Thread: Musings On A Changed Landscape

Musings On A Changed Landscape
By: James G. Wiles, For The Bulletin
06/01/2007
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Myrtle Beach, S.C. - Traveling back and forth between Philly and Myrtle Beach nine times in six months, I've become reacquainted with parts of the Eastern Shore, Virginia and the Carolinas I knew well 30 years ago. The change is very striking - and it brings home the impact this Mexican migration is having.
Every little crossroads town seems to have at least one Mexican restaurant and Mexican store. Everywhere, it seems, there are weekly Spanish-language papers. In D.C. - where I lived for seven years - there's a Spanish-language daily, a broadsheet called The Washington Hispanic.
There are more Catholic churches, and all of them have a Spanish-language Sunday Mass. The Lowe's and Home Depot stores have bi-lingual signs and packaging.
For me personally, this change represents a personal treat. I can build my Spanish vocabulary simply by walking around with a pen and note paper. I can speak my bad Spanish every day. And I can indulge my taste for Hispanic food.
Nevertheless, I wonder. Samuel P. Huntington and Pat Buchanan have written powerfully of the impact of this huge migration on the United States. The largely homogenous American society and culture which existed in 1965 as a result of the "closing of the doors" in the 1920s is gone. As Buchanan detailed in his humanevents.com column this week, we're no longer one people.
How did this happen? Sen. Ted Kennedy's leadership on "immigration reform" for the last 40 years, I think, is the clue.
In hindsight, his 1965 Immigration Bill must be seen as a part of the larger Liberal Project, which began with the Kinsey Report in 1948, to de-construct the America of its time.
This effort has often been covert, perhaps because it's anti-democratic. But it's been largely successful. But the truth is that the immigration aspect of the Liberal Project is coming at a moral cost which no thinking liberal should support.
First, this illegal migration is hurting African-Americans.
Americans have no special moral obligation to illegal immigrants simply because they are poor and want a better life. But we do owe obligations to our disadvantaged fellow Americans.
Here in Horry County, for example, illegal immigration is helping to perpetuate the remnants of Jim Crow and legal segregation.
Sixteen percent of Horry County is black. The Grand Strand has boomed for 40 years. Yet, the majority of African-Americans still live in the piney woods or separate neighborhoods, often shop in their own stores, go to their own churches. Cleaning and maintenance employees at the hotels and motels are still bused in in the morning and are bused out at night.
It is greatly better than it was in 1961, when my family began coming here. But the changes are in no way good enough.
And now the Hispanic wave has arrived.
When my parents retired here in 1976, there was a morning market for African-American day laborers. Today, that market is gone.
On the many, many construction sites around town, I observe few black faces. I see many Hispanic faces. There are many Hispanic restaurants and tiendas. The need for seasonal and blue-collar workers is so high here that the biggest local real estate, hospitality and entertainment company says it has to go to Europe and Israel to get the people it needs.
Yet, while South Carolina's unemployment rate of 5.8 percent is the second highest in the nation, African-American unemployment is double that.
Second, public policy based on a refusal to face reality.
The Hispanic presence here is rarely acknowledged. The Horry County Chamber of Commerce, in its annual statistical report, does not even have a separate population category for Hispanics! Their 2006 report merely says that, in addition to the 159,363 whites and 30,468 blacks, the county's population includes 2,402 "other."
Well, the eye alone sees more "other" around here than that. So do the school enrollment figures. Here's the '06 breakdown for Horry County:

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# of Hispanics % Hispanic

Grade School 1,047 6.7%

Middle School 340 4.29%

High School 339 3.4%

TOTAL 1,726 5%

With their parents added in, this statistic implies a minimum Hispanic population in the county of at least 5,178. This does not, of course, include Hispanics attending Catholic schools or Hispanics here without their families.
Third, dishonesty in our public discourse. As columnist Mark Steyn wrote this week:
"The unspoken premise behind the bill is that the socioeconomic order in America is now so dependent on the vast apparatus of a giant shadowy state of illegal immigrants that it cannot be dismantled but only legitimized and expanded. If that is true, that is a basic structural defect that should be addressed honestly." ("Amnesty? Congress Says 'Zee' For Yourself," May 24)
Steyn's right.
Finally, the integrity of our democracy.
The elites' acceptance of illegal immigration and amnesty while professing to support neither reminds me of my Dad's stories about the politicians of his high school and college years. They talked Prohibition at election time. And drank bootleg gin the rest of the time.
Prohibition gave us the Mafia and, as Pennsylvania author John O'Hara wrote in Sermons and Soda Water: Imagine Kissing Pete (195, a "great contempt for the law."
Mencken thought the same.
I submit that the last 20 years of our leaders' dissembling about illegal immigration has been just as corrupting of this generation of Americans' faith in democracy as Prohibition was of O'Hara and my father's generations.
I intend to read the proposed new law. And then perhaps I will write about this again.
And, in the meantime, I hope that the many other Hispanic immigrants who have welcomed this strange norteño on his travels in the last six month will forgive me.

James G. Wiles is a Philadelphia lawyer.
http://www.thebulletin.us/site/news.cfm ... 6361&rfi=6

That really brings it home to us and demonstrates how the country will look to my grandchildren.