Nice Has Nothing to do With It (Immigration and Assimilation)

By Wayne Allensworth

I was strolling around the campus of a major state university not so many years ago. Along the way, I committed what has become a cardinal sin in our brave new globalized world—I noticed something that stood out like a man in a three-piece suit in a 21^st century supermarket. What I noticed was that the student body didn’t look very American. I saw lots of representatives of the Indian sub-continent, for instance, and lots of what we call “Asians” nowadays. Some were even garbed in the exotic styles of their native lands. Turbans and Sarees. A significant number of the blacks I saw looked African rather than African-American. Whites of whatever variety—fairly normal, whatever that means any more, nerd, or radical chic Bohemian—were definitely a minority. Joe Campus and Susie Sorority were no doubt around somewhere, but if so, were like phantoms passing unnoticed in the twilight.  

An old friend accompanied me. And I subjected him to an impassioned rant about the elephant in the room we are supposed to ignore. Our ancestors who founded this university, I began, would likely be appalled that the people it was intended to educate — our own — were only an afterthought. If, that is, they were given any thought at all, except as representatives of an oppressive, racist society in need of re-education.

Our old alma mater was in fact not a “state” university at all, but a global one, a channel for training and funneling human techno-widgets into the globo-Babel machine the Blob is so busily creating right in front of our eyes.

Flash forward a few years. My wife and I were invited to a wedding in Kentucky, with a gathering at Churchill Downs thrown in. The groom was what Archie Bunker would have called “a regular American,” albeit of the upper middle class. The bride was a “dot” Indian. I clinched my jaw through a full-scale Subcontinent ceremony, half expecting the happy couple to enter on the back of an elephant. It was loud, garish, and quite depressing. They, it was quite evident, were not becoming us. We were becoming them.

We should have expected that reverse assimilation would be “a thing” in post-Christian post-America. We are supposed to become them. Or simply disappear. And many of us — including the groom at that wedding — have already shed our old identities like a snake shedding its skin. It’s part of our new religion. We have not only accepted reverse assimilation, we never truly assimilated our own children, admittedly a difficult task in an atomized technological society. But that doesn’t change the truth of our failure.

Shocking, revolting, depressing, scary … take your pick, but the reality of an immigrant-swamped America is all of those things.

There are myriad good reasons for opposing mass immigration. Of course, sensible political, economic, and environmental arguments can be made, all of them supported by lots of evidence. Anyone making them will be blasted as a racist anyway, but there you are.

But one reason is the ground of all the others, the one that matters most. We want to preserve the remains of this country because it is ours. It was made by our ancestors for ourselves and our posterity. Demographics and racial/ethnic composition are core issues. The millions of people streaming across our invisible and practically non-existent border from vastly different cultures, speaking dozens of languages, often adhering to religions not our own, are not us and can never be us. The differences are too vast, the numbers too great, and reverse assimilation bolstered by white guilt is doing its job of making amnesiacs of more and more of us.

I have a number of foreign-born neighbors. In fact, on some days a walk through the neighborhood is like an imaginary world tour. Occasionally they speak only a vague facsimile of English. And most of them are quite nice. We are terminally nice ourselves, no longer allowing ourselves to notice the shades of differences, much less the vast gulfs, between us and them that we intuitively know will make Rainbow America nothing more than a fantasy, a waystation to further chaos and the inevitable expansion of the managerial class and its power over us.

You see, gentle readers, yours truly long ago realized that my very nice neighbors cannot feel the way I feel when I have walked across the battlefield at Gettysburg, eyeing Cemetery Ridge, hearing in the distant background the clash and clatter of our national tragedy. No wave of wistful affection accompanies their glancing down the benighted main streets of our dying small towns. No sense of connection exists between them and the countryside of vast plains, forests, deserts, and mountains of our America. They can’t feel it because they never knew it.

We shouldn’t need to explain this, and in a sane world we wouldn’t. We may grow weary of repeating what should not need repeating, but it’s necessary to say so again and again. Not because we hope to convert those who have already sold their souls to the globalist beast, or to foreigners who have no ears to hear. But because we still need our own people to hear it and know it’s true and good and not a sin to believe it.

It may well be that my foreign-born neighbors are nicer, more pleasant, and easier to get along with than some of my own relatives. I may see them more often than old friends. But the bigger part of them will remain forever strangers. Nice has nothing to do with it.

The things we value most in life, and that bring meaning and purpose to our lives are not so easy to explain in the kind of newspeak we have grown accustomed to. And it’s all too easy for our opponents to use contextless politicized speech to dismiss our quite human, quite necessary, even indispensable attachments.

There’s not much time, and I’m not optimistic that Texas Governor Abbott or any other governor will take a truly radical step and confront Leviathan head on regarding mass immigration. They are too attached to the beast themselves. And I do not believe that conventional “horse-race” politics, especially at the national level, can save us. Our focus should be elsewhere. Yet anything at all we can get in the way of border control is a good thing.

In the meantime, we should behave as if our life in exile has already begun — I, for one, think it has — and take care of our children and grandchildren as they face an increasingly hostile environment.

Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of  The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.