US immigration history is hilarious. And also more than a bit tragic. New groups arrive. A new set of yahoos comes out of the woodwork, spouting the same hogwash as similar defenders of “Real America”, decades or even centuries before. Rinse, Repeat. Today’s video on Columbus Day peels those layers back a bit. 100 years ago, US bigots weren’t worried about Muslims or Mexicans, it was the Italians, and to a lesser extent the Slavs and the Jews. If you look back at this earlier era of bigotry, the arguments are almost exactly the same. The fear of change, “being swamped by multitudes” and having our culture changed never fades away. It’s never been justified either.
We’re in a weird panic transition moment in the United States today. Both of the great “threats” hyped by our modern morons, “Islamic Terrorism”, and the “Mexican Invasion” are fading away. As I predicted years ago, lower oil prices mean that there is less Gulf money for extremism. Also, Muslim countries outside of the gulf are getting rich enough to liberate themselves from the Saudi-CIA corruption of their versions of Islam. As I have also talked about at great length, migration from Mexico is basically done, and the few tens of thousands coming from Central America will never amount to the same sorts of numbers. Affirmative Action may keep the idea of a distinct Latin identity a little stronger than Italian-American distinctiveness, but in practical terms, the distinct group of Mexican migrants is already assimilating away.
The entrepreneurs that profit off of these old bigotries are still profiting, from YouTube to the White House. These panics are always strongest after the phenomena in question have passed, but savvier operators can already see them fading away. The Pentagon has now abandoned “terrorism” as a threat and they are now trying to push “great power rivalry” though that doesn’t really exist yet either. Forward Thinkers!
I don’t know who the next group to be panicked about will be. My hunch is that it will probably be Africans, as that continent is the only one that will be offering surplus population in the decades to come. Perhaps it will be Chinese or Indians, as the rising wealth of those countries, or perhaps a crisis in one of them leads to more migrants. We can be sure, however that there will be a new group for morons to panic about. This is profoundly sad of course, but it’s also a bit reassuring. We’ve seen these waves of bigotry before, and they’ve receded before. There is nothing new under the sun.
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Video Transcript after the jump…