Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [46]
As an example, Chavez cited an essay by Mac Donald mockingly titled, “Hispanic Family Values?” Says Chavez: “Mac Donald’s article is a litany of dysfunction and pathology among Hispanics—mothers pimping their own daughters, incest, drugs, ubiquitous illegitimacy, and welfare dependence.” Elsewhere, Mac Donald has employed reckless generalizations, claiming that Latinos are culturally averse to marriage, congenital violent criminals, and that “cutting school is something of a tradition among Hispanics.” On occasion, she feels the need to dehumanize illegal aliens entirely. In one article she referenced a newspaper headline that read, “Patients, Fearing INS Raids, Don’t Seek Health Care,” and then wrote, sarcastically, “And what exactly is wrong with that?”
Chavez argued that it’s “dangerous to win the immigration debate by stirring up racial or ethnic animosities by playing to the prejudices of that small group of Americans who are motivated by racism and nativism.” And she said there’s more than enough blame to go around. “I don’t for a minute believe that the Left isn’t guilty of similar sins; I’ve made a career of attacking the Left when it veered into anti-Americanism or promoting racial divisions. But I expect more from my fellow conservatives.”
DIGESTING WHAT WE’VE EATEN
Mac Donald’s central concern is that Latinos, for various reasons, are either incapable of assimilation or not interested in trying. And while she overstates her case, and is needlessly bellicose in presenting it, her view is hardly unique or original. As Benjamin Franklin demonstrated, the fear that newcomers will dilute the essential character of the country—that immigrants will change America more than America will change immigrants—is as old as the country itself.
Calls for an immigration moratorium or “time-out” are also old hat. In the congressional debate over the Immigration Act of 1924, Senator Ellison DuRant Smith argued that the country already had enough foreigners. “I think we have sufficient stock in America now for us to shut the door, Americanize what we have, and save the resources of America for the natural increase of our population.” It’s worth noting that at the time of Smith’s floor speech— which invoked the theories of Madison Grant to argue that lower levels of immigration were needed to preserve America’s Anglo-Saxon culture—the Chinese Exclusion Act was already in effect, and Congress had passed severe restrictions on Southern and Eastern European immigration only three years earlier, in the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. Nevertheless, Smith felt too much foreign riffraff was still washing ashore.
“Thank God we have in America perhaps the largest percentage of any country in the world of the pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon stock,” said Smith. “It is for the preservation of that splendid stock that has characterized us that I would make this [country] not an asylum for the oppressed of all countries, but a country to assimilate and perfect that splendid type of manhood that has made America the foremost Nation in her progress and her power.”
Senator Smith was a silver-tongued segregationist from South Carolina, a Democrat who defended the Southern way of life until his death in 1944. But on immigration he spoke for most of the Senate; the 1924 act passed with only six dissenting votes. And if you listen closely to today’s immigration debate, Smith’s voice can still be heard, and not just among Internet cranks and talk radio Know-Nothings.
Plenty of fair-minded Americans, of all races and ethnicities, fear that we are not assimilating Latino aliens as fast as they are entering the country through Mexico. Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wants the border closed “to give the latest wave of immigrants time to become Americans” and “time to absorb our meaning and history and traditions.” In recent decades, she says, the country has “experienced the biggest wave of immigrants since the great wave of 1880-1920. And we’ve never stopped to absorb