http://www.theconservativevoice.com/article/17873.html
by Henry Holzer
The Bell Tolls
August 31, 2006 11:01 PM EST



Patrick J. Buchanan’s important new book could have been entitled “Indictment,” for that is what he has given us: sustainable charges against the Mexican government for fostering reconquista of the United States Southwest and an intent to pillage our values, culture and wealth—aided and abetted by complicit Americans, both private citizens and public officials. “For the America of yesterday,” Buchanan writes, “has vanished and the America of tomorrow holds promise of becoming a land our parents would not recognize.” And too many Mexicans and too many Americans are to blame.

An indictment, of course, is merely an accusation. Proof is required, and Buchanan provides an overwhelming amount in a richly sourced book that stands as a virtual legal brief in conclusive support of his argument (even though State of Emergency would have benefited from more linear organization and less repetition).

Throughout, Buchanan provides fact after fact that incriminates the Mexican government itself in what is befalling the United States. Although the author doesn’t use the word “motive,” he unmistakably identifies the factors animating official Mexican policy historically and today.

In the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, Mexican General Santa Anna massacred every defender of the Alamo, and then at Goliad murdered another three hundred Texans who surrendered. Soon after, at San Jacinto, the Texans struck back, decimating Santa Anna’s army. Forced by their defeat to cede Texas to the Texans, the Mexicans quickly repudiated the treaty.

Nearly a decade later, Congress officially annexed Texas—considered by Mexico still to be one of its provinces. The Mexican war followed. Mexico lost. And in the war-ending Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, the Mexicans ceded not only Texas but “the entire Southwest, and California, to the United States.”

Years later, in yet another Mexican-perceived affront, President Wilson sent General Pershing across our southern border against Pancho Villa, who had murdered Americans students in cold blood and then crossed into New Mexico attacking the town of Columbus, where he murdered another seventeen Americans.

In this historical chapter—which Buchanan aptly entitles “A Grudge Against the Gringo”—and elsewhere throughout his book, the author offers example after example of the long-held animus of Mexicans toward the United States.

For a thumb-nail sketch of today’s Mexican strategy, Buchanan quotes Hudson Institute scholar John Fonte:

[W]hat is envisioned by Mexican elites and their American allies is not (as

some would have it) a crude attempt at reconquista (or a reconquest of the

American Southwest, but a sophisticated and long-term strategy similar to

the approach promoted by leaders of the European Union and other global

and transnational elites, of slowly and steadily building a series of

institutions and structures [like NAFTA] that would lead to greater and

greater political integrations in North America—and thus, by definition, a

weakening of American constitutional sovereignty.

While agreeing with Fonte about Fox’s “building” strategy, Buchanan disagrees with the former’s “airy dismissal of any Mexican idea of reconquista.” To the contrary, Buchanan sees the Mexican president’s strategy as aiming “directly at a reannexation of the Southwest, not militarily, but ethnically, linguistically, and culturally, through transfer of millions of Mexicans into the United States and a migration of ‘Anglos’ out of the lands Mexico lost in 1848.” Recent displays of the hundreds of thousands of protesting Mexicans the drum-beaters can put into the street in support of unconscionable demands lends much credence to Buchanan’s thesis.

Indeed, the author’s summary of current Mexican strategy reflects much of today’s status quo:

[E]ndless migration from Mexico north, the Hispanicization of the

American Southwest, and dual citizenship for all Mexican-

Americans. The goals: Erase the border. Grow the influence,

through Mexican-Americans, over how America disposes of her

wealth and power. Gradually circumscribe the sovereignty of the

United States. Lastly, economic and political merger of the nations

in a binational union. And in the nuptial agreement, a commitment

to share the wealth and power.

And who are the winners from this strategy?

Employers of illegal immigrant laborers, who not only work cheap but in the process keep down the wages of Americans who are willing to work.

The Democrat Party, which sees millions of eventually amnestied illegal aliens as beneficiaries of vast social programs, and thus voters for the politicians who provide them.

Mainline churches, according to Buchanan, who can replace defecting parishioners with new worshipers.

Unions, to replace members lost through downsizing and outsourcing.

American elites, who on the backs of their countrymen move closer to their vision of eliminating the America of their patrimony and replacing it with their utopian World Without Borders.

Mexico itself, because it exports its poor and unemployed through the safety valve of a porous border where they can make trouble only for the host, and where the Mexican people receive billions in remittances that the Mexican government otherwise would have had to pay for social and other services. Indeed, Buchanan quotes Fox’s national security advisor as candidly admitting that Mexico’s “economic policy is dependent on unlimited emigration to the United States.”

