AMERICA NOT MEXAMERICA

Government-Made Crises
by <!– put author name below, before tag –> Jacob G. Hornberger<!– put date below, before tag –>

A fascinating aspect of government intervention is how it induces people (1) to get embroiled in the crisis environment that the intervention produces, and (2) to feel a vested interest in coming up with a solution to the crisis.

Consider price controls, an intervention that governments traditionally turn to in response to their own debasement of the currency. As prices rise in response to monetary debasement, people begin screaming at businesses for raising their prices, not realizing that rising prices are in reality just a reflection of the falling value of the dollar due to government’s inflation of the money supply.

Responding to the screams, government officials make it illegal for businesses to raise their prices. Yet, inevitably, there are those businesses that violate the law, if for no other reason than to simply survive.

What happens then?

There’s a crisis involving price-control violators, and nearly everyone not only gets embroiled in the crisis but also joins the crowd in trying to come up with a way to make the price controls succeed. Everyone from newspaper editors to television commentators to the man on the street starts exclaiming that something needs to be done to stop the criminals. “They’re gouging us! They’re stealing from us! The law is the law! Enforce the law! Increase the punishments!” Snitches pop up everywhere, reporting price violators to the police.

Then along comes a libertarian who says, “Hey, how about just repealing the original intervention — the price controls — along with all the subsequent interventions? How about simply operating under the economic laws of supply and demand?”

Immediately, he is met with a cavalcade of criticism: “Why, that’s just crazy! We’re at war! You want us to just surrender to the price violators? You’re so impractical! Join the crowd! Help us find a way to make the price controls succeed!”

Or consider another example — immigration controls. Some central-planning bureaucrats in Washington come up with an arbitrary number of Mexican immigrants who may enter the United States, and they enact that number into law. The problem, however, is that the artificial number is far below the number of immigrants who enter the United States in response to the natural laws of supply and demand. Immediately, there are illegals who are entering the country in excess of the arbitrary number set by the bureaucrats.

People then become embroiled in the crisis and involve themselves with helping come up with a plan to make the intervention succeed. “We need to do something to stop the illegals!” becomes the battle cry. A host of new interventions come into existence to deal with the crisis. Laws against the transportation of illegal aliens. Laws against harboring them. Laws against hiring them. Laws against renting to them. Fences and walls. Militarization. Checkpoints. Searches. Spying. ID cards. Every day, someone calls for a new intervention to deal with the ever-growing crisis.

Then some libertarian comes along and says, “Hey, I’ve got an idea. How about simply repealing the original intervention — the immigration controls — along with all the subsequent interventions? How about simply operating under the economic laws of supply and demand?”

Immediately he is hit with the same cacophony of hoots and jeers encountered by the libertarian who calls for the repeal of price controls to deal with the price-control crisis: “We can’t do that! That wouldn’t be practical! You would have us surrender to the illegals? We just have to crack down harder. Enforce the law! Increase the punishments!”

As Ludwig von Mises pointed out, one government intervention inevitably leads to more government interventions because of the problems arising from the previous interventions. The inevitable trend is more and more government intrusion in people’s economic affairs, with omnipotent government and loss of liberty at the end of the road.

Such interventions as price controls and immigration controls are good examples of this phenomenon. The solution to interventionist crises lies not in enacting more interventions but instead in repealing the interventions. By restoring the free market, we not only rid ourselves of needless government-made crises, we also restore freedom, peace, harmony, and prosperity to our lives.

Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email.

IMMIGRATION LAW PORTENDS UNCERTAINTY IN ‘MEXAMERICA’

• By LARRY ROHTER

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June 7, 1987

LEAD: AS the day drew near when enforcement of the new United States immigration law was to begin, protests from factory owners, farmers, ranchers, hotel owners and restaurateurs natiowide rose to such a pitch that the Senate voted to delay it. But nowhere is there more apprehension than along the United States-Mexico border, whose residents fear the law may disrupt a remarkable process of economic and social integration.

AS the day drew near when enforcement of the new United States immigration law was to begin, protests from factory owners, farmers, ranchers, hotel owners and restaurateurs natiowide rose to such a pitch that the Senate voted to delay it. But nowhere is there more apprehension than along the United States-Mexico border, whose residents fear the law may disrupt a remarkable process of economic and social integration.

In his 1981 book, ”The Nine Nations of North America,” Joel Garreau was already writing of ”MexAmerica,” a binational and bicultural combination of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. By 2000, he predicted, MexAmerica could become the continent’s economically dominant and most populous region.

Although the forecast is still far from reality, inhabitants on both sides are conscious of forging a new entity and way of life. ”On the border, we live together more and more intimately and intensely every day,” said Jorge Bustamante, director of the College of the Northern Border in Tijuana. ”The relationship we have is not one of equality, but it is harmonious, and we do understand each other.”

