This appeal to emotion deliberately ignores a crucial fact: large numbers of people from many other cultures, nations, and regions either reject outright, oppose, or are indifferent to individual rights; specifically, the unalienable rights of individuals, set forth in the Declaration of Independence, upon which the United States was founded and built.

Progressives and liberals, in their pursuit of "diversity," smugly assert that no matter what differences exist among people from various cultures, nations, and regions of the world, the similarities are more important. In the end, people care about the same basic thing: making a better life for themselves, their children, and their families.

From the very beginning of U.S. history, the acceptance of these individual rights has been the core element of American culture. But in 1965, the federal government adopted Progressive-liberal ideology on immigration; Congress passed and the president signed a law that amended the Immigration and Nationality Act. This law resulted in a surge of immigration, and began to change America's cultural makeup.

Since 1965, the vast majority of legal immigrants (more than 80 percent) have come from cultures, nations, and regions that have traditions not of individual rights but of collectivism or authoritarian rule. And this is not a natural occurrence; under the 1965 law, the federal government set up the system in a way that ensures this outcome.

Overall, the federal government has been permitting about one million people a year to legally immigrate. (These statistics on immigration do not include illegal immigrants, widely estimated at eleven million, the vast majority of whom also have come from cultures and nations with traditions of collectivism or authoritarian rule.)

The consequences of such "diversity" are dire. Many experts on history and politics have demonstrated that cultural, national, and regional factors play a decisive role in human behavior, and that people with a collectivist or authoritarian heritage are far more likely to support violations of individual rights by a government, or authoritarian conduct by a government, or both, for the purpose of securing government-invented group rights and other collectivist policies.

In particular, the historian Carroll Quigley, a former professor at Georgetown University who taught and influenced future president Bill Clinton, demonstrated that cultures and civilizations are fatally weakened from within by a rejection of the principles upon which they were built, and then after being so weakened, are finished off by outsiders who "submerge" (i.e., inundate) them.

For the last half-century, Progressives and liberals have been pushing the United States down this same road to ruin.

Nevertheless, some people claim that none of these lessons from history apply to America. Basically, they refer to the United States as a nation of immigrants, and they argue that concerns expressed in prior centuries about immigration turned out to be unfounded.

However, the distinguished scholar Thomas Sowell, countering this argument, has shown that circumstances today are not the same as circumstances during earlier periods of immigration from Europe. For example, in the past, immigrants not only came to America to become Americans, but American society itself expected immigrants to assimilate; specifically, to learn and to adopt the elements of American culture, including the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But during recent decades, in the name of diversity, Progressives, liberals, and many advocacy organizations (including Hispanic advocacy organizations such as La Raza, and Muslim advocacy organizations such as CAIR) have been encouraging immigrants to keep their native cultures. In the words of Sowell, there are many people today, including politicians, who are working actively "to keep foreigners foreign and to make other Americans accept and adjust to that."

Notably, Progressives and liberals use many of the same arguments, and rely on the many of the same appeals to emotion, for refugees that are used, and relied on, for immigrants.

In short, Progressives and liberals aggressively insist that diversity is a good thing, while denouncing as hateful anyone who favors taking a stronger position on immigration or refugees. Moreover, even Republican politicians, when framing their own arguments, often weaken their own case by timidly refusing to counter the Progressive-liberal dogma on diversity.

Ultimately, the issue, when framed correctly, is one primarily of rights. Governments do not exist to pursue ideological concepts or utopian fantasies such as diversity; governments exist to secure the rights of the people. Indeed, the United States was created on this principle, which is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

The federal government's policies on immigration and refugees, though, not only undermine the securing of the unalienable rights of the nation's citizens, but also pose a serious threat to the nation's future.

Paul Pauker is the author of Morality and Law in America. He also runs a site dedicated to advancing the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and property.