Mark Steyn - After America

And then Napoleon sold America the port of New Orleans. “I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her pride,” he said, making mischief. 71But the Mexican border was less than 200 miles from the newly American port, and a mere hundred from the expanded republic’s critical artery, the Mississippi River. The wannabe Imperio, for its part, had a problem of its own. The land west of New Orleans, in the Mexican department of Texas, was mostly desert or mountains, and consequently lightly inhabited. So it suited the southern power to let American immigrants settle in this unpromising terrain—“doing the jobs Mexicans won’t do,” one might say. When Sam Houston decided it was time for northern settlers to rebel, the distant imperial capital of Mexico City had a hell of a time just getting troops through to Texas in order even to be able to hold a war. The defeats that left the U.S.-Mexican border where it is now delegitimized New Spain’s ruling class, destabilized the politics of Mexico City for the better part of a century, and led to the squalid and violent polity we know today.

There are, give or take, 200 countries in the world. If you had 20 million “undocumented” immigrants more or less proportionately distributed between those 200 countries—Irish, Uzbeks, Belgians, Botswanans—then maybe they would be assimilable, although even then it would be an unprecedented challenge. But borderland immigration is different. In British terms, consider not the rapidly Islamizing East London or Yorkshire, where Muslims are aliens replacing a native population, but think instead of Ulster: when Ireland came under the English Crown, Scots Protestants settled the north. When the south seceded to become the Irish Free State in 1922, the United Kingdom got a land border for the first time in its history.

The loyalists could have had all nine counties of historic Ulster for their Northern Ireland statelet, but insisted on a mere six because they knew they did not have the numbers to hold the other three. And even in the six counties thousands were murdered in the decades ahead. A border settles things, but only conditionally: for Irish nationalists in Fermanagh and Tyrone, the line meant nothing. This was Ireland, not Britain, and they had been there first. That’s how many Mexicans feel about the southern frontier: Arizona is Mexico, not the United States, and it was Mexico first. You don’t have to be a large minority to cause an awful lot of trouble—as the British found out on a small patch of turf where Irish nationalists were outnumbered two-to-one by Unionists. And you don’t even have to believe so fervently that you’re willing to kill and bomb. You just have to believe enough to live it, in your daily routine. In the Arizona of tomorrow, Hispanics will be not a minority but a majority: they will not assimilate with the United States because they don’t need to. Instead, the United States will assimilate with them, and is already doing so, day by day.

In July 2010, Maywood, California, became the first city in America to lay off its entire workforce, including the police and fire departments, and contract out all services. 72It did this because the city was so mismanaged that its insurers canceled the coverage and every alternative provider declined to accept the city’s business. I was interested to discover, via the 2000 census, that the city is 96.33 percent Hispanic. Celebrate lack of diversity! What will it be by the time the 2010 census numbers are out? 98.7 percent? Maywood does not seem an obviously Spanish name, and in fact the city was named for Miss May Wood, a young lady who worked for the real estate developers responsible for the original subdivision that led to the incorporation of the city in 1924. If you lived there in the boom years of the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties, you’ll remember a blue collar town with good jobs, a civic culture, and a population that reflected the ethnic mix of the time. Then the jobs disappeared, and the civic culture declined, and Maywood turned 96.33 percent Hispanic in little more than two decades. So much for the melting pot. Today, one third of the population is estimated to be “illegal.” 73I put it in quotations because possession is nine-tenths of the law and in this case there’s no doubt who possesses Maywood. How many other towns will similarly transform, and how fast?

Culture is not immutable. But changing culture is tough and thankless and something America’s ever weakening assimilationists no longer have the stomach for. So go with the numbers: the Southwest will be Mexican, and Washington’s writ will no longer run. The Mexican-American War established the borders of the America we know today. It took a couple of centuries, but illegal immigration has reversed the results of that conflict.

America won the war, Mexico won the peace.

For Eloi America, it’s a short step from ethnocultural penance to ethnocultural masochism. Los Angeles, New York, and other “sanctuary cities” have formally erased the distinction between U.S. citizens and the armies of the undocumented. This is the active collusion by multiple jurisdictions in the subversion of United States sovereignty. In Newark, New Jersey, it means an illegal-immigrant child rapist is free to murder three high-school students execution-style for kicks on a Saturday night. 74In Somerville, Massachusetts, it means two deaf girls are raped by MS-13 members. 75And in the 7-Eleven parking lot in Falls Church, Virginia, where four young men obtained the picture ID with which they boarded their flight on September 11, 2001, it means Saudi Wahhabists figuring out that, if the “sanctuary nation” (in Michelle Malkin’s phrase) offers such rich pickings to imported killers and imported gangs, why not to jihadists? 76

So here is another proposition for the proposition nation: Is it more likely that these trends will reverse—or that they will accelerate? Consider life in a permanently poorer America with higher unemployment, less social mobility, and any prospect for self-improvement crushed by the burden of government. Will that mean more or less marijuana? More or less cocaine?

More or fewer meth labs? Mexican cartels account for approximately 70 percent of the narcotics that enter the U.S. to feed American habits. 77Arizona already has a kidnapping rate closer to Mexico’s than to New England’s. Are the numbers likely to rise or fall in an ever more Mexicanized United States? If you’re lucky, San Diego will seem no worse than Cancun, eastern resort capital of the Caribbean Riviera and generally thought of as relatively far from the scene of Mexico’s drug wars. 78Yet even in Cancun, within the space of a year, the head of the city’s anti-drugs squad was murdered; the chief of police was arrested on drugs-trafficking charges; and then the mayor was, too. We will start to read similar stories of wholesale corruption and subversion from the cities of the American Southwest. And similar tales of depravity, too: in 2010, the bodies of four men and two women were found in a cave on the outskirts of Cancun. 79They had been tortured. Their abdomens were branded with a “Z.” The mark of Zorro? No, the Zeta drug cartel. Three of them had had their chests ripped open and their hearts removed.

As I said, Cancun is regarded as one of the towns least afflicted by drug violence. More than 4,000 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq between 2003 and 2010. In 2010 alone, some 13,000 Mexicans were killed in the drug wars. 80More than 3,000 died in just one town—Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso. 81America will be importing not just drugs from Mexico, but the dominant players, the municipal outreach, and the business practices.

It’s foolish to assume “globalization” is a purely economic phenomenon.

In 2006, a group of Muslim men raised in suburban Ontario were arrested and charged with a terrorist plot that included plans to behead the Prime Minister. 82Almost simultaneously, the actual heads of three decapitated police officers were found in the Tijuana River. 83In 2010, four headless bodies were left dangling from a bridge in the picture-postcard tourist town of Cuernavaca. 84The same year, authorities arrested a leading hit-man beheader for one of the Mexican drug cartels. 85He was fourteen years old, and a U.S. citizen, too (the anchor baby of an undocumented Californian).