VISHAL MEHRA writes:

I would like to offer a perspective on the culture, nation and immigration topic regarding your comments on the Pope.

Traditionally most societies were multicultural, a hodge-podge of races, castes and nomads, castoffs, immigrants, trading colonies and whatnot. Europe was no exception in the main but perhaps England was (along with some other Northern lands). Thus English and Anglospheric people start with a virtually unique perspective that is not shared by a great majority of people worldwide. You know a pure nation but we do not. Thus other people do not make the same assumptions regarding ethnic or cultural purity as you do. For a South/Central European pre-WW II was to be a witness to a multi-culti hodge-podge that was destroyed by the maniacs for ethnic and cultural purity.

Also, the successful nations and the metropolises naturally attract immigrants. Rome had plenty of immigrants from all over and so would China if it ever attains to the status of World Centre.

I do not understand Lawrence Auster’s point. America (or American culture) is voluntarily destroying itself per Auster. That is, it is committing suicide. How can you blame open borders for the suicide?. If America were to be Traditional, then all the open borders would not matter and the immigration would indeed enrich the culture.

Laura writes:

It is not true that most societies have been multicultural in the sense you mean. Nor is it true that America has ever been a “pure nation” or that Mr. Auster is advocating racial or ethnic “purity.” All harmonious political entities – nations, empires, principalities – require some form of common identity or they dissolve into fractious parts. I object to the use of the term “purity” here when we are really talking about identity, which is something always partly undefinable.

The idea that much of Europe and the Roman Empire were simply hodgepodges of  peoples with no dominant ethos and racial character is very uninformed. There were no Chinese living in the Roman Empire: Africans and East Asians never formed sizeable communities in Europe before modern times – they never formed any comunities at all.  Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and Hindus did not live side by side throughout Christian Europe. 

A culture is formed over many, many generations with the gradual development of a shared history and way of life. All cultures are continually refashioned. There is no question of fixing a people in place and making them pure of outside influences. Nevertheless, no people can remain stable and harmonious if shocked into redefining itself by a sudden influx of very large numbers of people who possess a radically different heritage.

This is what occurred in America after the passage of the 1965 Civil Rights Act, which brought an unprecedented wave of immigrants of non-European descent at a time when multiculturalism had redrawn the terms of assimilation. Instead of the immigrants adapting to the dominant culture, multiculturalism required Anglo-American culture in many ways to adapt to the newcomers . It might be described as reverse assimilation. As one example, Spanish is now a quasi-official language. No group in previous history retained its native language as have Mexican Americans, who understandably have remained strongly allied with their home country, which is right next door.

 As Mr. Auster wrote in The Path to National Suicide, progressives “seem to think that since a moderate degree of ethnic diversity (mainly among European peoples along with a black minority) has been by and large a good thing for America, therefore, an unlimited amount of diversity (among all the peoples of the earth) must be even better—which is like saying that since a few glasses of water a day will keep you healthy, a hundred gallons a day will make you a superman.” 

America was not a “pure” nation from the beginning. Nevertheless, the nation was overwhelmingly comprised of people of European descent and it was Protestant Anglo-Saxons who defined its dominant ethos, faith and civic habits. Later immigrants from Europe, with varying degrees of difficulty, fit into this identity, with many ethnic groups, such as Italian Catholics and European Jews, surrendering their native languages while maintaining aspects of separate subcultures and faiths. 

We are a democracy, which means that the people themselves have great power. To say that all immigration is good no matter how much, and no matter how culturally distinct the immigrants may be, is to say that it is not important for those who must join together to shape government to forge a common identity and purpose. That is a recipe for political friction and dissolution.

 There have been major economic consequences of this great wave of immigration. What we are addressing here are the cultural effects. It’s worth quoting at length from Path to National Suicide:

The history of assimilation has not been, as our mythology now tells us, a simple, glorious progress. Each wave of immigrants, especially the “new” immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, brought dislocation and conflict as well as new vitality; loss as well as gain. But the important thing was that the “new” immigrants still had much in common with the earlier Americans; the fact that they were of European descent and came from related cultures within Western civilization made it relatively easy for them to assimilate into the common sphere of civic habits and cultural identity …. Americans thus remained a people —  though obviously not (because of persisting ethnic distinctions) in the same sense that the Japanese, the English or even the French are a people. The relative degree of similarity helped make it possible to stretch America’s cultural fabric without ripping it.

