The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return

by Michael Anton

So we don’t know how many newcomers—legal and illegal—have resettled here. It might be sixty million. It might be seventy-five million. It might be higher than that. In any case, it’s not lower than fifty-nine million;

Our enjoyment of his joke was enhanced by the acid of vengeance against those who thought they were better than us. [Emphasis

Hence to suggest that the Ellis Islanders might have carried some drawbacks with them across the Atlantic, stashed in their steamer trunks, is… well, it can’t be “racist” because they were all white, but it’s definitely “hateful” and not true! Those heroes didn’t change America at all, you bigot! Except to make it better!

Finally, and most consequential, the Ellis Island wave shoved the American political center well to the left—permanently. There would, and could, have been no New Deal without the votes of millions of immigrants and their descendants who transformed the American electorate.

But somebody must be benefiting, or else this wave wouldn’t be happening—wouldn’t be allowed to continue, and those who raise questions wouldn’t be consistently demonized and de-platformed.

In contemporary America, the only acceptable answer to the question “Who benefits from mass immigration?” is “We all do!”—sung out with a Stepford-wife, hostage-video-style grin.

Having insufficient babies to replace, and even exceed, a nation’s current population is often said to be the ultimate societal catastrophe.

In this understanding, a “nation” is nothing more than whichever people happen to live on some particular stretch of dirt at any given time. Hence France is just a plot of land in Western Europe bordering Spain, Germany, Italy, and a few others. France would still be “France” no matter who lived there.

Social Security is squarely based on what has been called the eighth wonder of the world—compound interest. A growing nation is the greatest Ponzi game ever contrived.

“jobs Americans just won’t do—at the low wages corporations and other businesses want to pay, which poor immigrants will accept eagerly.”

The other reason employers love mass immigration can be summed up by another economic slogan: privatize profits, socialize costs. It goes without saying that the money employers save by hiring immigrants—especially illegals—they keep. The costs—in healthcare, schooling, policing, and other government services—are borne by taxpayers.

The bottom line is that there are few—if any—“jobs Americans just won’t do.” Americans do, however, understandably resent having their wages relentlessly undercut by foreign labor in their own country.

Yet it’s reasonable to ask why, if immigrants possess such superhuman powers, they don’t use them to make their own countries into places that no one would ever want to leave. You know: rich, clean, safe, advanced, innovative, and attractive.

In the immortal words of Jeb Bush, immigration—especially the illegal kind—is “an act of love.” Immigrants selflessly come here to make our country better, something we cannot do for ourselves.

Yet it is precisely to this horribly racist country that more than a million immigrants of color flock every year, and to which leftists insist they should flock year after year.

Suketu Mehta, author of This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto, explains the thrust of his book: “I claim the right to the United States, for myself and my children and my uncles and cousins, by manifest destiny.… It’s our country now.”

We have come here to collect. “We” and “they” have switched places. “They”—foreigners—are the new “we.” They define themselves as anyone wronged—actually or in their own accounting—by the American past. And not only by the American past, as the anecdote illustrates. You might ask: how is it that the United States (Mehta himself lives in New York and teaches at NYU) is in any way to blame for British colonialism in India?

[T]he central problem of immigration today [is] that the law… has not recognized that individuals have rights irrespective of their citizenship. It has not recognized that the relevant community is not merely the nation but all men of goodwill.

brings us back to the as-yet unanswered question: if one truly believes in permanent, hereditary Western bloodguilt stemming from omnipresent racism and oppression, how is anything made better by urging people of color to move to a racist country that allegedly hates and mistreats them? If America is as bad as the left says it is, wouldn’t moving here be a punishment?

diversity is your punishment.

Post-1965 mass immigration has primarily benefited and continues to benefit four groups: 1) immigrants themselves, 2) the bureaucrats who serve them, 3) financial, big tech, and agricultural oligarchs, and 4) Democratic politicians and their leftist allies.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 63 percent of immigrants utilize means-tested welfare, compared to 35 percent for the native-born.

Poor immigrants are to welfare bureaucrats what unhappy couples are to divorce lawyers.

Our culture’s mawkish glorification of crossing an undefended border or overstaying a visa as the ultimate acts of selflessness obscures this otherwise obvious fact.

Well, what does that “better life” entail? Conservadorks of course insist: Freedom! Inside every day laborer the spirit of George Washington is struggling to break out! That may be true of a few, but overall—come on. Also, if “freedom” is so paramount to America’s post-1965 immigrants, why do they consistently vote for the anti-freedom, nanny-state party?

right—which desperately wants to be bamboozled. Mass immigration’s true beneficiaries know they must tailor their message for different audiences; they further know that what roadkill is to flies, appeals to “freedom” are to conservatives.

It’s important to see this for what it is: weaponized social “science,” bought and paid for by the ruling class—often literally, in the form of generous grants to “think tanks” and other research institutions that dutifully produce “studies” that conclude precisely what their patrons want you to hear.

That kind of thinking plays directly into ruling-class hands: no opinion can possibly be valid unless “studies show.” The people and institutions behind the studies all share the same interests—including an interest in ensuring that you believe what they want you to believe.

Apparently, the only myths about immigration are those which question whether mass migration is really the solution to every social and economic problem.

