A Dubious Patriotism - On Accommodating Reality
By Fred Reed
January 12, 2017 "Information Clearing House" - Methinks that, for the good of the country, it is time that the “Alt-Right,” those bitterly hostile to our Latin-America population, stop and think. There is a difference between opposing further immigration, a good idea, and constantly attacking American citizens.
Many good reasons existed for preventing massive immigration from the south. But it happened. Some forty-five million legal Hispanics (whatever exactly the word means) are now in America, mostly citizens. They show no signs of leaving. They cannot be deported. Their children become citizens. It is unlikely that many of the (very vaguely) estimated twelve million illegals will be deported or chased out.
Given this reality, the question becomes, or should become, what to do to, for, with, or about these people? The future of the country very much depends on the answer.
A beginning would be not to turn them into another dysfunctional, hostile racial minority–which is exactly what the Alt-Right seems bent on doing. Blacks, thirteen percent of the population, appear irremediably angry, with obvious untoward consequences. If the Alt-Right can make another seventeen percent into internal enemies, it will be the end of anything recognizable as America.
Yet from the organs of the Alt-Right–VDare, Breitbart News, and so on–comes a drumbeat to the effect that Latin-Americans are stupid, filthy, lazy, criminal, and parasitic. Mr. Trump, hostile to Mexico and Mexicans, has called them “rapists,” which resonates in Latin America much as Hillary’s “deplorables” speech did in Middle America. We have hysterical books painting them as the end of civilization and human decency. (Ann Coulter’s ˇAdios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole comes to mind.)
Yet from the Alt-Right comes no suggestion of practical policy toward the permanent Latin population. Hatred is not a policy.
The choices available to the country, other than doing nothing, are to encourage, or to discourage, assimilation. For the good of the United States, assimilation seems much the better choice. Diversity is almost always a disaster, but, if you already have it, and it is not going to leave, the best hope is to assimilate it, to encourage the diverse to move into the middle class and stop being very diverse.
Can Latin Americans be assimilated? Maybe, maybe not. Walking around Los Angeles, San Antonio, Houston, or in Chicago, where relations seem entirely amicable, suggests “yes.” The “not” arises largely from the possibility that the combined influence of the Alt-Right and black racial animosity will drive young Latin men into the current anti-white insanity.
My own experience suggests that assimilation can be accomplished. In these matters I may have more experience than most of the Alt-Right. I have lived in Mexico for sixteen years. My wife is Mexican, we speak Spanish in the home, and we have toured the country from one end to the other. I have traveled extensively in all the countries of South America except Paraguay and Venezuela. Nowhere (with the exception perhaps of parts of Central America) have I seen the hellholes imagined–I might almost say “fervently desired”–by the Alt-Right. Lima, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Bogotá, Montevideo and many others are modern cities, with airlines, telecommunications, skyscrapers, and so on. Hellholes? I wonder whether Miss. Coulter has been in Latin America.
On the site of American Renaissance, which takes a very dim view of Latin-Americans, I have seen links to a pair of studies by the Pew Research Center. The first, from 2013, found that 89% of American-born Latins are proficient in English. astonishing as sunrise. The second found that succeeding generations are losing their identification as Hispanics, also hardly a surprise, and also that intermarriage is high. Is this not assimilation?
America’s various minorities are not identical. The Latins are Christian, speak a European language, do not drive airplanes into buildings or shoot up homosexual nightclubs, do not have Brown Lives Matter or the Knockout Game, do not mutilate their daughters or discourage them from going to university, do not engage in honor killings.
Consider a not-very-hypothetical Rosa born of illegal parents in Los Angeles, age nineteen, speaking unaccented California English, and pecking at her cell phone. She will not be seen as very Mexican by young Anglo men. Language is a powerful marker of difference. Rosa is also likely to be pretty, which will not hinder assimilation.
The second available policy toward Latins is to discourage assimilation. This won’t work for long (see Rosa, above). Such discouraging is the obvious if unacknowledged desire of the Alt-Right. The Anti-Latinos tend to frame their hostility in terms of objective traits real or imagined–Latins don’t learn English, do commit crimes, live on welfare, take American jobs. Yet one requires little reading to see that their real objection is racial.
In today’s climate of compulsory right-thought, wanting to maintain one’s race and culture is bad, very bad. Actually of course it is an age-old instinct and practiced by Japanese, Chinese, Jews, white nationalists, Latin Americans, and pretty much everybody else. It does not well survive assimilation.
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The problem vis-a-vis the Alt-Right’s desire for racial purity is that Latins, who are not going to go away, cannot change their race. This means that no matter what they do, how many languages they learn, how many degrees they earn, or taxes they pay, the Alt-Right will loathe them. I wonder: Should this loathing be permitted to shape the future of the country?
Assimilation and racial purity being incompatible and diametrically opposed, we must choose. You can have one, or the other, but not both. To discourage assimilation, one needs to maximize bad relations between Latin and Anglo. This seems exactly what the Alt-Right is determined to do.
Racial hostility explains the profound ignorance of most of the Alt-Right of South America. Read their websites, their comments. They seem to have no curiosity as to where the immigrants come from, what manner of wights they be, or what they can do or have done. This is not the place for a disquisition on Latin American culture. Still, anyone of intellectual breadth must be aware of the rich and extensive body of music, literature, poetry, and cinema of southern lands. All of this can easily be found on the internet. One may wonder why the Alt-Right has not bothered. Ask who Carlos Monsivais was, or Octavio Paz. You will get get a blank stare.
More culpable are the leaders of the Alt-Right, highly intelligent and educated people, most of them talking heads of the DC-Manhattan bubble. They are not of limited mind and could afford to learn what they are talking about. They do not. They are misrepresenting peoples they have never met, civilizations they have never seen. They regard this a patriotism.
Finally, though perhaps in offense to literary continuity, it is interesting to look at the logic, if that is quite the word, of much of the Alt-Right’s cultivation of hostility. They say that “Mexicans take American jobs.” How? Does Pedro put a pistol to an American worker’s head and say, “Geeve me zee shoffel or I blow your brines out”? Or do American businessmen, to make more money, hire countless Pedros, knowing perfectly well that they are illegal? Do Mexicans attach wheels to American factories by dark of night and roll them to Tampico? Or do American corporations, to make more money, build factories in Mexico? Who is taking American jobs?
The Latins are in America to stay. Love it or hate it, it is over, a done deal. How do we make the best of i–which may not be very bad?
Fred's Biography - As He Tells It - Fred, a keyboard mercenary with a disorganized past, has worked on staff for Army Times, The Washingtonian, Soldier of Fortune, Federal Computer Week, and The Washington Times. His website - www.fredoneverything.org
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