Thomas Jackson, American Renaissance, August 1995

Immigration and the American Identity, Rockford Institute, 1995, 232 pp.

Importing Revolution: Open Borders and the Radical Agenda, William R. Hawkins, American Immigration Control Foundation, 1994, 209 pp.

To its great credit, Chronicles has been perhaps the one “mainstream” magazine consistently to oppose large-scale third-world immigration to the United States. Although it has never made sustained racial-biologicals arguments, Chronicles has convincingly made just about every other case against a policy that it does not hesitate to call a disaster.

Immigration and the American Identity is a collection of articles that have appeared in the magazine over the past ten years. Among the 26 essays by 22 different authors there are so few duds it would be uncharitable to name them. For the most part, this is a refreshingly brisk attack on contemporary bromides.

Although much of the public debate is a fog of numbers “proving” that illiterate Guatemalans either do or do not pay more in taxes than they get in social services, Thomas Flemming, editor of Chronicles, explains that his magazine took the position early on that welfare and taxes are not what matter. It is the quality and cohesiveness of the United States that matter.

Chilton Williamson puts it this way: “You could ‘prove’ to me that, without the immediate transference of the entire population of Hong Kong to the state of California, the United States would be in a major economic depression by the middle of next year, and I would still be against transferring it there.”

As he explains, there is infinitely more to a nation than GNP, but for those who can see no further than that, a Haitian rafter who gets over his sea-sickness and finds a job is just as fine an American as the descendants of Pilgrims. The Let-‘em-All-In school claims that America is unique in that it is an idea, which is open to everyone. Despite some chatter about “democracy” and “freedom” the idea that counts is a booming economy. Although no citizen of any nation should ever have to refute something so stupid, Clyde Wilson was patiently doing so ten years ago:

[F]or many of us America constitutes not an idea but a quite tangible land and tradition which we like to consider not everybody’s and anybody’s but ours; a land and tradition to which we relate not as an abstraction but as a link with our forebears and our posterity.

Often the noisiest proponents of the view that anyone can become an American are people who, themselves, only recently did so. Dr. Flemming points out that “the American culture created by earlier immigrants [has] been submerged” by newcomers, some of whom think they can explain the national character and traditions to old stock Americans.

Thus it is that, as Peter Brimelow explains, the Ellis Island Museum of Immigration now promotes the breath-taking lie that from the very moment of its founding, America was multi-ethnic and multi-racial. Of course, neither blacks nor Indians were citizens and everyone else was white — and 80 percent were British. Christian Kopff points out that to participate fully in our society is to take part in traditions that may go back to the Ancient World, traditions that are not instantly adopted.

Although explicitly racial arguments can still make Chronicles nervous, several of the contributors point out that any policy that reduces European-Americans to a minority will irrevocably change the nation for the worse. Also, it is pretty clear what Garrett Hardin is talking about when he calls it “passive genocide” for a nation to admit into its territory a different, more rapidly breeding population: “It may be that no one is ever killed; but the genes of one group replace the genes of the other. This is genocide.”

Likewise, Mr. Williamson clearly means “people of non-European stocks and cultures” when he writes: “The stranger is within the gates, and he smells blood. I do not mean that he is bloodthirsty; he simply senses our weakness and is ready to exploit it as far as he can.” Mr. Williamson notes that we are cooperating in that exploitation as part of a quasi-religious mission to redeem the world through the purity of our intentions: “But if we do succeed in crucifying ourselves, after our crucifixion we shall not rise again, and there will be no inheritors and apostles of our peculiar faith. The Third World — its cultures, its peoples — will remain emphatically in place, but we ourselves will have perished forever . . .

Samuel Francis can, of course, be counted on to write clearly about race. In his devastating dismissal of “multicultural” schooling he observes, “It is all very well to point to black cotton-pickers and Chinese railroad workers, but the cotton fields and the railroads were there because white people wanted them there and knew how to put them there.”

Of course, even aside from the threat of racial and cultural dispossession, some aspects of immigration are so awful that even a denatured country like ours might be expected to put them right. Wayne Lutton lists a few: Nigerian con men love fleecing Americans “because they are so trusting;” third worlders bring us leprosy, typhoid, malaria, and tuberculosis; Chicano students openly call for Mexican occupation of the American Southwest.

