After America

by Mark Steyn

  What then are the alternatives? And, if you’re a relatively sane, lightly populated state such as Wyoming or a fiscally viable powerhouse like Texas, are you prepared to beggar yourself for the privilege of keeping fifty stars on Old Glory?

  In 2010, just as a federal court was striking down the Arizona legislature’s attempt to control the state’s annexation by illegal aliens, far away in the Hague the International Court of Justice declared that the province of Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia two years earlier “did not violate any applicable rule of international law.”53 Certain European secessionist movements—in Spain, Belgium, and elsewhere—took great comfort in the ruling. Russia and China opposed it, because they have restive minorities—Muslims in the Caucacus, and the Uighurs in Xinjiang—and they intend to keep them within their borders.54 The United States barely paid any attention: if the ICJ’s opinion was of any broader relevance, it was relevant to foreigners, and that was that. But, taken together, the Hague and Arizona decisions raise an interesting question: What holds the United States together? And will it continue to hold?

  In 2006, the last remaining non-Serb republic in Yugoslavia flew the coop and joined Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia ... hold on, isn’t it Bosnia-Herzegovina? Or has Herzegovina split, too? Who cares? Slovenia’s independent and so is Slovakia. Slavonia wasn’t, or not the last time I checked. But Montenegro is, and East Timor, and Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, and every other Nickelandimistan between here and Mongolia. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, big countries (the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Indonesia) and not-so-big countries (Czechoslovakia) have been getting smaller. Why should the United States remain an exception to this phenomenon? Especially as it gets poorer—and more statist.

  For the best part of a century, America’s towns, counties, and states have been ceding power to the central metropolis—even though, insofar as it works at all, Big Government works best in small countries, with a sufficiently homogeneous population to have sufficiently common interests. In The Size of Nations, Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore note that, of the ten richest countries in the world, only four have populations above one million: the United States (310 million people), Switzerland (a little under 8 million), Norway, and Singapore (both about 5 million).55 Small nations, they argue, are more cohesive and have less need for buying off ethnic and

  That theory is now being tested on a daily basis. To ram government health care down the throats of America, Congress bought off regional factions with deals like the Cornhusker Kickback and the Louisiana Purchase. It is certainly no stranger to buying off ethnic factions in pursuit of the black and Hispanic vote—with immigration un-enforcement and affirmative action. Yet to attempt to impose centralized government on a third of a billion people from Maine to Hawaii is to invite failure on a scale unknown to history.

  In the years ahead America will have its Slovakias and Slovenias, formally and informally. But it cannot remain on its present path and hold its territorial integrity.

  Let us grant that the United States is not such a patchwork quilt of different ethnicities as Yugoslavia; it’s a “melting pot”—or it was. Let us further accept for the sake of argument that the United States’ success was unconnected to the people who established it and created its institutions and culture. It is famously a “proposition nation,” defined not by blood but by an idea:Here, both the humblest and most illustrious citizens alike know that nothing is owed to them and that everything has to be earned. That’s what constitutes the moral value of America. America did not teach men the idea of freedom; she taught them how to practice it.56

  Who said that? A Frenchman: Nicolas Sarkozy, addressing Congress in 2007. But what happens when America no longer teaches men how to practice freedom? What then is its raison d’être? Does it have any more reason to stick together than any other “proposition nation” that dumps the proposition?

  Once upon a time, the mill owner and his workers lived in the same town. Now American municipalities are ever more segregated: the rich live among the rich, the poor come from two or three towns away to clean their pools. Nor is the segregation purely economic. The aforementioned Bell, California, was the town whose citizens had a per capita income of $24,800 but a city management that awarded themselves million-dollar salary-andbenefits packages. It comes as no surprise to discover 90 percent of its inhabitants speak a language other than English at home. Bell is an impoverished Latin American city, and so, like thousands of others south of the border, it has corrupt, rapacious Latin American government. Celebrate diversity!

  Ask not for whom Bell tolls. Joe Klein, the novelist and columnist, was one of the most adamant of media grandees that the Tea Party’s millions of “teabaggers” were “racists and nativists.” “Sarah Palin’s fantasy America,” he explained to his readers at Time magazine, “is a different place now, changing for the worse, overrun by furriners of all sorts: Latinos, South Asians, East Asians, homosexuals ... to say nothing of liberated, uppity blacks.”57 Joe, naturally, is entirely cool with all that. “The things that scare the teabaggers—the renewed sense of public purpose and government activism, the burgeoning racial diversity, urbanity and cosmopolitanism—are among the things I find most precious and exhilarating about this country.”

  Joe Klein finds “the burgeoning racial diversity, urbanity and cosmopolitanism” of America so “exhilarating” that he lives in Pelham, New York, which is 87.33 percent white. By contrast, Sarah Palin’s racist xenophobic hick town of Wasilla, Alaska, is 85.46 percent white. (Percentages courtesy quartiers—the Bronx, for example—yet Joe Klein, Mister Diversity, chooses not to reside in any of them, and prefers to live uppitystate of the uppity blacks. Statistically speaking, he lives in a less diverse neighborhood overrun by fewer “furriners” than that chillbilly bonehead’s inbred redoubt on the edge of the Arctic Circle. Yet she and her supporters are the “racists and nativists,” while Joe preens himself on his entirely theoretical commitment to “diversity.”58 He would seem to be volunteering himself as a near parodic illustration of the late Joseph Sobran’s observation that “the purpose of a college education is to give you the correct view of minorities, and the means to live as far away from them as possible.”59

  I don’t mean to single out Joe Klein, who I’m sure is the soul of kindness to lame dogs, l’il ol’ ladies, uppity blacks, and South Asian furriners, where’er he encounters them. No doubt Pelham has the occasional African-American college professor, East Asian hedge-fund manager, and perhaps even a Muslim software developer or two sprinkled among its 87.33 percent upscale honky populace. But Joe Klein is like a lot of Americans of his class: “diversity” is an attitude rather than a lived experience.

