Katie’s Dad 2.0

After Fisking Clive Crook’s permissive immigration piece, I decided to drop Mr. Crook a note to let him know that I’d replied to his editorial.  It was a bit of a surprise to get a response…I’ve sent probably 50 or so such notes since I started writing this five years ago and I can only remember getting a couple of other responses from media types.  So I have to tip my hat to Mr. Crook for that.

Here’s the exchange, starting with Mr. Crook’s thoughts on my original piece.

From: Crook, Clive
Sent: Sunday, May 13, 2007 2:31 PM
To: Katie’s Dad
Subject: Re: You’ve been Fisked

Dear Katie’s Dad,

Thanks for alerting me to your post. In a way, of course, I’m flattered that you thought my article worth attacking so passionately and at such length. I suppose the worst thing, if you have an opinion you wish to foist on other people, is to be ignored.

The contempt you express for me and my article does not exactly invite conversation, but for what it’s worth I’d like you to know that I deeply admire America and the American idea; that it has been my ambition for many years to live and work here, and to become an American citizen. I believe that America’s ability to assimilate its immigrants has been its greatest strength (to be contrasted with Europe’s failure in this regard), and that this, in turn, has much to do with the country’s ethic of work and the obligations of citizenship. Immigration without those things—immigration in a prevailing climate of “multiculturalism”–is a disaster; but immigration with those things is a source of strength and renewal. Reading some of your other posts I infer that you agree with the importance of that distinction. I understand that you believe America’s ability to assimilate its immigrants is being taxed beyond breaking point. I respect and understand that point of view, but think that it is overly pessimistic. At any rate, I don’t think the country will have much trouble assimilating me—or so my American wife keeps telling me.

Yours sincerely
Clive

I responded today with this:

Dear Mr. Crook,

Thanks for your kind reply. My blog can be a bit harsh. I have a consistent history of taking issue when a foreigner, whether he’s a legal immigrant to America or a Mexican President, has access to big pulpit and uses it to influence my nation’s immigration policy. I think it’s bad sport because immigration isn’t a political issue between different nations; more than any other factor, the immigration policy we act upon has the capacity to fundamentally affect the nature of who we are and the legacy we leave for our children.

Outsiders should have no say whatsoever on this issue.

So, when reading your article I locked in on your immigrant status. I was reminded my disgust for my U.S. Senator, Mel Martinez, the poster boy for why immigrants should never be allowed to run for higher office. He exemplifies the danger of electing poorly-assimilated interlopers whose understanding of American history is errant and trivial. He intentionally positions himself to make fundamental changes to our culture. If he gets his way, my four-year-old daughter will grow up to suffer greatly for it. I’ve been made steward of a heritage legacy for my descendants that Mel Martinez wants to destroy in favor of his ‘tribe.’

To me, that’s what political pandering to ethnicities represents: Modern Tribalism. But as a ‘white guy,’ it remains politically incorrect for me to point out that the needs, wants, desires and best interests of my tribe - the one that Founded America – are being ignored in this political rush to suck up to our imported replacements. All the while, ‘guys of all the other tribes’ are encouraged in some Orwellian political theater of the absurd to exalt in the primacy of alien cultures that were all so successful that they had to abandon their communities in a quest for ‘better lives.’

I applaud your wanting to become American. In my experience dealing with immigrants in recent years, and I have a lot of it, I find your desire to be quite rare. If you are to become an American Citizen, I do hope you try to understand that there is still a lot of desire on the part of many Americans to be faithful stewards of ancestral achievements. For the most part, you aren’t going to find them in big cities; the impositions of diversity offend deeply those of us whose parents handed down American legacies. I take my role as steward quite seriously; because I am the youngest son of the youngest son of the youngest son, I am only five generations removed from the Revolution and only 12 generations removed from founders of Massachusetts Bay Colony. As I child, I had the benefit of having older parents who had even older cousins and all of them steeped my young mind in my American heritage. I’ve been an interested student of how this nation came to be and what made it great for as long as I have memories.

I’ll agree to a point that America has had great strength in its ability to assimilate immigrants. But I patently reject the notion that we have ever been ‘tolerant’ of them in the least. I also reject as simplistic any claims that assimilation is all about embracing the ‘work ethic.’ Becoming American requires more than embracing a creed or subscribing to a list of ideals. It requires embracing the whole culture to the exclusion of the political and social artifacts of an immigrant’s birth culture. When an alien internalizes our culture to the point at which he thinks of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, etc. as ‘my founding fathers,’ he’s on the right track. If you take time out of your day to carry signs and chant slogans in spanish while carrying Mexican flags through the streets of someone else’s nation, it’s good indicator that you don’t give a rat’s ass about ‘their founding fathers.’

Sure, some immigrants have added a bit of spice here and there, but they have not really changed us. It used to be only the incredibly rare exception that an immigrant could come here and still hold in his heart more than a few trivial remnants from his homeland. Of course, it’s always been easier for a Brit to assimilate because our ancestors are the same. And the Brits had been ‘rubbing elbows’ (warring, trading, swapping genes, forming alliances) with the tribes that formed the nations of Western Europe for thousands of years. It isn’t a hard leap for most from that region to come here and get with the program.

On the other hand, we do not share a long historical love/hate relationship with the source nations that supply most of our immigrants today – our historical ‘elbows’ never touched. While Jefferson did not address the issue of our current sources of immigrants directly because he could not have foreseen it, he was very clear about the dangers inherent in the importation of too different others in Notes on Virginia, Query 8. From most, my pointing it out would be deemed racist, xenophobic and all of the other colorful epithets the pro-mass immigration folks have taken up to discourage any discussion about what their intentions might mean for those of us who don’t believe America can thrive or survive if it becomes truly multicultural to the point that its ancestral legacies are lost, buried…or intentionally destroyed. I can think of no more effective way to erase history than by replacing a good portion of our population with Diasporas that do not place the same value on education that we do and that on the average are a full standard deviation less intellectually capable than the average American. You included in the title of your original piece, ‘The Wealth of Nations.’ Well, let’s just entitle my rebuttal, ‘IQ and the Wealth of Nations.’

