sixth of that of Haiti. The government is making sure newcomers feel right at home. In April, 1995, the State Department proposed providing “cultural orientation programs” for Iraqis in the wake of reports about the high incidence of pedophilia and rape committed by recent Iraqi refugees.

Female circumcision (genital mutilation) is practiced here now by immigrants from Africa and the Middle East. Ironically, for those who have not yet come, opposition to this ancient rite is cited as sufficient grounds for admission as a “refugee.” Genital mutilation is the custom in some 26 African and Middle Eastern countries. How many natives of these lands will be admitted in the future.

Kidnapping of child-brides, a Laotian prenuptial custom, is now practiced in the United States. A man, often in his thirties, makes off with a girl in her early-to-mid teens, and has sex with her for three days. They are then declared married. However, if, after trying her out for a while, the “husband” decides she is lazy, or is otherwise unhappy with her, the now-violated girl can be returned to her family. The return of a kidnapped bride is considered a great disgrace, and has led anguished Laotians living in the U.S. to commit suicide or kill members of their own families.

“Cultural orientation” is now offered as a defense in criminal cases. In one of the first instances of this newly accepted judicial stance, New York State judge Edward Pincus cited “cultural differences” when he granted Dong Lu Chen probation after the Chinese immigrant beat his 99-pound wife to death with a hammer. Mr. Chen claimed his anger was justified because his wife has been unfaithful.

In a 1996 case in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Judge Ramona Gonzalez sentenced a Southeast Asian immigrant, Sia Ye Vang, 32, to take English lessons (in addition to probation and community service) instead of going to prison, after he was convicted of molesting his two stepdaughters, aged 10 and 11. Yang’s lawyer, Katherine Schnell, argued that sex with young girls is an accepted part of Asian culture. Judge Gonzalez said that she wanted to allow Vang “the opportunity to continue his education and his assimilation into our culture.” (That Wisconsin, a state settled by Germans and Scandinavians, is now blessed with a Judge Gonzalez, is itself a sign of worrisome demographic shift.)

In the summer of 1996, San Francisco Deputy District Attorney Susan Breall, dropped statutory rape charges against Iraqi native Mohammed Alsreafi, aged 30, who has ex with an 11-year-old girl. Breall told the San Francisco Chronicle that she did not want to be accused of putting his culture on trial white “I and many other San Franciscans pride ourselves on being sensitive to some’s culture.”

That pre-modern people engage in practices Westerners find odd, repellent, or illegal is nothing new. What is markable is that we allow people who indulge in such practices to be imported by the million into our country. What we are witnessing is the creation of a new doctrine: that the alleged needs of people bred to other norms give them the right to violate ours.

Culture Clash — The Spread of Witchcraft in America

George H.W. Bush’s Vice President, Dan Quayle, was one of the many cheerleaders for multiculturalism, who took pride in declaring at every opportunity that “our strength is in our diversity.”

One variety of “diversity” the new immigration has brought is witchcraft. In parts of the former United States boasting populations from Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and Africa, stores catering to the followers of all manner of dark cults can be found in nearly every neighborhood. In cities with large Hispanic populations, such as Miami, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, there are areas where botanicas can be found two or three to a block. These are stores that cater to superstitions and carry everything needed to cast a spell, remove a hex, or heal a physical or mental disorder. Shelves are stocked with Haitian voodoo dolls, crucifixes, protective amulets, medicinal herbs, incense, and votive candles to summon or give thanks to the deity of your choice. Botanicas also sell statues of Catholic saints for practitioners of Santeria, Palo Mayombe, Brujereia, or Macumba, Umbanda, Candomble, and other voodoo-like cults especially popular in Brazil.

Casting spells and hexes has become an increasingly familiar part of the criminal justice system in our ever-more “diverse” America. In 1995, it was widely reported that the Dade County (Greater Miami), Florida courthouse is littered with dead animals, offered as ritual sacrifice by members of Miami’s large Caribbean immigrant population. Dead chickens, goat heads, and lizards with their mouths tied shut — a none too subtle message to witnesses and informers — are swept up daily by maintenance workers, who have been dubbed the “Voodoo Squad.” Court houses in other cities in Florida, New York, California, Texas, and other centers of Hispanic and African settlement report the same thing.

Santeria is a gruesome Afro-Caribbean religion that is essentially a version of Haitian voodoo brought over to the U.S.A. by Cubans in the early 1960s. In its present form, it was first practiced around 2,500 BC in what is now Nigeria. Yoruba tribesmen developed a nature religion that allowed mortals to approach gods through the worship of natural objects, such as shells, feathers, and herbs.

Santeria — Spanish for “worship the saints” — spread to the New World in the 1500s. African slaves substituted their own gods for Catholic saints. They might bow down to Saint Lazarus, but direct their prayers to Babalu-Aye, the Yoruba god and patron of the sick. When they kneeled before Christ on the cross, they may have been calling on Oloru’n Orofi, the great Creator. Santeria established an especially strong presence in Cuba and Brazil, where, in a slightly different form, it is known as Macumba or Umbanda.

Today, Santeria practitioners are known as Santeros, and they worship a bewildering array of deities, called orishas, who are represented in their dual role as Catholic saints and ancient African gods. Santeros believe that every person is assigned a particular orisha at birth, which acts as a guardian angel of sorts. The believer also has his own special plant, animal, and birthstone but he must discover which orisha been assigned to him. If you can discover your orisha, you can improve your fortune by always carrying your specific orisha symbols with you.