There are more profiteers from illegal immigration, including “the new Hispanic media—the purveyors of films, the owners of the Spanish-language radio and TV stations, the publishers of magazines, books, and newspapers for Hispanics. Survival for these media institutions, some of the fastest growing and most politically powerful in the nation, depends on immigrants not converting to the English language. They will fight to the death against making America an English-speaking nation again.”

Why is this happening?

Because, Buchanan contends, of “[p]olitical correctness, political cowardice, political opportunism, a sense of guilt for America’s sins . . . .”

As to the latter, Buchanan makes a powerful point:

Baby boomers have been marinated in guilt, indoctrinated to believe

America is fatally flawed—racist, sexist, nativist, homophobic. Many

were not taught to see her history as glorious but only as the shameful past

of a brutal country that had enslaved one people and exterminated another.

Growing up in the civil rights era, many baby boomers bought into its core

doctrine: America must confess her sins, seek absolution, do penance, and

make eternal restitution.

In public and private schools, colleges and universities, through

Hollywood films and Broadway plays, in fiction and nonfiction,

magazines and newspapers, TV documentaries and prime-time

shows, this message of our oppression of minorities has been

drummed so deep into the souls of this generation, many are

incapable of mounting a defense when confronted by alleged

victims charging America with injustice.

The consequences of virtually unlimited illegal immigration, and the changes it has already wrought in the United States, are all around us. Buchanan relentlessly catalogues just the worst examples of it brought to us by perhaps as many as 20 million illegal aliens already in the country.

Criminals enter the country at will, join gangs, commit crimes, clog our courts, and fill our prisons. Criminal aliens constitute about 30% of federal prison populations, while aliens are only 12% of the entire population.

Within our southwestern states, we have non-assimilated populations in “cities” within cities, where one has no sense that he is in the United States of America. For example, Buchanan reports that “[t]hree million people of Mexican ancestry today call L.A. County home, and half of all its residents—54 percent—speak a language other than English in their homes, up from 49 percent in 1990. When more than half the people of so vast a county do not speak English at home, do not listen to the same radio and TV programs as the rest of us, do not read the same newspapers, magazines, or books, do not share the same heroes, history or holidays, how can we say that we are all still one nation and one people?”

Our cities tip into a culture that is alien, in more than one way, to traditional American values. In New York’s and San Francisco’s metropolitan areas, immigrants are more than 25% of the population and in Los Angeles and Florida’s Dade County 32 and 36 percent respectively. The States of California and Texas are already 34% Hispanic. Nationwide, Mexicans outnumber other immigrants 6-to-1.

Illegal immigrants coming from Mexico’s third world backwaters bring with them diseases that not only spread through our society, but which cost uncounted billions of dollars to address. Between 1994 and 2000, 84 California hospitals shut down because of the impossible costs associated with servicing the substantial health needs of illegal aliens from Mexico.

Some American cities—New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, among them—have flouted the law by unilaterally declaring themselves “sanctuaries,” where illegal aliens can roam free and where local law enforcement is forbidden from interfering with them. Buchanan writes that in L.A. “95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide, which total 1,200 to 1,500, target illegal aliens. Two-thirds of the 17,000 outstanding fugitive felony warrants in Los Angeles are for illegal aliens. Some 12,000 of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang that operates across Southern California are illegals.”

American workers at the low end of the skills spectrum are deprived of work because employers violate the law by hiring illegal aliens who work for less because they’re happy to get whatever they can. The net result is that money is transferred from the United States taxpayer, via unemployment and other benefits paid to out-of-work indigent Americans, to unskilled illegal aliens who then send it back to Mexico. Second in amount only to the Mexican government’s income from “nationalized” oil properties stolen from United States and other companies years ago, are the dollar remittances sent home by illegal aliens.

There are many other consequences that Buchanan chronicles, but perhaps the most sobering is this:

. . . if present projections of the U.S. Census Bureau prove accurate, the America our grandchildren will live in will be

another country, a nation unrecognizable to our parents. * * *

By 2050, it is now estimated that there will be almost 2.5 times as many people here as in 1960: 420 million. The share of the population of European descent will be a minority, as it is today in California, Texas, and New Mexico. And that minority will be , aging, shrinking, and dying. There will be as many Hispanics here—102 million—as there are today Mexicans in Mexico. * * * By 2050, they will be 24% of a nation of 420 million. * * * Our great cities will all look like Los Angeles today. Los Angeles and the cities of the Southwest will look lie Juarez and Tijuana.

