“Immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighborhoods residents of all races tend to `hunker down’. Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.”
Robert Putnam
E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century
The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture
By saying that “immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital,” what Putnam is getting at here is that ethnic harmony produces stability. This obvious truth is controversial and the articulation of it threatens careers in a time where there is a mania about denying the obvious.
The obviousness that ethnic harmony produces stability while ethnic diversity reduces social solidarity and social capital is even seen in the historic definition of the word nation, which stems from the Latin “nasci.” Webster’s 1828 dictionary gives us the definition of “nation,”
“nation as its etymology imports, originally denoted a family or race of men descended from a common progenitor, like tribe.”
Of course, this flies in the face of the modern insistence that America particularly is a “propositional nation.” The idea contained in that phrase is that America was never intended to be a nation of common blood and ancestry, but instead, America has always been a place that found its union in the idea that a governed people find their unity in a shared commitment to a shared set of ideological truisms.
That this is historical revisionism is seen by just a few quotes, In The Federalist Papers, John Jay emphasized ethnic unity and religious unity as the source of American strength, saying that,
“Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs….”
A lesser-known Founding Father John Dickinson in his “Observations on the Constitution Proposed by the Federal Convention” likewise wrote,
“Where was there ever a confederacy of republics united as these states are…or, in which the people were so drawn together by religion, blood, language, manners, and customs?”
One can find other sentiments like the above throughout US History. John Calvin Coolidge, when Vice President echoing Robert Putnam above, wrote,
“There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend…. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.”
Dr. Joel McDurmon captured some of this sentiment when he wrote in his, “Preventing the Warfare State: the biblical laws for kings,”
“The U.S. Constitution returned to the pre-1066 Anglo-Danish standard of “kith and kin.” The word “King” is related to the English “kin” which has an ethnic reference. “Kith and kin” means “same country and family.” Without this quality among a leader, there cannot be any true loyalty to the people. And while this sounds like a side matter, it is not: a ruler who identifies with the people almost as a family will fight to defend them and their liberties. A ruler, however, without that loyalty will more likely be less interested in defense. It’s the difference which Jesus taught between the shepherd and the hireling.”
All of this to say that the strength of a nation is found in ancestral roots which form a common ethnic bond. These roots provide the organic, interwoven connections among kith and kin who have lived cheek by jowl for generations in shared communities. What immigration does as it comes from nations that share no blood, religion, manners, history, and language with the White Anglo Saxon Christian origins of this nation is that it destroys the organic community roots by snapping off the shared plausibility structures, destroying the shared common way of life, and poisoning the well where the waters of common culture are drawn. Where harmony of interests existed what is interjected by way of alien immigration is an instant conflict of interest driven by placing contradictory religions, ideologies, and theologies in the same proximate space. Where shared interests and values once existed as the glue that holds cultures together now room must be made for polygamy, clitorectomy, jihads and who knows what other foreign interest and value. Where community had been the coin of the realm, now balkanization is hegemonic.
Immigration is better called “recolonization,” and when practiced with passion, “genocide.” What is lost when mindless immigration is practiced is something of greater value than stock dividends and an ever-ballooning Gross Domestic Product. What is lost is a sense of identity, generational history, and belongingness to a particular people in favor of an egalitarian cosmopolitanism that atomizes the individual with the consequence that the only possible identity comes from identifying with the State which becomes both the destroyer and the pretended protector of the original stock.
In the end, the simple truism that “proximity + diversity = war” is indeed accurate. World history testifies to that truthfulness. Whether one looks at the Muslim conquest of the Northern African Littoral, or the Norman conquest of the Anglo-Saxons, or Stalin’s population transfers, or the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or former Yugoslavia repeatedly it is found that pronounced diversity in one geographic area is a recipe for significant cultural conflict. The vacuous and jejune egalitarian idea that “diversity is our strength” is just stupidity on steroids and no amount of reciting that mantra is going to make it become true. Not even when one sprinkles it with Christian pietistic sparkles. Similarly, the ubiquitous and now tired habit to use the cultural Marxist magic hex word “racism” in order to sublimate the reality that immigration and ethnic diversity is a bad thing sure to create conflict has become tantamount to peeing in a stiff breeze. It may make someone feel better short term but it only results in getting all wet.
The result of all this will either be genocide if the host culture surrenders or if the host culture does not surrender the result will be a Hobbesian war of all against all which will make the Lebanese civil war look like Red Sox vs. Yankees Baseball game.
In the former Christendom (The West) we are now absorbing the largest immigration movement in World history. Much of the visible church mindlessly blather about how God is bringing the world to us in order to be converted. Hearing the visible Church leadership exult in this mass migration is like being present to hear Montezuma and the Aztec leadership rejoice with the arrival of Cortez. Those with eyes to see know that it is not the immigrant world that is being assimilated to Christianity but rather it is Christianity that is being assimilated and redefined in a non-Christian direction. When we rejoice with the entry of the third world into the West we are rejoicing at the death of Christianity and the death of that ethnic group that God has pleased, by His grace alone, to make the primary civilizational carrier of Christianity.
All of this is why Enoch Powell as the canary in the coal mine could lament 50 years ago
“Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.”
