Early in December of last year, while President-elect Clinton was trying to come up with a Cabinet that would “look more like America,” the U.S. Census Bureau published a report that told us what America really looks like and what it will probably look like 60 years from now. Presumably, Mr. Clinton will have departed from the White House long before the prophecies of the bureau’s professional beancounters come true, but not even the cabal of questionable millionaires, hatchet-faced fag hags, and trendy minorities selected by the new President to run the country for the next four years bears any resemblance to the rulers of the days to come or the population they will rule. Indeed, the subtext of the Census Bureau report suggests that within the lifetimes of Americans now living, the United States as its citizens have known it for the last two centuries will, for all practical purposes, cease to exist.

The report, written by demographer Jennifer Cheeseman Day, concludes that the population of the United States will grow from its present 255 million to 383 million by 2050, but the expansion of total numbers is not the most interesting finding of the report. It also concludes that by 2050, the Hispanic part of the population will have grown from its present 24 million to 81 million, that the “Asian and Pacific Islander” portion will have risen from 9 million in 1992 to 41 million, that the black population is “projected to almost double from 32 million in 1992 to 62 million,” and that “the non-Hispanic White share of the U.S. population would steadily fall from 75 percent in 1992 . . . to 53 percent in 2050.” While nonwhites and Hispanics will increase by some 120 million between 1992 and 2050, the white population will swell by a mere 11 million in that period, and by the middle of the next century whites should be on the eve of becoming a minority in the United States.

The report attributes these changes in the ethnic and racial composition of the country to differences in the birthrates of the various groups and also to immigration rates. “Currently,” it states, “about 66 percent of all births are non-Hispanic White. That percentage is expected to fall to 61 in 2000, 56 in 2010, 48 in 2030, and 42 m 2050. All other race and ethnic groups would increase their share of births.” As for immigration, “the U.S. population in the year 2000 is projected to be 9 million (3 percent) larger than it would have been if there had been no net immigration after July 1, 1991. The equivalent figures for 2010, 2030, and 2050 are 21 million (7 percent), 49 million (14 percent), and 82 million (21 percent).” By 2050, that is, the population of the country will, in the words of the New York Times reporting on the Census Bureau publication, “include 82 million people who arrived in this country after 1991 or who were born in the United States of parents who did. This group of immigrants and their children will account for 21 percent of the population.”

The Bureau’s conclusions differ from those of earlier reports it has published because this time it makes use of rather different assumptions from those it employed in the past. In earlier reports, the Bureau assumed that the total fertility rate would fall. But, “since the late 1980’s, after a relatively stable 15-year trend of low fertility, there has been a dramatic rise in total fertility levels to almost 2.1 births per woman. Secondly, convergence of fertility among race and ethnic groups is no longer assumed.”

Earlier Census Bureau reports also assumed that immigration would decline due to the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. “The last report,” the new report states, “assumed the Immigration and Reform [sic] Act of 1986 (IRCA) would partially reduce undocumented [i.e., illegal I immigration.” That, indeed, was a major purpose of the act, as its sponsors repeatedly assured us, but “in fact, there is no evidence of any reduction in the undocumented movement. In addition, the Immigration Act of 1990 allows more immigration. For these reasons, the future immigration assumptions for undocumented, legal and refugee immigrants were increased.”

The meaning of all these numbers, percentages, and quotations should be clear. By 2050, a white person born in the United States in 1990 will at 60 years old be part of a minority in the country his forefathers founded. The racial and ethnic groups to which he belongs will be dwindling in numbers and in their percentage share of the population. Moreover, since the Census Bureau report uses the Office of Management and Budget definition of “white” as “a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East,” its count of whites living in the United States now and in the future does not refer exclusively to European-descended elements of the population but also includes non-European, African, or Arabic strains that most white Americans have not historically considered to be white and with which they share little cultural kinship.

The conclusions of the Census Bureau beancounters are not entirely new. In 1982, demographers Leon Bouvier and Cary B. Davis reached similar results about the future population of the United States in a study distributed by the Center for Immigration Research and Education, but their monograph attracted little notice. A few years later, Time magazine published a cover story (April 9, 1990) which found that “by 2056, when someone born today will be 66 years old, the ‘average’ U.S. resident, as defined by Census statistics, will trace his or her descent to Africa, Asia, the Hispanic world, the Pacific Islands, Arabia—almost anywhere but white Europe.” These studies, however, were not the official word of the American megastate itself, which the Census Bureau’s new report more or less is, but when the report was published last year, even though it made the front page of the New York Times, there appeared to be little reaction from anyone, especially whites, to the news that the historic core of the population of the United States was about to experience a revolution.

