“Truths would you teach, or save a sinking land?
All fear, none aid you, and few understand.“

        —Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man”

Although the raw figures from Census 2000 have been in the public domain for months already, the American public’s response to the latest decennial survey is still not clear. For politicians, the census has been a wakeup call, alerting them to the 13 million new or potential voters pumped, sucked, or snuck into the American polity since 1990. For plain American citizens, it is a fire-bell in the night, warning them that, for the past 20 or 30 years, their country has been the object of a foreign invasion, and they are now in danger of losing it entirely. The response of the political class to the demographic crisis, since President Bush floated his Mexican amnesty proposal last summer, has been plain for all to see. The response of the public at large, on the other hand, is anything but plain—one reason among many why the direction and ultimate fate of what Jesse Jackson thinks of as the Old America is hard to foretell.

One of the most dramatic moments in one of the most prophetic events in history occurred within minutes after the Titanic collided with an iceberg off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. Summoned to the bridge by Captain Edward Smith, Mr. Thomas Andrews, managing director of Harland & Wolff, the ship’s builder, heard crewmen’s reports on the extent of the flooding below decks as he pored over a blueprint of the liner. Then, with impeccable British composure, he explained to the captain and bridge officers why the unsinkable Titanic had an hour and a half to live. Titanic‘s architects had designed the ship to float with two of her watertight compartments flooded. Now, it appeared that the damage below waterline extended at least to the third compartment, whose bulkhead rose only ten feet above the waterline. The laws of mathematics and of physics, Andrews explained, were inescapable. Water flooding the two forward compartments must draw the ship down by the bow, causing water from the second compartment to overflow into the third, from the third into the fourth, and so on throughout the length of the length of the 888-foot hull. The point of no return had already been passed; the Titanic was inexorably doomed.

The question posed by the census is, has Third World immigration flooded the United States as far as the third compartment already? The issue is usually reformulated in terms of the future of the Republican Party in a country that truly has become a nation of immigrants, where George W. Bush stands to be the last Republican president elected before a Thousand-Year Democratic Reich takes hold, maintained in power first by a plurality and, eventually, a majority of nonwhite voters. For now, a consensus seems to have developed based on the demographic and cephalogical assessment by Steve Sailer (of UPI and VDare.com), who suggests that, while the burgeoning Hispanic population is certain to have a major political impact at some future time, that time has not yet arrived. If Sailer is correct, the United States still has the opportunity to save itself by declaring a moratorium on immigration or by writing immigration laws far more restrictive than the suicidal ones it presently finds no incentive to enforce.

Of course, the extinction of an already self-castrated, self-lobotomized, and self-disemboweled GOP is by no means the worst imaginable disaster to befall the country in the minds of skeptics and dissenters from the globalist orthodoxy who wonder whether the characteristically Western enthusiasm for other races, cultures, and civilizations is reciprocated by the immigrant peoples who represent them in the United States. President Hillary Rodham Clinton, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, House Majority-Leader Henry Waxman, and U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Chuck Sehumer do not represent the outer limit of possible consequences in store for the United States as a direct result of policy based on the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which opened the country to massive immigration from the Third World.

Ragged prophets, shunned and stoned by respectable people, have been warning at least since the 1980’s that demographics resulting from a million prolific Third World immigrants arriving annually must eventually create a voting bloc soon to become unignorable and, in time, irresistible. Twenty years later, we have reached the first stage, as the George Bush- Vicente Fox master plan for the United States demonstrates; how long it will take us to arrive at the second, as the dynamics of fertility and chain migration speed population growth, no one can say. Already, though, it may be later than we think.

With the American electorate divided more or less evenly between two opposed ideological camps, the immigrant vote becomes the swing vote or tiebreaker, assuming an importance greatly in excess of immigrants’ cultural influence and numbers but crucial all the same to the election strategies of both mainstream parties. Also, because the immigrant vote is overwhelmingly nonwhite, a social imperative exists for Republicans as well as Democrats to “reach out” to it, rather than to adopt the unthinkable alternative strategy of creating an overriding majority by frankly soliciting the European-American vote, which could successfully be rallied to shut down immigration. Whether or not President Bush’s amnesty-regularization-nuevo bracero plans are realized, the Republicans are likely to contest mightily with the Democrats for Hispanic support—support that, for the GOP, is not at this point worth pursuing but whose inutility they are unlikely to discover until they have flooded the country with millions more Mexican voters, all of whom will promptly become registered Democrats.

