Mark Steyn - After America

The problem with dissolving the people and electing another is that you’d have to be a genius to pull off such a transformation without any unintended consequences. On the scale and speed with which much of the West has attempted it, you quickly reach a tipping point, in which the cultural capital of a functional nation state has been exhausted and what follows is… something else. The particular nature of America’s mass illegal immigration is almost consciously designed to fracture the republic, and lead to enormous tracts of the country becoming entirely dysfunctional.

For the corporate right, undocumented immigrants mean cheap labor.

For the statist left, they mean dependents—and cheap votes. For sentimentalists in between, it’s an act of ethnocultural penance: hence, the Cinco de Mayo observances in schoolhouses up and down the land. The left are right.

Big Government centralists don’t mind about the costs Undocumented America imposes, because in the main it imposes them on states, cities, and school districts—and thus makes previously self-sufficient branches of government ever more dependent on central authority. And just as Big Government doesn’t care about the impact on local government, Big Business doesn’t care about the impact of illegal labor on small business. This is a recipe for civil strife, if not, ultimately, civil war.

The corporate right wanted open borders for cheap workers in part because the statist left has made American workers too expensive: you can ship manufacturing jobs to cheaper labor overseas, but it’s not so easy with hotel chambermaids and seasonal agricultural workers. Meanwhile, the statist left favored open borders as a way of importing voters: untold millions of poor, ill-educated people with little English would need government services, and untold hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats would need to be hired to service them. And so Big Government grows its base. Most illegal immigrants arrived in the Southwest, where states are not red like the Old South nor blue like the Northeast, but kinda purple—50/50 congressional districts and Senate seats where a few anchor babies here and English-as-a-Second-Language programs there and the Democratic Party can tip the demographics permanently in its favor. In such a world, what happens when the economy nosedives and you have competing groups of poor whites, poor blacks, and poor Hispanics chasing ever fewer jobs and crushing the welfare system through sheer numbers?

The left was smarter than the right: the business class told itself it was importing hardworking families who just want a shot at the American Dream. But welfare mocks the Ellis Island virtues, upending them as easily as the shattered Statue of Liberty Charlton Heston stumbled across in the sands of a ruined planet. In an America with ever bigger government and ever poorer people, the dependency rationale for illegal immigration will win out over the business rationale. Seventy percent of births at the San Joaquin General Hospital in Stockton, California, are the so-called “anchor babies” born to illegals. 65In related news, by 2010 Stockton’s school district had a deficit of $25 million. 66Same thing at Dallas General: 70 per cent of newborns are “anchor babies.” 67Seven out of ten isn’t any kind of “minority”; it’s the dominant culture of America’s tomorrow.

As for “racist” Arizona, the majority of its schoolchildren are already Hispanic. 68So, even if you sealed the border today, the state’s future is as a Hispanic society: that’s a given. Maybe it’ll all work out swell. The citizenry never voted for it, but they got it anyway. Because all the smart guys bemoaning the irrational bigots knew what was best for them.

To the coastal Eloi, “undocumented immigrants” are the unseen Morlocks who mow your lawn while you’re at work and clean your office while you’re at home. (That’s the real apartheid: the acceptance of a permanent “undocumented” servant class by far too many “documented” Americans who assuage their guilt by pathetic self-serving sentimentalization of immigration.) But in border states illegal immigration is life and death. A few days after Arizona passed its new law, I gave a speech in Tucson for the Goldwater Institute, and a lady came up to me afterwards to talk about the camp of illegals that’s pitched up on the edge of her land, a few miles from downtown, but where the Federal Government has posted highway “Danger” signs warning the public that travel beyond this point is “not recommended.” My audience member had no choice in the matter: she’s not passing through; this is her home—and, if the Government of the United States is now putting up signs explaining that its writ no longer runs, they didn’t think to warn her ahead of time. So she lies awake at night, fearful for her children and alert to strange noises in the yard. President Obama, shooting from his lip, attacked the Arizona law as an offense against “fairness.” 69But where’s the fairness for this woman’s family? Because her home is in Arizona rather than Hyde Park, Chicago, she’s just supposed to get used to living under siege? She has to live there, while the political class that created this situation climbs back into the limo and gets driven far away from the intimidation, and the cartel hits, and the remorseless ebbing of U.S. sovereignty. The fetishization of the Undocumented is a form of class warfare waged against poor whites by Eloi elites who don’t have to live with the consequences of the socioeconomic experiments they impose on others.

As for “the jobs Americans won’t do,” most of them would be more accurately categorized as the jobs American employers won’t hire Americans to do—because, in a business culture ever more onerously regulated, the immigration status of one’s employees has become one of the easiest levers for controlling costs. Why would this change? After all, as the official unemployment climbed to 10 percent and the non-college-educated unemployment rate hit 15 percent and the unofficial rate among blacks and other groups rose even higher, the rote-like invocations of “the jobs Americans won’t do” was affected not a whit. If Americans won’t do them (or won’t be hired to do them) even at a time of high unemployment, maybe that’s the problem that needs to be addressed. Instead, to solve an artificially created labor shortage, the U.S. government deemed U.S. immigration law unenforceable and illegitimate. And so the armies of the Undocumented will swell exponentially as Mexico dissolves into a murderous narco-state feeding ever greater northern habits. What is happening on the southern border is the unmaking of America.

There was a story that zipped around the Internet a few years ago, about a Mexican Air Force pilot who’d supposedly photographed a UFO. North of the border the response to this amazing news, from professional comedians to website comment sections, was well nigh universal: Mexico has an air force. Who knew? 70

Ha-ha. Mexico. Third World joke. Actually, two centuries back, it had a bigger military than the United States. Like America, it was a settler society, but older and larger: Mexico City was founded in 1524, and, when Madrid belatedly recognized the independence of “New Spain” in 1821, the city gave its name to a country—and, indeed, empire: Imperio Mexicano. Not as silly as it may sound. Before the Louisiana Purchase, if you’d been asked to predict which settler capital, Mexico City or Washington, would emerge as the seat of power in post-colonial North America, many an analyst would have plumped for the Spaniards. They had an imperialist’s sweep: when they seceded from Madrid, they did so in a “Solemn Act of the Declaration of Independence of Northern America,” which definition stretched all the way north to what’s now the Oregon border and quite a ways south, to Panama. By comparison, the United States seemed a weak and vulnerable territory holed up east of the Appalachians. It was a land economically dependent on exports but with few strategic transportation routes and unable to protect its sea lanes.