You Can’t Have a Constitution without a Nation To Go with It

Cross-posted earlier on Traditional Right.

You can tell it’s an election year, because the Republicans are all of a sudden talking about the Constitution again.  Not that I mind, of course, but it seems that they only start paying attention to it when the generally more conservative and constitutionalist Republican primary voters start paying attention to them.  So suddenly, the political realm is filled with talk about what the Constitution says about every issue, from abortion to xylophone maintenance.

The problem that I see with this, however, is that at the same time as they are claiming their love and devotion to our founding document, most of these same politicians are pursuing policies relating to demographics and national sovereignty which are completely at odds with the perpetuation of the diluted remains of constitutional government.  Put simply, the mainstream Republican pursuit of amnesty, open borders, and massive immigration (both legal and illegal) works to destroy the very Constitution they profess to be so concerned about.

We must consider the following as a truism: There is no such thing as magic soil.  What I mean is that a person’s culture and upbringing do not change simply because that person occupies a new geographical location. An immigrant (regardless of their legality) will not automatically possess a new set of fundamental political, social, cultural, and moral attitudes, simply because they occupy a place on American soil, or even have gone through the extended process of formally attaining American citizenship. To see them acquire an American outlook to go along with their American residency requires time-consuming, extensive, and (in an ideal world) mandatory acculturation to our society and mores.  In days gone by, our society and government both worked to try to make that happen (with a fairly good success rate).  Unfortunately, our government has completely absconded (and is, in fact, hostile to) its responsibility to assimilate immigrants, and political correctness is increasingly tying the hands of anyone else who would seek to encourage immigrants to become genuine Americans in more than just a formal sense.  Diversity – the death-knell of any advanced civilization – is becoming the norm, rather than just an unfortunate but temporary exception.

That, of course, greatly affects our political climate, which in turn affects the reverence for (and consequent adherence to) our Constitution.  I believe that we can look at American history and see a steady erosion of our founding principles and constitutional government that goes hand in hand with our absorption of more and more immigrants from abroad.

Broadly speaking, there are three general “peak periods” of immigration to the United States.  The first occurred roughly between 1830-1860, and was primarily made up of British and Irish workers and German political refugees, most of them fleeing the crackdowns after the unsuccessful revolutions of 1848.  The second wave occurred between approximately 1880 and 1920, and was made up of large number of workers from southern and eastern Europe, though its early years also had a large Scandinavian component as well.  This is the immigration that most people have in mind when they fetishize Ellis Island and “coming from the old country”.  The third wave began with the liberalization of our laws in the early 1960s, and continues to this day.  This wave is characterized by a much greater proportion of immigrants coming from non-European nations, primarily south and east Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and especially Mexico and Central America. 

The first two waves of immigration were markedly different from the third.  In those waves, the immigrants were largely from Europe, and came from cultures that were at least distantly related to America’s prevailing Anglo-Saxon culture.  At the same time, there was pronounced encouragement of these immigrants to become Americans.  From official government entry policy down to the social assumptions of the man on the street, our attitude towards immigrants was guardedly welcoming, but on the supposition that they would make the effort to fit into our culture, rather than expecting us to cater to theirs.  There were no ballots printed in 75 different languages in those days.  Immigrants learned English (if they didn’t know it already) or they starved.  They were expected to be patriotic and to operate within our political and social norms.  No “honor killings” or shari’a law would have been tolerated back then.   

Despite this, we still see that these waves of immigration had a profound (and negative) impact on our political culture and constitutional fidelity. In the decades closely following each wave of immigration, massive changes were made to our government and political realm as the immigrants began to take their places in the pool of available voters.

The first wave brought with it a combination of unprecedented political corruption combined with German radicalism.  It was on the heels of this wave that Tammany Hall really broke wide open as a political machine cultivating and controlling the votes of Irish immigrants in New York.  It was also in this time period that the newly-formed Republican party adopted its radical turn at the behest of the many Germans in America, during whose dominance America essentially was changed from the federal representative Republic she was founded to be to the sort of increasingly majoritarian and unitary democratic state that bodes so poorly for individual liberties and states’ rights.

The second wave saw large numbers of immigrants come in from countries with authoritarian traditions – especially those from various areas in the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires.    Almost none of them came from countries with genuine traditions of individual liberty or some form of constitutional rule of law.  As a result, these immigrants brought in with them the cultural preconception that government should both be obsequiously deferred to and looked to as a paternalistic provider. It was this wave of immigrants who provided fertile grounds for advancing and then cementing the so-called “progressive” movement that looked to technocratic government for all the answers to our problems, and which eventually culminated in Roosevelt’s New Deal. 

In spite of the damage done by these waves, America still retained some of its original pristine constitutional purity in the 1950s and into the 1960s. Free speech, freedom of religion, and the rest of the Bill of Rights were still largely in place.  Notwithstanding the rampant abuses of that document, the average citizen was still largely free to live as they pleased.

And then came the third wave of immigration to America. 

This wave has featured, and continues to feature, huge numbers of immigrants who have absolutely no connection to limited government, no understanding of constitutional restrains on government, and no concern for natural rights and individual liberties.  Indeed, in many cases, these immigrants come from places completely outside of any definition of Western civilization, and cannot be expected in any way, shape, or form to understand what American culture and society are really all about.

What’s worse, there is now (official or unofficially) no effort to assimilate these immigrants to American culture and civilization.  In many cases, there is not even the expectation that these immigrants will contribute positively to American society even in a purely economic sense. Witness the many who come to America solely to partake of our “entitlements” largesse.  Because no effort is made to assimilate them, the American polity continues to balkanize, the “melting pot” model giving way rapidly to the “rocky road ice cream” model where in the underlying substrate must make room for increasingly large and undissolved chunks of foreign objects. 

It is coincident with this third wave that we have really seen the rise of undiluted, raw socialism in America.  “Progressive” politicians have realized that it is advantageous to themselves to discourage the Americanization of immigrants, since this makes them less likely to reject the politicians’ offer of “free” goodies in exchange for votes.  Because these immigrants largely have no understanding of or care for things like individual liberties or constitutional government, they are not in the least concerned that the giving of these goodies will require the loss of liberty and the destruction of constitutionalism.  In other words, when you bring in millions of foreigners from socialistic countries with no real tradition of limited, constitutional government, you’ll eventually end up with a socialistic country with no more limited, constitutional government. When that happens, the government is free to take away every liberty you have, regardless of what that dusty ol’ Constitution has to say about the matter.

And that’s what the Democrats (as well as the establishment Republicans) want – a government that they can use to milk the hard-working people of this country for money and power. 

This is why it is vitally important that the flow of immigrants into this country be halted, and those who are here be required to Americanize and assimilate, or else be asked to return to where they came from.  America is not simply a geographical or political entity.  It is a nation with its own unique culture, traditions, mores, and history.  Like every other nation on Earth, America deserves to be able to defend and preserve her own traditions – one of which was limited constitutional government designed to safeguard liberty and prevent the rise of tyranny.  If immigration presents a threat to that, then that immigration needs to be stopped until such a time as the “indigestible nugget” can be absorbed. 

In other words, if you want to preserve (and maybe even restore) the Constitution, you need to make sure that you have a population that understands and believes in its principles to go along with it