Chronicles contributors have advanced another argument against immigration that in our current era of chic environmentalism should be decisive but, somehow, is not. How can it possibly be to our advantage, asks Donald Huddle, for immigrants to make the state of California grow more rapidly than India or Pakistan? And once again, Mr. Williamson:

It is considered ‘humanitarian’ to fret about population growth and its effects on the natural environment at the global (which is to say, at the abstract) level; but ‘racist,’ ‘xenophobic,’ ‘uncompassionate,’ and ‘un-American’ to worry about the population crisis as it immediately affects the United States, the only place in the world where we are in a position to be able to do anything about it.

Prof. Hardin adds that by accepting the overflow from Cuba, Jamaica, Mexico or Haiti we only foster the illusion that these countries do not have population problems.

Although speculation about the motives of others is always chancy, several authors do wonder why people favor immigration. In what may be the most original and provocative article of all, Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues that the ruler of a mass democracy has no incentive to improve the quality of a nation’s population: “Bums and inferior people will likely support his egalitarian policies, whereas geniuses and superior people will not.” Claes Ryn notes that Americans have abandoned the traditional path of virtue that makes difficult personal demands. The new, undemanding virtue merely expresses “altruistic sympathy, tearful ‘compassion’ for favored suffering groups,” of which non-white immigrants are handy examples.

Samuel Francis suspects that wretched alien refuse is fodder for big-government social engineers: “Third World immigration allows for the importation of a new underclass and provides unglimpsed vistas of social manipulation in the form of new opportunities for managing civil rights, ethnic conflicts, education, health, housing, welfare, social therapy, and assimilation itself.”

Foundation Run Amok

The question of motive is central to another recent book about immigration policy, Importing Revolution. William R. Hawkins has studied how the Ford Foundation promotes groups that hate the United States and wish to transform it. Professor Hawkins finds that whether or not the Ford bureaucrats are, themselves, Marxists, they have given millions of dollars to people who are.

Communists have always seen foreigners as a revolutionary element that may yet radicalize the sleepy American proletariat; every shirtless Mexican is a potential Leninist. In this context, Prof. Hawkins has unearthed a number of quaint statements by Ford recipients. James Cockcroft, for example, has written that “U.S. workers must rally to the expression of solidarity with workers of all types in their common struggle against world capital, which is determined to break labor’s spirit and to engulf young workers in renewed regional or world war.”

Mr. Cockcroft who, in 1986, had predicted that “American democracy may well be the ultimate domino,” was a speaker at a “Breakdown the Border” conference in El Paso in 1987. According to the conference organizers, one of its main issues was, “Will the oppressed close ranks and oppose the attacks on the immigrants who have a deep hatred and experience in fighting U.S. imperialism and are an important force for revolution?”

Prof. Hawkins reports that according to one popular Marxist theory, the proletariats in the imperialist countries are, themselves, so gorged on the fruits of third-world exploitation that they must be liquidated along with the ruling class. To this end, as many non-whites as possible should be brought to the United States to reduce wages for Americans and stir up revolution.

In fact, American communism has always had a foreign smell. During the 1920s perhaps only one in ten party members were native born Americans. Even years later, natives who asked to join were invariably suspected of being spies.

Of the many far-left organizations to fatten on Ford money, the National Lawyers Guild is perhaps the most effective. The guild pays lawyers to thwart every effort by the INS to do its job, and may win top honors for the most damage done for the least money.

The guild celebrated its radicalism at its national convention in 1987. According to a report in the Marxist weekly, Frontline, guild founder Marty Popper praised “the political diversity that is characteristic of the Guild — from liberals to social democrats to communists . . .”

Even the Washington Post has marveled at the radical lawyers’ success in hobbling the INS:

[B]ecause of [activist] lawyers, the Haitians who are coming illegally [in 1980 and 1981] are perhaps being accorded more legal rights than those who obey the law. To force the government to provide due process for the Haitians, the lawyers have raised not only the merits of individual cases, but also virtually every possible legal issue to trap the government in its own bureaucratic tangle . . . ‘Fighting [the INS] is like shooting fish in a barrel . . . ,’ said Ira Kurzban, who is leading the lawyers.

