Latinizing the United States

America’s brainless left has assured us that the migrants flooding the nation from south of the border are going to bring us their brilliance and competence. They are going to contribute mightily to the growth of the technology industry. Many will be competing for Nobel prizes in science. Beyond the fact that we will lose our moral compass if we do not appear to be the world’s most caring state, we must allow in anyone who wants to enter the nation… because it will be good for us.

In a recent post Daniel Greenfield makes a more salient point. (via Maggie’s Farm) The Mexican and Central American immigrants are fleeing social and political dysfunction. They are fleeing crime ridden nations, world leaders in homicide, and nations run by a small coterie of oligarchs that own just about everything.

We should open our eyes to the simple fact that they are not going to assimilate. They are not going to embrace American values… most of them do not speak the language and do not have more than an elementary school education. By the laws of demography the more there are the more likely they will be to stick together and to preserve their native culture.

By any indicators, the nations to the south are in deep political trouble:

Even now, there is political chaos in Nicaragua, with major protests demanding the ouster of Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, and brewing scandals in Argentina, Brazil and Peru that could expand and tear any or all of the three countries apart.

Political instability, sharp swings from the far left to the far right, from Marxist terrorists to military warlords, are not a temporary aberration that can be fixed with our foreign aid or military intervention. They’re an enduring feature of political life that are as much a part of Latin America as the Declaration, the Constitution and the Founding Fathers are a part of the United States of America.

Worse yet, Greenfield astutely points out, America is too divided to offer a unified culture, one that migrants can adopt. Only a united America, an America proud of its greatness can have a chance at assimilating migrants. A divided nation will not. What's the point of becoming part of a nation that never was great, that was an organized criminal conspiracy.

So, the migrant population will bring their own culture to America. America will not turn them into thriving citizens. In truth, they will change America into something like a replica of South America.

The nations south of the border have always resented their northern neighbors. It’s about culture. It’s also about religion. This resentment has proved a fertile ground for Marxist fantasies of overthrowing the capitalist patriarchy… because South and Central Americans see themselves as the victims of Anglo-Saxon tyranny and exploitation. If North America has largely outperformed the rest of the hemisphere, then the exploited and oppressed masses must rise up to deconstruct its success.

Greenfield continues:

Political and civic institutions in Latin America are sources of instability. What little stability there is comes from the legal economy of oligarchs and the shadow economy of organized crime. The oligarchs work national economies and provide opportunities for educated professionals and trained workers. The crime lords, cartels and gangs offer security and economic opportunity for those nearer to the bottom.

America is not going to Americanize the countries south of the border. Instead America is being remade along a more Latin American model with radical politics, gang violence and a loss of civic confidence.

If we cannot get migration under control, we are doomed as a nation and doomed as a civilization.

Lest anyone believe that the problem began yesterday or that it was produced by bug-eyed leftist buffoons, Greenfield reminds us that it began with farmers looking for cheap agricultural labor.

Latin American revolutions delivering cheap labor to America is not a new phenomenon. The real life Joads of Grapes of Wrath wouldn’t have been able to find agricultural work because the jobs were filled by Mexicans. The Cristero War’s Mexican migrants had been protected from the Immigration Act’s quotas because then, as now, agribusiness insisted that they couldn’t run farms without them.

Even in the Dust Bowl era, the same old interests insisted that there were jobs Americans wouldn’t do.

This began nearly a century ago. How well have these workers assimilated into America?

A century later the same Mexican workers that helped build California agriculture, decimated it by voting in Democrats whose environmental policies starved farms of water and strangled them with countless regulations. The workers have moved on to water-hungry cities where they don’t pick fruit, they provide services to a wealthy population of professionals, and then pass the bill to social services.

So, the children and grandchildren of the farm laborers voted for a political party that killed many farms with burdensome environmental regulations. They migrated to the large blue state cities where they have become a servant class. And profit from America’s generous welfare programs:

American taxpayers are being taxed to death so that blue state urban professionals can have cheap nannies, housekeepers and gardeners working off the books and making their lifestyles possible. The hospital visits, prison terms and welfare of that shadow population is financed by onerous taxes.

The problem cannot be addressed, Greenfield states, without building a wall along the nation’s southern border. It will not merely show that we are a nation with borders, but will declare that we are not going to try to fix the rest of the continent. In so saying he is countering the current policy proposal, being floated by left and right, that we can solve the problem by sending aid money to Mexico and Central America, the better to help them to build their countries.

As Greenfield sees it, those countries are beyond fixing.  A few more dollars is not going to do much of anything.

The wall is an important symbol not only of American sovereignty, but of the recognition that we are not going to fix the rest of the continent. When President Trump pulled foreign aid from migrant countries, he was not only sending them a message, but tossing out the swamp talking point that the best way to stop migration wasn’t a wall, but nation building in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.

No amount of foreign aid is going to change the reality on the ground in the homeland of MS-13.

America is not going to assimilate these migrants because it has lost its social cohesion. In that, Greenfield is saying, it resembles the failed nations to our south. With an absence of social cohesion, we see more crime, more criminal gangs, more oligarchs and more social chaos:

Policies don’t stop crime. Social cohesion does. As a society breaks down, it tries to fight the most obvious symptoms of social breakdown with violence, before embracing the breakdown until there is no longer a distinction between law and criminality, between cops and gangs, and politicians and bosses.

Mass migration breaks down social cohesion. Immigration transformed major cities a hundred years ago, and then took a breather, allowing them to develop their own culture and identity. The organized crime that they brought with them faded as the next generation assimilated and became Americans.

That’s where the New York City, Boston or Philly we know came from. But there are no more geographic restrictions and no breathers. Not when hordes of Somalis are crossing the border on the way to Maine.

He adds a few highly pertinent remarks about the collapse of America’s social cohesion. If you examine the state of today’s politics, you cannot help but see social disintegration in action:

The collapse of social cohesion wrecks the middle class leading to political radicalism and gang power. Political instability and social instability form a violent cycle which drive each other. The migrants heading north carry their radical politics with them. And the organized criminals who accompany them set up shop and quickly transform political instability into social instability.

That is what is tearing apart America.

To conclude, he notes that South and Central American nations do not care that much about American foreign aid. They receive billions in remittances from their citizens who are working off the books in America and who are sending money back to their home countries:

Mexico began the great tradition of dumping its social problems in America over a century ago. These days it’s become an extremely profitable endeavor with billions in remittances pouring back in. Latin American countries export unskilled labor and gang members, and get back billions of dollars.

It’s a great deal for them. And a terrible deal for us.

Honduras and El Salvador don’t care if Trump cuts off its foreign aid. Not when remittances make up a fifth of their GDPs. The more of their citizens they get across the border and onto our social services, the more money their countries have. It’s not just the migrants who are exploiting the United States to avoid the social collapse of their countries. Latin American countries are exploiting America wholesale.