by Mark Steyn
DESTINY’S MANIFEST
There was a story that zipped around the Internet a few years ago, about a Mexican Air Force pilot who’d supposedly photographed a UFO. North of the border the response to this amazing news, from professional comedians to website comment sections, was well nigh universal: Mexico has an air force. Who knew?70
Ha-ha. Mexico. Third World joke. Actually, two centuries back, it had a bigger military than the United States. Like America, it was a settler society, but older and larger: Mexico City was founded in 1524, and, when Madrid belatedly recognized the independence of “New Spain” in 1821, the city gave its name to a country—and, indeed, empire: Imperio Mexicano. Not as silly as it may sound. Before the Louisiana Purchase, if you’d been asked to predict which settler capital, Mexico City or Washington, would emerge as the seat of power in post-colonial North America, many an analyst would have plumped for the Spaniards. They had an imperialist’s sweep: when they seceded from Madrid, they did so in a “Solemn Act of the Declaration of Independence of Northern America,” which definition stretched all the way north to what’s now the Oregon border and quite a ways south, to Panama. By comparison, the United States seemed a weak and vulnerable territory holed up east of the Appalachians. It was a land economically dependent on exports but with few strategic transportation routes and unable to protect its sea lanes.
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.71 But 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.72 It 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 73 I 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.74 In Somerville, Massachusetts, it means two deaf girls are raped by MS-13 members.75 And 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” 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 .77 Arizona 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.78 Yet 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.79 They 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.80 More than 3,000 died in just one town—Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso.81 America 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 82 Almost simultaneously, the actual heads of three decapitated police officers were found in the Tijuana River.83 In 2010, four headless bodies wer
e left dangling from a bridge in the picture-postcard tourist town of Cuernavaca.84 The same year, authorities arrested a leading hit-man beheader for one of the Mexican drug cartels.85 He was fourteen years old, and a U.S. citizen, too (the anchor baby of an undocumented Californian). The drug cartels weren’t Muslim last time I checked, but decapitation isn’t just for jihadists anymore: if you want to get ahead, get a head.
How about stoning? Isn’t that something they do to women in Iran? Yes, but a good idea soon finds an export market. In 2010, the body of Gustavo Sanchez, mayor of Tancitaro, in the Mexican state of Michoacán, was found with that of an aide in an abandoned truck.86 Both men had been stoned to death. Tancitaro isn’t anywhere important: it’s a town of 26,000 people. Nonetheless, in the year before the mayor’s fatal stoning, the city council chief was kidnapped and tortured to death, and Sanchez’ predecessor and seven other officials resigned after being threatened by drug gangs and left unprotected by local cops. The entire 60-man police department was subsequently fired. In Santiago, they found their mayor’s corpse with his eyes gouged out.87 Mexico is degenerating into a narco-terrorist enterprise with a sovereign state as a minor subsidiary. George W. Bush liked to say of Iraq that we’re fighting them over there so that we don’t have to fight them over here. In Mexico, America has no choice in the matter: the decapitations and stonings and eye-gougings will move north of the border.
Of course, the real narco-state is not Mexico but America: if we didn’t take drugs, we wouldn’t need someone to supply them, and running a cartel wouldn’t be such a lucrative enterprise. America’s hedonist stupor has real consequences for others, and we will be living with them north of the “border” all too soon. But it’s not necessary to argue about the drug cartels, or the gang killers, the child rapists, the drunk-drivers. Even without these, the central fact of Hispanic immigration—the wholesale transformation of innumerable American municipalities at unprecedented speed—would place a huge question mark over the future. Don’t take my word for New York Times’. In 2009, it ran a story of immigrants in Langley Park, Maryland, “Struggling to Rise in Suburbs” (as the headline put it).88 Usual sludge, but in the middle of it, helpfully explaining Langley Park to his readers, the reporter, Jason DeParle, wrote as follows: “Now nearly two-thirds Latino and foreign-born, it has the aesthetics of suburban sprawl and the aura of Central America. Laundromats double as money-transfer stores. Jobless men drink and sleep in the sun. There is no city government, few community leaders, and little community.”
At which point I stopped, and went back, and reread it. For it seemed to me at first glance that Mr. DeParle was airily citing laundromats doubling as money-transfer stores, jobless men drinking and sleeping in the sun, and dysfunctional metropolitan government all as evidence of “the aura of Central America.” And that can’t be right, can it? Only a couple of days earlier, some Internet wags had leaked a discussion thread from the JournoList, the exclusive virtual country club where all the hepcat liberals hang out. In this instance, the media grandees were arguing vehemently that Martin Peretz of The New Republic was, in the elegant formulation one associates with today’s J-school alumni, a “crazy-ass racist.”89 The proof that this lifelong liberal is a “fucking racist” came in his observations on our friendly neighbor to the south: “I am extremely pessimistic about Mexican-American relations,” said Mr. Peretz. “A (now not quite so) wealthy country has as its abutter a Latin society with all of its characteristic deficiencies: congenital corruption, authoritarian government, anarchic politics, neartropical work habits, stifling social mores, Catholic dogma with the usual unacknowledged compromises, an anarchic counter-culture and increasingly violent modes of conflict.”90
Martin Peretz’s assumptions about “the aura of Central America” are not so very different from Jason DeParle’s, but Mr. Peretz brought down the wrath of his own side’s politically correct enforcers. Even though his remarks are utterly unexceptional to anyone familiar with Latin America. But since when have the PC police cared about observable reality?
