The Houston Chronicle reports that over the last ten years, the immigrant population in the United States grew more than at any other time in American history. The 2000 Census shows that one in ten people living in America are foreigners, and half of them are Hispanic. If America is to remain American, and not become a carbon copy of the General Assembly of the United Nations—or the Mexican Congress—she must take Patrick J. Buchanan’s latest advice: the creation of a single-issue, “Defend Our Borders” party. This tightly focused party would put the oft-ignored immigration issue on the national agenda and hold the two (one?) Establishment parties (party?) accountable. Pat Buchanan is a national treasure, and his idea is golden.
Everyone remembers what happened to the Reform Party during the last election. Buchanan’s idea avoids the possibility of repeating that debacle by confining the message, platform, and efforts of the proposed party solely toward issues of immigration reform. Buchanan attempted a “left-center-right coalition” in the past by courting Lenora Fulani, but his efforts proved premature. Part of the failure to build this wide coalition lay in the attempt of the Reform Party to handle a plethora of issues, which created the opportunity for infighting and discord. In contrast, a single-issue party centered on the immigration problem will attract the broadest of bases—from liberal environmentalists concerned about the unchecked growth of the nation’s population to paleoconservatives and nationalists who seek to preserve America’s traditional European racial and cultural character as well as her English language.
America sorely needs such an initiative. The elites suffer no dearth of tools and fools who back open borders. Steve Murdock, director of the Texas State Data Center at Texas A&M University, vacuously stated, “I think we need to recognize that our population needs to be internationalized as our economy is internationalized.” Murdock’s reasoning typifies the mindset of the elites: open borders yield cheap labor, which bolsters profits. For Murdock, everything must be subordinated to the economy—even national and racial pride and identity. Murdock’s hypercapitalism is no better than communism—both constitute a perverse form of idolatry, deifying Economic Man at the expense of all other values.
We need to reconsider the relationship of capitalism to conservatism. Sometimes capitalism produces some rather un-conservative outcomes, so there is reason and room for conservatives to decide just what kind of capitalism they support. There are different kinds: global capitalism versus a more parochial capitalism, and finance capitalism versus a more tangible-based, production-oriented capitalism. The more wholesome varieties are the parochial and production-oriented. We once knew that.
Today, no one stops to think what it means that American students are declining in numbers in the graduate programs in their own country. Do we really need any more Chinese teaching assistants, who can barely speak English, teaching math to American undergraduates? Does anyone realize that these foreign students occupy spaces that could have been filled by young Americans who got turned away?
We have students here from China studying nuclear engineering, organic chemistry, and computer science—fields of knowledge that they can easily bring back home to use against us twenty years from now. The “relative gains” problem, as they call it in the academic discipline of International Relations, comes into play here—America becomes weaker when China becomes stronger, even if American power is superior in the absolute sense over China. Even as America has thousands of nuclear warheads, it is better that China has 50 than 500 or 5000. We’re letting other nations catch up to us economically and technologically because of our good will, which is actually misplaced altruism. I’d rather fight another nation that is not brought up to our level by our own hand.
The Establishment condemns my views on these issues as “protectionism.” Who made “protectionism” into a dirty word? Some things deserve protection, such as one’s family, friends, and country. Who would simply throw the things they love to the wind, or to the invisible hand? This denigration of protectionism must be another politically correct “word-job,” the same treatment given to the word “discrimination,” which once meant “discernment” or “the exercise of taste and high standards.” Another example of a PC word-job is what happened to the word “gay,” which used to mean “happy” or “gleeful.” That lifestyle is far from one that produces happiness in the end (no pun intended)—it cuts 30 years off a man’s life. As one reader once e-mailed me, “they ought to be called ‘sads.” Good patriots must reclaim the true meaning of these words.
The English school of economics, which includes Adam Smith and David Ricardo, argues against protectionism from the standpoint of “comparative advantage,” and it is a mistaken argument because of its shortsightedness. It fails to take into account the fact that one cannot be a consumer if one does not have a job. The free traders (or “free traitors”) forget that we do not live in a unified, perpetually peaceful world but one of conflicting nation-states and realpolitik. Excessive dependence on foreign nations puts a nation at a disadvantage in terms of its national security. True national sovereignty and independence becomes impossible and illusory. The better model is indeed the protectionist; the early American Republic relied on the economic advice of the German economist Friedrich List who advocated a system of tariff protection. Of course, few know of List’s work in the U.S. anymore, even economics graduate students and professors. One has to ask why this knowledge has been suppressed. Who benefits? Follow the money.
Imagine what America might be if her high-tech companies took the money they donate to the two major political parties in exchange for H1-B visas and instead used it to invest in their fellow Americans. They could create and expand programs with the schools to train new American engineers, getting them on the math and science track even before high school. Then there would be no “labor shortages” for these skills—and no convenient excuses for importing foreign labor. We’d have a more cohesive nation. Not that I am saying the government should require or prod this—I am no socialist. I merely call for a re-examination of the prevailing corporate ethic. We have to change corporate culture, and remind them what it means to be an American.
Changing the culture remains more desirable than empowering government regulators. Take the resistance of American “multinational” companies toward identifying themselves as American, for example. Some companies even prohibit American flags and eschew the National Anthem on company property. Is it better to pass some law making them swear loyalty, or can we actually change their attitudes and educate them so that our corporate friends actually come to believe in their own nation’s value again? Perhaps certain laws and incentives may be a necessary measure now, since we are so far gone, but I yearn for the day it won’t be necessary. That’s the turning point when you’ll know patriots have finally won.
In the meantime, I’ll settle for a generous corporate donation to the Defend Our Borders Party.