This Land Is Our Land

by Suketu Mehta

  Your belly or your dick: choose!

  Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, were leading advocates for restricting immigration to the United States—because all those extra people would be bad for the environment—and for restoring ethnic quotas on immigration. He predicted that 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would die because the planet was incapable of feeding them. “Sometime in the next 15 years,” Ehrlich predicted, “the end will come.” This was in 1970.

  None of this actually happened, of course—and India, Ehrlich’s nightmare country, is actually reaping the demographic dividend of a workforce with a median age of twenty-seven. But there’s something about brown and black people reproducing that has always horrified Western thinkers and leaders. Churchill, in 1945, opined that Hindus are “protected by their mere pullulation [rapid breeding] from the doom that is their due.”

  * * *

  The Mein Kampf of the contemporary anti-immigrant movement in the West is a poisonous 1973 French novel called The Camp of the Saints. Its author, Jean Raspail, was nothing like Lévi-Strauss, the champion of aboriginal cultures, or Ehrlich, the environmentalist. He was a French adventurer in the tradition of the great pith-helmet-wearing white explorers who brought horrifying tales of native debaucheries back to Europe for the delectation of audiences like the Académie Française and the Société de Géographie, both of which gave Raspail awards for his books. The Camp of the Saints imagines a convoy of eight hundred thousand migrants from my birthplace, Calcutta, on course to land in France in the year 2000. On board, they copulate promiscuously, including with their own children, and eat each other’s excreta. As they prepare to land in France, the country is torn between liberals who are prepared to welcome the new arrivals and the gallant native whites who have the moral fiber to fire on the unarmed men, women, and children of the convoy.

  The prose of the novel is a whiter shade of purple. This is how the Indians—like me, my parents, my children—are described: “First to land were the monsters, the grotesque little beggars from the streets of Calcutta. As they groveled through the wet sand like a pack of basset hounds, or a herd of clumsy seals exploring an unfamiliar shore, with their snorts and grunts of joy, they looked like an army of little green men from some remote planet.”

  It is an out-and-out, unapologetically racist book, as Raspail states in his 1982 preface to a reprinting: “Our hypersensitive and totally blind West … has not yet understood that whites, in a world become too small for its inhabitants, are now a minority and that the proliferation of other races dooms our race, my race, irretrievably to extinction in the century to come, if we hold fast to our present moral principles.”

  The novel’s influence has only grown over time. It set off a wave of other (mainly French) imaginings of this alien invasion, such as Renaud Camus’s theory of “the Great Replacement,” in which Europeans will be replaced by immigrants, mostly Muslim, all at once. Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel Submission imagined a North African Muslim winning the presidency of France.

  In 1995, Raspail’s disease-ridden book crossed over the ocean and landed in America, where it was reprinted by a malevolent ophthalmologist and eugenicist in Michigan named John Tanton, the fons et origo of today’s anti-immigration movement in America. Tanton founded the anti-immigrant groups Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies, and Numbers USA; and was a board member of U.S. English and, not incidentally, the head of the Petoskey, Michigan, chapter of Planned Parenthood and a Sierra Club official. (There’s often been a troubling alliance between extreme environmentalists, the zero-population growth crowd, and racists, based on a common fear of density). The Camp of the Saints has had enormous influence on both Steve Bannon, who has called current immigration to Europe “a Camp of the Saints–style invasion,” and Marine Le Pen, who keeps a signed copy at her desk.

  Tanton republished The Camp of the Saints in 2001, writing,

  Over the years the American public has absorbed a great number of books, articles, poems and films which exalt the immigrant experience. It is easy for the feelings evoked by Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty to obscure the fact that we are currently receiving too many immigrants (and receiving them too fast) for the health of our environment and of our common culture. Raspail evokes different feelings and that may help to pave the way for policy changes. The Camp of the Saints takes the world population explosion and the immigration debate in a new direction. Indeed, it may become the 1984 of the twenty-first century.

  Tanton’s correspondence with a white donor reveals his truest color. “One of my prime concerns is about the decline of folks who look like you and me.” The godfather of today’s anti-immigration movement also declared, “For European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” He was, like many racists, a eugenicist. “Do we leave it to individuals to decide that they are the intelligent ones who should have more kids? And more troublesome, what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less. Who is going to break the bad news to them?”

