by Suketu Mehta
This view is given scholarly sanction by people like Stanford University’s Thomas Sowell:
Not all cultures are compatible with the culture in this country that has produced such benefits for the American people for so long. Not only the United States, but the Western world in general, has been discovering the hard way that admitting people with incompatible cultures is an irreversible decision with incalculable consequences. If we do not see that after recent terrorist attacks on the streets of Boston and London, when will we see it?
The op-ed columns and airwaves are filled with pundits like Sowell who proclaim that most migrants assimilate—except Muslims. Just like their intellectual ancestors, who made the same claim about Papists and Protestants.
Fueled by this ideology, the United States, and some European countries, are being run by a bunch of Islamophobes who are already in power, like Viktor Orbán, or have come close to attaining power, like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. Muslims are the only group that you can publicly hate and get away with it.
The president of the United States of America, the most powerful human being in the world, is a Muslim-hater. I first became aware of this when he tweeted lies about Muslims cheering the fall of the Twin Towers. I was certain of it when I saw his retweets of a British neo-fascist hate group, itself retweeting three inflammatory (and untrue) videos captioned “Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death”; “Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches”; and “Muslim destroys a statue of Virgin Mary.”
His secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and his national security adviser, John Bolton, have endorsed the open hate of professional anti-Islam activists like Frank Gaffney and Pamela Geller. This is what the fear of migrants has done to America: we have elected, in a country founded, allegedly, as a refuge for Quakers and Puritans and others persecuted for their religion, a man who hates people for the God they worship.
A 2018 paper by Karsten Müller and Carlo Schwarz of the University of Warwick found that in the days and weeks after Trump’s anti-Muslim tweets, the number of hate crimes against Muslims specifically (as opposed to hate crimes generally) rose significantly. Trump tweets out his bigotry; his base listens and acts. Hate crimes against Muslims are now more widespread than at any other time in American history, including the period after 9/11.
12
THE COLOR OF HATE
For many years, it seemed that foreign cultures had replaced dark-skinned races as permissible objects of loathing and contempt. But lately, the pendulum of hate has swung back to race. “You will not replace us,” read the posters held aloft by the white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia. There is one number that fills the nativists with horror: 2044. That is the year when America is projected to stop being a majority-white nation. Whites will become just one of many minorities.
An analysis by The Washington Post found that Trump’s immigration policies, if implemented, would keep out 20 million immigrants over the next decades, and push back the Rubicon five years, to 2049. “You can shut the door to everyone in the world and that won’t change,” said Roberto Suro, an immigration and demography expert at the University of Southern California. “The president can’t do anything about that. If your primary concern is that the American population is becoming less white, it’s already too late.”
In 2013, America reached a different racial landmark. For the first time, half of the babies under the age of one were nonwhite. In 2018, deaths among whites outnumbered births in more than half the states—twenty-six, up from seventeen just two years ago. (Partly, this was driven by drug overdoses. Whites, particularly, are turning to heroin, fentanyl, and opioids, just as African Americans in the 1980s and early ’90s turned to crack.)
The United States, in the future, will look increasingly like Latin America, and also like India and China.
Hispanics in the United States have an average age of twenty-eight, in their prime for making babies. White Americans have an average age of forty-three. From 2010 to 2016, the population of native-born Hispanics grew by 5 million; the population of native-born whites fell by 400,000. The 18 percent of the population that is Hispanic is the biggest minority group in the country today; by 2060, it will be 28 percent.
Although Latinos still make up half of all the foreign-born in the country, and Asians only 31 percent overall, that ratio has been changing in recent years. The fastest-growing race in the country is now Asian; we are increasing by a rate of 3.4 percent a year. The second-fastest-growing group? The mixed-race: those who are descended from two or more races. And the slowest-growing racial group? Whites, who are ambling along at 0.5 percent a year.
There’s also the fear that, once the nonwhites are let in, we’ll do better than them. The 2016 median U.S. income for Indian Americans was $110,026, the highest of any group. Palestinian Americans earned $65,170; Syrian Americans, $63,096. “White” Americans, as a group, earned $61,349—lower than Pakistani Americans, Egyptian Americans, Iranian Americans, and a whole slew of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries.
When it comes to education, African immigrants are more accomplished than the average American: 43 percent of those older than thirty have a college degree, versus 29 percent of native-born Americans over thirty. While some groups of immigrants, such as refugees from Latin America, are less educated and earn less than the average American, immigrants overall are much better educated. Thirty percent of native-born Americans have college degrees. The immigrants arriving between 2000 and 2009 were of the same grade: 30 percent of them were college educated. But of the immigrants arriving after 2010, a full 45 percent have college degrees.
