On Andrea Tantaros radio show last week, conservative columnist and author Pat Buchanan warned of an unintended consequence of the immigration reform bill, a bill which doesn’t place a high priority on assimilation.
According to Tantaros, her previous guest, former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey, said that the immigration legislation funnels money to so-called community organizing groups like La Raza with the idea of teaching immigrants “American history, the Constitution and civic participation.” That leaves open the possibility of activist groups teaching with a partisan slant — and impedes assimilation.
Buchanan, author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”explained that when different cultures are encouraged to assimilate, nations are susceptible to splitting apart, pointing to recent history as proof.
“With regard to the history and the teaching of it — this is one of the problems I’ve talked about when you have a single-culture single nation, you have basically a single culture,” Buchanan said. “If you indoctrinate or teach kids different views about what their country and how it began, what you get is a growing disintegration of the country, a fragmentation into different parts. And we see this happening all over the world. In the last few decades where ethnic groups and linguistic minorities and ethnic minorities, cultural minorities, given the pressures of ethno-nationalism, [they] are breaking up countries all over the world. It’s happening all over the Middle East. It happened in the Balkans where Yugoslavia broke up into seven countries. The Soviet Union broke up into 15 countries.”
And when immigrants don’t assimilate, as could be the case with the inflow Hispanic immigrants from the impending legislation, nations break up — a possibility he laid out with the United States.
“You put 100 million Hispanic folks in the United States and, say, 70 million on the southwest border. That becomes as much as part of Mexico as it is the United States,” Buchanan continued. “If they have a different language, different culture, a different faith — basically you get two peoples. And two peoples eventually become two countries. This is what I see as the future of America — the Balkanization and the disintegration of a country which become one nation back around 1960 when all the immigrants who came from Eastern and Southern Europe, 1890-1920, had been assimilated and American-ized. We all had gone through the Depression together, heard radio together, went through World War II together and American television — that brought us all together. And now we’re coming apart.”
