What the Immigration Debate Really Should Be About
Editor’s note: It strikes me that until we talk explicitly about racial/ethnic genetic interests, we cannot win. The 1924 Immigration Restriction Act was based on an explicit assertion of an ethnic status quo which assumed that each group currently in the country had an interest in maintaining their ethnic representation. The Boasian attack on the concept of race, continuing now as an article of faith among all elites in the West, is the most powerful weapon against White interests and the continuation of the West as anything remotely resembling the civilization of a particular people. This consensus against mentioning White racial interests is vigorously policed in the media, the political arena, and even in most positions of employment. Ted Sallis argues that, as the result of losing this battle, conservatives launch a host of arguments, many of which are likely veiled attempts to retain White demographic predominance; but these arguments will inevitably fail. When conservatives bewail what has happened while at the same they time reject Darwinism, they should realize that it was the successful attack on Darwinism that is the greatest intellectual disaster for Whites and their civilization. Kevin MacDonald
I have previously written about the ongoing immigration amnesty travesty. Since that essay, there have been some stirrings of rebellion against the Establishment’s promotion of immigrant interests vs. that of native White Americans. These stirrings have not yet been particularly effective. However, regardless of the ultimate outcome regarding this legislation, I note that the arguments on both sides strictly hold to aracial concerns. It seems that no one is “getting it.” Let’s take a look at some of the common immigration arguments, particularly from the anti-amnesty side, and evaluate why they ultimately miss the point.
1. The problem is with illegal immigration, with law-breaking. We have no problem with legal immigration!
In my previous TOO essay, I wrote:
The easiest way to solve the problem of illegal immigration is to simply make all immigrants legal. If the entire population of Mexico has the legal right to migrate to the USA, then the Establishment can honestly say that illegal immigration from Mexico has fallen to zero. Now, that possibility is an indictment of the “I’m not racist” argument that “we’re not against immigration, only illegal immigration.” When people paint themselves into a corner like that, it is only time before the Establishment calls their bluff, legalizes everyone, and then asks, “What’s the problem now? They’re all legal! You aren’t racist, are you?”
This can be put into perspective by considering whether the masses of non-White illegal aliens in the USA would be any less destructive to our interests if they had come legally. We can also ask: if you had to choose, would you prefer one million legal Afro-Asiatic-Latino immigrants or one million illegal European immigrants?
True enough the legality issue has some merit (other than as a tool to motivate aracial conservatives). After all, blatant disregard for laws and national sovereignty is not good, and a nation that cannot control its borders is not really a nation at all. However, even given that, let us at least be honest — our major objection with these immigrants is with who and what they are, not how they got here. I suspect that not all of the conservatives screaming about the legality issue are completely aracial — opposition to illegal immigration may be one of those “implicit Whiteness” deals in which furtive racial motives hide behind legal, social, and cultural pretenses. But, as stated above, implicit calls for legality will ultimately fail, since legalization of the influx can abrogate the whole issue. And we cannot forget that the major driver of the demographic transformation of America over the last half-century has been legal immigration, particularly after the atrocious genocidal legislative crime of 1965. Legal or illegal — they are here, they are occupying America, and they are displacing White Americans.
Note also that even those “conservative Republicans” against the amnesty are generally in favor of more “legal” immigration — with the exception of Senator Sessions, who’s about the best there is on Capitol Hill (which is at best a left-handed compliment). And it was those “anti-amnesty conservatives” — who are gung ho for more immigration — who “slapped down” Sessions when the Alabama Senator had the temerity to ask for decreased total immigration. Again — the Establishment’s “solution” to illegal immigration is to increase the “legal” immigration quotas to such an extent that illegal entry becomes superfluous. And that’s the general “conservative” agenda. What else can you expect when you emphasize scraps of paper — legal migration — over the fundamental foundation of blood kinship?
2. It’s just the numbers. It’s not, you see, that we object to people from every corner of the Earth coming here, it’s just that we are already overpopulated, filled up, and can’t take any more.
There will always be arguments against that (indeed, some kosher conservatives have argued that the USA can comfortably be home to three billion [!] people at a Western European standard of living). But the argument fails in the end because it is really a matter of who the immigrants are. Certainly, overpopulation, crowding, and environmental degradation are all real problems, and there are limits to proper US population size, regardless of race. But, really, the “overpopulation argument” is more about fast-breeding Third Worlders than it is about any European immigrants (and their below replacement level fertility). It’s about race — overpopulation is just another mask, another implicit excuse.
3. These immigrants have a low-IQ! They will not be productive! They are crime prone!
In other words: the HBD argument. Now, certainly, people should have the right to make that argument, and what happened to Jason Richwine was disgraceful. However, this is not the main issue.
