The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Friday, July 18, 2014

Pat Buchanan, revisionist historian

Immigration, again

To make the problem seem much scarier he ignores the very similar diversity imported with past floods of mostly European immigrants who also spoke no English and settled in clusters all over the country, living in city neighborhoods known as Little Italy, China Town, or Polish Hill, or settling the countryside in such numbers as to dominate the populations of several states in New England or the Middle West, patronizing their own newspapers and radio stations and schools eventually reaching from K through college in their mother tongues far into the 20th Century.

The assimilation he writes of took decades and generations.

And as to the new waves of immigrants he finds so scary, decades have not yet passed.

How does he know assimilation will not happen?

I agree it would be best to close the door indefinitely, if not to all then at least to the most potentially dangerous like the Muslims.

But he is overdoing his message of panic and his predictions of breakup of the nation are thinly supported, indeed.

And in the long run are we really sure altering the racial balance of the country will be any more harmful than those earlier waves of immigration that permanently changed the ethnic makeup of what was, at the time of the Revolution, a white American population of almost entirely British origin?

People of Brit ancestry, including descendants of those who made the Revolution, nowadays account for roughly a quarter of the US population.

The ancestry of the rest of America's whites - some 70% of the whole population - is European but other than Brit, and the largest single ethnicity among all whites is not the Brits but the Germans, by a considerable margin.

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