A piece from 2002 that shows how far we've come

Just three years ago, Lawrence Auster gave a speech to the Council for National Policy that discussed the artifacts within American culture that allowed...even fomented...its balkanizations after the 1965 Immigration Reforms. Then, the conservative audience didn't get it, even though it was a remarkable talk. Perhaps it was a bellwether moment. I'm not sure.

What I am sure of, is that Auster put everything I have thought and brainstormed over the last fifteen years and one-upped me several times over.

If you want to end this immigration folly, you'd best understand how it started. This piece should be in your quiver for future battles.

It is that important!

Immigration and multiculturalism: Why are the conservatives silent?
Lawrence Auster, View from the Right

"To believe that all peoples on earth should join our country is the very idea that God rejected at the tower of Babel. God said he did not want all men to be united in one society, because that would glorify human power. If I may presume to say so, God had a more modest idea of human life on earth. He wanted men to live in distinct societies, each speaking its own tongue, developing its own culture, and expressing God in its own way. This is the true diversity of cultures that constitutes mankind, not the false diversity that results from eliminating borders and coercively mixing everyone together, which destroys each country’s distinctive character. Consider how today’s multicultural London has lost much of its Englishness, and increasingly resembles multicultural New York.

So I would respectfully suggest that when Christians translate the spiritual idea of the unity of people under God into the political ideology that people from all cultures should be allowed to come en masse to America and other Western countries, that is not the traditional teaching of the Christian church, that is a modern liberal idea, that is the Religion of Man, which has been infused into the Christian church over the past 50 years.

But if this is the case, how can we reconcile our potential spiritual unity as human beings under God with our actual cultural differences? The answer is that in individual and private relationships, people of different backgrounds can relate to each other as individuals, without discrimination of culture and ethnicity. But on the group level, on the level of entire peoples and nations and mass migrations, cultural differences do matter very much and cannot be safely ignored."

I think that the average conservative mindset on immigration has evolved light years since this speech was given. I'm really pleased at the progress we've made.

Technorati tags: immigration, balkanization, multiculturalism