There is a hint of truth to the contention, usually cited by leftists with nefarious motives, that the United States is a “nation of immigrants.” Every human being in this country, after all, either came here themselves or are descended from ancestors who came here. This also includes Indians, who, leftists will be loath to admit, migrated to this continent from Asia.
You might wonder why I still use the term Indian. It’s because, as Matt Walsh recently pointed out, white people descended from Europeans are in fact the real Native Americans. They founded the country we call America. They brought the culture here. They tamed the wilderness. They created the infrastructure, laws, and civilization that laid the framework for the greatest, most successful country the world has ever known.
The mostly nomadic previous inhabitants of the land, the people hero Christopher Columbus endearingly named “Indians,” while admirable and worthy of respect in many ways, did little to contribute to the country we know of as the United States of America, and so are not 'native' Americans in any meaningful sense. But their ancestors did immigrate here like everyone else, so we all get credit for THAT, I suppose.
Interestingly, the descendants of white Europeans have been on this continent much longer than most people think. In fact, upwards of 85% of the more than 2 million white people living here in 1776 were born here, not across the ocean. This reflected more than 150 years of demographic expansion and settlement in the colonies well before they declared their independence.
There is the odd belief among liberals that some sort of ‘magic dirt’ exists in the West that transforms anyone who steps on it into fine, upstanding, productive, patriotic, God-fearing, law-abiding citizens. From French immigrant and naturalized American citizen J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, who in his 1782 book Letters from an American Farmer described this country as a place where Europeans from diverse backgrounds “melted into a new race of men,” to early 20th century playwright Israel Zangwill’s portrayal of immigrants from different nationalities, cultures, and ethnicities being fused into one by the “crucible” that was America in his 1908 play The Melting Pot, assimilation into one culture has historically been the celebrated norm. Add to that radical leftist Emma Lazarus’ (in)famous poem “The New Colossus,” an emotional plea to welcome all the world’s refuse placed inside the Statue of Liberty in 1903, and it’s almost tough to blame anyone for not thinking like this.
After all, assimilation did work here, and it worked for a long, long time … until it didn’t. Why is that? What happened? Well, anyone with half a brain and a lick of common sense would trace it to when progressive Democrats emboldened by the post-World War II consensus about 'equality' began to lobby hard for immigrants from the Third World. Starting with then-Senator John F. Kennedy’s 1958 book A Nation of Immigrants, which framed immigration restrictions on non-Europeans as incompatible with American values of equality, continuing with then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s criticism of the immigration quota system that had been in place since the 1920’s to protect the white majority, and culminating with the 1965 passage of the Hart-Celler Act, championed by then-Senator Ted Kennedy, which opened the floodgates to the non-white Third World despite promises from Honest Ted that the ethnic makeup of the country would not be altered, the seeds for the permanent displacement of America’s founding stock were irrevocably sown.
No, I’m not blaming it all on the Kennedys, but they aren’t looking good here either. Do you know what else isn’t looking good? America’s supposedly 'magic' dirt. Just as it didn’t do a damned thing for the Indians who came here from Asia, it also hasn’t worked to transform Third Worlders into model members of Western Civilization. Dearborn, Michigan looks like the carbon copy of a city in any Muslim country, East Los Angeles looks no different from any Latin hellhole, and Minneapolis’ "Little Mogadishu" is pretty much indistinguishable from actual Mogadishu. Turns out, if you move masses of people from one area to another, the place they move to will quickly come to resemble the place they came from.
The lesson here is that, despite leftist sentimentalities, it was never about the dirt, but rather the people. People create culture, and demography is destiny. These are uncomfortable but incontrovertible truths. It’s fine to expect assimilation into your country and culture when the country and culture immigrants are coming from are not that entirely dissimilar from your own. It’s no surprise that the Irish and Italians, despite their early struggles, eventually figured it out. But erasing America’s white majority, as is steadily happening on a scale we’ve never seen before, will turn America into a different country entirely. If your politically correct impulses and misplaced empathy tell you that’s a good thing, we’re all about to find out the hard way just how wrong you are.
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