Influx of Mexican migrants crippling American culture, says Pat Buchanan
Pastor Dale Morgan
Influx of Mexican migrants crippling American culture, says Pat Buchanan*
By Harry Mount in New York
(Filed: 23/08/2006)
America is going the way of the Roman Empire and will be extinguished by
illegal immigration, Patrick Buchanan, the Right-wing firebrand, writes
in a new book.
In State of Emergency - The Third World Invasion and Conquest of
America, the provocative Mr Buchanan jabs at one of America's raw nerves
- the influx of Latin American immigrants across the Mexican border.
Patrick Buchanan
Patrick Buchanan: predicts the death of the West
Latest estimated figures put the number of illegal immigrants at 11
million, compared to 8.5 million in 2000.
The former Republican presidential adviser calls for a deportation
programme and a new Berlin Wall along America's Mexican border.
He accuses Republicans and Democrats of being so paralysed by guilt over
past racial injustice that they are unable to create an effective
immigration programme.
Mr Buchanan is on the Right of the Republican party but is still
considered a serious political figure. A presidential candidate in 1992
and 1996, he worked for Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald
Reagan.
Mr Buchanan accuses George W Bush of being the president who will lose
the south-west to Mexico.
"As Rome passed away, so the West is passing away, from the same causes
and in much the same way," Mr Buchanan writes. "What the Danube and
Rhine were to Rome, the Rio Grande and Mediterranean are to America and
Europe, the frontiers of a civilisation no longer defended. The children
born in 2006 will witness in their lifetimes the death of the West."
Mr Buchanan alleges that one in every 12 people entering illegally into
America has a criminal record. By 2050, there will be 100 million
Hispanics concentrated in America's south-west and between 10 and 20 per
cent of all Mexicans, Central Americans and Caribbean people have
already moved to the US, he says.
Mr Buchanan accuses the Mexican government of a conscious campaign to
use America as a dumping ground for its poor and unemployed.
The policy is to achieve "La Reconquista", winning back lands lost in
the Mexican-American war between 1846 and 1848.
America too has been complicit in the influx, according to Mr Buchanan,
erasing its borders in order to merge the US and Mexico into a "North
American Union".
In an interview with Time magazine, Mr Buchanan said: "I'm predicting
that America will no longer be one nation but more like the Roman Empire
- a conglomerate of races and cultures held together by a regime. The
country I grew up in was culturally united, even if it was racially divided.
"We spoke the same language, had the same faith, laughed at the same
comedians. We were one nationality.
"We're ceasing to be that when you have hundreds of thousands of people
who want to retain their own culture, their own language, their own
loyalty."
The immigration issue has become one of the most sensitive in American
politics, with immigrants taking to the streets in protest to point out
that America is a country built on immigration, and that Hispanics
provide the labour for a booming economy.
The publication of Mr Buchanan's book coincided with new census data
revealing that white people will soon be a minority in 35 of America's
50 largest cities.
Between 2000 and 2004, the white non-Hispanic population dropped below
50 per cent in Phoenix, Tucson and Denver, according to William Frey, a
demographer with the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
Mr Frey predicted that, within the next four years, whites will become a
minority in Las Vegas, Austin, Charlotte and Arlington.
Of the nation's 361 metropolitan areas, 111 registered declines in white
population from 2000 to 2004, with the largest absolute losses occurring
in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
The decline in the white population was greatest in economically
stagnant parts of the country.