Counties that voted for Hillary Clinton account for 64 percent of the U.S. GDP, twice that of the many more counties that voted for Trump. That’s because her voters are clustered around cities and universities, both of which attract immigrants, who help make the places they settle flourish. For this they are hated. Fifty-eight percent of Republicans now think that universities are bad for America. As the economist Paul Krugman points out, “One way to think of Trumpism is as an attempt to narrow regional disparities, not by bringing the lagging regions up, but by cutting the growing regions down. For that’s what attacks on education and immigration, key drivers of the new economy’s success stories, would do … They won’t make America great again—they’ll kill the very things that made it great.”
* * *
But even if whites lose their majority, and their educational preeminence, they’re not about to lose power anytime soon. That’s because whites vote, even if they haven’t finished school. In 2020, whites without a college degree will still be 44 percent of the eligible voters, and they vote solidly Republican; Clinton lost them by 31 points in 2016. According to the political scientist Ruy Teixeira, their support will enable Republican presidential candidates to keep winning the Electoral College through 2036 even as they lose the popular vote, other factors being equal. “This is a real sea change,” Teixeira said. “This is why Republicans have been able to weather these demographic changes, entirely on the backs of white noncollege voters.”
And it’s those noncollege voters who care most deeply about immigration. So the appeals to their xenophobia, by Trump and his successors, are a logical electoral strategy. Keep immigrants out; and if they must be let in, keep them from being naturalized; and if they’re naturalized, keep them from voting. Hence the barrage of new voter ID laws in Republican-controlled states with a lot of Hispanic voters, like Texas and Arizona. Fifty-four percent of all legal immigrants get naturalized within a decade, and are thus eligible to vote; among certain groups of immigrants, the rates are even higher: 78 percent of Africans and 65 percent of Asians get naturalized within ten years. And they vote—Democrat. In the 2018 midterms, 69 percent of Latino voters voted for Democrats; for Asian voters, that preference was even stronger, shooting up from 50 percent in 2016 to 77 percent in 2018. Immigrants don’t like the Organization Formerly Known as the Party of
Lincoln.
So, the expelling of undocumented immigrants, the vast majority of whom are nonwhite; the severe limits on legal migration; and the types of migration that the Trump coalition wants to put an end to—the diversity lottery and family reunification—have a clear end in mind: to keep whites in power.
And what would this plan cost? What would it really cost to throw out all the undocumented? A total of $4.7 trillion, according to the Center for American Progress. That’s how much the GDP would be lowered over a decade if such an expulsion would be carried out, plus $900 billion in lost revenue for the government. All this is not including the cultural and human cost of the ethnic cleansing.
Half of all federal prosecutions already involve immigration. With the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy of treating all undocumented immigrants as criminals, this is going to consume a greater share of federal prosecutorial resources. The Justice Department has become, above all, the Department of Immigrant Hounding.
We are seeing a new Red Scare, except this time the enemy isn’t communists; it’s immigrants. The ICE and Border Patrol raids, grabbing mothers on the streets and hustling them into government vans in front of their screaming daughters, are reminiscent of the Palmer Raids in 1919 and 1920, when hundreds of suspected leftists who were foreign or looked or sounded foreign were rounded up and deported. Obama was better in his language than Trump, but not much better in his policies. He was called the “deporter in chief” by immigrant advocates because of his record of forcibly removing 3 million people without proper papers—a far higher number than Bill Clinton or George W. Bush had removed. Obama expended little serious political capital to make life easier for the undocumented during his eight years in office, pleading political gridlock under a Tea Party–controlled Congress, although he did sign executive orders protecting the Dreamers in his second term.
What are whites so afraid of?
* * *
In 2007, I sought a meeting with a man who, at the time, came across as a wild-eyed extremist on race and immigration. He turned out to be something of a prophet. His name was Ron Cutlip, and he was the head of the New York chapter of the Minutemen (Jim Gilchrist wing). A ragtag bunch of nativist vigilantes, they had been in the news for going down to the U.S.-Mexican border and harassing people they thought were illegal immigrants. I had wondered what a group like that was doing in New York City.
Cutlip agreed to meet me at a Starbucks below his office, on Eighth Avenue.
“How will I recognize you?” I asked.
“I’m five feet eleven. White male, obviously. And you’re Japanese?”
I looked for him in the Starbucks. He was forty-seven, with slightly graying brown hair and a tight, angry mouth. He was angry about many things, but he was angriest about being called a racist. He spent the first fifteen minutes of our interview defending himself against a claim that I had not made.
He gave me a card. It said “R. Stuart Cutlip” in a Gothic font, with a Highland-plaid ribbon and a coat of arms to its left, and underneath, the title:
Golf Course Architect
Land Planner
“Did you say you’re Indian?” he asked.
“Originally, yes, but now I’m American.”
“I’m gonna speak to you as a white male. For the majority of the population, which is white, the pendulum swung too far the other way … You keep calling me a racist and it has no effect on me anymore,” he said, addressing his invisible opponents. “I’ve traveled the world and seen racism in Africa, one tribe against another. You could be any race in the world, you could be racist. White America has bent over backwards not to be racist.”
