Illegal aliens demo in old New York
The rally in New York City for illegal aliens, one of about 60 demonstrations taking place in cities throughout the U.S. as part of the National Day of Action for Immigrant Justice, was held from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Broadway next to City Hall Park. At 6 p.m. a friend and I emerged from the Park Street Station of the IRT line and found ourselves conveniently located just a few yards in front of the speakers’ stand, with a huge tv screen behind it and a female of color’s angry ranting voice being amplified beyond endurance—and beyond comprehension. We began walking away from the stand heading uptown on the sidewalk, moving parallel to the demonstrators gathered in the street, and we eventually covered the entire length of the demonstration.
Mark A. writes:
I’m sad to report that immigrants rallied here in Philadelphia yesterday. About 7,000 marched according to the local newspaper. Even sadder is the fact that the Archdiocese helped organize the march. God help us. I pray that these marches are akin to the Muslim riots in Europe this year: I hope this is a wake-up call to white Americans that we must do something about this now or we are finished.
I went to elementary school and junior high school about 90 miles north of Mexico in southern California. De facto segregation was the norm. This was in the 1980s. Lunch, academics, and gym were all segregated. The Chicanos on one side and the whites on the other. The school never said a word about it. Every pickup basketball game was automatically Chicano vs. white. The racial abuse was non-stop: I learned every Spanish cuss word and anti-white insult immediately. (All of this was one-sided: The whites never said a thing; it was always instigated by the Chicanos.)
The bottom line (that you have so importantly been pointing out): this is about race, people. This isn’t just about immigration. It’s about Chicano-racial-payback against the white man. Fasten your seat belts.
irst I thought the crowd was not that big, only filling Broadway for two blocks back from the stand. But in fact it continued many blocks farther than that, all the way to Franklin Street many blocks away from Park Street, though some blocks were almost empty of demonstrators and others were partly or mostly filled, on the blocks where electronic speakers were set up. A policeman indicated to me that earlier in the afternoon the crowd had filled Broadway all the way back to Canal Street. Park Street to Canal Street is a considerable distance.
I had heard that the demonstrators had been told to bring American flags, to counteract the disastrous PR effect of all the Mexican flags at the Los Angeles march. But of course the Los Angeles marchers also had lots of U.S. flags, mixed with Mexican flags. It was the same here, a huge number of flags, about equally divided between U.S. and Mexican flags throughout the crowd wherever we walked, as well as other Latin American flags. The signs carried by the demonstrators said, “We are America,” and “All rights for Immigrants, Amnistìa.” The incoherence of the message hit you in the face. If they are Americans, and demanding rights as Americans, why all the foreign flags? It’s the typical liberal multiculturalist message, demanding full inclusion in the society while aggressively asserting an alien identity; also known as “wanting it all.” As for their demeanor, the demonstrators were reasonably well behaved, not threatening or hostile as far as I could see, though the speakers we heard, including Roger Toussaint, the Haitan-born, firebrand head of the Transit Workers Union, who probably gets a six figure salary and lives in a mansion, all sounded like typical left-wing anti-Americans, decrying American racism, repeating the catalog of mistreated minorities throughout American history, and yelling, “No justice, no peace.”
I assume that most of the people demonstrating were illegals, though of course there is no way to know that. It was an interesting experience to see this many Mexicans and other Hispanics all grouped together in one mass, and what I mainly did as we walked the length of the demonstration was to look at people’s faces. I wondered, since the dominant ethnic type of the Mexicans is Mestizo, a mixture of white and Indio with the Indio predominating, how could there have been enough Spanish colonists in the early days of Spanish Mexico to have married with enough native women to produce an entire population of Mestizos? At any rate, though the Mestizos are not as different from us as pure Indios or African blacks, they are not us. Assimilation means to become the same, therefore there is no way that these people can ever assimilate with us and become part of one people with us, unless we repeat what the Spanish did five hundred years ago and intermarry with them. I’m sincerely sorry if you don’t like my uttering such a shocking thing, but please get this, folks: I didn’t invent the world. I live in this world and try to understand it, just like you. And in the real world that we all live in, this world that presents itself to us every day, when it comes to relations between entire peoples race matters. The immigrants and illegal aliens are fully aware of this fact of life and speak plainly about their own racial difference from us, including their intention, not to join with us, but to displace us; yet if we even mention these obvious actualities, we are thought to be bad people, unfit for decent society. To coin a phrase, the double standard stops here.