  11

  CULTURE: SHITHOLES VERSUS NORDICS

  From The Great Gatsby:

  “Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?”

  “Why no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

  “Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

  “Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—”

  “Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”

  “We’ve got to beat them down,” whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.

  “You ought to live in California—” began Miss Baker, but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.

  “This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and—” After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again. “—And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?”

  There was something pathetic in his concentration, as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more.

  America, a nation of immigrants, offers the welcome mat to newer immigrants; and periodically, yanks it out from under their feet. A look at our complicated history shows that the anti-immigrant story is long in the making.

  In 1751, Ben Franklin wrote about the alien menace: the forefathers of our current president. “Why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.”

  In the 1850s, the American Party, or the “Know-Nothings,” sent over a hundred people to Congress and eight to occupy governors’ mansions. They were formed as a populist Protestant reaction to the Irish fleeing the potato famine, and were anti-Catholic and anti–moneyed elites. They tried to change the laws so that only immigrants who had been in the country for twenty-one years could become citizens; this would ensure that recent immigrants, like the Irish, wouldn’t be able to vote for many years. Eventually, the party collapsed in a split over slavery.

  It wasn’t just outright racists and nativists who engaged in such rhetoric
, or even policy. In 1925, Franklin Delano Roosevelt editorialized, “Californians have properly objected” to Japanese migrants “on the sound basic ground that … the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results.” When he became president, he put 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent in internment camps, suspecting them of dual loyalties.

  Occasionally, nativists formed unlikely alliances with African American groups for economic reasons. In 1924, the civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph came out against immigrants: “We favor reducing immigration to nothing … shutting out the Germans … Italians … Hindus … Chinese and even the Negroes from the West Indies. The country is suffering from immigration indigestion.”

  A perennial strain in thinking about immigration says, we’re not against immigration, but some immigrants are better than others. The definition of “better” changes according to the season. Earlier, it was about cranial size or IQ. The “Goddard” in Gatsby is a reference to Lothrop Stoddard, a Harvard Ph.D. and Klansman whose 1920 book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy was an immediate sensation. Warned Stoddard, “Non-white races must be excluded from America … The red and black races if left to themselves revert to a savage or semi-savage stage in a short time.” Shortly after the book was published, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, invited Stoddard to be on the board, where he joined a roster of other well-known eugenicists.

  These days, the debate is about culture.

  In January 2018, according to The Washington Post and NBC News, Trump spoke out at a cabinet meeting about what kind of people should and should not be welcomed in the United States. “Haiti? Why do we want people from Haiti here? Then they got Africa. Why do we want these people from all these shithole countries here? We should have more people from places like Norway.”

  An essential prerequisite to denying entrance to the migrant is to posit a dualism, a clash of civilizations, in which one is far superior to the other, and is therefore entitled to dominate the other.

  In July 2017, Trump delivered a speech in Poland, written by his adviser Stephen Miller, about what distinguishes Western civilization:

  Today, the West is also confronted by the powers that seek to test our will, undermine our confidence, and challenge our interests … The world has never known anything like our community of nations … We write symphonies. We pursue innovation. We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs, and always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers. We reward brilliance. We strive for excellence and cherish inspiring works of art that honor God. We treasure the rule of law and protect the right to free speech and free expression. We empower women as pillars of our society and of our success. We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives … And above all, we value the dignity of every human life, protect the rights of every person, and share the hope of every soul to live in freedom. That is who we are. Those are the priceless ties that bind us together as nations, as allies, and as a civilization.

  All hail Western civilization, which gave the world the genocide of the indigenous Americans, slavery, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and global warming. How hypocritical this whole debate about migration really is.

  In 2004, Samuel Huntington, a Harvard professor who’d previously predicted a “Clash of Civilizations” on Islam’s borders, now warned against Latino culture in a Foreign Policy cover story bearing the title “Jose, Can You See?” “There is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English,” Huntington wrote. He asked readers to think of the United States not so much as a melting pot but as a tomato soup: “The base of the tomato soup is the aboriginal Anglo-Protestant culture.” And what about everyone else who came later? “Onions and croutons and parsley and spices.”

  Huntington explained the differences between the base and the add-ons by quoting a Texas entrepreneur on “Hispanic traits (very different from Anglo-Protestant ones) that ‘hold Latinos back’: mistrust of people outside the family; lack of initiative, self-reliance, and ambition; little use for education; and acceptance of poverty as a virtue necessary for entrance into heaven.”