One central measure of interdependence – the enormous flow of people back and forth across the border -is likely to be severely affected when enforcement of the new law begins, probably next month. At the San Ysidro-Tijuana crossing, the busiest of the 1,952-mile frontier, an estimated 50,000 Mexicans cross legally to jobs on the American side. An unknown but significant number make the daily crossing illegally, and it is their employers who would face penalties under the new law.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service reported a sharp decrease in the number of illegal aliens apprehended along the border here last month. But Jorge Castaneda, a specialist in bilateral relations at the National University of Mexico, noted that ”the only certainty” about the new law ”is that no one in Mexico or the United States knows what its results will actually be.” A likely outcome, Dr. Castaneda predicted, is that loopholes will allow the legislation to ‘’satisfy those who need cheap, unskilled labor from abroad.”

As much as by human contacts, the region is tied together by flows of capital, a situation that is not expected to change with the new law.

American border communities have learned the hard way that, despite their higher standard of living, they are vulnerable to the wild swings of Mexico’s economy. The oil boom in the 1970’s produced an overvalued peso that brought Mexican shoppers and new prosperity to towns such as McAllen, Tex., Nogales, Ariz., and Calexico, Calif. Then, in 1982, came Mexico’s economic crisis, which drove many American enterprises into bankruptcy but also prompted capital flight from Mexico, estimated at more than $35 billion, mostly to banks in the American Southwest.

The most important factor knitting together the two sides may be the maquiladora, or duty-free assembly industry. Factories in Mexico, 80 percent of them American-owned, assemble components from the United States and send them back; duties are based only on the value added through the assembly. The maquiladoras employ more than 300,000 Mexicans, 95 percent of them in six states along the border. And, as Raul Garcia Perez, president of the Baja California Maquiladora Industry Association, noted, many ‘’spend their paychecks on the American side.” A study by the University of Texas at El Paso found that the maquiladora industries ranked second only to government spending as a source of economic growth in the El Paso area.

In some respects, the border is already fulfilling predictions that it will eventually seem invisible. With enthusiastic support from Tijuana, for instance, San Diego recently sent a trade delegation to Japan. The idea, said an American diplomat, was ”to sell the two cities as parts of a single metropolitan area.”

Hundreds of thousands of people on each side of the border have relatives on the other side. Approximately 50,000 Americans live in the Mexican state of Baja California Norte, mainly people who have retired to such resorts as Ensenada and Rosarito. But there is also the San Diego automobile dealer who commutes to work from his home in Mexico, less than 30 miles away. The symbiosis may be even more advanced along the Texas border, where the income gap between the two sides is less pronounced than in California.

The intricate and growing web of commercial and personal ties has produced disputes over water rights and use, and over environmental issues such as the dumping of toxic wastes. Perhaps of most concern, however, is the inability of border inspection stations to handle the constantly increasing flow of pedestrians and vehicles. Waits of up to two hours are common. One American official calls the problem ”a bottleneck that could inhibit further growth.”

Frustrated by the inability or unwillingness of the two national governments to deal with basic problems, many state and local authorities have made their own informal arrangements covering police, fire, health and education services. For instance, California and Baja California recently organized joint disaster relief exercises. That, however, does not always play well at the national level. ”Washington and Mexico City look at all of this with suspicion,” Dr. Bustamante said. ”The feeling in both capitals is that if we understand each other, then something must be going wrong.”

The start of MexAmerica?

MEXAMERICA

Nine Nations: Mexamerica
by Jason Godesky

What barely-closeted racists^{1, 2, 3} have called the “crisis” of the United States’ “broken borders” has become a major issue for the 2008 presidential election. Should English be made the official language of the United States? All the current Republican candidates support such a measure—and most Americans, thinking they’re supporting a recognition of their national language, say they support a very different thing, an official language (the difference, put simply, is that where a national language acknowledges a demographic reality, an official language is being a jerk about it—making it illegal to use other languages in any kind of government-issued communication). Should a giant fence be built along the Mexican border, emulating the smashing historical successes of projects like the Maginot Line or the Berlin Wall, at enormous expense?

The United States has a long and ignoble history of virulently racist treatment for any new immigrant group. As Miami’s former mayor, Maurice Ferre, put it as he mocked American racism:

Look, okay, I understand. It was just us Americans before. We had to accept those damn Jews and then we had to accept those damn Catholics, and even the blacks got in. And the Indians made their pitch with Wounded Knee, then came the youth movement, and now we got all these crazy kids and they’ve got rights. And now you got gray power to counteract black power, and Claude Pepper is passing bills left and right that say you can’t discriminate against an American just because he happens to be old.

