America’s Census results show that the country is being transformed “into a much browner, more suburban, more southern and western place”.
According to a recent study from the Census Bureau, the majority of them are now from groups normally considered minorities, chiefly Hispanics and blacks. The latest release of data from last year’s decennial census confirms that whites still constitute a slender majority, 54%, of those under 18, and a larger one, 64%, of the population as a whole.
America’s demographic change is rapid enough to be called a revolution. Over the past decade minorities accounted for 92 per cent of all population growth, with the number of Hispanics in the US now somewhere around 51 million, and minorities a majority in California and Texas, the US’s most populous states. By 2050 whites will be a minority in the US, a historically astonishing transformation.
For its first century the US was not particularly diverse. Writing the Federalist Papers in 1787, John Jay, first chief justice of the United States, gave thanks that “Providence has been placed to give this one connected country to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs”.
From the 1880s to the 1920s the United States was transformed by its first wave of mass immigration, from eastern and southern Europe. But the differences with today’s movement are striking. America imported overwhelmingly Christian, European migrants into a confident national culture with a high native birth rate in a sparsely populated continent. It had no welfare state and ruthlessly rejected immigrants who did not succeed (some 40 per cent of European immigrants returned home), immigrants faced enormous social pressures to drop their ethnic baggage, and for reasons of money and time they had to abandon links with their mother country. All of those things are true today, if you insert the word “not” before (with the exception of population density).
The United States only embraced diversity in 1965, with Senator Edward Kennedy’s Immigration Act, which opened up the country to non-Europeans in large numbers for the first time (although more than they expected: Kennedy predicted 62,000 immigrants a year; by 1996 it was 1.3 million a year). Before that, the United States was 90 per cent white, with large swathes totally dominated by northern European Protestants; America’s diversity experiment is as recent as Britain’s.
How will this new America be different to the old one, apart from being far more unequal? In some ways, not much. America’s political culture was forged by British-Americans such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, and its political ideals are still explicitly Anglo-Saxon. But culture and biology need not match, and Anglo-Saxon political ideas have survived better in the US than they have in England, where governments of recent years have assaulted such principles as the right to remain silent, habeas corpus and double jeopardy.
What may change is the United States’ relationship with Europe and Britain in particular. The term “special relationship” is a tragically embarrassing fiction – Britain is way down the list of America’s best friends, barely an usher, let alone best man; but the two countries have enjoyed a more than close relationship during the last century. It is not just two World Wars, the fight against Communism, a dozen smaller operations and intelligence sharing. In many parts of the world Britain effectively handed over the British Empire to Pax Americana. Mark Steyn even suggested that future historians may see British and American rule as two parts of the same political era.
And this relationship was not entirely just about shared interests and a shared language; there was also a certain degree of shared descent, if not biological than at least cultural. Certainly President Woodrow Wilson, who effectively invented modern Anglo-Americans relations, saw it in familiar terms, and subsequent WASP presidents felt a certain attachment to the country from which the Mayflower sailed. And while American Anglophiles come in all shapes and colours, a disproportionate number come from historically English parts of the country and from Anglo, or at least European, backgrounds.
But what will Anglo-American relations look like when America is no longer Anglo? Will a Latinised, less European United States enjoy such a spiritual bond with England? We already have some indication with Barack Obama, the most anti-British US president in living memory, an inheritance from his Kenyan father (although on his mother’s side he has a great deal of English blood, and claims descent from both Alfred the Great and Edward I), and Hillary Clinton’s views on the Malvinas. Considering the nature of the future US electorate, which politician would take Britain’s side against a Latin American state?
Let’s hope Britain, and Europe, never needs rescuing, once again, from an aggressive totalitarian ideology.
The idea of deliberately changing the ethnic & cultural nature of your population--from the standpoint of upholding the multi-generational function of any people or nation--is insane. What Teddy & his friends launched was a deliberate assault on American continuity, which made sense only to those who hoped to dilute our sense of being unique, of a clear identity--with that traditional ongoing purpose, set forth in the Preamble to the Constitution.
On the other hand, from the standpoint of those who sought to build a World Government, where all the peoples of the earth would find themselves submerged, with little or no possibility of ever escaping, the gambit made perfect sense.
We are now on the cusp of a decision that will decide whether any semblance of the unique achievements, the essential aspects that reflect the actual populations of nations, will survive the machinations of the enemies of nation & freedom. The deliberate homogenization of existing nations with outsiders brought in to accomplish "diversity," is a death thrust towards those existing nations. In no other way does it make any sense.
Pre-1965 American immigration policy was not an attack on any people. It was intended as an affirmation of the American people. (For more detailed analysis, see Immigration & An American Future">.)
I have been in this fight, since I took on Norman Cousins on his promotions, many decades back. We will lose everything we value, unless we are able to look more closely at what has really been going on here.
William Flax
Britain will be an Islamic Republic by then so what’s to worry?