As I wrote previously:
[Frank] Salter writes in On Genetic Interests that any group has an interest in its own continuity independent on where it ranks — or where others think it ranks — on a suite of phenotypic traits. And that is correct, since genetic kinship, and not a phenotypic rank, determines genetic interests.
Consider the following: what if the bulk of illegal immigrants in the USA were high-IQ, highly-skilled Chinese? Would that be better? The HBD crowd may be happy, but the fact remains that Chinese are even more genetically distant from Europeans than are mestizos (who are of part-European ancestry), and the Chinese are from a completely different culture and civilization. The fact that they are more intelligent and more disciplined means that, in the last analysis, they would be more formidable competitors — a worse situation for White Americans.
The problem with the current illegal population — the real problem — is not that they are low-IQ or any other such characteristic. It’s that they are not White. That may sound harsh, and it may scare away even the borderline racialist HBD crowd. But it is nonetheless true. If “high-IQ” is all that matters, then any of the people making this argument should have no problem whatsoever with mass East Asian immigration, legal or illegal. And the other implication of their argument is that they wouldn’t really mind the millions of Mexican illegal immigrants, if only the illegals were on the right side of the bell curve.
Beating the drum about “IQ” or “highly-skilled” or “law abiding” or “k-selected” or whatever other proximate measure avoids the fundamental issue of kinship and also sets you up for race replacement by “high-IQ Asians.” Most parents tend to prefer their own children compared to strangers’ children, even if the latter are smarter or better-looking or more “highly skilled” than the former. Until Whites are able to comprehend that the same principle applies at the population group level, maladaptive outcomes will occur. At some point, the Establishment will say, “Hey, you want high-IQ? There’s several hundred million Chinese who would jump at the chance to migrate to the USA! And they are ‘highly-skilled’ (and non-White, and potential ‘liberal Democrat’ voters). You want them, you got them!” What’s going to be the anti-immigration argument then? Or will the HBDers welcome the influx?
Genetic kinship is the 800 lb. gorilla in the room that almost all in the immigration debate — and many people in general who believe they are “racially aware” — pretend does not exist. It is “the argument that dare not speak its name.” Hopefully, here at TOO we will continue to speak its name. Therefore, I’ll stake out the (perhaps controversial) position that: (1) kinship-based racialism and HBD-based pseudo-racialism are competing for the same niche space, (2) only kinship-based racialism ensures adaptive responses, and (3) a predominant emphasis on HBD is, ultimately, detrimental to White racial interests.
Emphasizing kinship gets to the core of the matter, and also sets aside all sorts of arguments such as those made by Ron Unz, re: “His-Panic” and all the detailed counter-arguments. Now, there’s nothing wrong with refuting the arguments of Unz, if those are wrong, but that is not a foundation for opposing (or supporting) immigration. People who are truly against “Unzism” should stop playing by the “proximate rules” and change the terms of the argument. What’s the excuse? The genetic interests concept has been discussed online for about a full decade by now. Are some afraid that “ultimate” arguments will “scare away the conservatives?” If so, that would be a good thing (see point #6, below).
4. Amnesty will be bad for the economy, it will cost trillions! This is opposed by the pro-amnesty counter-argument that an amnesty, coupled with increased (especially “highly-skilled”) legal immigration, will “enhance economic growth.”
The argument, from either side of the debate, is really, really bad — worse than the preceding three. This argument views economic growth as some sort of deified abstraction, to be worshipped regardless of other factors that impact people. Alternatively, economics are viewed from a purely hyper-individualist standpoint as to whether a given policy will increase or decrease a person’s economic net worth, disregarding all of the other costs, including group/societal costs, that will impact that person and every other person living in the nation.
That is one reason why I agree with Greg Johnson and Robert Stark that the Right needs to deconstruct the “free market capitalism is good” meme and promote race-friendly alternatives. While I’ll need to study “social credit” in more detail before I’m ready to endorse that concept, at first glance it looks a lot better than the current system, which allows Levantine billionaires to effectively control the American social, economic, and political system. The purpose of the economy should be to serve the interests of the people; unfortunately, “conservatives” instead promote the idea that people exist only to serve the economy.
To get a good handle of what’s really at stake in the immigration debate, read this. I quote:
Any consideration of the costs vs. benefits of immigration — or of a multiracial society in general — must absolutely consider the costs incurred at the most basic, most personal, and most fundamental human level. After all, humans are living, breathing organisms — “economic growth” or other issues are important only insofar as they influence real, living humans and human interests. A people do not “benefit” from “X” if “X” results in that people’s displacement and their replacement by others to an extent equivalent to mass murder.