In that, today’s Hispanics are simply the latest in the line following blacks, Irish, Jews, German “Krauts”, Italian “Dagoes”, and even Catholic “Papists.” In another sense, however, today’s Mexicans have more in common with Native Americans. In one segment aired by the Colbert Report covering some citizens setting up a shabby fence along the border, an elderly woman says, “This is my country. I’m not going into your country. Please don’t come into mine.” That might be a reasonable sentiment, except for its complete ignorance of history. She did go into their country; we all did, in one of the most shameless and unjustifiable acts of American imperialism before the invasion of Iraq—the Mexican-American War. At the heart of the entire “Mexican Debate” lies an historical truth few U.S. citizens are willing to admit to: we invaded Mexico, stole the southwest by force, and have ever since been struggling to keep a natural bioregion divided. The waves of “illegal immigrants” are in their country; it’s the gringos that are the invaders.

Native Culture: Aztlán

The seven caves of Chicomoztoc

The name of “Aztlán” comes originally from the ancient Nahuatl origin myth that they came from Chicomoztoc, the place of the seven caves, and each cave was the birthplace of one of the seven Nahuatl tribes: the Xochimilca, Tlahuica, Acolhua, Tlaxcalan, Tepaneca, Chalca, and Mexica. The tribes left the caves, and founded the city of Aztlán. In some tales it is a paradise, analogous to Eden; in others, the Aztecs (named for Aztlán) are tyrannized by the Azteca Chicomoztoca, whom they escaped and fled south. The god Huitzilopochtl forbade them from calling themselves Aztecs anymore, and instead they called themselves Mexica; it was 19th century scholars who resurrected the term “Aztec.” The legend of their migration to Tenochtitlán (now underneath Mexico City) is the central Mexica foundation myth. It remains essential to Mexican identity today; the vision of the eagle alighting a cactus that marked the location of Tenochtitlán as blessed by Huitzilopochtl still adorns the Mexican Flag, and the very name of “Mexico” derives from the Mexica.

When the legends are traced back, the location of Aztlán generally falls in what is now the southwest United States. This area has always functioned as a single bioregion with northern Mexico and Baja California—a single desert bioregion bound by the same seasonal cycles and the same flora and fauna. Before the Mexica, the Toltecs similarly migrated south into the ruins of the Teotihuacano empire from regions generally around the southwest United States, while the native cultures of the southwest, like the Hohokam and the Anasazi, show evidence of significant cultural diffusion from Mexico’s civilizations.

Anglos with a stereotype of persons of Mexican ancestry as pickers of fruit and drawers of water like to forget history. Americans who mutter darkly about “alien hordes” ignore the fact that, like the French of Quebec, the Spanish-speaking people of the Southwest were here first. MexAmerica bulges hundreds of miles north of the border into New Mexico, Colorado, and California, because, for example, a flourishing Spanish civilization existed at Santa Fe before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. The Santa Fe Trail was important to Missouri frontiersmen in the early 1800s, because it opened up trade to a city then already two hundred years old. Place names, from San Antonio to Los Angeles, bespeak the ancient Spanish presence. The northern borders of California, Nevada, and Utah are at the 42nd parallel, because that’s where the Spanish empire of Alta (Upper) California (as opposed to Baja [Lower] California) ended.

The conquistadors and the padres saw this region whole, without imaginary lines creating divisions between the state of Sonora and the state of Arizona. The desert was the same, the cactuses were the same, the climate was the same, and the people were the same. And the descendants of the conquistadors are still here. Hispanics in New Mexico still refer to themselves as Spanish, rather than Mexican-Americans, partially out of snobbery, but also out of a sense of historical accuracy. In Santa Fe, because of intermarriage, the lineage is thoroughly European. Mexican-Americans, by contrast, claim a far more indigenous North American ancestry. Their forefathers may have been European, but their maternal ancestors were Aztec and members of the other highly developed nations of Central America that flourished before the white man came.

The Anglo world is the latest invader of these parts, not the Indian, Mexican, and Spanish. It’s the borders that have moved, not the founding cultures. There are great numbers of Hispanics in the Southwest who can’t be told by ignorant Anglos to go back where they came from. They are where they came from.⁴

Hispanic population in the United States (2000 Census)

The border as we have it today was drawn by the Mexican-American War. Looking to expand into what is now the southwest, Andrew Jackson sent his good friend Sam Houston to provoke a war, so that Texas could gain its independence, and then cede that independence to the United States. Houston was the terrorist of his day, but he succeeded in his mission, and in 1845, Texas was annexed by the United States. Mexico never recognized Texas’ seccession, so the United States’ annexation was an invasion of Mexico. The war was as divisive then as the Iraq War is today, and for many of the same reasons. Proponents supported the war for grasping America’s “Manifest Destiny” by sweeping out the inferior races and establishing an American Empire that would rule with an iron, blood-stained fist. Critics assailed it for many of the same reasons that critics assail today’s Iraq War: as an unjustifiable, imperialist act of aggression. In his classic essay, “On Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau argued that while asking Americans to do the right thing was obviously asking for far too much, that we could at least refuse to do the wrong thing, or to aid our government in the commission of evil. The two, co-equal evils of the United States government that Thoreau turns to, again and again, are slavery, and the war in Mexico. After the U.S. army burned Mexico City to the ground, the Mexican government signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, granting the United States the territory that would eventually become California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, and parts of Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico. The remainder of Arizona and New Mexico (south of the Gila River) was bought from Mexico five years later in the Gadsden Purchase.