In a country in which “expert” consensus is the highest authority, the citizens’ desire is illegitimate and not to be heeded if it contradicts the experts. We see this insistence most glaringly on display with respect to “climate change.” Global warming is “settled science,” our betters shout, and your desires to keep your lousy coal-mining job or drive gas-guzzling muscle trucks are therefore immoral.

There is a natural right to emigrate but not to immigrate. A government based on the social compact must allow the unhappy to leave; it can’t guarantee that they’ll be able to settle in the country of their choice. That’s

We come, finally, to immigration’s most important beneficiaries: Democratic politicians and their various constituencies.

But above all, immigrants provide votes. The single greatest correlative factor of an electoral district’s propensity to vote Democrat is its percentage of foreign-born: the higher the latter, the higher the former. This is the main reason why California turned, politically, from pale red—which it was for most of the twentieth century—to deep blue,

Once Texas is gone, barring a history-making realignment, Republicans will have no hope whatsoever of ever winning the presidency again.

First of all, government at all levels consumes nearly two-fifths of U.S. GDP. That means that almost 40 percent of “the economy” is institutionally indisposed to the stock Republican message.

Still, the main reason Republicans are so daft on immigration is that a majority of them have completely internalized the rewritten Narrative of America as a “proposition nation”: an idea, not a country, with a racist past that must be atoned for. In other words, they accept in almost every particular the leftist/ruling-class Narrative designed to “fundamentally transform” the county in leftist/ruling-class interests and against the interests of Republican voters, constituencies, and communities.

One wonders what form of “natural conservatism” fueled the Hispanic voting surge for socialist Bernie Sanders or the General Social Survey result showing that 39 percent of Hispanics sympathize with socialism. In that same survey, 60.3 percent of the foreign-born in America said they support socialism. “Natural conservatism”!

Barry Goldwater’s 1964 slogan was “In your heart, you know he’s right.” The unspoken Republican slogan ever since has been “In our hearts, we know we’re wrong. And racist. And so is America.”

Blues perpetually outvoting reds and ruling unopposed: this, and only this, is what “democracy” means today.

the fall of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the USSR, 9/11, and the one-two punch of the coronavirus shutdown and the woke-riots.

As we have seen ad nauseum, surface consistency is not a strong suit of the Narrative. There is, however, an underlying consistency: anything that serves the interests of the ruling class and hurts Trump is good. Period.

The “unpersoning” of dissenters will become ever more similar to what the government of China does through its “social credit system”: ranking people based on their opinions—and Wokerati opinion of them—and then granting or limiting access to basic freedoms and services. This will be, and already is being, justified because it is done primarily by the private sector, whether by for-profit businesses that lock people out of entire sectors or “nonprofits” such as the odious Southern Poverty Law Center that identify targets.

And every step of the way, the Narrative’s reply to those who raise the alarm will be: That’s not happening, and it’s good that it is. You’re a paranoid lunatic for even suggesting that censorship, de-platforming, or un-personing are problems, and also a racist who deserves it.

Combine these factors with leftism’s top-down, total control of thought, and the picture becomes bleak indeed. The times are already quite vapid; very little (if anything) of lasting merit has been produced in literature, philosophy, film, or the other arts in several decades. The trend seems to be getting worse.

Decadent Society

Humiliation is part of the appeal. While most lefties tend to believe in the urgency of whatever cause they happen to be worked up over at the moment, their deepest satisfaction arises less from seeing justice done than watching the retrograde submit. It lets the bad guys know who’s boss. “How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?” Forcing you to call a woman a man, or vice versa, is all the more satisfying when those holding the gun to your head know you don’t really believe it. That, and the constant ginning up of new hysterias keeps deplorables off-balance and on the defensive.

Whitener is a disabled black lesbian who immigrated from Trinidad. She joins Inslee’s two other appointees: Raquel Montoya-Lewis, a Jewish Native American who previously served on tribal courts, and Mary Yu, an Asian-American Latina lesbian who officiated the first same-sex marriages in the state. Are they “outstanding jurists”? Who cares! Though, to be fair, as the left defines “outstanding jurist,” they surely are: they can be counted on always to rule the correct way.

What the so-called “American empire” really is, then, is a voluntary alliance of neoliberal elites across nations to work together in their own interests, underwritten by American technological and financial might, backed up by the implied threat of American military force, and “legitimized” by an omnipresent propaganda barrage which insists that their cooperation benefits everyone. Note that the only truly “voluntary” parties to the alliance are the elites themselves; their peoples are rarely consulted and any objections they may raise are curtly overruled.

To the ancient Romans or the Victorian Britons, the superiority of the ruling class and the superiority of their society were inseparable. Rome and Britain were great because Romans and Britons were great, and vice versa. Our elites, by contrast, love themselves but hate their country. Is that a recipe for long-term world domination?

Leftist politics are fundamentally about dividing up spoils. Leftists see this as zero-sum: whatever you’re getting, I’m not getting. This is one reason why infrastructure is the very worst in the bluest, richest states. The left no longer holds to any conception of a common good. Hence in the areas they control, politics is all about who gets what, and public projects either don’t happen, take forever, and/or are ruthlessly exploited by rent-seekers.

Multiple incidents in June 2020, when black activists demanded random whites to bow down to them, and were obeyed—when masses literally prayed to fellow citizens for the forgiveness of sins they hadn’t committed but which they believe are inherent in their biology—suggest who will insist on being on top in the new hierarchy.

Every knee shall bow!