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I had asked: “… how could there have been enough Spanish colonists in the early days of Spanish Mexico to have married with enough native women to produce an entire population of Mestizos”
Someone writes from the website Gene Expression:
Concubinage and polygyny. Mestizo populations tend to be wholly Iberian on their male lineage and indigenous on their female. But the number of males was few while the number of females was many.
That is interesting. Now I’m wondering if this was part of a deliberate policy on the part of the Spanish to create a new, mixed race.
Mark D. writes:
Unlike you, who were on scene, I did have the opportunity to watch lots of TV coverage of the illegal immigration demonstrations yesterday.
I heard all the usual arguments, positions, slogans, etc. Nothing new.
I heard no one mention or discuss “culture.” The unspoken assumption is that illegal aliens are worker drones and bring no culture with them, and of course there is no identifiable American culture for them to impact anyway.
I still wait to hear the word, “Brazil,” with all the cultural and social connotations that the word evokes. Will we become a Latin American country on the model of a Brazil? And if that is our future, does anyone care, or does anyone even have the right to have such concerns (that is, do we have the right to protect and conserve our own culture)?
I saw deep alienation and anger among many Americans as a consequence of the immigration scandal and the provocative demonstrations.
I think the reaction is far different from the reaction to, say, MLK’s rally in DC in 1963 on the occasion of his I Have a Dream speech. Those days are gone, although some wish to resurrect them. I just don’t think America is in that place anymore.
Mark A. writes:
I’m sad to report that immigrants rallied here in Philadelphia yesterday. About 7,000 marched according to the local newspaper. Even sadder is the fact that the Archdiocese helped organize the march. God help us. I pray that these marches are akin to the Muslim riots in Europe this year: I hope this is a wake-up call to white Americans that we must do something about this now or we are finished.
I went to elementary school and junior high school about 90 miles north of Mexico in southern California. De facto segregation was the norm. This was in the 1980s. Lunch, academics, and gym were all segregated. The Chicanos on one side and the whites on the other. The school never said a word about it. Every pickup basketball game was automatically Chicano vs. white. The racial abuse was non-stop: I learned every Spanish cuss word and anti-white insult immediately. (All of this was one-sided: The whites never said a thing; it was always instigated by the Chicanos.)
The bottom line (that you have so importantly been pointing out): this is about race, people. This isn’t just about immigration. It’s about Chicano-racial-payback against the white man. Fasten your seat belts.
Michael K. writes:
Massive “Hispanic” immigration has everything to do with race. Restrictionists who insist that their opposition to massive Third-World immigration has nothing to do with race are more dishonest and/or estranged from reality than white multiculturalists who argue that race is an artificial social construct even as they support massive nonwhite immigration for explicitly racial reasons.
The only reason that tens of millions of Mexicans and other “Latinos” have been allowed to enter this country, legally and illegally, is because they’re nonwhite. Even the insatiable hunger for cheap (or cheaper) labor is racial in effect if not overtly in intent since businesses could never find an endless supply of chattel workers from European countries.
Moreover, the fundamental reason that Mexico is a violent, impoverished Third-World country is because its population of 120 million is 90% nonwhite: 60% Mestizo (including “Zambos”) and 30% pure Amerindian.
If virtually all the Amerindians had died of European diseases, and/or if the Spanish had driven them into the jungles of Central America, and if they had not copulated en masse with Indian women but rather brought in myriads of Spanish women to marry, Mexico would be like Spain—almost surely better, in fact, given its proximity to the United States. And if they had welcomed myriads of other European immigrants (Italians, Germans, Poles, Jews, etc.), Mexico today would be like Argentina—only more prosperous, free, stable, democratic, given the influence of the neighboring United States. And the population would almost surely be closer to 30 or 40 million rather than 120 million.
