Dude, Immigrants

There are four different caravans making their ways north through Latin America.  Some along for the ride intend to settle in Mexico, while others are in for the long haul: to force entry into the United States.  All total, the figure of migrants numbers close to seven thousand, but that number is likely to fluctuate as some depart the caravans to go home or settle in Mexico, or those that leave their homes to join it.  As it stands, about twenty-three hundred of them have already applied for protection in Mexico.

As an aside: you gotta love these fact checks.  “Donald Trump said this thing, but he was wrong!  Here’s a quote from a news anchor assuring you that he’s wrong!  Trust us, you stupid idiot!”

We all know the debates on immigration by now, and this certainly isn’t the first time we’ve had a long march of people attempting, all at once, to break their way across the US border.  And we’ve all seen the gumball video that critiques the use of immigration as tool to combat the incomprehensible magnitude of worldwide poverty.  And we’re all aware that there isn’t a whole lot that recent administrations have tended to do about immigration.  And, of course, we’ve heard plenty of tragic news articles and NYT op-eds focusing on the plight of these defenseless, poor women and children as they traverse miles of desert to seek the American dream on this side of the liberal paradise.

This is the same American dream, mind you, that was robbed from generations of people due in no small part to financial, corporate and government interests who decided to use, among other things, immigration as a tool to bludgeon us with.  We’re told these immigrants will do the jobs Americans just don’t want to do, but it seems impossible to hire an American for a position that’s already been filled by someone else.  Enjoying the labor in question is irrelevant when the labor market has already driven wages into levels so low that the typical American worker wouldn’t even be able to make the minimum payments on his outstanding debt.  Welfare naturally becomes a more appealing option.

What isn’t focused on as much is whether any of this is right in the first place.  The self-professed humanists on the left simply believe immigration to be a positive good for everyone involved.  The more the merrier—and all in the name of preserving human rights.  Which human rights?  Well, it was only a year ago that hysterical activists insisted that this included the right to murder.  They find allies on the right who, though they may have different rights in mind, see the spread of the neo-liberal order as fundamentally a good thing.  The gargantuan industrial farms out west need their cheap labor, after all, and unlike America’s once-thriving manufacturing sectors, farms can’t just be picked up and moved south of the border.

Nationality and a shared common heritage, the two things that come to define a people, mean nothing to these groups who so ardently espouse immigration.  Materialism supplants the traditions of what made America itself instead of something else.  America, forged with a frontiersman spirit harangued by Indians to the west and the treacherous seas to the east, whose birth pangs were heralded by a bloody and internicene conflict that its parents refused to acknowledge the full extent of, found a balance of prosperity between the Masonic influences of its formulation and the dangerous instability of its sudden growth.  America was made by people who were willing to take what they had and the sum accumulation of what was given to them by their forefathers and march out with it into the wilderness to populate and tame an unpredictable frontier.  The freedom that Americans once valued was not a freedom to consume, but a freedom to build, by the grace of God, a national identity that could tame the anarchic tribulations of the frontier.

Notice that there is nothing here that inspires any great confidence in neither the “civic nationalism” of the moderates nor the white nationalism more associated with the right.  White nationalism implies a coherent sense of white identity, a nebulous concept forced upon the right by the divisive voices of the opposition, at the expense of recognizing the more nuanced reality of ethnic identities and the place law holds with relation to the interaction between ethnic enclaves.  This is not the same, however, as the wholehearted embrace of a the law to dictate what sort of civic duty each and every person within its jurisdiction is held to—such civic nationalism paints over the ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds of its subjects and pretends that no differences exist.  The “civic nationalism” espoused by classical liberals has more in common with their supposedly left wing opposition than it does with their nationalist right wing cohorts.

This isn’t to say that the opposition doesn’t believe in an American identity or an American consciousness.  What they’ll tell you, at least, is that America is still a land of freedom, but the freedom they’re interested in is the freedom to acquire stuff, the freedom to go into debt, the freedom to eat junk food, the freedom to indulge in casual sex of nearly any variety, and the freedom to avoid, at any cost, contemplation of the transcendent.  These are the freedoms of corporate enterprise, modern international finance, sexual liberation, and religious liberty.  These are “freedoms” that entail service to the neoliberal order: debt slavery whose main features are obscured by bread and circuses.

So what sort of freedom are the immigrants coming here to obtain?  Chances are: neither.  Ostensibly, they’re fleeing countries ravaged by poverty and violence, though outright “official” warfare is still off the books.  Any claim toward being refugees is rendered moot without an active genocide or a war.  Instead, they’re impoverished, and whatever skills they have tend to be little more than whatever constitutes menial labor.  What you’re looking at are masses of people who have been sold an idea of America that claims that all peoples everywhere no matter their race, color, or creed are welcome in any number as they see fit, regardless of their intentions, ethics, backgrounds, interests, or culture.  And these are people who see no problem uprooting their children, forcing them on allegedly thousand-mile marches, all so they can try to force entry into another sovereign nation.  If they aren’t outright human traffickers, then they could easily be described as abusive parents.

They know there are legal methods for entering the country, but they don’t care.  They’d rather risk the wellbeing of their entire family for this.  And yes, you could make the claim that where they are is so terrible that it’s worth this risk.  And if it were mere handfuls fleeing these countries, it’d be one problem.  But when it’s the workers, the young, the able generations that are leaving, who is left to fix where they came from?  Who is going to make the countries that need to be improved places worth inhabiting?  And what’s going to happen to the place they’re running to in the mean time?

What’s it called when one thing is taken from someplace and moved to a different place at the expense of a thing that was already there?  There’s a word for it… ah, right: replacement.  That’s what’s happening here.  That’s what happens to any culture unwilling to say “no, hang on a second, that’s not how this works.”  Those tasked with that message—the US Government—have failed us, and worse than that, they have betrayed us with things like the 1965 Hart-Celler Act.  The times have proven, despite the lies fed to us that got NAFTA, the immigration reforms, and the economic changes shoved down our throats, that free trade and immigration don’t work the way they’re billed.  We were sold up the river so our urban elites could retire with a few extra zeroes attached to their hedge funds.  America needs to take care of the world?  We can’t even take care of ourselves, now.

For the past couple of years, the white population of America has been in such steep decline that it has been shrinking, even while the country’s overall population has remained fairly steady in its increase.  You already know who is replacing them, and you already know that the country your children will grow up in will not be the same one that you grew up in.  The connection to the past was tenuous enough for people of the Boomer generation.  They grew up when populated manufacturing cities and neat suburban communities were normal, and where a father could work a nine-to-five and make a wage decent enough to support a home, a stay-at-home wife, and two or three kids.  Their kids have grown up in a country that now forces debt into their hands before they can even get a steady job.

And the kids of those kids?  My kids?  I shudder to think about it.

On a more blog-related note, I’ve started a mostly-nightly blog over at The Nightly Grind, if you’d like to check that out, and I have begun recording these Friday longposts for a bare-bones style podcast that’s on the Apple store and apparently Spotify.  Direct access is here, but you can also listen on my YouTube page.

I do have intentions of starting up the QNUWstream again soon, I just need time in my schedule to work out when I’m able to.  Those were pretty fun and, hopefully, they’ll be a good way to get into better touch with you guys, my readers.  I’m also still in the process of setting up a Discord server to help facilitate streaming, as well as making it easier to contact me.  Look forward to the future!

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