Donald Trump’s pledge to deport millions of illegal aliens has been dismissed as unrealistic, but to his core supporters, this position is not up for negotiation. The MAGA base has experienced and is reacting to the most dramatic demographic shift of modern times. In the mid-20^th century, as the Baby Boomers were coming of age, America was still a country inhabited by people of predominantly European extraction—where most practiced some form of Christianity, and social cohesion, outside of troubled communities undergoing court-ordered racial integration, was high. Today, whites are approaching minority status in America for the first time, and they are marginalized in every conceivable way, culturally, socially, and politically.

Many harbor regrets about this unbidden transformation and what it portends for them and their descendants. The ceaseless haranguing of ungrateful anti-American newcomers and their political pressure groups does little to allay the anxiety of so-called “nativists,” who share, despite differences of national origin, a common interest with besieged Europeans in stopping an influx of barbarous peoples, like the Pakistani men responsible for the horrific rape gangs in the formerly great Great Britain.

Mass immigration in America has produced a less dramatic clash of civilizations than in the UK. The MAGA movement, the principal vehicle for anti-immigration politics in this country, is now a multi-racial coalition with some of the cultural reminders of the ghetto. You can buy pro-Trump paraphernalia that depict the Donald in the guise of a gangster rapper. A sanguine view of this, perhaps ironic, development might take MAGA’s expansion as a triumph of civic nationalism or proof that the paleoconservative thesis about American identity has been repudiated.

Still, tensions remain in MAGA-land. The recent debate on the right over skilled, legal immigration from India illustrates the point. Those who want to limit the H-1B guest worker program have been dismissed as lazy, dumb, provincials who can’t compete with the “best and brightest” the rest of the world has to offer, or even as “woke” right-wing socialists clamoring for a form of affirmative action for whites.

The suggestion that there is a concept of “DEI for whites” is almost fantastical. The only countries that consistently fail to provide even modest preference for their indigenous inhabitants are in Western Europe and its former colonies.

This has certainly been the case in America, where the foreign-born population, after four years of Joe Biden’s open border, stands at an all-time high, anti-white policies have already made it illegal to recruit the “best and brightest” who were born here, and mass immigration makes it unprofitable to do the same. Third World immigrants are reaping the benefits, encouraged to retain their ethnic attachments, and generally behave in as rude and brutish a manner as they wish towards their hosts.

While immigration advocates hold out legal immigration as an almost magical, virtuous, disciplined cousin of illegal immigration, the reality is much less romantic. A large influx of people is seldom orderly. The Anglo-Saxons who founded America could not do so without replacing the “merciless Indian savages” they found there. Somebody is always going to get shoved aside, and that’s as true today as it has been in every time and place.

The core Trump base does not care if their displacement comes with the government’s explicit permission, or if it is through the government’s failure to enforce the laws. The result will be the same, and it is distasteful either way.

History is on their side, as it happens. The Immigration Nationality Act of 1965 quietly opened our borders, by an act of Congress, to a flood that literally remade the face of the nation. Americans living then never truly consented to this process, which President Lyndon Johnson sold as a limited reform. But now that the change is complete, those on the losing end are told that America will cease to be America unless they accept millions more newcomers every year from the global south. Third World chauvinists would have us believe that America was never great before the civil rights era, when America began to embrace its true destiny as a multi-racial “nation of immigrants.”

The shaming of the West has worked so well, that even critics of mass immigration downplay its effects. The Indian provenance of the vast majority of H-1B holders certainly is significant, however many critics of the program may wish to focus on the economic side, which even socialist Bernie Sanders has taken up. It is by no means obvious that the distinct culture and character of America is sustainable in a majority-minority future, and it is not “woke” to face this reality. What is revolutionary is the peculiar idea that the West can survive, indeed can only do so, by replacing itself with the rest of the world.

Notwithstanding the tensions within it, President Trump’s MAGA movement is filling a deep void. The desire for a political homeland is the most natural thing in the world, and it will not be repressed forever.