Just as a legal brief would do, State of Emergency anticipates and demolishes the other side’s arguments, principally in two quite different but related chapters. “What Is a Nation?” explores concepts of patriotism, fatherland, nationhood, and contains some of Buchanan’s finest prose (“A nation writes a constitution that is the birth certificate of the nation already born in the hearts of its people. So it was with the American nation.”). He quotes the English writer Israel Zangwill, author of the 1908 play The Melting-Pot, who held, in Buchanan’s words

that Europeans were being reforged, as in a fiery furnace, into an entirely

new people. This is the traditionalist view: that Americans—whatever or

wherever our ancestral roots—are a people separate and apart from all

others of the earth, with far more in common than political beliefs. We are

of a unique country, with its own unique history, heritage, heroes,

language, literature, law, mores, traditions, customs. It is this America

that is being imperiled by the mass migration of tens of millions and

perhaps hundreds of millions this century from countries whose peoples

have never before been assimilated. [Buchanan’s reference to “countries”

is because he has a chapter entitled “Eurabia” which discusses the problem

of Muslim immigration into Europe, a subject unnecessary to his case

against Mexican immigration into the United States.]

Buchanan’s strongest rebuttal is his chapter “A Nation of Immigrants?” Note the question mark. Here, he distinguishes between those who settled the New World and its colonies—“At the time of the Revolution, there were 2.5 million people living in the thirteen colonies, mostly English, Scottish, and Scotch-Irish, with 100,000 emigrants from Germany and a smattering of Dutch, Huguenots, and Jews. * * * Of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, forty-eight were American-born . . . .—and those who “immigrated” later. Even those never swamped this country. Not until the 1965 Celler-Hart immigration “reform”] bill, which Buchanan correctly characterizes as “the greatest bait-and-switch in history.” Under that law, national origin quotas were removed for Europeans and handed over to the Third World, opening our country to mass immigration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. He who brought us the War on Poverty, the Great Society, and much of the Vietnam War, signed the Immigration Act of 1965 while standing at the foot of, and desecrating, the Statue of Liberty: President Lyndon Johnson—ironically, from Texas!

Buchanan’s last chapter is entitled “Last Chance.” Though there is no question mark, one hangs there implicitly asking whether the nation our fathers knew will survive another half-century of this metastasizing invasion. The author considers the forces against reform:

Corporate America wants an endless supply of cheap labor and the

freedom to hire foreign workers and bring them to the United States.

The major media, the unions, the churches favor amnesty. The

Democratic Party sees in mass immigration the future voters who can

end Republican hegemony. The GOP is terrified of offending 45 million

Hispanics and of a cutoff in campaign cash if it imposes sanctions on

corporate scofflaws who regularly hire illegal aliens.

The 36 million foreign-born already here want the guaranteed right to

bring in their relatives. The survival of Hispanic media depends on a

constant resupply of Spanish speakers. Internationalists see nations as

relics of a forgettable past, world government as the future, and want to

erase all borders. Critically, Hispanic voters in Texas, Arizona, New

Mexico, and California, and the swing states of Colorado and Nevada

are approaching numbers where they may be decisive in all future

presidential elections.

In light of these factors, is there hope the tide can be made to recede? Buchanan doesn’t really know. Nor do any of us. But the key to the answer is found in one almost throw-away sentence buried amidst the author’s recommendations: “Middle America no longer seems to care whether the newcomers assimilate or not. American seems to be losing interest in an integrated society so long as they are left alone.” (My emphasis.)

And therein lies the rub. The national disgrace that American immigration policy (if it can be called that) became as a result of, and has remained after, the Immigration Act of 1965 is the fault of the American people. It is they who sent the politicians to the White House and Congress, it is they who sat by and watched the endless stream of illegals make a mockery of our borders, it is they who directly and indirectly benefit from the presence of illegal aliens in the warp and woof of American society. And it is they who are going to pay the price. In State of Emergency, Buchanan quotes John Donne’s familiar admonition: “. . . never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Sadly, even now, amidst the cultural, social, economic, political, and other chaos engulfing the United States of America, few hear the bell tolling.

Because Pat Buchanan does, every American who cherishes the land of our fathers, every American who seeks an explanation for what Mexican immigration has done to it, and every American who is concerned about what irreversible disaster is about to befall us, should buy, read, and re-read his State of Emergency.

And by the way, if you order his book by telephone, please remember to press “numero dos” for English.

THE TOLLING BELL

A review of State of Emergency by Patrick J. Buchanan

Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, $24.95

By Henry Mark Holzer

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Henry Mark Holzer (http://www.henrymarkholzer.com), a constitutional and appellate lawyer, is Professor Emeritus at Brooklyn Law School.