Once three to eleven million Mexican illegals have been amnestied and millions of guest workers allowed into the country, with several more million arriving as relatives of the amnestied population and millions more coming in illegally, Mexican-Americans will rapidly become America’s largest ethnic majority—an irresistible political force to be placated, solicited, and demagogued.

Mexican immigrants to this country, like the Mexican population as a whole, are mostly urban individuals. Though Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castenada has dubbed them the “new American pioneers,” pioneering skills are, in fact, what they conspicuously lack. (What pioneer worth his salt cannot haul his bones to safety across 20 or 30 miles of desert from which the feared Apache have long since been removed?) Today’s immigrants arrive in expectation of the security afforded by the welfare state, not the hardship and danger of the frontier. Polls show that, while Mexicans in the United States like President Bush, they have no use at all for the Republican Party. This lack of affinity has little if anything to do with past Republican support for immigration control, and everything to do with the Mexican perception that the GOP opposes big government and the welfare state. “We aren’t against big government, we’re for it,” a Mexican-American politician in Los Angeles told a reporter last summer. “We see things we want that only government can give us.” Obviously, if the Hispanic presence in America swells only a little more, the GOP is going to need to bend itself to the Democratic program even faster and more shamelessly than it does now.

The Clintonization of the Democratic Party seems to have wakened the Republicans to the dangerous nature of modern American polities and to fundamental differences that divide their constituency from the Democratic one. But following the naturalization of several million Mexicans and the subsequent arrival of millions more, the Republicans will find it impossible effectively to confront the anti-Western and supranational-socialistic Democratic agenda by aggressively defining themselves in opposition to America’s tacitly acknowledged premier political party while, at the same time, pursuing the Mexamerican voting bloc whose support they will require to avoid filling into permanent minority status. This is because, when it comes to race, no one can out-demagogue the Democrats. Immethately following the leaked news that Bush was considering amnestying Mexican illegals, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle grabbed the microphone to accuse the President of being discriminatory and to demand that all illegal immigrants—Mexican, Haitian, Afghani, Chinese, Eskimo, Venusian, and extragalactic—be accepted as candidates for citizenship. Of course, the senator from South Dakota had greater logic—if less sense—on his side than President Bush did. By the logic of liberalism and of the age, the right thing to do is amnesty everyone already in the United States. Indeed, doing the right thing means accepting everyone who wants to come here, so long as we do not have to send an airplane to pick him up. If Bush’s amnesty makes it through Congress, it is nearly certain to be followed by a Great Opening-Up to immigrants from everywhere that, by comparison, will make the Immigration Decade of the 1990’s look like the Time of the Heavy International Tourist Visitation.

As Samuel Francis has noted, “racism” now means opposing anything that people of color want, and people of color want, more than anything else, to come to the United States and to bring as many of their own kind as possible with them. The primary attraction is economic, not political; immigrants do not come to America because they admire Americans or British-American political institutions, but because they envious our wealth and (for civilized people) the least attractive aspects of our way of life. Most do not seem to mean us particularly well, while some are cocky, aggressive, and even threatening. (The media do not cover ugly Mexican nationalist demonstrations in Southern California and elsewhere.) Yet, no one dares speak out against immigrants or immigration, because to do so is considered racist by the elite class that sets the standards of acceptable public discourse in America.

The restraints those p.c. standards impose make the impact of Census 2000 on the American public hard to assess. Signs of restiveness and unease appear here and there, particularly among the environmentally minded. Environmental groups, however, conscious of their own liberal standing and also of the fat corporate contributions they have come to expect and depend on, keep quiet. Americans, contrary to the national mythology, have been timid about voicing unfashionable opinions since the end of the Civil War; recently, political correctness—reinforced by poor education, intellectual sloth, religious unbelief and material surfeit—has greatly increased their reluctance to dissent from whatever point of view represents the official consensus. Illegal invaders could be rounded up by the police and thrown out of the country, but such “conservatives” as Michael Medved consider this solution “fascitic,” and there is certainly no possibility of Congress adopting it. Ron Unz, celebrating the end of white America in Commentary a couple of years ago, rejoiced that America will certainly become a multicultural entity, barring a resurgence of nativist resistance-in which case, Unz admitted, all bets on the American future are off.

Though signs of resistance have yet to occur, reaction seems inevitable in the long run. Almost as inevitably, the long run will be too late, beyond the point where regaining control of national political institutions and reinstating the old American culture is possible. And, as the European-American remnant asserts itself at last, the shock and indignation this provokes will heighten self-awareness among the former minorities and further promote the Balkanization of the nation. Once the southwestern states are loaded with Mexican immigrants and their descendants—enjoying dual citizenship in the United States and Mexico—the possibility for the return of these territories to Mexico by simple majority vote will be very real.