  And it will be ever more so: the more starkly we Balkanize into Bells and Pelhams, the more frenziedly the Kleins of the world will bang the “diversity” drum. The more rarefied the all but all-white communities get, the more “COEXIST!” stickers they’ll plaster on their Priuses: hybridity is for your cars, not your municipal demographic profile.

  In an age of political correctness, older people sometimes express bewilderment at the lack of “common sense.” But you can’t have common sense in a society with less and less in common: What does a gay hedonist in San Francisco have in common with a Michiganistan mullah? What does a Mississippi Second Amendment gun nut have in common with a

  But forget gays and Muslims and consider two sixtysomething whitebread Wasps living side-by-side in Yonkers, New York: At Number 27 is a lady who retired from teaching in the local school at the age of fifty-nine and lives on an annual pension of $78,255, exempt from state and local tax, with gold-plated health benefits, and everything inflation-proofed. At Number 29 is a guy exactly the same age who owns a hardware store, can’t afford to retire, has health issues and crummy provision for amelioration thereof, yet will be working till he dies, while his neighbor enjoys a lavish two-decade retirement that he paid for in his taxes. This is a recipe for civil war, and no gay h
edonists or firebreathing mullahs need be involved.

  The “happy” ending for a statist America is an ever more self-segregating patchwork of cultural ghettoes from the barrios of California to the mosques of Dearborn to the beaches of Fire Island, each with its own TV networks, fashions, churches, mores, history, even children’s names (Connor, Mohammed, Tyrone), but presided over by a bloated centralized government that presents itself as the sole legitimate arbiter between these factions, as they compete for its favors while ever more onerously taxed. What kind of America would that be? E pluribus who-num?

  BORDER COUNTRY

  “Would it not be easier,” wrote Bertolt Brecht after the East German uprising in 1953, “for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”

  The thought has occurred to several governments over the years, and I don’t mean the dictatorships. The easiest way to elect a new people is to import them. So the Eloi not only turn a blind eye to mass “undocumented”

  Almost every claim made for the benefits of mass immigration is false. “Sober-minded economists reckon that the potential gains from freer global migration are huge,” writes Philippe Legrain in Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them. “The World Bank reckons that if rich countries allowed their workforce to swell by a mere three percent by letting in an extra 14 million workers from developing countries between 2001 and 2025, the world would be $356 billion a year better off, with the new migrants themselves gaining $162 billion a year, people who remain in poor countries $143 billion, and natives in rich countries $139 billion.”60

  $139 billion? From “a mere” 14 million extra immigrants? Wow!

  As Christopher Caldwell points out in his book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, the aggregate gross domestic product of the world’s advanced economies for the year 2008 was estimated by the International Monetary Fund at close to $40 trillion. So an extra $139 billion works out to an extra, er, 0.0035. Caldwell compares the World Bank argument to Dr. Evil’s triumphant announcement (in the film Austin Powers) that he’s holding the world hostage for one million dollars!!! “Sacrificing 0.0035 of your economy would be a pittance to pay for starting to get your country back.”61 As for that extra $139 billion divided between the inhabitants of all the world’s “rich countries,” that works out to less than what the U.S. Government spent in 2010 on unemployment insurance ($160 billion).

  So much for the economic argument in capitalist terms. In welfare terms, Europeans were told they needed immigrants to help prop up their otherwise unaffordable social entitlements: in reality, Germany’s Gastarbeiter Gast-, ever lighter on the—arbeiter. Turkish immigrants have three times the rate of welfare dependency as ethnic Germans, and their average retirement age is fifty.62 Foreigners didn’t so much game the system as discover, thanks to family “reunification” and other lollipops, that it demanded nothing of them. Entire industries were signed up for public subsidy. Two-thirds of French imams are on the dole.63 Does the World Bank set their welfare checks on the debit side of that spectacular 0.0035 economic growth? Or does that count as valuable long-term investment in the critical economic growth sector of incendiary mullahs? A dependence on mass immigration is neither a goldmine nor an opportunity to flaunt your multicultural bona fides, but a structural weakness.

  “Moderate” Republicans often say that the party base represents a declining demographic (too white) and that the GOP needs to do more to reach out to Hispanics and other fast-growing segments of the population. The argument would seem to assume that this dramatic demographic shift is an entirely natural development. Why, after all, are white guys in decline and Hispanics on the rise?

  Because the governing class decided, with the 1965 immigration act and much that has followed, that that’s the way it’s going to be. In the not entirely likely event that the GOP could persuade Hispanics to vote in overwhelming numbers for small government, the Democrats would look elsewhere for new clients—Muslims, say, maybe from Somalia, a nation which, in barely more than a decade, has transformed the welfare profile even of such backwaters as Lewiston-Auburn, Maine.64 “Moderate” Republicans would then argue that the party’s white-Hispanic base was now stagnating, and that the GOP needs to do more to reach out to Lewistan-Auburnistan.

  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

  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 65 In related news, by 2010 Stockton’s school district had a deficit of $25 million.66 Same thing at Dallas General: 70 per cent of newborns are “anchor babies.”67 Seven 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.68 So, 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 m
atter: 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.” 69 But where’s the fairness for this woman’s family? Because her home

  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.