If we look at the pattern of Hispanic immigration into the United States, it becomes clear that the driving force is basically the nonsensical nature of the border itself, drawn by an unjustifiable war. Mexicans are simply moving back into their own country. The concentrations of Hispanic population shown by the 2000 Census do not follow the arbitrary borders drawn by imperialist conquests, but they do follow the boundaries of the actual bioregion of Mexamerica.

The proposed nation of Aztlán

It’s mostly extreme right-wing, neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups that bring up Aztlán today. They speak also of a Reconquista that Mexican immigration represents. These elements do exist among Mexicans, but they are extremely marginal, and also largely right-wing, militant, nationalistic movements. They share many points in common with neo-Nazis, including a perverse preoccupation with “purity” and a vicious homophobic streak. The Reconquista, sadly, exists mostly in the rabidly racist imaginations of avid white supremacists. When Lou Dobbs aired a piece on Aztlán on CNN, he used a map from a white supremacist group.⁵

It is not entirely a fantasy, though; a fringe of militant Mexicans do espouse a dream of restoring Aztlán and reuniting the Mexamerican bioregion.

There’s a legend that has acquired popularity among some of today’s young Chicanos. The origins of the great Indian civilizations like the Toltec and the Mayan have always been shrouded in mystery. But the first Aztec said they came from Aztlán, and their descriptions of it tally with what today is the United States Southwest. Azdan literally means white earth, and when a bulldozer flattens the top of a hill for a San Diego subdivision, white earth is what it’s pushing. The legend continues that Aztlán will someday be regained by the sons of the Aztec, and a new civilization will flourish. The land will once again be regarded as holy, and oppression be brought to an end.

Already, there are Mexican-Americans who refer to the five-state region of California, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Texas as Aztlan.⁶

There seems to be more than a little self-fulfillment to such a prophecy; the restoration of Aztlán would erase the nonsensical border drawn by the Mexican-American war, and when borders align with real, bioregional boundaries, everything becomes much, much easier. It’s trying to divide in half what functions as a single, ecological whole that invariably runs into trouble—and nowhere is that trouble more evident in North America than in Mexamerica.

8 deaths cap off bloody week in Juárez

Killings cap off bloody week in border city; police force in town near N.M. quits amid threats

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico – The killers arrived at the motel in the predawn gloom.

Dressed in military-style uniforms and armed with automatic weapons, they forced the manager to hand over a guest list, then stormed from room to room, pointing their guns at the terrified occupants.

In Room 49 they opened fire on the man and woman inside. The woman’s body was on the floor next to the bed, and the man was in the bathroom. At least 100 bullet casings were found, police said. The killers escaped in three late-model SUVs.

These were but two of eight killings in this grim border city as Good Friday turned to Black Friday, culminating one of the bloodiest weeks in memory, officials and residents said.

“Good Friday? Where?” asked Jaíme Torres, spokesman for the Juárez Police Department. “We thought this would be a more tranquil day to reflect, but no such luck. This has been one of the deadliest weeks in recent history, and the day hasn’t ended yet.”

In addition to the eight killings, a police officer was in critical condition at a hospital after being shot three times while on patrol.

Also on Friday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents seized a semiautomatic .50-caliber weapon and 23 other guns from border arms traffickers. Motives were unclear, though Mexican officials have long said drug kingpins use these smuggled weapons for their bloody turf wars.

Most of the killings Friday were believed to be related to the ongoing battle between the Juárez and Sinaloa drug cartels, U.S. and Mexican officials said. More than 160 people have been slain in Juárez since Jan. 1, including about 30 in the past week.

The brutality unfolding in this region bordering Texas is generating debate regarding President Felipe Calderón’s strategy to take on the cartels using more than 30,000 troops and federal police. More than 3,800 people have been killed in drug-related violence since Mr. Calderón took office Dec. 1, 2006, according to the Mexico City newspaper Reforma. Among the dead were 334 police officers and 39 soldiers. This year, drug killings are up 30 percent compared with last year, the newspaper said.

“I don’t know that Calderón had any choice,” said Tony Payan, a Mexico expert at the University of Texas at El Paso. “He has to fight back, and he’s doing that, forcing a disruption within the cartels, which is leading to the violence we’re seeing.”

About 100 miles to the west, in and around the town of Palomas, just across the border from Columbus, N.M., 40 people have been killed this year.

