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 Editorials | Opinions | September 2006 
Buchanan's Crusade
 Ruben Navarrette - San Diego Union-Tribune
| State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America
Patrick J. Buchanan |
Pat Buchanan was nativist before most of us had ever heard the word.
According to his new book, "State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America," Buchanan was "the first national leader to put the issue of America's broken and bleeding border and the Third World invasion of the United States onto the national agenda."
Well, yes and no.
It's true that Buchanan was one of the first public figures to sound the alarm over illegal immigration from Mexico and the rest of Latin America. In fact, while campaigning for president in 1996, he shared with supporters in Iowa his message for those who violate U.S. immigration laws: "Listen, José, we ain't gonna let you in again!"
But in the way that he links immigration to national identity, and in his complaints that the immigrants themselves are somehow defective, Buchanan is not all that unique.
There was Benjamin Franklin, who in the mid-18th century was sounding the alarm that German immigrants would "Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion."
Then there were the Californians who, in the mid-19th century, insisted that Chinese immigrants were "unassimilable." The hysteria spread to Congress and led to the unambiguously titled Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In 1943, the act was repealed and the Chinese were assigned an annual quota of 105 immigrants.
Then there was President Coolidge, who embraced the Immigration Act of 1924. That law limited the number of Southern Europeans (read: Italians) by setting quotas for each country in proportion to their percentage of the U.S. population in 1890, when most immigrants came from Northern and Western Europe. On signing the bill, Coolidge declared: "America must remain American."
Now, Buchanan - whose Scotch-Irish ancestors were not exactly welcomed off the boat with a red carpet - makes pretty much the same argument in trying to keep out Latino immigrants.
In the world according to Buchanan, America is on life support, people of color are crashing the gate and the nation's best days are history. He kicks off his book by warning that Americans have entered "the final act of our civilization."
That's Pat. He's always peddling fear. Now Buchanan is warning us that excessive immigration is wrecking the United States. It's not just those who come illegally that worry him. He also wants to limit legal immigration, especially from Mexico.
His complaints are as follows: There are too many Mexican immigrants entering the United States. They are refusing to learn English or otherwise assimilate. They're an economic burden, and they depress wages for U.S. workers. They bring disease and lower the standard of living. And, last but not least, they're part of some elaborate conspiracy on the part of the Mexican government to reclaim the American Southwest, which was lost in the Mexican War of 1846-48.
Much of that harkens back to the one thing that concerns a lot of people about Buchanan: his ugly obsession with race. While other immigration restrictionists focus almost exclusively on Mexicans and other Latin Americans, Buchanan also worries about the encroachment of Asians, Africans and others from the "Third World."
Buchanan frets that the United States isn't as white as it used to be. He prefers the way it was in 1950, when - as he spelled out in a July 7, 1993, column - 90 percent of the country was "of European stock." By 2050, Buchanan writes, "whites may be near a minority in an America of 81 million Hispanics, 62 million blacks and 41 million Asians."
Let's just hope that most Americans recognize Buchanan for what he is: a racist, a danger to the country, a throwback to an earlier time and a hindrance to having a mature and rational debate on the urgent issue of illegal immigration.
About the writer: Ruben Navarrette Jr. writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune. His column routinely appears in The Bee on Wednesday and occasionally on other days. Reach him at ruben.navarrette@uniontrib.com. |
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