Hubert Collins, American Renaissance, April 1, 2015

It has become steadily more popular for white dissidents to claim that immigration is no longer an issue–or at least not worth much of our effort. Richard Spencer, Jack Donovan, and Harold Covington take this view, and many others agree. With due respect, I think they are wrong.

But first, let us consider their positions. This is from Richard Spencer’s address at the 2013 American Renaissance conference:

In the summer 2011, the Census Bureau reported that the majority of children born in the United States are non-white. Thus, from our perspective, any future immigration-restriction efforts are meaningless. Even if all immigration, legal and illegal, were miraculously halted tomorrow morning, our country’s demographic destiny would merely be delayed by a decade or two. Put another way, we could win the immigration battle and nevertheless lose the country, and lose it completely.

Mr. Donovan is of a similar, but more cynical, mindset. He sees the chaos being brought on by swarms of illegal immigrants as a good thing because it will hasten the collapse of our current, undesirable regime–which will make it easier to create a nation more to our liking. A few years ago he wrote:

Illegal immigration is killing my grandfather’s America, but that America is never coming back. The bright side I see is that this is all part of the process of creating a failed state–a state where no one believes in the system, where the government is just another shakedown gang, where no one confuses the law with justice. . . . In a failed state, we go back to Wild West rules, and America becomes a place for men again–a land full of promise and possibility that rewards daring and ingenuity, a place where men can restart the world.

Mr. Covington largely agrees. He calls for whites to abandon formal politics completely, and begin migrating to the Pacific Northwest so that they can secede when the federal government becomes weaker.

The conclusion that these men and others have drawn from current demographic projections (which are all too plausible), is that since a non-white America is inevitable, white advocates should drop immigration and focus on the creation of a white ethnostate. While I support this goal, it doesn’t make immigration irrelevant. Think of it this way: In the year 2100, would a racial secession movement be more likely to succeed if the rebellious whites who made up the movement were 10 percent of the population, or 20 percent? Numbers are always an essential part of political action.

In the history of secession movements, there are not many happy endings: from the Basques in Iberia, to the Kurds in the Middle East, to the Confederacy in 19th century America, fighting for separation is not easy. Aside from the very unusual circumstances of the breakup of the Soviet Union, it is rare for a government to let a group of people establish their own country. Usually, the result is war, and as Napoleon said, “God is on the side of the big battalions.”

Numbers still matter, even in an America where whites were no longer the majority. I would love to live in an American with a white super-majority, and I realize that is impossible now. But a high number is always better than a low number. An America that is 30 percent white is better than one that is 20 percent, 20 percent is better than 10 percent.

The “immigration no longer matters” argument is almost an endorsement of Lenin’s dictum: “the worse, the better.” Lenin meant that every misery suffered by the Russian people under the czars was good for the revolution, since poverty, civil unrest, and violence would make more Russians favor a Bolshevik coup. Things in Russia did get bad, and Lenin carried the day in 1917, and the horrible state of Russia in the 1910s helped the Communist cause. Ever since, many revolutionaries have adopted the “worse is better” mentality.

And indeed, even some revolutions from the Right have benefited from intolerable living conditions. Franco’s rise to power in 1930s is an example, as is Pinochet’s 1973 coup in Chile. All this suggests that if things get worse in America, a successful white identity movement could arise, but it’s not guaranteed.

Sometimes when things get worse, they ignite rebellion, but rebellion fails. Germany after World War One was a terrible place, but the Spartacist uprising didn’t last two weeks. Hungary was miserable under the yoke of Soviet tyranny, but its bid for freedom was crushed.

And sometimes, of course, when things get worse, they just get worse. In the 1930s, Joseph Stalin began deliberately starving the people of Ukraine in what is called the “Holodomor.” Millions of people died in just a few years, but no revolution came of it. In the last few decades, Argentina has suffered economic crash after economic crash, and no lasting “savior government” has leaped from the ashes of this perpetual chaos. The Finns were occupied by the Swedish Empire for over six centuries, but they never had a large-scale revolt until over a century after the Swedes had ceded their Finnish territory to the Russian Empire in the early 19th century.

In the United States, mass immigration literally kills white Americans, raises the crime rate, wrecks schools and communities, burdens taxpayers, erodes social trust, and on and on. We must limit immigration as much as we can now, both for the benefit of whites today, and for those who may–or may not–take action tomorrow.

How much worse do things have to get before they get better? Things seem bad enough now to justify revolution: The black-on-white rape rate is horrifying, journalists and pundits are regularly purged for saying anything “impolite” about race, the federal government punishes cities for putting down race riots, and the President cheers the Balkanization of the country. As the remnant of whites with racial consciousness, it is our duty to protect whites however we can, and cutting immigration is a good place to start.

The mix of immigrants makes a difference, too. Compared to the problem of Muslim immigration into Europe, the Hispanic burden is relatively light. There are already calls for a mass influx of refugees from ISIS, Syria, etc., and stopping that would save lives. Turning the country into Somalia is worse than turning it into Mexico, so rulings against Sheriff Joe Arpaio are a setback, but Somali immigration is worse.

Not all of those who say immigration is a distraction take a pure, “worse is better” position. Mr. Spencer, for example, would agree that it would be better if immigration were stopped, but thinks that for white activists to work in that area is a mistake because of the opportunity cost. It may be that continued demographic turmoil is necessary for whites to rediscover their identities, but for now, working towards an ethnostate is the best way for us to spend our meager resources.

I disagree on this count as well. Efforts can be split among worthy causes. You can vote for restrictionist candidates and donate money to a White Student Union. Anyone who supports the Center for Immigration Studies can also give a copy of Jared Taylor’s book White Identity to his neighbor for Christmas. All these things help whites, and we all set our own priorities. Nor is activist energy strictly limited like money or time. You may well feel you have done all you can this week for one cause but still be inspired to work hard for a different cause.

As Bismarck said, “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable–the art of the next best.” For the time being, immigration restrictionism is within the realm of possibility in a way that an ethnostate is not. What is possible and good for whites is worth our attention. Historically, immigration has united racial activists. Consider how Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard both worked hard to develop a sense of race solidarity among Americans in the 1920s, and how that influenced the immigration laws of that decade. In Europe, the Identitarians, so-called “far right” groups, and the National Front have had remarkable success in getting whites to think seriously about the future of the continent. They have done so by emphasizing the terrible effects of immigration.

Fighting immigration through the electoral process and grassroots activism may not be as glamorous as writing a call to arms for the formation of an ethnostate or considering what one would look like, but it is just as important.

Immigration is so damaging to whites that we cannot stop fighting it. Nor can we be completely confident white consciousness will rise like a phoenix after this fire runs its course. Immigration matters, and will always matter. Now is the time to think big, and I support all attempts to build white communities and white societies, but immigration will be a terrible obstacle to achieving those goals.