Thomas Sowell, Townhall, January 20, 2015

Islamic terrorist attacks in Europe, and European governments’ counter-attacks, are more than just a passing news story.

Europe is currently in the process of paying the price for years of importing millions of people from a culture hostile to the fundamental values of Western culture. And this is by no means the last of the installments of that price, to be paid in blood and lives, for smug elites’ Utopian self-indulgences in moral preening and gushing with the magic word “diversity.”

Generations yet unborn will still be paying the price, whether in large or small installments, depending on how long it takes for the West to jettison Utopianism and come to grips with reality.

Meanwhile, in the United States, no one seems to be drawing any lessons about the dangers of importing millions of people from fundamentally different cultures across our open border. In America, “diversity” has still not yet lost its magical ability to stop thought in its tracks and banish facts into the outer darkness.

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There are some politicians–both Democrats and Republicans–who just want to get the [immigration] issue behind them, and are prepared to leave the consequences for others to deal with in the future, just as they are leaving a staggering national debt for others to deal with in the future.

These consequences include irreversible changes in the American population. Ethnic “leaders” and welfare state goodies guarantee the fragmentation of the population, with never-ending strife among the fragments. People who enter the country illegally will get, not only equal benefits with the American people who created those benefits, they will get more than many American citizens, thanks to affirmative action.

We cannot simply let in everyone who wants to come to America, or there will be no America to come to. Cultures matter–and not all cultures are mutually compatible, as Europeans are belatedly learning, the hard way. And “assimilation” is a dirty word to multiculturalists.

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To many in the media, the only question seems to be whether we are going to be “mean-spirited” toward people who want to come here–especially children who were brought here, or sent here, “through no fault of their own.”

It is as if those children had some pre-existing right to be in the United States, which they could lose only if they did something bad themselves. But those children had no more right to be here than children in India, Africa or other places with millions of children living in poverty.

Surely we can think ahead enough to realize that children living in this country illegally are going to grow up and have children of their own, with cultures and values of their own–and ethnic “leaders” to promote discontent and hostility if they don’t get as good of results as people who have the prevailing American culture, beginning with the English language.

You can’t wish that away by saying the magic word “diversity”–not after we have seen what “diversity” has led to in Europe.