Earlier this week, hitmen left two bodies, their hands tied behind their backs, at the entrance of the city. Police Chief Emilio Pérez, whose force has had two officers killed, was threatened by phone and told that he would be next. Within hours, the six remaining police officers quit their jobs. Mr. Pérez drove across the border and asked for political asylum, a U.S. law enforcement agent said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Mr. Pérez was probably in the protective custody of ICE, the official said.

Columbus Mayor Eddie Espinoza described the situation in Mexico as “out of control.”

“We’re telling tourists going into Mexico, ‘Enter at your risk,’ because there are no reliable authorities there,” said Mr. Espinoza, who speaks from personal experience. As he was undergoing a root canal during a visit to his dentist in Palomas last weekend, two hooded gunmen stormed into the office and robbed the dentist, Dr. Felipe Salazar, as Mr. Espinoza waited nervously in the dentist’s chair.

“I understand they got a couple of grand from the doctor, and what’s really scary is that they knew the layout of the office,” Mr. Espinoza said.

Mr. Espinoza was unhurt but returned to Columbus a changed man, he said. Although he grew up on both sides of the border and has relatives in Palomas, he promptly warned family and friends to “stay away from Mexico. It’s lawless over there.”

He reported the incident to the office of U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., and requested that local, county, state and federal law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Border Patrol, keep a 24-hour vigil over Columbus. The town is best known for being invaded by Francisco “Pancho” Villa, the border bandit who became a hero of the Mexican revolution, on March 16, 1916.

Across the border in Palomas, Ivonne Romero, who along with her husband, Sergio, owns the Pink Store, a popular tourist destination, played down the current threat, saying that the mayor’s actions and U.S. media attention were “not very balanced.”

“Yes, there have been some killings, but the city is not lawless,” said Ms. Romero, who added that sales are down by more than 30 percent during a peak season, when retirees head for the border in their recreational vehicles.

“We have state police patrolling the streets. Things are calm today,” she said Friday.

Ciudad Juárez was anything but calm, as police reported the eight killings on a day when long lines of traffic snaked through the city with Holy Week shoppers eager to cross international bridges into El Paso.

Local and state police officials said the shootings at the Motel del Rio took place about 5:30 a.m. Friday. Police did not identify the man and woman who were killed.

Earlier Friday, three men were shot and killed at a bar called La Mentira, and a man was shot and killed at the corner of Kenia and Tercera streets. The bodies of two men were found overnight in an area known as La Colonia Leyes de Reforma.

Hours later, police Officer Jorge Luís Osorio Caraveo was traveling in patrol car 288 when he was shot in the back, arm and chest, police said. Mr. Osorio, 38, was in critical condition at a hospital.

Officials are also bracing for possibly widening violence. Chihuahua state police and other state officials have received threats; one official received a type of floral arrangement used at funerals, law enforcement officials said.

Juárez is no stranger to violence. The city has attracted worldwide notoriety for the killings of hundreds of women and girls beginning in 1993. Most of those cases remain unsolved. In the past eight years, 64 bodies have been dug up from the back yards of several homes. Since February, authorities acting on an anonymous tip have unearthed the remains of 38 people in the yard of an abandoned property.

“I have always said that El Paso is one huge warehouse, ideal for drug traffickers to hide and transport their drugs,” said Mr. Payan of UTEP. “And Juárez is one huge graveyard where bodies are buried underneath bathrooms, kitchen and bedrooms.”

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Mexamerica, here we come

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Have Americans, one wonders, fully reflected on what the Bush amnesty portends for the country their children will grow up in?

Consider what Bush is saying with this amnesty for 8 million to 12 million illegal aliens and his “guest workers” program to allow employers to go overseas and hire people anywhere in the world for jobs Americans will not, or cannot take at the wages offered.

He is saying: I cannot defend our border. I will not enforce the laws. I will not send illegal aliens back. And as I cannot stop this invasion of the United States, I intend to legalize it.

Bush is not only rewarding millions of law-breakers and gate-crashers, he is erasing the border with Mexico. Mexamerica is our future. The United States is going to become a giant Brazil. Bush is saying there is no way to stop it – therefore, we must embrace it.

Ethnically and racially, this means an America that is no longer a First World country. Third World people of color will be the majority in two decades. Americans whose forefathers came from Europe, 90 percent of the population in 1960, will be a shrinking minority by 2040. For not only are the birth rates of white Americans lower than those of immigrants, the new immigrants will be from the Third World.

Economically, Bush is throwing American workers – white, black, Asian, Hispanic – into a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest struggle for jobs with foreigners willing to do sweat-shop labor for wages that cannot sustain an American family.

Winners will be the economic elites who will benefit from low prices produced by cheap labor and from having a vast proletariat to do the chores at their homes, country clubs, ski lodges, restaurants, parking garages, vacation spas and yacht basins.