Likewise, Central American illegals in California are represented by Ford-funded lawyers who are specialists in finding every loophole and throwing up every possible obstacle during INS deportation hearings. No doubt there is Ford money behind the lawyers who hijacked California’s Proposition 187.

Prof. Hawkins notes that the only time the National Lawyers Guild has ever opposed bringing aliens into the country was in 1975, when President Gerald Ford wanted to admit several thousand Vietnamese orphans. The guild quite naturally sided with the Communist regime, which wanted to keep the children.

Of course, not all immigration advocates who receive Ford money are openly or even privately Marxist. Many simply hate the white, European character of the United States.

Prof. Hawkins describes the effect that massive Ford Foundation support has had on Hispanic organizations. LULAC, or the League of United Latin-American Citizens was founded in 1929 as a grass-roots Mexican-American advocacy organization. It was open only to U.S. citizens, stressed the use of English, and opposed Mexican nationalists and Hispanic separatists. Its members were middle-class immigrants who sought assimilation on American terms. It supported the Border Patrol and cheered the arrest of illegals.

LULAC began to change shortly after 1968, when Ford started helping rival Hispanic organizations. One of these was the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), which Ford started with a grant of $2.2 million — twice the amount its organizers asked for. With the active support of Jack Greenfield of the NAACP, MALDEF quickly established itself as militantly pro-Hispanic. It has used the courts to promote bilingual education and has been a tireless advocate of giving all the benefits of citizenship — including the vote — to aliens, legal or not. MALDEF claims, truthfully, not to advocate open borders. It wants open borders only for Mexicans. By 1992, MALDEF had swallowed more than $18 million in Ford money.

The National Council of La Raza (“the race”) takes similar positions, and between 1967 and 1992 received over $10 million in Ford money. Major corporate donors like IBM, AT&T, General Mills, and General Motors also give these groups money.

Despite the fact that they scarcely have real Hispanic constituents — MALDEF is said to get no more than two percent of its budget from Hispanics — these organizations have dragged the old, assimilationist LULAC markedly to the left. LULAC no longer stresses the responsibilities of citizenship but takes positions little different from those of MALDEF. Far from supporting the INS, in 1992 a past president of LULAC, Jose Velez said the Border Patrol was “the enemy of the people and always will be.”

In 1989, the new, racialist LULAC also began to receive Ford money and had gotten more than $600,000 by 1992, but MALDEF is still the foundation’s raven-haired boy. Ties were further cemented when a Ford trustee, Harriet Rabb joined the MALDEF board in 1986.

Ford is clearly pushing some Hispanics in directions they would not naturally go. Polls repeatedly show that Hispanic-Americans — citizens, non-citizens, legals and illegals — oppose more immigration from Mexico. Immigrants come here because things are better in el Norte. Most Mexicans have a dim understanding that the only thing millions more of their brethren would do is turn Texas into Chihuahua.

Prof. Hawkins reports that before Ford money began to flow, Hispanic politicians were natural products of their communities: successful businessmen who reflected the assimilationist aspirations of the majority. Now, hot-house Hispanic organizations can parachute lefty, well-funded candidates into neighborhoods and push aside community leaders.

Chicano nationalists are not hard to understand, but why do whites want to destroy America? Prof. Hawkins argues convincingly that many of the most mischievous are Marxists, but for how much longer can American Communism survive the death of the real thing? Many pro-immigration lawyers are Jews, who no doubt want to keep the golden door open for their coreligionists. But countless whites have been stripped of any sense of the legitimacy of their own interests. They practice the suicidal altruism of which Garrett Hardin writes.

Robert Frost reportedly defined a liberal as someone who could not take his own side in an argument. Pro-immigration whites do not even seem to realize they have a side. As Samuel Francis writes in the forward to Importing Revolution, “[I]n order to curb immigration, it is necessary first to assert the existence, integrity, and legitimacy of the Western and American way of life — to assert, in other words, the legitimacy of a ‘we’ against the demands of a ‘they.’”