One of the greatest services that Pat Buchanan performed for America in his discussions about immigration was to emphasize the place of culture in that conversation. While talk about the subject generally tends to revolve around questions of legality versus illegality, crime, and its impact on wages and jobs–and these are all important matters, mind you–discussing the impact immigration has on America’s culture has found much less of a place at the table.

The reader may find himself asking, “Why are you talking about culture again? How come you’re always harping on that subject?” The answer is because culture is important. Culture is, in fact, more important for the long-term direction of a nation than are its electoral politics, its economic choices, or its foreign policies. Different types of governments, economic booms and busts may all come and go, but the culture of a nation will set the tone for how the nation responds to and weathers these things.

I’ve discussed before how inseparable a culture is from the people who bear it. When large numbers of people live together in community, they develop unique cultures that are then perpetuated for generations upon generations. Culture is among the most persistent of factors in the human experience. The culture of a people is usually only changed by either eradicating that people (the least desirable means) or by putting into place active, vigourous, systematic efforts at loosing them from their former culture and embedding them into a new culture (assimilation).

By all rights, talk about culture should impact the American national discussion on immigration. It doesn’t, but it should. The reason for this is because we are currently in a situation where, rather than assimilating foreigners to our own culture and mores as formerly happened, we are instead seeing our traditional Anglo-Saxon culture being weakened and undermined by millions of unassimilated foreign entrants, largely from Latin America. These immigrants have reached a critical mass of numbers such that they are forming large pockets of Latin American (primarily Mexican) culture on our own soil. This is not at all surprising. Whenever a nation pursues a policy of accepting massive numbers of immigrants while refusing to require them to assimilate themselves to our folkways and culture, you will see what we’re seeing take place today.

Cultures as holistic, all-encompassing entities cannot exist in the same place at the same time. One will always come to dominate the other for any number of good or bad reasons. What we’re seeing throughout the American Southwest, as well as in inner cities (and not so inner cities) all across the country, is the Mexification of large swathes of American geography. Because post-1965 America has pointedly refused to require assimilation, we’re finding that in areas where the majority becomes Mexican, the culture becomes Mexican as well.

This is not a good thing. My firm belief is that all cultures are not equal. Intrinsically speaking, some cultures are better than others, for objective and quantifiable reasons. Cultural equalitarianism is simply not an intellectually valid belief. This being said, I will then apply it by saying that I believe America’s Anglo-Saxon derived culture is better than the various Latin American cultures we see entering our land. This is not to say, obviously, that Latin Americans themselves are bad people. The problem is not the people themselves, but the cultures that they carry with them.

An honest assessment suggests that Latin American cultures contain a disturbing number of pathologies that make them incompatible with tradition American Anglo-Saxon culture. They tend to encourage a subservient, even obsequious, attitude towards government, with its caudillos and jefes, that makes Latin Americans more naturally socialistic. Latin American cultures tend to reject the right of self-defence, thus making them more likely to disarm their populations. They have a much higher tolerance for corruption, both political and private, than do Northern European-derived cultures. Latin American cultures tend to be low trust cultures. They tend to place less value on education, scholarship, and innovation. They tend to be more socially stratified and have less tolerance for individuals who seek to better their social and economic statuses. Because there is little cultural tradition of consensual self-government and orderly transfer of governmental power, much of the history of Latin America (as well as a lot of what we still see today) involves a cycle of revolution followed by dictatorship followed by revolution followed by dictatorship…

What I’m describing above goes more deeply into what “culture” actually is than does the rather superficial sense that most people have, meaning things like “ethnic foods, ethnic clothing, and musical styles” that they can gawk at when visiting an ethnic restaurant. “Culture” encompasses the way a group of people tend to thinking, feel, and act about…everything. It defines their responses, how they interpret social and interpersonal stimuli from the world around them. The superficial view of “food and music” as culture is merely the tip of a deep, deep iceberg (see below).

If we continue to see Latin American cultures displace American culture in increasingly large regions of our own country, we’re eventually going to see the United States become Latin American in culture. And that means that all the cultural attributes that made America what she historically was, and the successes that those attributes brought, will no longer be there to sustain continued American success as a polity.

What happens when America finishes becoming the sort of low trust society like we see across Latin America? What about when we become as corrupt as is typically seen south of the border? Will investors want to park their money here, knowing that an American caudillo might well nationalise their assets to curry favour with an increasingly socialistic population? What happens to America’s research and development culture when the value we place on education reaches Latin American levels? How many Nobel laureates in the sciences has Latin America had? The answer: from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego, they’ve had a total of six, the same number as Belgium alone. As I’ve pointed out before, we can’t expect our Constitution–uniquely English in derivation as it is–to survive long in a non-Anglo-Saxon cultural setting.

Simply put, if Mexican society is so bad that it has already run off a full quarter of its own population, why on earth would we want to transplant the same thing here on our side of the border?

This is why the American people need to get serious about regaining control of our immigration apparatus back from the current gaggle of globalists, internationalists, and chamber of commerce-style plutocrats who currently use it to provide for themselves a virtually limitless supply of cheap labour to be used to both save them money and destroy traditional America. What to do about the immigrants from south of our border? Plainly, we must send home the vast majority who bring no special skills or knowledge to our society while working assiduously to assimilate and fold into our own culture those who do bring to the table skills or talents we are interested in, and who are allowed to remain here. We really do need to make America America again, by studiously preserving our own unique (and successful) culture as a gift to our posterity.