Losers will be American workers who have to compete for jobs with folks for whom $5.15 an hour is pay undreamed of back home in the Caribbean, Nigeria or Mexico.

Politically, our welfare state will explode. The Bush plan will convert America from the middle-class country we grew up in into a nation with a huge proletariat with a rising claim on our tax dollars for more schools, courts, cops, hospitals, parks, roads and prisons.

If you would know America’s future, look at California. In the 1990s, for the first time since the Spanish arrived, California saw an out-migration of native-born Americans, white and black, along with a huge influx of immigrants, legal and illegal.

We are endlessly reminded how wonderful the new America will be as she becomes more diverse. Californians, who already live in that new America, apparently don’t think so. Every chance they get, they vote to chop welfare and deny drivers licenses to illegal aliens. Now, they are deserting the new California beloved of our elites. If assimilation is working, why are Californians voting with their feet and fleeing to Nevada, Colorado, Arizona and Idaho?

“Who cares where people come from?” comes the retort. “The Melting Pot will make them all Americans, as it did the 18 million who came from Eastern and Southern Europe from 1890 to 1920.”

But those were European peoples coming to a country run by descendants of Europeans. They came to a land that enforced assimilation in its schools. They learned and were taught in the same language, read the same books and magazines, went to the same movies, listened to the same radio, went through the Great Depression together and served in the same Army in World War II.

And after the great wave ended in 1920, we had 45 years of low immigration to assimilate and Americanize the children of the immigrants who had come here.

But America’s population has doubled since 1945. Instead of the 16 million people of color we had in 1960 – almost all of whom were black Americans immersed for centuries in American culture – there are 80 million people of color here now, from 100 nations.

Instead of assimilation, we live in an age of racial and ethnic resentments and entitlements, where “multiculturalism” is in vogue and it is “racist” to demand immigrants learn the English language.

But if we no longer worship the same God, honor the same heroes, speak the same language, study the same history, love the same literature or even agree about what is right and wrong, how do we remain one nation and one people?

What do we have in common anymore? If Bush’s ally-ally-in-free immigration policy is embraced, the old America we knew will be nothing more than a global hiring hall and what Teddy Roosevelt called a “polyglot boarding house for the world.”

And if it doesn’t work, there is no going back. It is the end of the America we all loved. Why is President Bush taking this risk with our country?

Gold Medal in Tyranny
A look at China’s authoritarianism.
by Matthew Continetti

In July 2001, when the International Olympics Committee (IOC) awarded the 2008 summer games to Beijing, the international community began a thought-experiment. Wouldn’t holding the games in China give the world’s democracies “leverage” over that country’s Communist dictatorship? Wouldn’t the increased media attention and “scrutiny” force Beijing to relax its security apparatus and increase civil liberties? Wouldn’t the Olympics be just another elevation in China’s “peaceful rise” to “responsible stakeholder,” great-power status?

Seven years later, we have our answer. It is a resounding “No.” Over the last couple of weeks, riots have broken out in Tibet and surrounding areas and been suppressed by brute force. The State Department’s annual report on human rights details an uptick in China’s already dismal practices. A prominent Chinese dissident has been put on trial in Beijing on charges of subverting state power. The hypothesis that hosting the Olympics would mellow Beijing’s ruthlessness has been proved false. The experiment has failed.

Back in 2001, a bipartisan coalition of American political and business elites supported the Chinese Olympics bid. Among them was the chairman of the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, future Massachusetts governor and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who told reporters shortly before the games were awarded to Beijing that the “Olympics are about building bridges, not building walls.” The former Clinton national security adviser Samuel Berger wrote a Washington Post op-ed entitled “Don’t Antagonize China” in which he argued that the “world looks different from China” and that it makes “no sense” for U.S. policymakers

to”throw a monkey wrench” into the “boldest market-oriented economic experiment in modern times.” The Bush administration was officially neutral on the Beijing bid. As then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer put it in his press briefing on the day the Chinese got the games, the “president does not view this as a political matter.”

There were many who had faith that the Chinese Communists would see the Olympics as a chance to reform. “This now is an opportunity for China to showcase itself as a modern nation,” Fleischer said. The New York Times editorialized that “there is reason to hope that the bright spotlight the Olympics can shine on the Chinese government’s behavior over the next seven years” will benefit “those in China who would like to see their country evolve into a more tolerant and democratic society.”

The day after the IOC made its historic announcement, former Carter national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski–who these days advises Barack Obama–took to the Times op-ed page to disavow any parallel between the 1980 Moscow Olympics and the 2008 Beijing games. Brzezinski had helped plan the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Olympics to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But “the situation with China” is “not only different,” he wrote in 2001. It is also “more complex.” Sure, Brzezinski continued, “grievous human rights abuses are being committed by the Chinese government.   .  .  . Tibet continues to be repressed.” The “regime as a whole is still committed to one-party dictatorship.” But don’t believe your lying eyes. “China is nonetheless becoming a much more open society,” because millions of Chinese “now have access to satellite television dishes” and “even to the Internet.”