For example, it was eastern and southern European immigrants— men like Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Frederick Loewe,Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, Frank Capra, Ernst Lubitch, Billy Wilder, Michael Hecht – who gave us many of the songs, plays and movies that are our twentieth century popular classics; who, in fact, created Hollywood. There was no insurmountable obstacle preventing these individuals from identifying with, and giving artistic expression to, the Anglo-American archetypes of our common culture; they so deeply identified with the American ideal that they created new and powerful forms of that ideal.

But it is not immediately apparent that people from radically diverse backgrounds and cultural identities—a Central American indio, a Cambodian peasant, a Shi’ite Muslim—can feel the same sort of ready identification with American myths and ideal figures. David M. Hwang, author of the racial morality play “M. Butterfly,” pinpoints the psychological dimension of this problem: “Growing up as a person of color, you’re always ambivalent to a certain degree about your own ethnicity. You think it’s great, but there is necessarily a certain amount of self-hatred or confusion at least, which results from the fact that there’s a role model in this society which is basically a Caucasian man, and you don’t measure up to that.”

To the extent that David Hwang’s views on the wounded self-image of racial minorities in predominantly white America are representative (and such views have indeed become commonplace), he may have pointed out a human dilemma that the ideal of cultural assimilation can no longer fully obscure. Generally speaking, human beings most readily identify and feel comfortable with people (and cultural figures) similar to themselves, a fact that explains the successful assimilation of European immigrants into Anglo-American culture. It follows that if the new Americans from Asia and the Third World are to feel truly comfortable as Americans (and if white Americans are to be cured of their own race-consciousness and not experience the massively increasing numbers of Asians and other minorities as a disturbingly alien presence in this society), then America’s role model, its ideal figures and unifying myths, must change, diversify, embrace all the races, ethnic types and cultures on earth. This implies a metamorphosis in our art, our drama, our popular entertainment, our literature, our teaching of history— a mutation of our very identity as a people.

                                                                                        — Comments —

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

It is instructive that Mexico, the main source-nation of our current immigration problem, has immigration laws that resemble our own not at all.  Mexican immigration law is draconian and its purpose is boldly stated – the keep Mexico Mexican and to discourage foreigners from influencing Mexican culture.  Equally instructive is the attitude of the Arabic-speaking countries, whence originate the largest number of Muslims in the USA.  Although the Palestinians, who to Westerners seem indistinguishable from Jordanians, Egyptians, and Syrians, share the same language, religion, culture as their neighbors, those neighbors refuse to admit Palestinians as immigrants, but conspire to keep them confined in the wretched “refugee camps.”  Tibetans have made it clear that they regard the settlement of ethnic Chinese in their forcibly incorporated part of China as an attempt to erase Tibetan culture, which is precisely what it is. 

In other words: The non-Western world, while taking every advantage to revile the West (especially the USA) for being racist and xenophobic, actually institutionalizes the protective national attitude against foreign immigration in law, Mexico and the Arab nations being examples.  In this, these nations are right, never minding the fact that they are sickeningly hypocritical in demanding that the USA or Europe admit indefinite numbers of their people. 

In addition, even seemingly small differences can tear a nation apart.  In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the French nation already existed; all Frenchmen spoke French.  The contest of Protestant Frenchmen and Catholic Frenchman, however, bloodied France for a century and was a rehearsal, in some ways, of the Revolution of 1789, from the effects of which Gallia has never recovered.  The American civil war offers a similar lesson.  It is worth noting that the Union was willing to apply crushing force to reduce the breakaway states into reunification and to abolish the slave-holding custom.  So much for the blessing of differences.

Reader writes:

I get so frustrated reading all the blather about illegal and legal immigration and diversity and open borders. 

From experience of four generations preceding me in this border state, membership in a huge bi-cultural, bi-lingual family and study of the Church’s teachings and the blather and documentable facts, I have formed the following firm conclusions. 

The Church’s teachings on immigration, quoted by Church bureaucrats so liberally, are addressed primarily to the Church’s duties toward the legal immigrant, the asylum seeker and the refugees. 

Very little is addressed to the issue of opportunistic, illegal immigrants. What is so directed makes clear that countries have a right to control their borders, entrants have a duty to respect the laws of the country they enter. Rich countries to the EXTENT THEY ARE ABLE, should welcome the illegal immigrant, try to help him to become legal, but if not reasonable (reasonable is my word) they should help the illegal immigrant to find another country or send him back to his own. 

The best and most long lasting solution to illegal immigration is to help the sending countries to remedy the social and economic motivations for emigration. This was said explicitly by John Paull II and Benedict XVI, by the latter on the plane to AMERICA and if I remember correctly by JPII in the same circumstance. Common sense and a superficial knowledge of history demonstrates that this solution is the only truly just one. 

