Mass Immigration Is Incompatible With National Survival

There’s a bit more to say about Democrat Illinois Rep. Delia Ramírez, who in her recent opening remarks at the second annual Panamerican Congress in Mexico City declared (in Spanish), “I am a proud Guatemalan before I am American.”

You might think, as I initially did, that Ramírez is an immigrant from Guatemala. But she was actually born in Chicago. Her mother illegally entered the United States by crossing the Rio Grande while she was pregnant, which gave Ramírez birthright citizenship. In common parlance, she’s an “anchor baby.”

That Ramírez, a natural-born American citizen, sees herself as a Guatemalan first is telling, and it gives us a window into the mindset of the political left, which believes it’s problematic, even shameful, to identify as simply an American — that there is something wrong with being an American as such, and something uniquely noble or praiseworthy about being an unassimilated immigrant and a foreigner.

Telling, too, was Ramírez’s reaction after negative coverage of her remarks by conservative outlets and social media. She issued a statement that almost perfectly distills her animating ideology. “Let’s call it what it is: today’s attacks are a weak attempt to silence my dissent and invalidate my patriotic criticism of the nativist, white supremacist, authoritarians in government.”

She went on: “No one questions when my white colleagues identify as Irish-American, Italian-American, or Ukrainian-American to honor their ancestry. I’ve consistently expressed pride in my heritage and history — a pride also often reflected in the origin stories of my colleagues. Only those who believe America should not include the children of immigrants or be diverse would attack me — and Americans like me — for honoring my roots. Honoring my Guatemalan ancestry only strengthens my commitment to America.”

Ramírez is here attempting a clumsy bit of legerdemain, claiming to honor her ancestry when in fact she was placing it above her national allegiance and identity as an American. And of course her comparison to her white colleagues is totally dishonest. No American with Irish or Italian ancestry goes around proclaiming they’re an Irishman or an Italian before they’re an American. It’s like pretending, as many on the left have done, that waving a Mexican flag during an anti-ICE riot is the same as waving an Irish flag at a Saint Patrick’s Day parade. At the parade, you’re actually paying homage to your ancestry. At the riot, you’re staking a claim against the nation to which you have emigrated, essentially declaring war against it.

That Ramírez frames her defense in racialist terms is also telling. As it is for so many issues on the left, the animus Ramírez displays for America is framed in terms of race. America is bad because it is “nativist” and “white supremacist.” The only way to redeem the country, according to this way of thinking, is to destroy its whiteness and its distinctly European and Christian culture. Indeed, this is at the heart of the multiculturalism that Ramírez and the entire political left champion.

For these people, nothing less than a cultural, political, and demographic revolution will suffice to redeem America. Their creed is a kind of anti-nationalism.

That’s why, for example, the administrative bureaucracy, long captured by the left, has slowly eroded the oath of allegiance to the United States that naturalized citizens must take. The oath begins with this: “I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen.” It goes on to require that naturalized citizens “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” bear arms in defense of the nation when required, and so on.

If Ramírez were a naturalized citizen, her comments in Mexico City would obviously have run afoul of her oath of allegiance. You cannot declare you are a proud Guatemalan before you are an American and still claim to have kept the rather straightforward bond the oath imposes on you.

There is a compelling argument that in such cases, citizenship should be revoked. Wade Stotts posted an excellent commentary on this recently, arguing that we should simply enforce the oath. “For years, we’ve treated that oath as if it were meaningless, so we shouldn’t be surprised that many immigrants are doing the same — that is, if they can even understand it in English, in which case to them it is meaningless.”

Stotts rightly notes that the oath has been gradually neutered, such that even the requirement that an applicant must understand English seems to have been eliminated. For example, the oath is always administered in English, but applicants are allowed to bring an interpreter. They can also “request a modification to the oath because of a religious objection or inability or unwillingness to take an oath or recite the words ‘under God.’” Indeed, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has an entire chapter of its policy manual devoted to oath of allegiance modifications and waivers. Applicants can get an oath waiver for any number of reasons, including if they are “unable to understand or communicate the meaning of the oath with or without an accommodation.”

All of this renders the oath meaningless — and in the process degrades citizenship. Perhaps that’s the point. After all, citizens of a nation are bound to it. Their loyalties are to the country and its people, and no other. Actual citizenship undercuts the leftist idea of a “global citizen,” and in practice makes it impossible.

Perhaps that’s why globalists are so keen on mass immigration. After all, mass immigration, whether legal or illegal, makes true assimilation impossible. We see this all over the world, with unassimilated immigrant populations making little or no effort to become part of the host country’s national culture.

Just this past week, for example, a Moroccan immigrant to France lit his cigarette on the Eternal Flame of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris, one of the nation’s most sacred war memorials. The man did this casually, in front of an astonished crowd of onlookers. France’s interior minister has apparently revoked the man’s permanent residency status, but the larger problem is that France has let in millions of such people, who have no connection to the nation, its history, heritage, and customs. There are many, many other immigrants like this Moroccan man in Paris, for whom a monument honoring the nation’s fallen soldiers is nothing more than a place to light his cigarette.

Or consider another spectacle from this week. A massive 51-foot-tall statue of the Hindu god Lord Ram has been erected in Ontario, Canada, just outside Toronto. Videos of the unveiling of the statue circulated on social media, showing a massive crowd of Hindus cheering the pagan god. It’s attached to the Hindu Heritage Center, one of several large Hindu temples in the area.

Hinduism is of course totally alien to Canada’s English and Christian culture. Yet mass immigration from India has created large unassimilated Hindu communities, which have no incentive to adopt Canadian culture and heritage as their own. The plain truth is that they are not really immigrants, but colonizers. And why shouldn’t they be? The host country, in thrall to the leftist ideology of multiculturalism, has not asked them to assimilate, much less required them to. So why should they?

This process is playing out across the West. In a recent interview, London Mayor Sadiq Khan said he’d like to give President Donald Trump a tour of London to allay his fears about multiculturalism by showing him how wonderful all the mosques and street markets are, that diversity is their strength and so on. It sounds like satire, but he wasn’t kidding.

On the one hand, it might seem that Khan, like a lot of political elites, is just disconnected from reality. London’s decline is after all world-famous at this point. No one can dispute it. At last year’s Notting Hill Carnival — one of those charming, multi-ethnic London events Khan would like to show Trump — nearly 350 people were arrested, 72 of them for possessing an offensive weapon (like a machete). Two people were killed, and there were eight stabbings.

On the other hand, Khan might simply be asserting that London is better off as a Third-world receiving hub than the capital of the English nation, even if it means it is objectively a much worse place to live. He can hardly be ignorant of the ways that mass immigration has effected Britain. Beyond rising crime rates, it is destroying national identity. As Telegraph columnist Sam Ashworth-Hayes has noted, fully one-fifth of Birmingham’s population in 2021 didn’t identify as English, British, or any other version of U.K. identity. England as a nation is being erased through mass immigration, a process that the country’s political leaders are cheering on.

It’s easy to imagine immigrants in any of these countries — England, France, Canada — saying proudly what Ramírez said, discarding or denigrating the national identity of their new home in favor of an ancestral or cultural identity tied to their country of origin. And one need not imagine the political leaders of these countries cheering that on, because they do in fact cheer it on quite openly. The destruction of national identity in the West is something they are actively seeking to accomplish.

What all of this mean is that if we allow leftist political leaders in America to have their way, and we do not require assimilation of our immigrants, then they will not assimilate — and they will not really be immigrants but colonists. Left unchecked, they will colonize our homeland, replacing our American civilization with theirs. And we will only have ourselves to blame.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.