Of course, hundreds of millions of Chinese have nothing but dirt. Internet access is policed by the ever-more-sophisticated sentinels of the Great Firewall. And prosperity, while a great public good, is a meager substitute for the greater public good of natural rights such as the freedom to publicly oppose one’s government, to legitimate state authority through elections, and to worship God as one sees fit.

Not to worry, Brzezinski suggested. Things will work out. The Olympics will only intensify the “pressures for change.” And Beijing will respond positively. It will have no other choice.

Apparently not.

On March 10, a small group of monks in Lhasa, the capital of Chinese-occupied Tibet, went to the Jokhang Temple and began to chant “Free Tibet” and “Dalai Lama.” Soon other Tibetans joined them. Police dispersed the protest, arrested the ringleaders, and prevented monks from monasteries on the city’s periphery from joining in. But the yak was out of the bag, so to speak. The protests continued and over the last few weeks have spread to Gansu, Qinghai, and Sichuan provinces. There have been hunger strikes, acts of self-immolation, some attacks on the ethnic Han Chinese majority, sit-ins, marches, and candle-light vigils.

The Chinese government’s response has been simple. It has used all available force, including deadly force, to crush the protests, while it heavily censors the information the world receives about them. Lhasa has been sealed off. We don’t know how many people have died in the uprising–the numbers range from 16 (Beijing’s official tally) to more than

80 (the estimaterom the Tibetan government-in-exile in India). Thousands of the People’s Armed Police have been mobilized. The People’s Liberation Army appears to be running logistics and resupply for them. Hundreds of people have been detained. Dozens have been arrested. The security services have built checkpoints and roadblocks. They regulate the flow of people into and out of the contested areas. And as we go to press late on March 20, reports are that the Chinese authorities largely have reestablished control.

In related news, on March 11, as unrest in Tibet was intensifying, the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor released its annual country reports on human rights practices. This year, for the first time, the People’s Republic of China has been left off the list of the world’s worst human-rights violators. China’s absence isn’t due to diplomatic considerations in light of the upcoming Olympics, acting assistant secretary of state Jonathan Farrar cautioned reporters. Nor is it due, apparently, to any changes in China’s human-rights practices. Quite the contrary; those practices have gotten worse. According to the report, in 2007 “controls were tightened in some areas,” such as religious liberty in Tibet and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, “freedom of speech and the media, including the Internet; and the treatment of petitioners in Beijing.” There were other serious abuses, the report continues, including “extrajudicial killings, torture and coerced confessions of prisoners, and the use of forced labor.” The “coercive birth limitation”–the One-Child policy–continues, too, “in some cases” resulting “in forced abortion or sterilization.”

Folks in China also have a tendency to disappear. Dissidents and political prisoners are sentenced to a network of maximum-security psychiatric prisons in which they are penned with the dangerously insane and from which they have no chance of reprieve. In addition, according to the State Department report, in 2007 “the party and state exercised strict political control of courts and judges, conducted closed trials and carried out administrative detention.” In China there is no presumption of innocence, no adversary system of justice, often no trial witnesses other than the defendant, no right against self-incrimination, “no protection against double jeopardy, and no rules governing the type of evidence that may be introduced.” What little provision for due process the law affords, the authorities tend to ignore.

The phrase “human rights in China” is little more than a joke. And any Chinese who dare say as much in public face harsh penalties. One of them, the AIDS and environmental activist Hu Jia, stood trial last week on charges of subverting state power. The road that led Hu to the Beijing Number One Intermediate People’s Court is long. Between August 2006 and March 2007, he spent 214 days under house arrest. On May 18, 2007, as Hu and his wife, fellow dissident Zeng Jinyan, were about to leave for an overseas speaking engagement, Hu’s house arrest was reinstated. From home, Hu continued to sign his name to essays drawing attention to the depravities of the Chinese government. During this time his daughter was born. On December 27, 2007, police removed him from his home, where his wife and daughter were forced to remain. The police confiscated every piece of electronic communications technology Hu and Zeng possessed. Their telephone line was disconnected. Applications from Hu’s lawyer to meet with his client were denied until February 4, 2008, at which time the police supervised the meeting. On the evening of March 6, Teng Biao, one of Hu’s lawyers, was forced into a vehicle and taken to an undisclosed location, where he was told that it was not in his interest to talk to foreign journalists about Hu Jia and human rights violations in China. Three days before Hu’s trial began, authorities informed his wife that she would not be allowed to attend. In the end only Hu’s mother was allowed into the courtroom. The trial was brief. A verdict is expected this week. Hu faces up to five years in prison.