Genetically, mass alien immigration is genocide. Similarly, a multicultural, multiracial society that manages the demographic eclipse of its majority population is also practicing genocide. These are facts which cannot be responsibly evaded.
Indeed, a people (and any individual belonging to that people, regardless of whether they acknowledge said belonging or not) will ultimately not benefit from “economic growth” if that people are replaced by another. After all, we can take the argument to its extreme. Assume that it can be 100% definitively proven that maximal economic growth in America can be achieved by replacing all White Americans with an equal number of high-IQ Chinese. Yes, sir — America will have a booming economy! However, White Americans wouldn’t be benefitting from it, would they?
Life is fundamental. As humans, we view — or should view — human life as fundamental. Ideals are proximate. They exist secondary to life. Without sentient life, there would be no ideals. If a meme (e.g., “economics are all important”) caused the extinction of the group that believed it, then the meme disappears as well.
Let us go back to the IQ question and consider the concept of “cognitive elitism” — that the most important thing is not race/group membership, but rather intelligence and skilled productivity. As we shall see the arguments made here match exactly that for the issue of economics.
The underlying basis of cognitive elitism is that varied individuals and groups differ in their intellectual abilities and these differences inevitably produce scaled outcomes. Therefore, this “ideal” has as its foundation real, live, breathing human beings. In other words, the ideal of cognitive elitism derives from human cognitive abilities, which in turn, are the products of the information encoded in our genes. Now, what are the putative benefits of cognitive elitism? Well, the supporters of this ideal tell us it would lead to better technology, medical advances, the progress of civilization, etc. — all summed up by saying that cognitive elitism will improve the quality of life for those peoples that embrace this ideal.
Very good. The quality of life. Thus, not only is the human cognitive ability to construct mental models of an ideal future the cause of the ideal of cognitive elitism, but ultimately, those who hold the ideal become the target of the effects of cognitive elitism. This ideal is produced by living humans, and its purpose is to influence living humans, but it is adaptive only if it serves the ultimate evolutionary interests of those having the ideal. Human interests are therefore fundamental and ultimate to cognitive elitism as well as being fundamental and ultimate to any other ideal, creed or meme.
This explains why it is essentially meaningless to talk about “what is good for America,” or “what is good for Americans,” From the human perspective, America is a concept, not a living organism. Thus it is not a fundamental cause of effects, nor — and this is relevant here — the principal target of effects. Americans are indeed living humans, but “American” is defined in a constitutional, not a genetic, manner. Thus, an “American” can be more similar, in a genetic sense, to a member of another nation than to a “fellow American.” If the underlying fabric of life is genetic information (and it is), then relative genetic similarity is what is fundamental and ultimate, while a constitutional definition of identity — itself the product of living people — is proximate and secondary. Therefore, what is most meaningful is to talk about how any particular thing influences genetic interests along a gene frequency-defined biological continuum: self, family, ethny, meta-ethny, humanity, etc.
Getting back to economics — if the objective of “economic growth” is to “improve the quality of life” (what other ultimate objective can it really have?), then we must say that life is paramount. Whose life? Well — “Americans.” But do all Americans have identical interests? Of course not. The widely divergent ethnies that make up the “American people” have sharply divergent interests (whether they acknowledge these interests or not). Any policy that decreases relative White demographic representation in America — with its consequent proximate effects on White sociopolitical interests even beyond the fundamental question of genetic interests — that policy, regardless of any of its other positives, is not good for White Americans. If “economic growth” depends upon White displacement (which is absurd, but for the sake of argument, assume it is so), then we just will have to make due with a smaller economy, won’t we? Existence and continuity trump economics. We are flesh-and-blood people. We are not electronic bank accounts. Our fundamental interests as people come first.
5. It’s about the culture.
Well, here we are getting close to what is really important. Culture, belonging to a particular Civilization (with a capital “C”) is extremely important, the most important proximate interest. But it cannot be separated from race. One can argue that race trumps culture (similar to the arguments about economics above). However, it is not appropriate to talk about race vs. culture in the sense of one “trumping” the other, as the two are connected. A culture is not static, it is changing and growing, based upon input from its creators. Cultures are creations of particular ethnies, and the fact that members of another ethny can copy some aspects of a culture (e.g.., East Asians and classical music) does not mean that the alien belongs to that culture, can sustain the culture, and, particularly, can create new cultural artifacts that truly belong to that Culture/Civilization. Conversely, cultural artifacts, which contribute to the environment and therefore exert selective pressures, influences race. Some speak of a Race-Culture. Regardless of naming and semantics, speaking only about culture, with no consideration of the actual ancestries of the peoples practicing that culture, is maladaptive, and reeks of the same sort of furtive “implicit Whiteness” as the other arguments here.
