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(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
He is convinced that this will mean the end of our cultural heritage; that the Christian West will soon be nothing more than a memory, because, in his words, it is “hard to believe that over one million immigrants every year, from every country on earth, a third of them entering illegally, will reforge the bonds of our disuniting nation.”
Bob Grant, a talk show host in the New York City area, has been hammering this theme since the 1970s. Grant is fond of repeating in melancholy tones, “It’s over, folks. It’s over,” to make the point that the United States will soon be unrecognizable in racial and cultural terms, a virtual Third World country. Grant sums up his reaction with a melancholy refrain: “I used to have a country; now I have a place where I live.”
Grant is not alone. I have noticed that many Americans including many good and decent Catholic folks become openly morose when confronting this reality, as if they are witnessing the end of their world. You can hear a note of despair in the voices of many callers to the radio talk-shows as they describe the “invasion” of their cities by hordes of immigrants, legal and illegal.
I think such sentiments may be unwarranted. Maybe we can cheer up. Am I saying that we should not seek the kind of immigration reform that Buchanan calls for? No. I am for his proposals for a serious cutback on immigration to allow a real assimilation to take place. I am alarmed by the prospect of the loss of our Western heritage. But I think there is a danger of going overboard in our fears. It is the preservation of our values and our heritage that is the key, not what the typical American will “look like” fifty years from now. We are Catholics, not members of the Aryan Brotherhood. The American future might not be as bleak as Pat Buchanan fears, even if there are more brown and yellow Americans than today.
Why? Because there are immigrants and there are immigrants. There is a difference between immigrants from Muslim countries who could create a culture hostile to Christianity if they became numerous enough and immigrants from Latin America and certain parts of Asia. Indeed, some of these immigrants, especially the Hispanics, may end up contributing more to the preservation of our national culture than many “Anglos” whose families have been in this country for centuries. We would be wrong to assume that their children will not assimilate. My years as a teacher in a public high school in the suburbs of New York City made that clear to me.
During those years, I saw the children of Hispanics, Koreans and other Asians become thoroughly assimilated in both a good and sad ways. They became indistinguishable from the rest of the student body in style of dress, tastes in sports and music. Many learned the snob appeal of the “right” colleges. Others succumbed to the lures of drugs and “alternative” lifestyles. They became admirable and high-minded young men and women, or lowlifes, in roughly the same percentages as the children of European descent. I will never forget one charming Korean-American girl, who returned from her first trip to Korea with the comment to her classmates that she was amazed because “they didn’t know I was an American over there.” Folks, this girl was genetically 100% Korean, but she had no doubt that she was an American; nor did she doubt that her classmates thought of her that way.
Consider your own experience. Do not the police officers with Spanish surnames on the real-life police shows such as Cops, where the cameras follow police officers on their rounds, inspire as much confidence in you as fair-skinned officers with names like Smith and Jones? Aren’t the cadets at West Point of Chinese and Korean background attractively patriotic in comparison to the snarling blue-eyed men in motorcycle gangs? Aren’t the children of Cuban immigrants in the stands at the University of Miami football games as Americanized as the student body at Georgia Tech? Don’t you feel at home listening to the Hispanic speakers who tell of their devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe on EWTN, the Catholic cable network? Their values are ours.
There is no reason to assume that our cultural values will be lost when the typical American looks as different as Pat Buchanan says he will fifty years from now. Race is not the key to whether our society will be a good society in the future. Hilaire Belloc was right about many things, but his quip that “the Faith is Europe; Europe is the Faith” has proven wrong. Christianity is dying in Europe. It is not Pollyannaish to speculate that perhaps non-white Americans, the children of recent immigrants, will become the most dependable defenders of the values we cherish in this country in the future. We must not forget that it was not brown and yellow immigrants who gave us the drug culture, Hollywood porn and legalized abortion.
Pat Buchanan’s projections for our demographic future may turn out to be correct. But the question for American Catholics of European descent is whether our children and grandchildren will get to Heaven, not what percentage they will be of the American population in the year 2050. Our mission should be to preserve, protect, defend and extend the values of the Christian West, whatever the racial and ethnic makeup of our society. Jesus saves, not demographics.