These are not isolated incidents. The Dui Hua Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit, has found that in 2007 Chinese arrests for “endangering state security” were at their highest level since 1999. This follows a doubling of such arrests between 2005 and 2006. Nor is the Tibetan uprising isolated. The number of officially reported “public order disturbances” has been on the rise for several years. China is ratcheting up its defense spending. Its policy of “noninterference” supports dictators in places like Sudan, North Korea, Burma, Iran, Venezuela, and Russia. Far from imposing democratic pressure on Beijing, the Olympic games seem to have done the exact opposite: They have emboldened the Chinese dictatorship in its constant quest to obliterate any chance the country has for a real politics.

There clearly wasn’t a good reason, then, for China’s absence from the State Department’s list of the worst human rights violators. Surely that absence reflects the same naive view articulated seven years ago during the debate over the awarding of the Olympics; the same facile argument American elites–Democrats and Republicans, academics and bureaucrats, lobbyists and corporate titans–have peddled for two decades: that our economic engagement with China would lead inevitably to political liberalization. This does not seem to be happening, however. Which raises some serious questions about our China policy. Isn’t it time we had a grown-up discussion about China’s persistent authoritarianism? This summer seems like a pretty good occasion to start it.

I Love My Country–Aw, Who Am I Kidding? My Country Can Go Fuck Itself

When I look at that grand old flag, waving up there, big and proud in the breeze, my heart swells near to bursting, and a tear forms in my eye from thinking of all that it represents. Freedom. Glory. Tradition. For this land—the greatest on earth—is the land that I love, and may its song of liberty ring out from now until—what in the hell am I saying? This country and all its inhabitants can go take a flying fuck for all I care, honestly.

Sorry. That came out all wrong. Not what I meant at all. You see, loyalty to this nation is something I hold dear, just as my father did and his father before him, and all that shit. I mean, who cannot help but be filled with pride to think of our humble beginnings, knowing that we grew into the greatest democracy the world has ever known, even if the Browns couldn’t win a game to save their lives and you can’t get one moment of peace with all the noise these goddamn neighbors of mine are always making? You know, thinking of this nation’s past stirs something deep inside me.

Yeah. Real fucking deep.

What’s so great about this place anyway? I hate my job, I’m still in debt for a dishwasher I bought six years ago, and I haven’t had sex since the last Olympics. Land of the fricking free, huh? I spend an arm and a leg at the garage and my car still breaks down every other week. I started balding when I was 25, and no matter how cool it is, I sweat like a pig if I so much as stand up too fast. That doesn’t exactly sound like a City upon a Hill to me—what about you, huh? And at the end of the day, after all this aggravation and grief, what’s my big reward? I get to stare at something called Grey’s Anatomy that my wife just fucking loves so fucking much.

Never mind that my youngest kid’s got lice again.

All right, all right. I’m getting off track here. Sometimes I can get excited, but the fact is that this is the best country in the world. No matter what they say, it’s the truth. Ever since I was a schoolboy growing up in a small farming town, I’ve had a profound sense of honor and duty and belonging deep in my soul. Why, it seems like just yesterday that I’d doff my cap, place my hand on my heart, and recite those famous words: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of Jesus fucking Christ.

Screw America. Does America give a shit about my daughter’s dickhead boyfriend who smells like bacon fat and hair spray and probably has crabs? Hell no, it doesn’t. Does America care that a fucking battalion of squirrels is chewing through the walls of my attic and nothing can seem to stop them, not BB guns or rat poison? Nope. All America cares about is putting coffee stains on my best shirt, losing my ATM card, and giving me a defective cell phone that never gets voice mails until three days later and you have to lean out the living-room window to get rid of this stupid fucking popping sound.

I’m sorry. I’m probably just tired. In the mornings, I get these headaches like you wouldn’t believe.

Just think about the Statue of Liberty and what an enduring symbol of freedom and hope it is to the rest of the world. That’s what a good American thinks of, right? Not that shit-headed little brat who was poking me in the back as we waited to get on the ferry? No. Not that, or what assholes everyone in New York was. Or how long we had to wait at LaGuardia just to get our asses back to Cleveland where it was snowing like a motherfucker.

Because, as I was saying, patriotism is my lifeblood. My very essence. Red-blooded American patriotism. For America. America the beautiful. O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, like Ray Charles ever saw amber fucking anything. Amber waves of nimrods trying to cut in front of me at the supermarket, maybe. Yes, in the words of Francis Scott Key: “Aw, who gives a crap?” And, of course, the purple mountains’ majesty, though the last time I was in the mountains was when I visited my pain-in-the-ass sister and her clammy-handed husband and it was the worst weekend of my life.

I love America. I do! And when the proud eagle soars above all of creation, I get a lump in my throat, and everything like that. So fuck this. You know what I’m saying—democracy, loyalty, values. Et cetera, et cetera. You get it. You know the drill.