Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, October 2006

Patrick J. Buchanan, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, Thomas Dunne Books, 2006, 107 pp.

This marvelous book appears at exactly the right moment: just as Congress is returning from vacation to resume debate on comprehensive immigration control. Patrick Buchanan, who has already written nearly a whole shelf of conservative classics, is topping the best-seller lists with one of the most eloquent and influential calls for immigration control we are likely to see for many years. One of the rare public intellectuals who can look past economic arguments to the ties of blood and heritage that make a nation out of a rabble, Mr. Buchanan knows that the demographic transformation we are witnessing threatens the very survival of the country he loves. This book is a cry from the heart of a deeply committed American patriot.

Mr. Buchanan covers just about everything that has gone wrong: government failure to protect our borders or punish companies that hire illegals, the crushing burden of medicine and education for immigrants, the abandonment by elites of the concept of nation, the indifference and even hatred of many newcomers for America, the lust for reconquista, and the loss of will that means we must adapt to immigrants rather than the reverse. But most remarkably, Mr. Buchanan does not shy away from race.

He takes deliberate aim at people like Ben Wattenberg who tell us that anyone can be an American because we are a “creedal” or “proposition” nation. “Language, faith, culture, and history — and, yes, birth, blood, and soil — produce a people, not an ideology,” he writes. Elsewhere, he scoffs at the diversity we are supposed to be celebrating: “Nowhere on this earth can one find a multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual nation that is not at risk.”

Mr. Buchanan even quotes approvingly the late Sam Francis’s words at the 1994 AR conference: “The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.” He points out that if Francis had said this about the Chinese, for example, no one would have been shocked, but to speak of the genetic endowments of Europeans is a hanging offense: Francis lost his job at the Washington Times.

Mr. Buchanan even puts in a good word for the people who passed the 1924 “national origins” restrictions on immigration: “We may call them bigoted, but they preserved the America we are losing.” Although at the time he supported the 1965 Celler-Hart bill that led to the current Third-World invasion, Mr. Buchanan now understands why Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina opposed it. “What is wrong with the national origins of the American people?” the senator asked. “What is wrong with maintaining them? What is wrong with preferring as immigrants one’s own kinsmen?”

This book is undoubtedly the strongest defense of an essentially European America now available from a mainstream publisher.

Much of the data and most of the arguments in this book will be known to readers of AR, but State of Emergency ventures into less well known territory as well. In a brief account of the history of US immigration policy, Mr. Buchanan points out that the Statue of Liberty was first publicly linked to immigration in a speech by Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 — on the 50th anniversary of its dedication. Ironically, this was at a time when the US was receiving hardly any immigrants. As Mr. Buchanan explains, people who would have us believe we are a “creedal” nation are always trying to hijack America’s past; they tell us the statue always meant immigration.

Mr. Buchanan also gives us a review of our stormy relations with Mexico, laying to rest the idea that Mexico has never willingly given up territory. He points out the Mexicans once offered to sell us Baja California for $10 million but Congress rejected the offer.

Mr. Buchanan has a knack for marshalling familiar numbers in interesting ways. He points out, for example, that the figure of 36 million for immigrants and their children living in the United States is almost as large as the entire number of immigrants who came between 1607 and the Kennedy election of 1960. And today’s newcomers, he adds, are people who “have never been assimilated fully into any Western country.”

Likewise, if we accept the figure of 12 to 20 million illegals in our country, this is more than all the German and Italians who ever came here — and they were the most numerous immigrant peoples until everything changed in 1965.

In another interesting juxtaposition of figures, he notes that during the 1990s, the Hispanic population of LA County increased 27 percent — and the poverty rate increased 28 percent. During the same period the white population fell by 18 percent.

We are told over and over that illegals are essential to our economy, but Mr. Buchanan points out that they do not dominate a single profession. Illegals are most numerous as drywall/ceiling installers (27 percent) and landscape workers (26 percent), and their share of every other trade is even less.

State of Emergency includes a good account of deliberate Mexican efforts to fill our country with Mexicans and keep them loyal to the motherland. One of the most blatant operators has been Juan Hernandez, a former University of Texas professor whom Vicente Fox picked to run his Presidential Council for Mexicans Abroad. Mr. Hernandez, a dual citizen but loyal Mexican, told ABC’s Nightline how Mexican-Americans must think: “I want the third generation, the seventh generation, I want them all to think ‘Mexico first.’”