If Mexico were like Spain or Argentina, tens of millions of immigrants, including 10-15 million illegal aliens, would never have invaded the United States. Over half a million illegals would not be entering the country every year. Immigration from Mexico would probably number in the tens of thousands rather than tens of millions.
There would not be hundreds of vicious “Hispanic” gangs—even in cities like Green Bay, Duluth, Fargo, Rogers, Arkansas, and the like—nor hundreds of thousands of gangsters and other criminals who commit millions of violent crimes and other felonies. There would be no “reconquista” movement, no myth of Aztlan (“the bronze continent”), no radical anti-white organizations like “La Raza,” MALDEF, Mecha, et al., no possibility that America would degenerate into a nonwhite majority country by mid-century in which the historic European population will ultimately be a dispossessed and persecuted minority.
In closing: The problem with massive “Hispanic” immigration, especially from Mexico, is not illegality but history, culture, overwhelming numbers, and RACE. The fervent nationalism of tens of millions of Mexicans living in the United States—legal immigrants, illegal aliens, and American citizens—is intensified by race. Their revanchist anger over the Mexican war and the expropriation of the Southwest is intensified by race. Their hatred of “gringos” and “Anglos” is deepened and inflamed by race. The reconquista/Aztlan movement is defined and driven by racial consciousness, solidarity, and anti-white enmity. Race and culture are inseparable. Race informs culture. And the overwhelming numbers and mass invasion of Mexicans and other “Hispanics” would not exist but for race—and, combined with race, renders assimilation impossible.
Clayton writes:
In your post entitled, “Illegal aliens demo in old New York,” you make the following statement: “Assimilation means to become the same, therefore there is no way that these people can ever assimilate with us and become part of one people with us, unless we repeat what the Spanish did five hundred years ago and intermarry with them. I’m sincerely sorry if you don’t like my uttering such a shocking thing, but please get this, folks: I didn’t invent the world.”
I’m not entirely sure I know what you mean here. Do you mean (1) they cannot “become the same” because they are of a different race, or (2) because they are of a different culture?
The first seems to me obvious on one interpretation, and racist on another. (Quick, but important, note concerning the possibly racist view. One’s race is not connected in any way with what one essentially is as a human being, is it? For example, wouldn’t an adopted infant of the Asian, African, or Mestizo races (indeed, of any race), if reared in a Western home, by thoroughly Western parents (culturally Western, that is, and they can be white Europeans or Americans if you like), pretty much turn out to be a Westerner him or herself? I think so. If, however, one’s race is tied to one’s culture—other than incidentally—then how is this so? I don’t see it.)
The second seems to me wrong. For immigrants of a foreign culture to adopt the culture of their new homeland is difficult and takes time, but it is not impossible. If you intend the second, why do you seem to think it is impossible?
I suspect you mean the first, namely that they cannot assimilate because of their race. After all, you speak of the race of these Mestizos, noticing their faces, which they have inherited from their Indio and Spanish ancestors (though mostly from the Indios).
Now, obviously “they are not us” and cannot become “us,” if by “us” you mean white folks, as the context suggests is your meaning: they cannot change their race. But so what? “So what” is precisely how one who does not consider race to be terribly important feels.
However, they can “become the same” in another sense: they can adopt our culture, or at least the essential elements of it. This process, it seems to me, need not require intermarriage. Intermarriage may facilitate changing their culture, thereby quickening the process, but it isn’t necessary. Changing their race will require intermarriage and offspring, but this will change “our” (white folks) race as well.