While the Christian god is believed to be loving, generous, and helpful to those who honor and pray to Him, followers of Santeria and other cults I have mentioned believe that malevolent deities must constantly be appeased with offerings. Common to these sects is belief in the power of blood sacrifice, which gives the orishas something in return for their helpful magic. Goats and chickens are the animals most often sacrificed. Drug dealers, alien smugglers, and other criminal elements are particularly given to appealing to spirits for enrichment and for protection from the hated “Anglos” or business competitors.

In metropolitan areas that still inhabited by Americans, non-believers have charged Santeros with animal cruelty and have complained to the police about their sacrificial rituals. The city of Hialeah, Florida, went all the way to the Supreme Court in what proved to be a an unsuccessful effort to curb these barbaric practices, which were ruled to be protected forms of religion.

The attorney who crossed swords with the Santeros in this case charged that Santeria is little different from Palo Mayombe, many of whose followers hold Oggun — the patron saint of criminals and crime — in the highest esteem. It should be noted that Palo Mayombe enjoys a strong following among the criminals who arrived in the U.S. during the 1980 Mariel boat-lift from Cuba.

In Palo Mayombe rites, animals — and sometimes even humans — are sacrificed after torture and mutilation. Pain and fear are powerful elements of the ritual. The blood of the sacrificial victim is then consumed by participants, as are some of the body parts. Efforts have been made to calm the public — that is, us — by claiming that most followers obtain human organs by robbing graves or medical supply warehouses. However, a number of cases have leaked to the public of actual human sacrifice. Perhaps the most notorious (to date) was the kidnapping of Mark Kilroy, a college student who went to Metamoros, Mexico from Brownsville, Texas with some of his friends during a 1989 Spring Break pub crawl. The blond baseball player and engineering student was abducted and sacrificed by a drug and alien smuggling ring led by an American-born Cuban, Adolfo Jesus Constanzo.

Cultural anthropologists explain that practitioners of Palo Mayombe eat human bones and other body parts (sexual organs are especially prized) because they believe this gives them power. Spirits are believed to live in the bodies of the sacrificial victims and these spirits can be enslaved for future use. My point discussing these practices is that they illustrate what has been happening in the United States and other Western countries. People are carries of and contributors to culture. Non- and anti-Western people, with their colorful, “diverse” practices, should not be made welcome, and their presence in our midst should not be tolerated.

The Question of Sovereignty

For several decades, the concepts of consent, sovereignty, and self-determination have been under assault in Western countries. In the U.S., government agencies and the courts have extended privileges formerly reserved to citizens, such as education, health care, and housing assistance, to aliens whose very presence is against the express wishes of the national community.

The American people are no longer allowed to determine for themselves who will be admitted to their nation. Historically, the determination of who is a citizen has been intrinsic to national self-determination. The concept of citizenship has been the cornerstone of the nation-state. In the United States and other Western nations, the state exists to protect the rights and interests of its citizens.

Thanks to the post-World War II emphasis on universal and transnational rights, distinctions between “national” and “alien” are thought to be suspect. The right of aliens to make claims on the citizens of other countries, stated in terms of “international human rights,” has played a major role in changing the character of the state and its basis of legitimacy.

The purpose of government, in the West, has been turned on its head. Instead of acting as the representative, and for the benefit, of its own nationals, it is now accountable to international institutions and rules for treating people who happen to be residing within its borders.

The West has therefore witnessed the emergence of transnational rights during an era of renewed transnational migration. Since 1970, U.S. federal courts have cited provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in cases involving aliens and refugees. And the European Commission on Human Rights has been cited in U.S. courts as a recognized instrument of international human rights law. I need hardly add that this has been used as a further excuse to expand the state bureaucracy to monitor the “rights” of various constituencies — newly favored groups, such as migrants, racial, religious, and “gender” minorities, women, and the physically and mentally handicapped.

In 1996, representatives of the governments of the United States and Canada participated in a Regional Conference on Migration, held in Puebla, Mexico. They solemnly pledged to work against the demands of their own citizens for immigration restriction and control. As the San Diego Union-Tribune reported in its March 15, 1996 issue,

The United States, Canada, and eight Latin American nations pledged to defend migrants’ rights and protect them from violence, xenophobia and traffickers. In a joint statement at the end of the historic two-day Regional Conference on Migration, participants condemned violations of migrants’ human rights and promised to respect their dignity. . . . The Puebla conference concluded that by and large, migration is a beneficial phenomenon with potential advantages for both countries of origin and destination. . . .  The ten nations agreed to counteract anti-immigrant attitudes.

As we approach the end of the twentieth century, we see that the state is no longer the embodiment of the “general will” of a particular people or nation — or at least not of some peoples and nations. As a practical matter, abandonment of sovereignty is limited to Western Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand.

Were we meeting today in Toronto, or London, Paris, Auckland, or Melbourne, my message would be the same. The West is under assault. If we fail to regain control of our nations, of our destinies, our people and the civilization they have created over centuries will disappear.

As we survey the wreckage of what was once the United States, we should be looking forward, as Kant invited us to do, when he observed, “There is a kingdom which does not yet exist, but can be realized through our actions.”

Editor’s Note: This essay is included in the book, The Real American Dilemma: Race, Immigration, and the Future of America, available at the American Renaissance store.