The Mass Displacement of European Americans

By Paul Roberts
Volume 9, Number 4 (Summer 1999)
Issue theme: "Population growth and resource depletion"

Recently a federal judge wrote to me. The judge enclosed a list of new citizens for whom he had conducted a naturalization ceremony. He was astounded that among almost 100 new citizens there were only four or five Europeans.

Immigration policy has produced an extraordinary change in the ethnic composition of the U.S. population. Experts tell me it has been three decades since Europeans comprised a significant percentage of new citizens. In 1965 the Democrats, who lost the South, changed the immigration rules in order to build African, Asian and Hispanic constituencies that would vote Democratic.

In effect, native-born U.S. citizens are being "ethnically cleansed," not by violence but by their own immigration policy.

With the United States taking in 1.2 million immigrants annually, and with that number again entering illegally, cultural homogeneity has been the casualty.

When I first came to Washington, D.C. 25 years ago, the only international-looking people one saw were in the diplomatic community. Now it is every third person. A person can now duplicate the experiences of world travel by just touring the neighborhoods inside the D.C. Beltway. It is much the same in most cities.

Recent immigrants who favor the melting pot are themselves alarmed. Yeh Ling-Ling, executive director of Diversity Alliance for a Sustainable America, believes we need a time-out from mass immigration in order to permit assimilation; otherwise, the United States will face ethnic divides that exceed those in Kosovo and the Balkans.

Yeh Ling-Ling reports that recently the Jewish principal of a predominately Latino school in San Fernando Valley was beaten unconscious by assailants who told him "We don't want you here anymore, white principal."

Native-born white liberals use "diversity" to justify mass immigration beyond the ability of the melting pot to assimilate. But the unassimilated immigrants are not as tolerant of diversity as their white liberal spokespersons. Mario Obledo, co-founder of the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, said on a radio program that Hispanics are going to take over all the political institutions of California and anyone who does not like it should leave.

In Dearborn, Mich., school fights have erupted between Arabs and non-Arabs, in New Jersey between Koreans and non-Koreans, in Maryland communities between Russian immigrants and native-born U.S. citizens, in Lexington, Ky., between blacks and Hispanics.

The formerly all-white community of Cupertino, Calif., has been so overrun by Chinese immigrants that the school board debated a Mandarin-immersion kindergarten class. Thai A. Nguyen-Khoa, a U.S. history teacher in San Francisco, has written about the conflict resulting from consigning Vietnamese immigrants to black housing projects.

There is a lot to be said in behalf of individual immigrants. I recently wrote about one, Juana Vasquez, a brave woman who stood up to the native-born white liberals who were acting out their fantasies by conducting a child sex abuse witch hunt in Wenatchee, Wash., and sending innocent parents to prison.

A sterling aspect of Third World immigrants is their lack of illusions about government. Unlike native-born liberals, non- European immigrants have been taught by experience to see government as the obstacle, not the path, to happiness.

When one encounters Third World immigrants as employees in government bureaucracies, they are often noticeably less officious than their white counterparts. In the end, the live-and-let-live Third World culture of bribery might be what saves us from increasingly intrusive government.

One downside to the massive non-European immigration is that, thanks to the liberals' civil rights policies, every one of these immigrants enters the United States as a "preferred minority" with legal privileges that native-born citizens of European origin do not have. For racial reasons unrelated to merit or competitive performance, every non-European immigrant is entitled to privileged consideration in university admissions, employment, promotions and government contracts.

It is impossible for the melting pot to work when new immigrants have a "preferred" status that the majority of native-born citizens do not have. People on whom legal privileges are conferred eventually feel like a privileged class and begin acting like one.

Mario Obledo is not the only one who believes native-born citizens are losing their country. Others see the demise of the native-born in a recent occurrence in Richmond, Va. There a city councilman, Sa'ad E1-Amin, has forced the removal of a mural of Robert E. Lee, the most beloved of all Virginians.

When I was a kid even Northerners respected Robert E. Lee. Not a word was heard against him. But Sa'ad E1-Amin compares Gen. Lee to Adolf Hitler.

Does this lack of good will toward "white culture" mean the portraits of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson will be removed from our currency and their historic homes, Mount Vernon and Monticello, closed? If mass immigration means the extinction of American culture, we had best rethink it.

About the author

Paul Craig Roberts is a columnist for The Washington Times and is nationally syndicated. This June 21, 1999 article is reprinted by permission.