And there are those who kill for lack of an identity

Pat Buchanan on the slumber of the West

Writing of the two killers in Britain, Pat says,

Both killers are Muslim converts of African descent, and both are British born.

How sadly nothing you must be in your own eyes to go this far in an attempt to be something.

Perhaps it is an error to say they killed because they were or had become Muslims.

Perhaps the truth is they became Muslim killers in order to be something.

However, Pat’s topic is immigration, a propos of which he denounces as a delusion

the idea that anyone and everyone who comes here, raises his hand, and swears allegiance to the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights becomes, de facto, not just a legal citizen but an American.

Well, OK, it’s not quite that simple, but, really, why not?

It’s pretty clear Pat has it in mind that immigrants from Europe – apparently, anywhere in Europe from which immigration was legal from about 1890 to 1965 – worked out fine and would continue to do so.

It is specifically about immigrants from elsewhere that he so baldly mocks the notion that any such ceremony as the usual oath of citizenship could possibly make Americans of them.

His claims to worry that non-European immigrants might or do bring their ancestral religious, cultural, and political loyalties with them, along with whatever hatreds of Americans those might involve, are perfectly sensible.

But the European immigrants did that, too, did they not, back in the day?

And given enough generations things settled down well enough.

What he really fears is white people becoming a racial minority in the USA.

Assimilation doesn’t make racial differences disappear or racial conflicts go away.

He and the other conservatives who have expressed similar fears, from time to time, have a point.

But that point is thought-crime, as we know.

And, anyway, opposition to the current, near flood-tide of immigration is a minority view even in Pat's party.

The dominant view is the Wall Street, agribusiness, libertarian one, that we really ought to open flood-gates completely.

Nothing quite like cheap labor, and those who for inability to assimilate end up depending on the welfare state can later be used in propaganda to alienate America from it and the liberals who built it.

Very much as Republicans have for decades used unmarried, black ghetto moms with dozens of kids by different men, living on food stamps and welfare checks in public housing they and those men have turned into hell holes.