Those of us who - since the 1970's - have been looking with apprehension at the phenomenon of too many immigrants coming into our country for its own good, are faced with many enemies.
The professional race mongers such as the head of the ACLU find that because we don't want everyone to come here, we are racists. LULAC and others, including several U.S. foundations and the Vatican, take the same stance. When we say that the arrival of mostly unskilled immigrants only hurts our poorest, often black, citizens, or our youngsters willing to take low pay to get started in the work place, such adversaries only think we are lying.
After all, in our hearts these folks tell the world, we really only want, if any must come, white Western Europeans like our majority before 1965's disastrous new migration law was passed. Ergo, we are xeno-phobes.
And then, from all wise, all powerful business types such as 40-year-old Bill Gates, we are anti-libertarian, perhaps the worst charge, since only by getting in the best and brightest from overseas can we maintain global supremacy - by-passing our own young talents - and training Indians and others in our latest technology - so they may return home to India with the technology to knock our socks off, even if they are paid in the interim on average half or less than the going wages required by comparable U.S. citizen employees.
The same thing that got the Trojans will get us. Greed and stupidity. Here we are, spending billions for weapons, standing military forces, swat teams, drug enforcement, etc., but have happily brought into our nation since 1965 an increasing stream of immigrants, who like the Greeks of the Iliad, quietly wait as our leaders claim that immigrants add endlessly to the economy without taking benefits (both untrue) - so we take the bait of cheap labor, which under cover of the darkness our leaders keep us in, labor which when taken home, will take our technology, while leaving us the world's poorest and most useless, and thus permit the quiet conquest of the greatest nation ever created.
By continuing to ignore the irrefutable demographics of the growing cancer of immigration, suddenly our kids and grand-children will awaken, perhaps 25 to 50 years from now, and see that the culture of our unique-ness and the brilliance of our economic system have been spirited away, pillaging our competitiveness, our technology, and our national spirit.
Finally, those of us who can read - apparently those with a true sense of our national interest and the ability to read are few - we who see this new Trojan Horse clearly, are identified as against the free market system, which everyone from Milton Friedman on down knows will solve all our problems, if only left unfettered.
Businessmen who use cheap foreign labor, including many of our elite who want to hire domestic help, use this argument what are borders, what is nationhood, what is the world but one big happy integrated McWorld?
Two recent books are worth reading. One, The Case Against Immigration by Roy Beck. (W.W. Norton, 1996) gives all the above arguments. The other, Jihad vs. McWorld by Benjamin R. Barber (Times Books, 1996) points out the startling conflict between fanatical extremism and world business greed, both leading relentlessly to a loss of demo-cracy as Americans know it today.
Our future is on the line The Trojan Horse is already inside the gate. We are looking at its apparent attractiveness, beguiled by its apparent beauty and friendliness. "Immigrants are much more scrappy and willing to work than Americans," according to one libertarian on a talk show I heard recently. We are about to fall asleep as the Dow hits new highs, our main political parties assure us all is well and that we are not already fiscally bankrupt. Our public infrastructure is seedy and our health care and social security are nearing bankruptcy, but we are told they will be fixed easily, and above all, that we need not suffer any pain to fix the follies of 60 years of wild government spending and resource-wasting. And we want so badly to believe.
Outside, in the real world of death and tyranny, not so analyzed on the screens of our flawlessly clear TV sets, the population of the world grows from 2 billion in 1930 to 3 billion in 1960 to 6 billion in 2000 to 12 billion by 2050. All the wars of the 20th Century killed 100 million, curiously the same number of net new people added yearly to our planet now; of those, 80 million are born in countries with per capita incomes at or lower than Mexico; we let in 1 million legal and illegals now, which means a U.S. population of 400 million vs the present 265 million by 2050!! Many outside the U.S. and the West have proved they are willing to die to get into the USA. Only 50 percent of us even vote in national elections and the power of money has bought off almost everyone, including our elected officials, who are no better or no worse than those who vote for them. After all, we are rich, we are safe, we are happy and we are looking bemusedly at the Trojan Horse of immigration, which insures our decline like all the civilizations before us ... or are we? It's your call, folks.