He grew up in Maryland, in the D.C. suburbs, going to school with the children of ambassadors in the 1960s and ’70s. He has an M.S. in real estate development from Columbia, where he recalled a political event he attended, put on by the Young Republicans and Minutemen. The audience was filled with students opposed to the event. “They were racist, ignorant.” An African American speaker took the stage. “The black student body was yelling very bad racial slurs.” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, had recently been invited to speak at Columbia; according to Cutlip, even he hadn’t faced such opposition. Cutlip decided that the students were completely ignorant, and he joined the Minutemen.
In New York, the Minutemen did things like turn undocumented immigrants in to the IRS for committing tax fraud or report them to ICE. “The Minutemen are common people like me and you. They fought the British, on a moment’s notice.”
Cutlip considers himself a true American. “I have Cherokee blood in me,” he said. The white part of his family has been in the country since 1740. There were Minutemen in his family more than once: they fought in the Revolutionary War and in the French and Indian War. But another side of his family came in through Ellis Island, from Eastern Europe at the turn of the century, “on those ships, getting examined, documented, quarantined. We don’t even have a system like that today—that would be called racist. They said, just like you did, ‘I’m an American now.’”
He explained how he viewed immigration: “We need to know who’s coming into the country and why they’re here. Just like if someone knocks on your door, you’re like ‘Excuse me, how can I help you?’ There are times you let the electric man come in or the plumber, but you don’t let him live there.”
“This nation is made up of immigrants,” Cutlip allowed. “I don’t care if you’re a Native American, you came from somewhere else. Minutemen are not against immigration. This is about the rule of law. Come here legally.”
He’s had problems with Republicans as well as Democrats. “After September 11,” he said, “I couldn’t believe the Bush administration didn’t shut the borders.” Cutlip had decided to quit being a member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because “they’re in bed with La Raza”—the Latino advocacy group. Also, “certain Chinese people are hooked up with the La Raza people.” He was now thinking of starting a garment factory, “because the U.S. can’t just be a service industry.”
The immigration issue, he noted, “is as broad as a quilt.” It includes issues such as terrorism, drugs, and gangs. “There is a huge number of illegal immigrants in our prison system for serious felonies. On the southern border it’s completely out of control—if you are a farmer or rancher, you’re afraid of going on your property unless you have a rifle,” he told me. “In New York City, the problem is a taxpayer problem. If you go down to the Medicaid office, you will find all the people there not speaking English. I’m paying their way. My taxes go up … There’s problems with illegal immigrants from China, from Arab countries, wherever … There’s issues probably from your own country—from Pakistan.” It’s the third country he’s identified me with, so far.
But he has a particular problem with Latinos. “I’m gonna talk specifically about Hispanics. La Raza doesn’t care about Ron Cutlip, the white man,” he said, pausing to look at me and adding, “may not even care about you.” When white people band together as a group, they end up in federal prison for racketeering. “None of the rules apply to Hispanics to come here—this race has preference over others.” He was mad that at Latino rallies, some people claim that part of the United States is part of Mexico. “I’m not gonna let it be a Spanish-speaking country,” he vowed. “I work in the golf course architecture industry. I’ve told the foreman I don’t want anyone driving heavy equipment that doesn’t speak English.” He didn’t say whether or not he imposed the same requirements on the workers not driving heavy equipment.
And how would he solve the problem of undocumented immigration? “Once you go after the employer for tax evasion and fraud, within a period of a year or two you could have this situation nipped in the bud. You crack down on him and give him a jail sentence.”
I asked Cutlip whether he had to hire undocumented immigrants, since the golf course industry is labor-intensive.
“Fifty percent or sixty percent of the workers in golf cour
ses are illegal,” he admitted, not answering my question.
* * *
In a 2018 column, the paleoconservative commentator Pat Buchanan pointed out the political ramifications of today’s immigration: “In U.S. presidential elections, persons of color whose roots are in Asia, Africa and Latin America vote 4–1 Democratic, and against the candidates favored by American’s [sic] vanishing white majority.” Then he painted a picture of the looming apocalypse: “Mass immigration means an America in 2050 with no core majority, made up of minorities of every race, color, religion and culture on earth, a continent-wide replica of the wonderful diversity we see today in the U.N. General Assembly.”
Today, these jeremiads against migrants are given vent full-throated on Fox News. According to Nielsen, 94 percent of people who watch Fox News are white. The Fox hosts know which side their white bread is buttered on. During one monologue, with background shots of undocumented immigrants climbing over the border fence, Laura Ingraham intoned, “The America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted on the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don’t like … Much of this is related to both illegal, and in some cases legal immigration.” David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan leader, promptly tweeted his endorsement: “One of the most important (truthful) monologues in the history of MSM.” Mainstream media is now openly amplifying and broadcasting what Duke and his kind, heretofore considered beyond the pale, wrote and said about white anxiety.