The absence of shock from whites themselves at their imminent demographic demotion is perhaps not all that surprising. A population, ethnic group, culture, or race that allows itself to be taxed without consent or understanding, runs off to fight wars for causes and against countries for reasons it can’t explain, and tolerates the level of criminal lawlessness and political corruption that Americans have come to accept probably just doesn’t much care whether it even exists or not, let alone whether it remains the core group of its nation and civilization. Moreover, so permeated are our minds with the fantasy that all cultures, races, and ethnic groups are the same, that a member of one group can as easily doff his culture and put on a new one as he can strip off a T-shirt, that most Americans who were aware of the impending demographic revolution probably didn’t see why it made much difference.

Nevertheless, it does make a difference—probably more difference than any of the various political, economic, and social changes the United States has ever experienced—and those Americans who do care about their country and its civilization ought to start thinking very seriously about what they can do to stop the revolution from proceeding. As the figures of the Census Report imply, the principal cause of the demographic revolution is immigration and the differential in birthrates between nonwhite immigrants and white natives of the United States. The main thing Americans must do to preserve their civilization and the ethnic base on which it is founded is to stop immigration, especially from countries that do not share the ethnic and cultural heritage of the historic core of this nation.

Even Time had the wit to understand that what it called in its 1990 cover story “the browning of America” “will alter everything in society, from polities and education to industry, values and culture.” This, from a magazine notorious for its superficiality, betrays a good deal more common sense than the proclamation from xenophile and champion of unrestricted immigration Julian Simon only a week earlier in Forbes (April 2, 1990) that “the claim that our basic values, institutions, habits will be altered by immigrants from a different culture, and permanently altered, is pure hooey. . . . At a time when barriers are falling down everywhere, even trade barriers, the only barrier that hasn’t fallen is the barrier to immigration.” It really doesn’t require much imagination (though more than Mr. Simon can muster) to understand that the importation of massive population fragments from radically different cultures will affect the receiving culture.

Indeed, in the last few years, the role of immigration in determining culture has been the subject of major historical scholarship. The most comprehensive is probably the work of historian David Hackett Fischer in Albion’s Seed (1989), a thousand-page study of the role of four British subcultures in the formation of American civilization. Professor Fischer identifies some 24 “folkways” or “normative structure[s] of values, customs and meanings that exist in any culture.” In his view, folkways do “not rise from the unconscious even in a symbolic sense—though most people do many social things without reflecting very much about them. In the modern world a folkway is apt to be a cultural artifact—the conscious instrument of human will and purpose. Often (and increasingly today) it is also the deliberate contrivance of a cultural elite.” The folkways Fischer enumerates include normative patterns governing such settled ways of doing and thinking as habits of speech, building, sex, food, dress, sport, time, wealth, work, rank, order, power, and freedom, and no doubt he could have added others. The Puritans of East Anglia who settled New England brought with them cultural habits and beliefs that were significantly different from those imported from the south and west of England to Virginia or from North Britain and its Celtic fringe to the Appalachian hills, and those patterns of belief that immigrated to North America in the 17th and 18th centuries have persisted, often unconsciously, ever since. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Grady MeWhiney, and Forrest McDonald, among other recent major historians, have also pointed to the original British immigrants to North America as the source of enduring American cultural habits.

In The Rise of Selfishness in America, a little-noticed but major book published in 1991, jazz historian James Lincoln Collier discusses the equally important contributions to an evolving American culture made by the European immigrants of the 19th century. Unlike the British immigrants of the previous era, he argues, the Irish, German, Jewish, and Southern and East European immigrants who came to this country in the 1800’s had little attraction to the prevailing Victorian ethic that the Anglo-Saxon stock had imparted. “The immigrants, then,” he writes, “were bringing to the United States an array of habits, attitudes, and folkways that conflicted, at times dramatically, with the prevailing American patterns of thought and behavior. They were, in sum, resolutely anti-Victorian in almost every respect. They did not believe in discipline, punctuality, sobriety—the order and decency of the Victorian ethic.” The result, in Collier’s view, was that the new immigrants imparted to America their own cultural habits centered around “expressiveness” through their predominance in the new industries of popular culture—sports, movies, music, theater, journalism, mass entertainment, and mass vices as offered by organized crime under the control of new immigrant godfathers.