Despite our being in the midst of the largest, longest and most alien immigration surge in American history, foundational Americanism is strong and influential in most of America. Our culture was first forged by Puritan intolerance, then rejuvenated by the reformations of the ‘First Great Awakening.’ Sadly, few Americans today know that all of our founding fathers were born and raised in an incredibly strict religious atmosphere that arose at the time of the Great Awakening. Yes, I’m well aware of the supposed ‘deism’ practiced by many founders, but they still were raised and molded by Protestant reformation ideals that were part of who they became. Most importantly, the Founding Generation (In my opinion, this was ‘The Greatest Generation’) fought for its freedom against the longest odds with the strong faith that Providence had preordained their success. Those who came after the Revolution were deemed ‘different,’ and when an American cartographer coined the term ‘immigrant’ in about 1789 it quickly became part of the common vernacular. The term was not taken up because it had a positive connotation and has retained a bit of its musty odor for all these years. The first American citizens were not immigrants and they had very particular notions about who might qualify to become an American.

For the nearly 200 years before the Hart-Celler debacle of 1965, repatriation was the only option for about a third of all who immigrated here. America became good at assimilation because it was inherently selective in who was allowed to come and who was allowed the comfort to stay. Even during the last great wave, those who were the most ‘different’ from America’s core stock, the Italians, had the hardest go of it and repatriated in the largest numbers. Considering the that wave led to the most restrictive immigration laws ever passed, America has never proved successful at assimilating large masses of immigrants of any stripe. And those groups it has taken in completely are without exception those from Western Europe. I always ask people who think we’re so good at assimilating immigrants to think about what might have happened at the start of WWII had the Johnson-Reed restrictions never been passed or never enforced. What would an America made up of 20% immigrants in Diaspora be able to do, considering it would have had large blocs of Germans and Italians whose children would never have really Americanized? What would we have done if 30% or so of the voting age population had naturally maintained in Diaspora its allegiances to Axis powers? What would the world look like today?

In 1910, 14.8% of the US resident population was immigrant. By then, restrictionist organizations had been growing in influence for more than a decade. Economics and war put a short halt to the influx and repatriation lowered the total percentage. But as soon as it started to climb again after WWI, there was a hue and cry for it to stop. And Congress did effectively stop it for 41 years. Thanks to that atmosphere, and the additional voluntary repatriation of millions from the Great Wave, the percentage of immigrants dropped. By 1970, just prior to the Hart-Cellar flood getting under way, there were fewer than 5% immigrant residents of America. History suggests it’s likely that there is some sort of percentage-of-immigrants threshold that when breached causes a backlash. Today we’re probably beyond that all-time high percentage of foreign-born residents set in 1910. What percentage of immigrants and their first generation children in Diaspora is too much? What happens when we get to 20% foreign-born residents, as will surely happen quickly if there is another amnesty and fairly soon if enforcement remains neglected?

What happens when enough American citizens who rightfully feel their birthright is being sold out by ‘their leaders’ wake up and realize that without their immediate action they will no longer be part of a majority ethnicity? How does their loss of political influence, and it would be lost forever, differ from the impending Muslim demographic takeover of Europe? The template for what will result is already there for those willing to look: I grew up in South Florida, near Miami. When I got out of college in 1982, I soon found myself working for a Congressional Miami field office. I’ve still not gotten over the third-world culture shock and cannot forget being constantly aghast at the open corruption I saw among my co-workers (many were the children and grandchildren of Batista’s close associates). Still, there was still some America left there and I spent years as a political operative in the region. I even lived in Miami for a year and learned first-hand how much inter-tribal hatred there is in that multicultural city. The real Americans left long ago.

Today, there are mostly first, second and third generation Cubans and other Caribbean and Latin American nationals living in the region. They think they know what it means to be American, but they never in their lives have been around a single soul whose ancestors had a hand in making this nation. How can they possibly have a clear clue about that? Based on two decades of communicating with and commiserating with people who believe we need strong immigration restrictions from across this land, I know that every single day there are hundreds, sometimes thousands, of American families packing up and fleeing from the joys of diversity. After years of trying to stick it out, I realized I could not risk being in my late 50’s in a South Florida that would culturally exclude me because I’d be of the wrong heritage for that place. I picked up my family and fled: We’re refugees in our own nation. This disaster has already gone too far and it must stop! If passed, this amnesty will trigger the largest internal refugee migration within any nation in history.

Edmund Burke, perhaps Britain’s greatest supporter of the American Revolution, would surely advise that those encouraging today’s rapid, radical change in American demography are being foolish and that we should chill out and think it over a bit. So, please pardon me for having a little fit over your ideas about immigration. Since your grasp of American legacy is still weak, your considering me ‘overly pessimistic’ about mass-immigration is more than a bit absurd. On what grounds aside from platitudes, from what real knowledge of America, do you make that assumption? Short-term economic arguments don’t count because if we become some God awful post-American America thanks to dumb immigration decisions, the greatest economic strength of the world will surely not be found anywhere near America.

While I do deeply admire you and everyone who truly has the desire to Americanize themselves before they take our oath and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to their former homelands, I just don’t think you’re very well informed yet. So it’s not your place to influence a debate that will decide what sort of ‘who we are’ I pass on to my descendants.

Regards,

Katie’s Dad.

American History, Culture, Diversity, Immigration, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, Politics, Racism