Samuel T. Francis
Monterey, VA: Americans for Immigration Control, Inc., 2002
$6.95
215 pp., Paperback
Reviewed by John Attarian
Over a million immigrants, virtually all non-white, enter America every year, and well over thirty million have arrived since 1970. Americans are taking this unprecedented flood calmly. Apparently they believe that these newcomers will assimilate—conform to American culture, folkways, and mores—just as their own immigrant ancestors did in the 1840s, 1890s, and 1910s, and that America will digest them without ill effects.
Not so, retorts paleoconservative columnist Samuel Francis, a penetrating observer of politics and culture. In this collection of columns written in 1998–2001, Dr. Francis argues persuasively that assimilation is not happening and that as a result, immigration is starting to radically transform America, with whites being dispossessed of economic, social, and political power, and of their culture too.
Studies, including a Center for Immigration Research and Education study in 1982 and a Census Bureau report in 1992, have pointed out that if current trends in non-white immigration and fertility continued, American whites would be a minority by about 2050. They have elicited little notice, much less alarm. Most Americans believe that race does not matter and that cultural differences will vanish as the newcomers become like us.
Mainstream conservatives and libertarians have a deep faith that insists that immigrants will assimilate. These people—Linda Chavez, Jack Kemp, Bill Bennett, Ben Wattenberg, and so on—typically argue that American identity is not grounded in race, ethnicity, national origin, culture, or religion, but rather in a set of "propositions," such as equality, entrepreneurship, "family values," and so on. This reductive approach, Francis rightly observes, does not try to prove that "real assimilation, as understood by sociologists and anthropologists, was taking place," but seeks to water down "the meaning of the concept of assimilation itself—and of America as a distinct, historically articulated culture as well."
But if the "right" dilutes assimilation, liberals simply disdain it. They laud immigration as providing "diversity," the real purpose of which, Francis bravely and rightly observes, is "to destroy whiteness." Liberals forsake the image of the melting pot for the "salad bowl," in which different groups will preserve their unique identities and perspectives. But salads are not famous for cohesion.
Dr. Francis excels at spelling out what assimilation is and why it matters. Many immigrants, he acknowledges, do assimilate and many others do so partially. But he makes the crucial point that assimilation itself admits of degrees. Minimal assimilation entails merely things like wearing blue jeans and eating fast food. Deeper assimilation involves adopting not only conventional American dress, speech, and the like, but also "cultural attitudes toward a multiplicity of kinds of behavior and the cultural norms that govern them."
The elites' self-serving conduct makes it brutally clear, Dr. Francis argues, that the American people cannot look to the elites to save America from being ruinously transformed by immigration. We must do it ourselves. The electoral victory of California's Proposition 187 shows that grassroots efforts can succeed. There is still some time left, he believes, but not much. "The day is soon coming—Mexican revanchists remind us of it all the time—when the immigrants will simply be too many for any sitting politician to call for immigration controls without inviting political suicide."
Sam Francis has an enviable knack for "reading" current events to divine what they reveal about both the present and the future; the penetration to see what he looks at; and the guts to report what he sees. The result is deep insight conveyed in vigorous, readable prose. Francis puts me in mind of the journalist Jules Machefer in Jean Raspail's The Camp of the Saints.
America Extinguished is one of the best warnings about the immigration menace I have read, a powerful work of prophecy. Fortunately it's priced to reach a mass audience. Buy it, read it, buy more copies, and pass them on.
Time is short.