Selwyn Duke writes: Have you heard about the millions of Chinese flooding into the Tibet? With their displacement of the native peoples and the supplanting of Tibetan with Chinese culture, anthropologists and human rights activists have labeled the colonization “cultural genocide.” (See here, here, here, here, and here, for example.) It is a cause célèbre with its own popular bumper sticker:
The situation corresponds precisely to what’s happening in most Western countries — most notably the United States — except for one minor detail:
No compassionate liberal activists call it cultural and demographic genocide.
They call it “diversity.”
Everything else reflects the West’s immigrationist malaise. This cultural sickness is not limited to America. The Swedish multiculturalist and anti-Western social engineer Mona Sahlin, commenting on the planned Islamization of her land, said in 2001, “[T]he Swedes must be integrated into the new Sweden; the old Sweden is never coming back.”
The old Hazleton is likely never coming back, either. There recently was a news story about how the Pennsylvania town has gone from 5 percent to 37 percent Hispanic in just a decade, between 2000 and 2010. Another news piece, one at PennLive.com titled “Not all in Hazleton convinced old town, new immigrants can co-exist happily” (they must be “racists”), points out that “[f]or years, the hospital ran deficits because of the number of people visiting the emergency room who could not pay” and that “[w]hen the Hispanic population started to boom in the early 2000s, Hazleton’s crime rate rose….” Of course, I’m sure this is mere correlation. Because we all know that our strength lies in our displac…er, I mean, diversity.
One thing we can say about Hazelton’s transformation, at least, is that it was driven by economic and lifestyle factors such as jobs and better neighborhoods. Not so with Obama’s amnesty plan to use illegal aliens — or, if that term is offensive, let’s say, undocumented Democrats — as “seedlings” to further effect the “fundamental transformation” of America. Oh, you haven’t heard about this? Well, it’s not the kind of scheme laid out in official policy papers or analyzed in The New York Times. But the gist of it, talk-show host Sue Payne told us while reporting on a conversation she became privy to involving federal officials, is that “new Americans” (read: “foreigners”) would “navigate, not assimilate” as they “take over the host,” create a “country within a country” and start “pushing the citizens into the shadows” (click here for more). The moral of this story? No one is talking about “assimilation” except suckers, who, it seems, are natural-born every minute.
Speaking of which, it’s certainly tempting to blame all this on Barack Obama. But note that the majority of Hazleton’s transformation occurred under George W. Bush’s watch — not that Mr. Mush deserves all the blame, either. Understand that the die for our fundamental transformation was cast long ago, in 1965, with the Immigration Reform and Nationality Act (gracias, Ted Kennedy). It radically changed our immigration model, creating a situation wherein for 50 years 85 percent of our immigrants have hailed from the Third World and Asia. And if demographics are destiny, we should ponder the almost unprecedented demographic shift the act has wrought. In 1965, whites were almost 90 percent of the population.
Now non-Hispanic whites are down to 63 percent.
