Where, then, is the virtuous pride that once distinguished Americans? where the indignant spirit, which, in defence of principle, hazarded a revolution to attain that independence now insidiously attacked?
Once we recognize the truth, that America has the moral right to control immigration on the basis of its own cultural—and environmental—self-preservation, we can begin to address the issue of meaningful immigration reform. It is not within the scope of this essay to go into details on such a complex question. For the present, I only want to suggest the outlines of a policy that will avoid national suicide.
(1) We need to reduce the number of legal immigrants in absolute terms, to the point where their sheer numbers will no longer overwhelm our society and culture or produce a disastrous swelling of our population. In place of our present system, which has a floor (quota immigration) with no ceiling above it (unlimited non-quota immigration and refugees), we must have a ceiling on total immigration. A limit of perhaps 200,000 per year would be reasonable. This would still leave us, by the way, with the most generous immigration policy on earth.
(2) The government needs to do whatever is necessary to stop illegal immigration. Despite the widespread belief that illegal immigration is uncontrollable, the fact is that the federal government has not been serious about this problem so far. If the government treated the problem seriously, it could stop illegal immigration overnight. Also, as Peter H. Schuck and Rogers M. Smith of Yale University have argued in Citizenship Without Consent, we need to change our current interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment which gives citizenship automatically to children of illegal aliens—a practice that undermines the consensual basis of citizenship and rewards lawbreaking.
It should be recognized that these proposals do not mean a return to the national and racial restrictions of the 1920s legislation; they do not mean exclusion of non-Europeans; but they do mean a rejection of radical multiculturalism and the visionary idea that the U.S. should become the “Mirror of the World.” We will be signaling to prospective immigrants that resettlement in the United States indicates a readiness to adopt the civilization of this country, including its common language. Immigrants should understand that they cannot expect to treat the U.S. as a mere extension of their home countries.
It should be made clear that these reforms are not aimed at non-European peoples as such, but at the huge numbers of immigrants that are altering the very composition—and destiny—of our nation. The rights and opportunities of new American citizens are not threatened by such changes in the law as are suggested here. But our recent immigrants and ethnic minorities should understand, as I’ve tried to show in this essay, that the endless continuation of uncontrolled immigration can only lead to the destruction of the very society that they supposedly want so much to be part of. By slowing immigration, we will give recent immigrants the opportunity and time to assimilate, much as the slow-down of immigration from 1921 to 1965 led to a diminution of anti-foreign prejudice and helped assimilation to occur.
There must be a middle ground that recognizes the rights of minorities and appreciates the values of a cosmopolitan mix in society at the same time that it affirms the historic character of our culture and America’s right to preserve that character. As columnist Samuel Francis has written, the survival of American culture requires “a new myth of the nation as a distinctive cultural and political force that cannot be universalized for the rest of the planet or digested by the globalist regime.”(87) What is proposed here is not a reactionary restoration of some vanished American past, but a reaffirmation of traditional principles in light of present realities. Our national self-concept is complex. The point is to prevent it from becoming so complex that it disintegrates. There must be room in our national mythos both for ethnic variety and the reaffirmation of our historic civilizational character.
If genuine reforms are thought to be impossible because of opposition by minority groups, I would like the reader to consider how much more difficult all political decisions are going to be in the future when every issue will have to pass a minefield of ethnic and racial blocs. That is why it is vital that we act now while there is still time—if there is still time. Action requires that the great mass of Americans, whatever their color, who care for this civilization and want it to be preserved, make their voices heard in a bloc, in the same way that highly motivated minority groups act when their interests are at stake. It is not enough merely to express concerns about immigration. People are doing that all the time, and it accomplishes little in the way of waking the nation up from its hypnotic passivity on this issue. On the contrary, the mere venting of anxieties and resentments only strengthens the open-borders orthodoxy by enabling it to dismiss all those who are concerned about immigration as xenophobes. It is time, rather, for the American people to legitimize the idea of meaningful immigration reform and then to enact fair and substantive changes in the law along the lines I have suggested here. All that is lacking, as the result of a quarter-century of orchestrated guilt, is the conviction that it is morally right—and the will to do it.
In any case, something must be done, and soon. The disdain felt by many Americans today for the 1920s nativists, for restricting immigration too tightly, will be nothing compared with the curses that future generations of Americans, mired in a divided and decaying society, will pile on our heads for erring too far in the opposite direction.
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