The conclusions of such scholarship as that of Fischer, Wyatt-Brown, McWhiney, McDonald, and Collier are perfectly consistent with common sense—that people carry their cultures in their heads and their hearts and do not leave them behind when they move. Immigration, therefore, affects culture, importing new habits and patterns of thought and behavior that often conflict with the old habits of the culture that receives immigrants, and the history of the political and social conflicts of European and American history can be told in terms of such struggles between clusters of customs and those who bear them. Moreover, cultural habits are not randomly distributed; they tend to follow ethnic and even racial lines, since most people acquire their cultural habits from their natural parents and families, if not from even more fundamental biological forces.

The demographic revolution that the Census Bureau predicts can therefore be expected to exert profound changes on American culture as it has flourished in our national history and as it exists now. The loss of political power by what the Census Bureau calls “non-Hispanic Whites” as they dwindle from a majority to a minority is only the most apparent such change, and it is hardly unreasonable to expect that what will follow from this transfer of power will be the outright dispossession and political and legal persecution of the white minority by a nonwhite and non-Western majority that has little experience in constitutional government, little respect for the rights of minorities and oppositional groups, and little love for whites or the West. Indeed, we already see the beginnings of that dispossession in affirmative action programs, hate crime laws, multiculturalist curricula, the vituperation of whites, and the proliferation of racially motivated atrocities against them.

Earlier this year the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain conducted a computer study of changes in the American work force based on data drawn from the 1990 Census. It found, as the Economist (Jan. 9, 1993) reported, that “white men may soon be a minority of America’s bosses. They are already a minority of the workforce. As recently as 1960, they held two-thirds of all jobs. Now they hold 45 percent.” While the percentages of white males in American managerial positions have declined in the last decade, those of women, blacks, and Hispanics have risen in the same period. In March, the Wall Street Journal reported that American corporations, ever indifferent to the health and survival of the culture, country, and people that enable them to function, are intent on hiring foreign professionals over their American counterparts. “Foreign professionals are becoming more attractive just as demand for some U.S. professionals, notably scientists and engineers, is at its lowest in at least a decade,” the Journal reported. “The number of electrical engineers employed in the U.S. . . . has fallen by one-fifth since its peak three years ago.” Nearly every white male I know who has sought a professional position in the last few years has tales of blatant racial or sexual discrimination against him; in one case, a black employment official simply laughed at the applicant.

Yet while the demotion and dispossession of the groups that created, ruled, and sustained American civilization may effectively decapitate the civilization, the importation of non-Western habits of thought and behavior will very likely simply kill it outright. Not only the absence of a “folkway” of constitutional government but also the lack of a scientific and empirical tradition in non-Western societies, different concepts of work and time, and different religious and ethical systems may well perpetuate within our borders the political repression, violence, superstitions, and apparent laziness of non-Western cultures. Farts of Florida, Texas, and southern California have already ceased to belong to the West in any but the administrative sense that they continue to pay taxes to Washington, and the same cultural meiosis is apparent in many major cities in other parts of the nation. Indeed, the very term “nation,” derived from the Latin word for being born, will become meaningless when as much as 21 percent of the population is not born within the country’s own borders.

Even as the Census Bureau published what may be the first lines of the epitaph of the American nation and its civilization last December, President Bush was plotting one last war in Somalia before he slipped into the twilight of history. The United States government, as George F. Kennan notes in his recent memoir, “while not loath to putting half a million armed troops into the Middle East to expel the armed Iraqis from Kuwait, confesses itself unable to defend its own southwestern border from illegal immigration by large numbers of people armed with nothing more formidable than a strong desire to get across it.” Mr. Bush’s last war and Mr. Kennan’s latest reflections point to the central irony of the American imperium’s last days, that the willingness of the American megastate to kill some 250,000 Iraqis who had never harmed or threatened the United States in any way is regarded as the ultimate confirmation of the omnipotence of a superpower that has ended history and can now do whatever it wants, while the same power cannot imagine any good reason to protect its own borders from invasion. The megastate and its masters can play with bombs in Baghdad and Bosnia all they want, save as many Somalians as can be rounded up, and count as many beans as they can find, but those enterprises will not preserve a civilization or a nation whose founding demographic core is facing a slow extinction and whose leaders have forgotten what civilization means and have come to regard their own nation as a barrier to be broken down and discarded.