Langley Park is a good example of where tiptoeing around on multiculti eggshells leads: there is literally no language in which what’s happening in 91 a land so obsessed by race that, in order to reverse an entirely fictional manifestation of “racism,” it invented the subprime mortgage and sat back as it came within a smidgeonette of destroying the housing market, banking system, and insurance industry. But, even if it had, at least we’d have demonstrated our anti-racist bona fides even unto self-destruction, so that’s okay.
To exhibit any interest in immigration or its consequences is to risk being marked down as, if not a “racist,” at least a “nativist.” And “immigration” isn’t really what it is, is it? After all, in traditional immigration patterns the immigrant assimilates with his new land, not the new land with the immigrant. Yet in this case the aura of Maryland dissolves like a mirage when faced with “the aura of Central America.”
Two generations ago, America, Canada, Australia, and the rest of the developed world took it as read that a sovereign nation had the right to determine which, if any, foreigners it extended rights of residency to. Now only Japan does. Everywhere else, opposition to mass immigration is “nativist,” and expressing a preference for one group of immigrants over another is “racist.” Until the Sixties, governments routinely distinguished between Irish and Bulgar, Indian and Somali, but now all that matters is the glow of virtue you feel from refusing to distinguish, as if immigration is like a UN peacekeeping operation—one of those activities in which you have no “national interest.”
Very few elderly, established residents of Langley Park knowingly voted for societal self-extinction, yet in barely a third of a century it’s become a fait accompli. And in a politically correct world there is no acceptable form of public discourse in which to object to it.
And so it just kinda happened. Another proposition: When large tracts of the United States take on “the aura of Central America”—laundromats doubling as money-transfer stores, jobless men drinking and sleeping in the sun, civic collapse, to cite only New York Times-observed phenomena—will
Human capital is the most reliable indicator of what society you’ll be. Even liberals, even Martin Peretz, even the New York Times acknowledge that, at least in unguarded moments. For almost half a century, the human capital of the United States has transformed faster than at any time since the founding of the republic.
“Poor Mexico,” Porfirio Diaz, the country’s longtime strongman, is supposed to have said. “So far from God, so close to the United States.” Today Mexico is America’s southern quagmire—farther from God than ever, and not close to the United States but in it.
After the Arizona court decision, Jon Richards published a cartoon in the Albuquerque Journal. It showed three Indians standing on the shore watching the Mayflower approach. “Are they legal?” wonders the chief. “What do we do if they have babies?” asks his squaw. “Is it too late to build a fence?” says the brave.92
What is the message of this cartoon? That America has always been a land of immigrants? Or that the tide of illegal settlement is going to work out as well for the United States as it did for the Algonquin nation? Is Richards’ cartoon just the cheap triumphalism of a self-loathing Anglo’s cultural relativism? Or is it actually a portent of the future? The latter isn’t so hard to imagine: a largely impoverished Hispanic Southwest, with a few tony Anglo gated communities—or, if you prefer, “reservations.”
SHADOWLANDS
The Conformicrats live off the fruits of the productive class and they need to keep them in a state of quiescence. They achieve this with their allies 93 Well, we’re about to.
Under Big Government, the ruling class get power and perks, some of the ruled class have workarounds (gated communities, offshore accounts), but others among the ruled class just get unruly.
What will the statists do? We are already watching municipalities drown in the pensions liabilities of their bureaucr
acies. Do they fix the problem or do they cut core services? The latter’s the way to bet: you don’t fire the police officers, but you reassign them to desk jobs where they’ll get out less and thus require fewer vehicles, less gas, less equipment, less ammunition. It’s already happening in the poorer cities, but, like rot in the boarded-up houses, the signs of decay will creep further up. A lot of cities will take on the character of Third World swamps the colonial authorities are resigned to losing: the police hole up in well fortified headquarters venturing out in heavily armored vehicles ever more rarely. Think St. Louis, Missouri, or Gary, Indiana, with a Green Zone, and your house is twelve blocks outside the perimeter. When the neighborhood’s up for grabs, all that expensive law enforcement of the Security State won’t be there for you. Get yourself a gun, while you’re still allowed to.
Picture an American airport on the Friday afternoon before a big public holiday—the long, slow trudge to gain admission to the secure area. The “secure area” won’t be just for airports anymore. More and more of America will seek to be “secured” in the interests of constraining the forces on the other side of the fence. Think of those decapitated heads in Mexico and hope the cartels don’t decide to learn incompetent transit terror from the jihad—because, inevitably, Big Government will respond with big, bloated, manpower-intensive, ever more intrusive bureaucratic overreach. A citizenry that shrugged when government bureaucrats took to themselves the power to poke around with no probable cause in the nooks and crannies of its genitalia will discover that such extraordinary powers will not remain penned up in Terminal Three, but will spread—to bus stations, and key Interstate ramps, and eventually random Main Streets. As the Shoe Bomber led to the shoeless shuffle and the Panty Bomber led to the federally mandated scrotal grope, so the first Suppository Bomber will lead to complimentary federal prostate exams from LAX to JFK.