It should not be a desire for racial or ethnic purity, or even cultural purity (our culture needs much healing at the present time) which should motivate our country to close its borders at the border, reject any type of amnesty and enforce our present immigration laws albeit with tweaks to best achieve a just state of affairs. It should be focus on the purity of adherence to the roots of the American experiment, traceable to Catholic thought especially in English law and which has formed a magnificent culture. Note “has”. 

America is no longer able. We need to put our own people to work and clean up our own act. 

Illegal and legal immigration is ruining Mexico. At least 15 to 20 percent of its population is here legally or illegally, leaving families broken and robbing Mexico of its talent. 

Further, the economic conditions down there are exaggerated in my experience. Exports to us and remittances down there result in lines of Mexican citizens standing in the American stores this side of the border buying numerous shopping carts piled high as possible with goods which are cheaper here than Mexico. The purchasers take the goods south, and even if they get caught and are assessed a duty, they can still sell those goods for a profit down there. There is a HUGH market for those items. 

Further, no one will ever answer the question of why, when China stole the jobs from the Maquilas and left hundreds of thousands of Mexicans on the border, that they still live there and do not rush the border in droves. 

In my opinion, the Bishops and big business and the politicians are manipulating this situation for their own interests and care little about ultimate justice, the preservation of families and so on.

Hurricane Betsy writes:

Nothing wrong with living in a country with a variety of ethnic groups, races, religions, castes, etc.  What is wrong is when the government entrenches multiculturalism and makes opposition to it illegal.  We need government giving us the freedom to discriminate against whomever we wish, without violence. Eventually, you will end up with  everyone clustering with his own kind, in his own area, because that is best, being organic, from the ground up and naturally evolving.

However, official multiculturalism of the kind in Western countries is a state-enforced conceit which can exist only in prosperous, technological, materialistic societies. And only where white people are so preoccupied with their comforts and entertainments that they think it’s all just so sweet to see these many lovely colours joining them.  However, when the problems hit the fan, I predict they will quickly fall out of love with state-sanctioned and -enforced diversity.

Lawrence Auster writes:

Vishal Mehra acknowledges that England and other Anglosphere nations historically had real national identies based on commonality (not “purity,” that is a false statement). Then he says that non-Western nations don’t share those assumptions of a common nationhood and see societies as nothing but hodgepodges of different peoples and cultures. Then he says that successful nations must receive mass immigration of diverse peoples—those same diverse peoples which, he has said, do not share our nationhood assumptions and who will want to change us into hodgepodges like the hodgepodges they come from.

He doesn’t realize that he is making a most convincing argument for the Western nations to STOP all non-Western immigration. We don’t want to become like you. We want to remain us. If you don’t like that, maybe you should return to the hodgepodge you came from.

Van Wijk writes:

Vishal Mehra wrote: “Rome had plenty of immigrants from all over and so would China if it ever attains to the status of World Centre.”

Rome’s immigrants had no “rights” as we understand them, could not hold political office unless they were citizens (which was very hard for most to obtain), and were expected to assimilate to a large degree on pain of death, to include the ostensible worship of the Roman pantheon (the Jews famously refused to sprinkle incense at the feet of Jupiter, and suffered mightily for it). To be an upwardly-mobile immigrant was to adopt Roman custom. Unlike us, the Romans were convinced of their own superiority and never stopped believing in themselves. Conquered territories were thoroughly Romanized rather than vice versa.

In short, whereas we are beholden to the demands of noisy immigrant lobbies, the Romans could have destroyed their entire immigrant population on a whim.

Bruce writes:

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes: “Although the Palestinians, who to Westerners seem indistinguishable from Jordanians, Egyptians, and Syrians, share the same language, religion, culture as their neighbors, those neighbors refuse to admit Palestinians as immigrants, but conspire to keep them confined in the wretched “refugee camps.”

Jordan actually IS Palestine, or was meant to be. According to Wikipedia:

“The newly created United Nations approved the Partition Plan for Palestine (United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181) on November 29, 1947, which sought to divide the country into two states—one Arab and one Jewish.” These two states were Jordan (‘Palestine’) and Israel. In other words, there already is a Palestine, and has been since 1947. It is not just a matter of sharing the same language, religion, culture – but actual shared political identity.

Of course, saying this changes nothing; but clearly, the existence of ‘Palestine’ cannot be the real issue.

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