La Reconquista! When I read Pat Buchanan’s book two years ago, I thought it was alarmist. He’s overstating his case to scare people, I thought. Not anymore.
Buchanan’s main points are easily verifiable by simply observing the culture. By 2050, America will be a Third World nation. With the influx of non-assimilating cultures, I see it happening as clear as day (although I probably won’t be around to see it). From Publisher’s Weekly:
“Historians may one day call ‘the pill’ the suicide tablet of the West,” writes former presidential candidate Buchanan in this cri de coeur regarding the perils that await Western civilization. And he is correct in his assessment that the advent of artificial contraception brought about huge changes in the ways American and European cultures dealt with sex, children and family. Buchanan, a staunch Roman Catholic and a conservative, feels that these changes were socially and politically disastrous.Worried about the declining birth rate of European-Americans and increased immigration from nonwhite countries, Buchanan predicts that people who are now celebrating diversity “will spend their golden years in a Third World America.” Along with shifting racial demographics, Buchanan also frets about the changes in morality “rampant promiscuity and wholesale divorce and tax-payer funding of abortion.” Buchanan is equally upfront about his position on homosexuality: “had the killers of Matthew Shepard chosen a sixteen-year-old girl rather than a twenty-one-year-old gay man, her rape-murder would have been to me an even greater evil.” Fearful that American is being “de-Christianized,” Buchanan argues that “while the prognosis is not good,” America must reevaluate itself and reclaim its white, Christian origins; despite the current “coarseness of her manners, the decadence of her culture, or the sickness in her soul,” the nation is worth saving. Buchanan’s passionately expressed ideology will be too extreme for most readers, and its proud bigotry is unlikely to play well even among most conservatives.
More resources:
BUCHANAN DECLARES: DEATH OF THE WEST, Matt Drudge
Death of the West?, Thomas Sowell
Death of the West?, Linda Chavez
Failure to Control Borders Causes ‘Death of the West’ , Wes Vernon
Book Review: Death of the West: Politics of Hate, Ian M. McGullam (who thought the book was “boring”)
If you’re still not convinced we need to clamp down on our borders, here’s some info that may hit closer to home. Check out a new study released by the Center for Immigration Studies, “The High Cost of Cheap Labor: Illegal Immigration and the Federal Budget.” Some of the findings:
— Households headed by illegal aliens imposed more than $26.3 billion in costs on the federal government in 2002 and paid only $16 billion in taxes, creating a net fiscal deficit of almost $10.4 billion, or $2,700 per illegal household.
— Among the largest costs are Medicaid ($2.5 billion); treatment for the uninsured ($2.2 billion); food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches ($1.9 billion); the federal prison and court systems ($1.6 billion); and federal aid to schools ($1.4 billion).
— With nearly two-thirds of illegal aliens lacking a high school degree, the primary reason they create a fiscal deficit is their low education levels and resulting low incomes and tax payments, not their legal status or heavy use of most social services.
— On average, the costs that illegal households impose on federal coffers are less than half that of other households, but their tax payments are only one-fourth that of other households.
— Many of the costs associated with illegals are due to their American-born children, who are awarded U.S. citizenship at birth. Thus, greater efforts at barring illegals from federal programs will not reduce costs because their citizen children can continue to access them.
— If illegal aliens were given amnesty and began to pay taxes and use services like households headed by legal immigrants with the same education levels, the estimated annual net fiscal deficit would increase from $2,700 per household to nearly $7,700, for a total net cost of $29 billion.
— Costs increase dramatically because unskilled immigrants with legal status — what most illegal aliens would become — can access government programs, but still tend to make very modest tax payments.
— Although legalization would increase average tax payments by 77 percent, average costs would rise by 118 percent.
From the Federation of American Immigration Reform: New Statistics:
New data from the federal Bureau of Prisons show that 29 percent of the federal prisoner population (or 47,570) are immigrants. This is a slight increase from 1995, when the figure was 25 percent.(The figure would be much higher if state prisoners were counted, but current data are not available on the nativity status of those additional inmates. Less than eight percent of the country’s prison population are in federal prisons.) [I've read that the illegal alien prison population nationwide is closer to 43 percent.]
Prisoners from Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic together account for more than one-fifth of the total federal prisoner population.
Incarceration of criminal aliens cost federal prisons $891 million in 2002, according to the most recent available figure from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Also see Illegal criminal aliens abound in U.S., Washington Times
The Illegal-Alien Crime Wave, Heather Mac Donald
Perhaps we should tighten up our borders just a little?