6. Immigration will make it harder for the GOP to win elections, and it will harm the maintenance of “conservative principles.”
All of the arguments discussed above also apply here. Political parties and political ideologies are useful only to the extent that they serve the Race-Culture. So, if the Afro-Asiatic-Latino masses can be converted to “conservative Republicanism” does that make race replacement acceptable? Once again, aracial ideals lead to maladaptive aracial behavior.
And anyway, we shouldn’t expect too much racially useful from conservatives, who are so stupid and ill-informed that it is breathtaking. For example, let’s consider the American Conservative Union (ACU), which endorses amnesty thus (emphasis added in all cases below):
The bill includes triggers to insure border security and interior security before any immigrant is given permanent legal status.
On the same day that article came out, we read that amendments which would have actually put in place provisos that the ACU thinks is in the bill were rejected:
Eleven other amendments were rejected or withdrawn, many of them Republican bids to bolster border security in ways that went far beyond the steps spelled out in the bill…
The rejected amendments included:
an amendment [by Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley] to require that the Obama administration achieve full control of illegal immigration at every part of the U.S. border before any undocumented people now in the United States could be considered for legal status.
Again, that’s what the ACU is suggesting is already in the bill. It’s not.
His majesty Senator Chuck Schumer has this to say about Grassley’s half-hearted attempt to “insure” security before legalization:
“This amendment would set a standard that would basically delay probably forever” the legalization of the 11 million.
Further, we also read:
The committee defeated a move by Cruz to delay legalizing illegal immigrants until 40,000 more border patrol agents were hired to join the 21,000 already there. Opponents said that would cost as much as $40 billion and take 10 years to achieve.
Good going, ACU!
But as we know, stupidity and cowardice are the conservative characteristics that have led them through decades of defeat after defeat. Should we care whether these bozos “lose power” because of the amnesty that they themselves are championing? I think not. The Republican Establishment and Mainstream Conservatism in fact rank high on the list of the enemies of White interests. Their constant betrayal of their White Base makes that obvious. We should never conflate racial interests with that of any political party or ideology that becomes unmoored from caring about the fundamental concerns of its supporters.
Conservatism is a joke, it is a dead end. If war is “politics by other means,” then the opposite is true as well: politics is war. And wars are ultimately won by offensive action, not by defense alone. However, the entire philosophical foundation of conservatism is defensive; it is Buckley and company shouting “STOP” at history — and then being swamped by the tides of change. Instead of trying to stop history, the Right needs to make history. I don’t expect Conservatism, Inc. to understand that, but they are not the proper audience for this essay.
Further, let’s be honest here. Whatever happens with this specific amnesty legislation, we lose either way. And it’s not only because minority births already outnumber White, although that’s an important point. If the amnesty passes, we not only have all the legalized illegals, but with no realistic enforcement (and you know there will not be), we’ll simply grow a new illegal population waiting for the next amnesty — and, at the same time, we’ll have increased “legal” non-White immigration. If the amnesty legislation is defeated, then the pro-amnesty forces will simply re-group and try again in five years or so, and they’ll keep on trying until they succeed. It’s not like anyone — including “conservatives” — are going to actually propose ridding us of the illegals. They stay either way, with amnesty now, or amnesty later.
But the immigration issue is worth delving into because it provides an “educational” opportunity to emphasize that what’s it is all about is race and genetic interests, not about legality, IQ, economics, the environment, or what have you. It’s about White vs. non-White demographics in America, and all the rest is a smokescreen obfuscating this key point. Since the illegals are not going anywhere under the current Establishment, and amnesty is more an issue of “when” and not “if,” there’s really nothing to lose by being overt and explicit. Yes, the “conservatives” will scream that we are “sabotaging their efforts” — but their pro-legal immigration efforts are not our efforts, and we need to do what we need to do regardless of whether it makes the job of the aracial anti-amnesty crowd more difficult. Again, and again, we need to hammer home that it doesn’t matter how the immigrants entered the country, or how smart they are, or what skills they have, or whether or not the GDP will increase — it’s about race. RACE. Race and genetic interests.
The immigration issue is also useful to rub the faces of the White GOP-voting lemmings into the filth of yet another Republican betrayal. What needs to be done politically from all of this will be the topic of a future essay, when this issue is, for now, resolved one way or another.
Summary: It is about Race, or the Race-Culture; it is about genetic interests, and these are things that can be, in the long run, defended only by Explicit Whiteness. If we can’t talk about racial interests as Whites, we can’t win. All these other arguments are ultimately meaningless if they don’t serve ultimate interests.
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