NewsNation/YouTubeTucker Carlrson While touting the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 on the Senate floor, the late Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) pushed a number of selling points. Among other things, he said that
- our cities would “not be flooded with a million immigrants annually”;
- “the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset”; and
- the bill would “not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area.”
Interestingly, it’s not just that these predictions were wrong.
It’s that they turned out to be the precise opposite of the truth.
What’s more, foreign-born people in the United States now number 53.3 million and are 15.8 percent of our population. Both figures are new record highs.
And, of course, there’s a reason automated telephone services now render the message, “Press 1 for English.” It’s called balkanization.
Yet while we do hear much talk about ending illegal migration, there’s almost none about ending the main cause of the balkanization: legal immigration.
Aiming to change this, however, is commentator Tucker Carlson. As he unabashedly put it in a recent interview, “We need to shut down all immigration right now…. Cap it right now and then just have a cooling-off period, 30 or 40 years.”
Immigration: A Passé Status Quo
Carlson made his comments Monday to fellow pundit Chris Cuomo on the latter’s eponymous NewsNation show. Laying out his thesis, Carlson said:
We have too much immigration, and we’ve made the country totally different. …We need to shut down all immigration right now, until we can retain or regain equilibrium and figure out what it is that holds us all together as a nation. It’s too chaotic; it’s too crazy right now. No more people, period — none. Cap it right now and then just [have a] cooling-off period, 30 or 40 years.
Cuomo then tried dismissing the issue as something that has been ginned up by President Donald Trump. (In reality, I and many others have been warning about our immigration regime’s perils for decades.) Carlson responded by saying that immigration is, in fact, “the biggest problem we have.” He then elaborated:
Because it creates chaos and disunity. If you have a continental-sized country like we do, the main question you have, always, every day — you’re thinking about it all day long — [is] how do we hold together? How do 50 states not become 50 countries?
… So we need a period where we can think through what it is to be an American, what unites us. Immigration makes it impossible because it’s too much … things change too fast. Who are these people?
… We’ve never had immigration like this as a portion of the population. … And by the way, it’s happening at exactly the time when technology is certain to overturn our economy and employment structure. Like, AI [artificial intelligence] is going to change everything. It’s too much change at once.
In other words, AI and robotics are poised to displace massive numbers of workers in the coming decades. So the argument that “we need workers” may be outdated.
One Billion Americans?
Cuomo, of course, interjected at times during the conversation and defended the immigrationist status quo. He said, for example, that immigration is “how we’ve populated the country.” To this Carlson replied, “not at this scale,” which is true.
In fairness, though, Cuomo is also correct: That is how we populated the country. And guess what?
The country is populated.
That job is done.
America is no longer a wide open land of forest and prairies. Our population is no longer 10 million. It isn’t even the 148.3 million of 1950 or 223.1 million of 1980. It’s now 343.6 million — up from just 338.3 million in 2021. And with our fertility rate (1.787) below replacement level, our population is only growing because of immigration.
Now, people such as commentator Glenn Beck believe immigration should continue until we have one billion Americans. They claim this is necessary to compete globally (as if AI and robotics aren’t a reality). Is this a good idea? Do we want this?
We really don’t know because, though this should be a major issue, we virtually never talk about it. But this could and should be a national discussion:
At what point to we cap our population by ending immigration? When our number is 500 million? Seven-hundred million? One billion?
More Inundation Than Assimilation
Carlson also warned, in so many words, that our rate of immigration long ago exceeded our rate of assimilation. As he put it to Cuomo, “Go to Portland, Maine — it doesn’t look anything like the Portland, Maine, you remember. There’s no evidence people are assimilating at all.”
This is again that deadly balkanization. There are multiple reasons for it, too, ranging from multiculturalism’s influence to our decadent popular culture’s lack of appeal to ethnic and religious chauvinism among newcomers. But then there’s this: We’ve just had too many immigrants coming in too fast — and too monolithically.
University of Edinburgh Professor Stephen Tierney explained this threat very well in his 2008 book Multiculturalism and the Canadian Constitution. He wrote:
In a situation in which immigrants are divided into many different groups originating in distant countries, there is no feasible prospect of any particular immigrant group’s challenging the hegemony of the national language and institutions. These groups may form an alliance among themselves to fight for better treatment and accommodations, but such an alliance can only be developed within the language and institutions of the host society and, hence, is integrative. In situations in which a single dominant immigrant group originates in a neighbouring country, the dynamics may be very different. The Arabs in Spain, and Mexicans in the United States, do not need allies among other immigrant groups. One could imagine claims for Arabic or Spanish to be declared a second official language, at least in regions where they are concentrated, and these immigrants could seek support from their neighbouring home country for such claims — in effect, establishing a kind of transnational extension of their original homeland in their new neighbouring country of residence.
Not Just Theory
So it has come to pass, too, in these United (for the moment) States. Historically, our immigrants could not obtain services in their native languages. They could not “press 2” for German, Italian, Swedish, Chinese, or Norwegian. And that we now have to “press 1 for English” says it all.
So how should we proceed? Well, if we could completely reinvent our immigration system in 1965 based on lies, can we not at least consider reinventing it today based on truth?
For those interested, Carlson’s interview segment is below.
