Bill Clinton once said that he looked forward to the day when whites were a minority in America.  While he won't live to see such a time, a demographic milestone that should send a tingle up Slick Willie's leg was just reached.  Writes The New York Times:

After years of speculation, estimates and projections, the Census Bureau has made it official: White births are no longer a majority in the United States.

Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 percent of all births in the 12-month period that ended last July, according to Census Bureau data made public on Thursday, while minorities - including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race - reached 50.4 percent, representing a majority for the first time in the country's history.

Obviously, a big reason for this demographic shift is migration -- and mainly the legal variety.  As a result of Ted Kennedy's Immigration Reform Act of 1965, the level of yearly immigration increased from approximately 250,000 prior to '65 to about 1,000,000 afterwards.  And its nature has changed also: 85 percent of our new arrivals hail from the third world and Asia.  This radical departure from America's traditional immigration patterns has created a demographic transformation possibly unprecedented in world history -- except for cases of actual invasion.

If one blindly accepts the unproven assertion, "Our strength lies in our diversity," one may join Clinton, Chris Matthews, and other languid-minded leftists in a leg-tingling love-fest.  But the reality is that diversity isn't a strength to be applauded -- it's an obstacle to be overcome.  To understand this, you only have to study history and consider the fate of the former Yugoslavia: the Balkans are balkanized because of diversity.  And now the United States is being balkanized, too.

Another problem is that "diversity" is a vague term; there are many kinds of diversity.  Not too many people care if you dine on Thai cuisine as opposed to Italian -- or hamburgers, hot dogs, and French fries.  People won't take to the streets because you play cricket or curling instead of baseball.  But when deeply held beliefs concerning all-important issues divide citizens, it's a different matter.

As for what's helping diversify us into division, immigration, it is a vaguely understood institution.  And when people accept something because it's fashionable, not really knowing what they're getting, disaster can result.

We're always wary of dangerous imports, such as contaminated goods from China or substandard medical devices from overseas.  It also requires vigilance when non-indigenous life forms are introduced into an ecosystem.  Some, such as the horse or soybean, blend in seamlessly and can be beneficial; others, such as pythons in the Everglades or the Brown Tree Snake in Guam, can disrupt an ecosystem and decimate native species.

This is why the answer to the question "Do you support immigration?" should be "not enough data."  Since people do get the government they deserve, it matters very much what species of immigration it is.  How high are the immigrants' numbers?  What is their cultural nature?  How compatible are they with our cultural ecosystem?  Will they blend into it or supplant native cultural elements?  Of course, some will say that the latter is fine, that change is good.  And, actually, they could possibly be right -- except that "change" is another vague term.  If those cultural elements are superior, then, by all means, embrace them; if they're not, avoid them like the plague -- which, incidentally, came to Europe from Asia.  Those who trumpet immigration, diversity, and change are the last ones to judge such matters, however, because they tend to be cultural relativists whose moral foundation is even vaguer than the slogans they disgorge. 

What they do know, though, is how to import leftist voters.  When I crunched the numbers a few years back, I found that the groups represented by that 85-percent third-world/Asian immigration block vote Democrat approximately 79 percent of the time.  Is this a surprise?  People don't come here as blank slates; they bring their religion and ideology with them, and these things don't magically change upon contact with American terra firma.  And remember that most new immigrants hail from Mexico and Central and South America (50 percent from Mexico alone), where socialism is the norm.  Sure, sometimes they may elect one of their "conservatives," but "conservative" and "liberal" are relative terms.  A conservative south of the border -- or in Europe, for that matter -- is much like our liberals.  Their whole political spectrum is to the "left" of ours, and the more voting-booth levers they pull here, the more our spectrum will be pulled left, too.

The lesson is simple: people make the culture -- not the other way around -- and then the culture makes the government.  If you imported enough Mexicans or Muslims to America, you'd no longer have Western civilization.  You'd have Mexico Norte or Iran West.

Many will say in response to this that assimilation is the answer.  Ah, it's a nice dream.  How can we expect people to assimilate when there is neither sufficient pressure from natives nor sufficient will from newcomers to do so?  How can we expect it when, according to a Zogby poll, 58 percent of Mexicans believe that California and the Southwest rightfully belong to Mexico?  How can we expect it from Muslims who believe that Western culture must be subordinated to sharia? 

Moreover, asking for assimilation becomes less logical all the time.  After all, how is it a meaningful statement to say, "All people have to do is become American" when there's no agreement on what it means to be American anymore?  Depending on whom you listen to, you can be an American and be a socialist, free-market adherent, devout Christian, witch, pro-abortion or pro-life activist, existentialist, realist, hippie, yuppie, black or white supremacist, La Raza separatist, prude, libertine, traditionalist, multiculturalist, patriarchy proponent, feminist, deist, atheist, humanist, or Satanist.  You can have any ideology, philosophy, faith, culture, or "lifestyle" you want.  It's "whatever works for you," and that itself is now to be considered a quintessentially American sentiment (unless it works for you to consider it something else).  Well, guess what?  What works for many is to not assimilate into they know not what.  And that is the issue: there's no clearly identifiable, dominant, appealing culture to assimilate into, anyway.

The problem here is the same as it is with the "undefining" of marriage: if something can mean anything, it essentially means nothing.  "Cat" refers to a specific creature, but if "cat" could mean fish, aardvark, meadowlark, chair, cookie, ice cube, or whatever works for you, it would lose meaning; it could mean anything and would just be "something."  And so it is with a nation.  People have no reason to assimilate into just "something"; they already have something -- something they already know.

The Western man has forgotten that a nation is essentially an extension of the tribe.  The only other option is to have many tribes living within the same borders, which historically hasn't begotten tranquility.  Just think of the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda -- and then consider that there was probably less dividing them culturally than there is dividing the motley "us."

This is why, unlike most, I don't expect America to ever become majority non-white.

Our republic won't last that long.

In the meantime, the band will play on, as we repeat all the vague feel-doubleplusgood mantras.  Hey, folks, remember, immigration is the lifeblood of America.  Well, maybe so.  But then it's important to accept a crucial fact about transfusions: if the blood type is incompatible, the body dies.

America is on life support, and she does certainly need some kind of transfusion.  But in a world dominated by socialism and kleptocracy, I don't know where one goes to find large amounts of freedom-flowing blood.  I think we had better shut our borders and stop looking overseas, open our minds, and start casting our eyes heavenward.

Contact Selwyn Duke