Warning: Pseudo-elites Encouraging Immigrants to Segregate, Not Assimilate

“Everybody, in all mainstream political parties and media … would laugh — laugh — about the word assimilation,” lamented journalist Mikael Jalving in 2014. It “is a Nazi word in Sweden 1764819241”

What kind of people was Danish journalist Jalving talking about? A good example is Swedish multiculturalist Mona Sahlin. Commenting on her land’s Islamization in 2001, she actually said that “the Swedes must be integrated into the new Sweden.” The “old Sweden is never coming back.”

And, warns a top immigration expert, like-minded, powerful pseudo-elites in America have the same attitude today. “Citizens of the world,” they dislike their country and culture, eschew Americanization, and thus discourage assimilation. Only, they’re not as forthcoming as Sahlin about their aims.

Nations Within Nations

Like her, though, they’re largely responsible for creating an immigration crisis. And Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, commented on that crisis recently. It will continue, he told Fox News Digital in an interview, as long as this anti-Americanization spirit persists. As Fox related yesterday, Krikorian stated

during an interview that one of the core drivers of declining assimilation in America is not only mass immigration itself but an ongoing “identity problem” in which the country’s elite have made assimilation a “dirty word” by rejecting American identity and exceptionalism.

“It’s not the immigrants’ doing, it’s a problem we have where our leadership classes, whether it’s government, business, education, religion, everything, aren’t really sure about whether it is even a good thing to be an American,” Krikorian … continued.

“The idea basically here is that there is no meaning to nationhood or to peoplehood[,] that living in the United States is kind of like living in Northern New Jersey as opposed to Southern New Jersey. You live in the United States, or you live in Mexico or you live in Swaziland, it doesn’t mean anything,” he explained.

In other words, instead of being in love with America, the pseudo-elites are “philanderers of nations,” as Chesterton put it.

Krikorian then explained the rationale underlying this immigrationist thinking. In these people’s minds, immigration law is akin to Jim Crow. Following from this is that enforcing that law (e.g., deportations) is immoral.

Yes, but…

While the above rationale is operative — among many rank-and-file and activist immigrationists — there’s far more to it. To wit:

• Pseudo-elites in politics, and many elsewhere, enable today’s Third World (im)migration because they know that most of these newcomers will vote for them (for leftists) upon naturalization — and sometimes before.
• These pseudo-elites also use the migrants to increase populations in Democratic areas. Why? Because illegals have typically been counted during censuses for reapportionment purposes — i.e., the larger a state’s population, the more congressmen it gets. This means greater power nationally.
• Powerful business pseudo-elites want hordes of (im)migrants as cheap labor.

In other words, generally speaking, it’s overly charitable thinking these power- and money-hungry pseudo-elites actually care about immigrants. In fact, if the would-be autocrats among them possessed the complete power and control they crave, they’d disallow immigration. Why?

For the same reason the old USSR did and China does today: Immigration causes demographic change and sometimes even upheaval. It’s destabilizing. This is fine when you desire someone else’s power and hence want to upset the apple cart. The story is different, however, when you finally control the apple cart.

Not Your Grandfather’s Immigration — or America

Krikorian also emphasized the difference between today and a century ago. His mother was a daughter of immigrants, he said, and was completely Americanized in her Boston-suburb school. She had to memorize the Gettysburg Address, revered George Washington, and sang “Hail Columbia” (an unofficial national anthem) with classmates. Today it’s different: Kids are taught anti-American revisionist history.

Krikorian emphasizes that until this changes, even mass legal immigration will be problematic. Know, too, that the United States’ foreign-born population is at a historic high: 16 percent of our country. Reality:

The rate of immigration long ago exceeded the rate of assimilation.

Krikorian also made an excellent, seldom highlighted point about how technology impedes integration. As Fox further relates:

“Newcomers don’t have to really cut off ties in the way that they had to do in the past,” he said. “In the old days, immigrating meant you had no choice but to reorient your emotional and psychological attachments to the new country … Nowadays, you can FaceTime home every day. You can hop on a plane and go to your cousin’s wedding in Bogota for a three-day weekend.”

This is a major factor. Yet there’s more to it: It’s not just the country that’s different today — immigration patterns are, too.

When immigrants are themselves highly balkanized — small numbers from each of many different nations — they must operate within the host country’s existing institutions (e.g., watch English-broadcast networks in the U.S.). When too many come from just one nation or culture, however, they can develop their own parallel institutions. An example is Spanish-language networks such as Univision. This encourages sub-culture cultivation and not assimilation.

Governing principle: Balkanized immigrants unify around the host culture; unified immigrants can balkanize the host culture.

Not Your Grandfather’s Immigrants, Either

Yet another difference is the immigrants themselves. Yesteryear’s newcomers tended to hail from Western Civilization, countries such as Ireland, Italy, Germany, and Sweden. So while not monolithic, they shared much, such as, to an extent, a common culture. Most importantly, they usually had a common religion, Christianity, inclusive of its moral foundation, the Ten Commandments.

Today, however, the majority of our immigrants do not hail from Western cultures; many aren’t Christian, either. Theological debates aside (i.e., “ideal faith” arguments), this clearly means they’ll not as readily assimilate into a Christian-foundation, Western nation.

This is where, too, we should note a 2009 warning about group-sameness assumptions from commentator and retired Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters. Recommending a thought exercise in which one views foreigners as space aliens (to break Truth-obscuring mental habits), he wrote that

we still hear the deadly cliché that “all human beings want the same basic things, such as better lives and greater opportunities for their children.” How does that apply to Afghan aliens who prefer their crude way of life and its merciless cults?

When girls and women are denied education or even health care and are executed by their own kin for minor infractions against the cult, how does that square with our insistence that all men want greater opportunities for the kids?

What about those Afghan parents who approve of or even encourage suicidal attacks by their sons? This not only confounds our value system, but defies biological reason.

Man in the Mirror

In fairness, though, another issue is that today’s American “value system” confounds yesterday’s. That is, immigrants a century ago entered a U.S. that was in most dimensions more virtue-oriented than their native lands. The point:

What are we now giving newcomers to assimilate into?

When they witness our decadent entertainment, vulgarity, corruptive intra-school ideology, sexual devolutionary agendas, and self-flagellation, are they encouraged to shed their ways for ours? When a Muslim with a sense of modesty sees men marching mostly naked in a “Pride” parade, what’s the impression? Will he be inspired to embrace this modern iteration of the American way? “When in Rome do as the Romans do” sounds less appealing when the Roman is Caligula with a Nero chaser.

And all of the above factors are why more and more Americans are realizing we need an immigration moratorium. Accepting more passengers is folly when our own ship is listing, taking on water, and heading for the rocks of civilizational destruction.