  The republic is in peril, wrote Huntington.

  The persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages. Unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclaves—from Los Angeles to Miami—and rejecting the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream.

  Huntington was the most respectable exponent of the cultural theory of the world: that it is divided between seven or eight civilizations locked in perpetual conflict. “These include Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African civilization,” he claimed. “The most important conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one another.”

  * * *

  So who are the “good” immigrants these days? In discussions of illegal immigration to the United States, people mostly focus on Latinos. While it’s true that half of the undocumented are Mexicans, what about, say, Canadians? “I’ve never met an illegal Canadian,” declared the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, explaining why the government focuses on undocumented immigrants from the southern border. “People come in from poor countries to work here. They come to Myrtle Beach, Canadians do. They enjoy themselves, they go swimming in March, and they go home.”

  In 2015, the same year Graham said this, ninety-three thousand Canadians overstayed their U.S. visas—more than any other nationality. That was twice the number of Mexicans who overstayed their visas. There are more than one hundred thousand illegal Canadians living in the United States today. No force of Minutemen is zealously guarding the northern border, standing watch for Canadians coming in through the snowy wastes of the Dakotas.

  Periodically, U.S. congressmen of Irish descent fought for legislation that would benefit their ethnicity. Such as the first diversity visa program, in 1987, created as a response to the 1965 Immigration Act, which lifted quotas on non-Europeans. It was sponsored by the Massachusetts congressman Brian Donnelly and passed at short notice and with little publicity—except in the Irish community. House Speaker Tip O’Neill ensured that the bill would pass, and Ted Kennedy did the same in the Senate.

  Ten thousand visas to countries adversely affected by the 1965 bill were to be awarded on a first-come, first-served basis, and people were allowed to file an unlimited number of applications. This benefited groups with knowledge of the process. All over America and Ireland, the Irish held “Donnelly parties,” filling out as many as five hundred applications per person. Ireland chartered special planes to ship the applications to the United States. As a result, more than 40 percent of the visas—4,161 of the 10,000—went to the Irish.

  The terms of the diversity program were changed in 1989, and it became a random lottery, with only one entry per person permitted. By 1990, the top three countries receiving visas were Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Egypt. The Irish share, though, dropped from 40 percent to 1 percent. This wouldn’t do. So the program was changed again in 1991 by the Connecticut representative Bruce Morrison. The program would give out 120,000 green cards, but 48,000 of them would be reserved for Irish immigrants. “For the Irish, the most important part of the Morrison bill is the section that gives virtual amnesty to all the illegal Irish immigrants in the country, and to aliens from some other Western European countries,” The New York Times reported.

  Again, in 1995, the Irish had priority for unclaimed visas under the program between 1991 and 1993. They received almost all—1,303 of the 1,404 visas—under the scheme.

  In 20
12, the Massachusetts Republican senator Scott Brown introduced a bill that would grant 10,500 special work visas exclusively for Irish immigrants. A 2018 NPR report states, “Ireland estimates as many as 50,000 unauthorized Irish are living in the shadows in America. Their government is so concerned that the prime minister has appointed a member of Parliament, John Deasy, to be special envoy to the U.S. Congress. His mission is to work out an immigration earmark for the unauthorized Irish, to find them a pathway to citizenship and get more work visas.” On his way out of office at the end of 2018, Speaker Paul Ryan pushed a bill through the House of Representatives that would award Irish citizens thousands of additional work visas every year. Even the right-wing Breitbart News called this bill “amnesty for Irish illegals.” Ryan has publicly expressed his hope that he would be made ambassador to Ireland in his sixties.

  The 50,000 Irish undocumented immigrants are all over the country, but particularly in New York, in neighborhoods like Woodside, Queens, working in construction, or as bartenders or nannies. In 2017, ICE deported 128,765 Mexicans—and 34 Irish.

  * * *

  America today seems to have an M&M problem: Mexicans and Muslims. When liberals bring up immigration, there’s one group that nearly everyone agrees is unassimilable: Muslims. A rich Persian, nominally Muslim émigré friend was talking about the problems with Muslims in Europe. “They shouldn’t be allowed to have minarets in Switzerland! It ruins my Swiss-chalet vibe.”