Even before the reconquista is a political fact, however, Mexicans may have ceased to be the dominant minority or plurality in the United States. Douglas S. Massey professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, predicts that the latent potential for immigration is greatest not in Latin America but in Asia,

where the forces that initiate and sustain international immigration have only begun to operate. The potential for Chinese immigration alone is enormous. Even a small rate of immigration, when applied to a population of more than a billion people, can be expected to produce a flow of immigrants dwarfing that now observed from Mexico.

While Chinese immigrants en masse would likely be more intelligent, better educated, and more skilled than the mestizo proletariat that supplies the lion’s share of emigration from Mexico, the Chinese, unlike the Mexicans, have not been our neighbors for several centuries, nor is their history entwined with our own. We might, however, expect from them cohesion, aggression, and ruthlessness in a degree likely to produce conflict with the former majoritarian population and also with former minorities, the Jews especially-America’s hitherto most successful minority, whose claim to victimhood is unlikely to receive sympathy from an Asian immigrant population with no compelling reason to assume a burden of guilt for two millennia of Jewish suffering.

Epochal forces, such as the new immigration to the United States and mass migration internationally, generate a momentum of their own that may be resisted only by a highly organized and resolute counterforce. In the case of the United States, no such force appears to be gathering. Caged in a fantasy world inspired by commercialized ideology and ideologized capitalism, corrupted by unprecedented affluence-the effect of which is to diffuse further a cultural tradition already undercut and attenuated by the Old Immigration during the past century-and-a-half—Americans today live in a state of moral paralysis that inhibits all the natural defense mechanisms and the instinct for survival. And so, as Paul Craig Roberts predicts, the fate of the United States probably is to become another Third World country, round about the middle of the 21st century.

Third World status implies that the United States will be other things as well. First, the consumer-socialist nature of modern America, long past the quickening stage, will be (barring an overwhelming influx of poverty-stricken peasants that swamps the economic structure) enhanced; the fatal fusion of political ideology and commercialism ensures this. Second, America will not enjoy a democratic polity as the term is now understood, the Constitution being amended—or replaced, or may be simply ignored—to accommodate the Third World genius for chaotic tyranny or tyrannical chaos and the difficulties inherent in governing a vast, polyglot, and crowded people. (The Second Amendment will be one of the first of our British-American inheritances to be dispensed with. Strangely, given their history of political oppression, Mexicans in America appear to favor gun “control.”) Third, “we” will no longer remain, even in semblance, a Christian country (Mexican immigrants are flocking in droves to Pentecostalism, a first step on the road to Scientism, nor are we likely to have any definable religious identity. Similarly, as the First Universal Nation, America will lack a common culture; in fact, it will probably not have any culture at all, aside from the ersatz one already in place. Fourth, America will be even more overwhelmingly an urban nation than it is today, the population—swelled by the superslums of the Third World—having grown prodigiously, suburban sprawl increased in proportion, and agricultural land being at a premium to reflect the burden of feeding not only ourselves but the billions of potential immigrants left at home. Finally, the country will have become an environmental mess, owing not just to overcrowding and the vastly increased pressure on natural resources (including groundwater) and open space, but the systematic repeal of environmental legislation passed in the late 20th century. (The indifference and contempt—even outright hostility—non-Western peoples feel for the natural world is no secret to anyone, except Big Environmentalism.)

Left unconsidered in this scenario is the possibility of a wild card. Barring any unforeseen catastrophic event, the future we face could quite plausibly be as I’ve outlined it here, the only consolation (if it is consolation) being that the United States would not suffer misery alone in a world worse off still than ourselves as demographics, limited warfare, terrorism, social confusion and decay, economic hypertension, epidemic, famine, and environmental disaster bring the end of history to a shuddering halt.

Unlike the Titanic, which plunged 12,500 feet to an honorable grave on the ocean bottom when flooding in the third compartment finally reached the 16th, something called the United States is likely to remain afloat—transformed from a powerful, graceful, and efficient luxury liner into a ghost ship, a down-at-the-bow Third World ghetto drifting on a Sargasso Sea, crammed and stinking, commanded by vicious thugs, each of whom has his own lifeboat picked out in case of the ultimate disaster: the realization in American terms of novelist Jean Raspail’s prophetic vision more than a quarter-century ago.

(The Titanic, by the way, though British-built and manned by British tars, was American-owned, the White Star Line being controlled by the International Mercantile Marine, a Morgan trust and about as British a firm, as Walter Lord pointed out, as U.S. Steel.)