How did we sink so low? Mr. Buchanan writes that “there has arisen among our intellectual and cultural elites a contempt for the West,” and that our rulers worship at the “Church of GDP,” which believes in nothing but economic growth. Business wants an endless stream of cheap labor, and nanny-state bureaucrats want endless queues of clients for their handout programs.

Some kinds of support for immigration come close to certifiable insanity. As Mr. Buchanan explains, Republicans can never hope to win much Hispanic support because “there is an irreconcilable conflict between being a conservative party and being a party of Hispanics.” George W. Bush’s Mexico-boosting means that “today’s champion of open borders is a president whose own party is mortally imperiled by open borders.” Mr. Buchanan notes that in healthier times, our president’s failure to guard the border would have brought articles of impeachment.

There is considerable space in State of Emergency devoted to Europe, which is facing exactly the same crisis with exactly the same cowardice and willful blindness. Mr. Buchanan mentions an event in France that took place shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, and went largely unrecorded in the United States. On Oct. 6, 2001, a much-heralded match took place between the French and Algerian national soccer teams — the first since Algeria won independence from France in 1962. Arranged as a sign of friendship and reconciliation, the game was held in the French national stadium, Stade de France, just outside Paris. Prime Minister Lionel Jospin was in the presidential box, along with half a dozen other ministers.

Things got off to a bad start when the French-Algerians in the stands — almost all of them French citizens — set up a terrible din of boos and whistles at the first note of La Marseillaise. The ministers could hardly hear their national anthem, but bellowed grimly through to the end. Every time a French player touched the ball he was met with jeers. With the French in the lead, four to one, the Algerians could stand it no longer. A woman, draped in the Algerian flag, jumped out of the stands and ran across the field. A stampede of spectators followed her and stopped the game. The crowd shouted “Algeria, Algeria!” and “We won!” as it began to pelt the presidential box with water bottles and cell phone batteries. Two lady ministers were hit. Minister for Youth and Sport Marie-George Buffet took a water bottle on the nose, and another had her fur coat ripped by a missile. The two sought safety in the ladies restroom. Security guards — beefed up from the usual 800 for such events to 1,200 on this occasion — managed to evacuate the stadium without much violence but home-bound Algerians sacked a commuter train and mugged passengers. As Mr. Buchanan notes, the weeks of arson and mayhem France went thorough in October and November of last year were hardly without warning.

The French have been as bumbling and indecisive in the face of mortal threat as the Americans — and the British and Germans and Italians and Australians. Whatever the combination of reasons — and I believe no one has adequately explained their psychological capitulation — elites have imposed the Third-World on Western societies against the express wishes of their inhabitants and voters. As Mr. Buchanan points out, countries like the United States and Australia can no longer be said to be democracies, and every white government has failed the test Enoch Powell set in 1968: “The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils . . . [T]he discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician.”

The result is that, in Mr. Buchanan’s words:

We are conducting an experiment rooted neither in common sense nor the American experience, but in an ideology that declares, against all historical evidence, that people of every country, creed, culture, or civilization are equally and easily assimilable into America, and all have an equal right to come here.

Mr. Buchanan proposes a sound list of remedies. He would build a 2,000-mile barrier along the entire southern border. He says it should be a 15-foot-high double wall with a road in between for the Border Patrol. It would cost about $8 billion but could be paid for if we charged $2.00 per person to enter the country legally.

Mr. Buchanan recognizes it would be a big job to cart off all the illegals, but believes they will go voluntarily if employers are strictly punished for hiring them, welfare and education benefits are cut off, and local police get the power to arrest on immigration charges.

Mr. Buchanan would end the “diversity lottery,” abolish birth-right citizenship, and make illegals ineligible for Social Security or the Earned Income Tax Credit. He would also end federal subsidies for cities that declared themselves “sanctuaries” for illegals, and would stop issuing visas to countries that refuse to take back unwanted citizens. If we do this, he writes, “in five to ten years our crisis will be at an end. But if we don’t do this, the crisis will end America.”

These measures would, indeed, be a marvelous beginning, and the success of Mr. Buchanan’s book suggests such a program would have broad support. Even if only half his program were enacted, it would be a great achievement. In the long term, of course, even if all immigration, legal and illegal, were halted tomorrow, differential birthrates would continue to eat away at the white majority, but our decline would slow from a gallop to a walk. Whites might even have babies again if they lived in a society they knew was dedicated to preserving European civilization and the people who created it.

The day may yet come when our people can say, along with Pat Buchanan, “America belongs to us, not the world.”