The inimitable Thomas Sowell has weighed in on the big-picture implications of mass immigration over at RealClearPolitics. While he does an excellent job skewering pro-illegal immigration cliches with his usual clear-headed rationality, the following excerpt represents a far greater and more important realization about the effects of millions of foreigners on American culture and society:
Why is this a far more prosperous country than the countries from which most of our immigrants come? Many of those countries are well endowed with natural resources but are lacking an economic and political culture that would allow those resources to be used to produce better results than the poverty which drives their people to other countries.
When you import people, you import cultures. Those cultures no longer give way to the American culture when "multiculturalism" is a dogma and its apostles and activists make it necessary for American laws, language, and culture to give way, or at least accommodate growing alien enclaves in our midst.
A nation is more than a collection of whatever population happens to reside within its borders. Something has to unite those people if the country is not to degenerate into the kind of unending internal strife brought on by Balkanization in many countries around the world, not just in the Balkans.
The final paragraph above is not only anathema to liberals, but to modern liberalism itself (embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike), which likes to hold that as all men are created equal, any cultural/racial/religious differences are mere details and relatively unimportant when it comes to deciding who we should choose to grant the gift and privilege of American citizenship. Read the full article here.
Image: The Central Balkans