Now, if you hold the view that race is tied to culture in other than incidental ways, then won’t intermarriage, while making “them” and “us” one people (both racially and culturally), also change both our race and our culture? Since I don’t think race is tied to culture in any ultimately important ways, the prospects of intermarriage and the racial changes that may result do not bother me. The prospect of serious, fundamental changes to our culture, however, does bother me. I think that that which makes one a Westerner is primarily cultural, not racial, and therefore any serious changes to our culture make us something other than Westerners. I don’t think I like that, and I definitely do not like it if any fundamental changes are ultimately understood to be changes for the worse.
Now if, as a result of the intermarriage you speak of, only superficial elements (whatever these might be) of the foreign culture are adopted, while the essential elements (whatever these might be) of Western culture are preserved, then I suppose that’s fine with me. But I don’t think I could stomach any serious changes to our culture.
LA replies:
Clayton subscribes to the modern liberal belief that race—i.e., what we are physically, what kind of bodies we have, and the physical commonalities we share among communities of common descent—is and should be of absolutely no importance to us as human beings. It’s an exceedingly strange idea, which, of all the societies in history, only the modern West has embraced. Obviously our race, our physical being, is a part of what we are. To claim otherwise is to alienate us from our very humanity of which liberals claim to be defenders.
Does race totally define us? Of course not. It is one of the dimensions of our being. Racial reductionists claim that race is the most important factor, they see race as the primary or sole determinant of what we are, and even (in the case of Nazis) as the source of moral virtues and cultural creativity. Modern liberals claim that race is of no importance at all, and that to think that it’s of any importance at all is the most wicked thing in the world. Between these two ideological extremes there is the reality in which we actually live, a reality in which race is part of what we are.
Clayton uses the example of a non-white child adopted and raised by white Western parents to demonstrate that race doesn’t matter. But the very atypicality of his example proves that race in the ordinary course of things does matter. Short of having all nonwhites adopted by white parents, the racial/cultural nexus of non-white peoples will remain intact. Further, once you have lots of non-whites integrated in a white society, their visible differences from the whites will undoubtedly lead them to adopt a different identity from the whites. This is because racial, physical differences do matter, not least in forming our identity and image of ourselves, which, again, is a normal part of our humanity.
Clayton writes: “The second seems to me wrong. For immigrants of a foreign culture to adopt the culture of their new homeland is difficult and takes time, but it is not impossible. If you intend the second, why do you seem to think it is impossible?”
His example proves my point. While small numbers of individuals may be (mostly imperfectly) assimilated, entire populations cannot be. To prove that race doesn’t matter, Clayton must engage in endless social/racial engineering. Ironically, though race-blind liberals often suggest a link between racially conscious whites and Nazis, it is actually the liberals who are more Nazi-like, since, like the Nazis, they seek to transform the human race in order to advance an ideology of human perfection, while racially conscious whites simply seek to preserve their historic peoples and cultures.
Mark D. writes:
IN response to Clayton’s point that Hispanics reared in Western homes would turn out to be Western, if one can believe Steve Sailer, this is naïve. According to Sailer, the average “Hispanic” has an IQ one full standard deviation below the average white. Sailer goes on to argue that IQ is directly correlated to income. Therefore, on average, your average Hispanic will earn less than your average white, permanently, forever, unless the state intervenes to remedy the disparity.
So, in answer to the question, No, they will not pretty much turn out like any other Westerner. They will turn out like an Hispanic.
Also, Clayton writes:
“Since I don’t think race is tied to culture in any ultimately important ways, the prospects of intermarriage and the racial changes that may result do not bother me.”
The problem with intermarriage is the IQ differential. Do people, on average, marry others who are significantly less intelligent than they are? One would have to answer yes to believe that millions of whites will intermarry with Mestizos.
As for the contention that race and culture aren’t related in any important way (!), how about the proposition that a population’s average IQ and its culture are related in important ways? Sailer and others trace the connection between average IQ and cultural level all over the world. It’s very interesting reading. We are importing millions of people who, in comparison to the average white, are dumb. I don’t condemn them for this. I do, however, doubt that some magical assimilation is possible or likely.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 10, 2006 09:58 PM | Send