If immigration completely transforms America, where can Americans go to preserve our national identity? Nowhere. This land is our one chance.

There is nowhere else to turn for Americans who want limited government, truly free speech, the norm of personal responsibility, and Judeo-Christian Enlightenment culture. Americans don't have the option of moving to another nation and replacing that nation's culture with our own.

The countries within Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia proudly preserve their national cultures. Plus, their immigrants come here and change American culture, and attempt to do the same to Europe. The immigrant is entitled to do so under the bipartisan doctrine of multiculturalism. The total lack of reciprocity is noteworthy; this imbalance is unsustainable. If America maintains multicultural dogma while non-Western nations remain culturally intact, the eventual outcome will be an inhospitable America. Where will the traditional American refugees go, in the “world community”?

Today’s immigrants enter an increasingly secular, multicultural society where assimilation is decimated, where minority group membership carries tangible benefits from the state, and racial resentment is taught with messianic zeal (see “Critical Race Theory”). In response, obtuse politicians like Lindsey Graham find it persuasive to quote the obsolete poem on the Statue of Liberty, as if a sonnet is going to turn statists into libertarians, resolve ethnic grievances, or maintain social cohesion as the foreign-born population approaches an unprecedented share of the overall U.S. population.

There is no place else for us to go and escape the welfare state, tyrannical speech codes, and the plagues of victimhood and relativism. Americans cannot migrate to any other nation and transplant our culture. Neither Mexico nor Canada is the New World. Besides, few Americans could afford to uproot themselves and their families. Cost is an even greater barrier to far-away places like New Zealand. Even for those willing to emigrate, other countries generally have their own distinct legal and political systems. They don’t want to hear how the Founding Fathers did things.

What happens then, if mass immigration is allowed to continue? America (and the West) will be nothing but cauldrons of conflicting, competing factions and ethnicities. That’s the opposite of stability, for those keeping score. Whichever ethnic special interest group is the most aggressive, embittered, and vocal will come to set the tone for the entire society. It will be as if the West were occupied by those who detest it.
 
There is no nation on earth where Western Europeans or Americans can go once our own nations are transformed. The nations of Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia will maintain their distinct national identities, while their immigrants move outwards with a sense of entitlement to reshape the West in their image. Why wouldn’t they? American society seems to contort and fracture itself to accommodate just about anyone. There is no reciprocity, and the West shies away from enforcing the very standards that account for our distinction. America is forced to change, along with Europe, as the nations sending their immigrants out remain the same. Where is our sense of self-preservation?

 The dilemma described above is not going to be resolved by optimism. That's why Scott Walker’s facile homage to optimism as he left the campaign trial was so absurd. Reagan invocations are fine and good, but Reagan and the Republicans went along with a transparent fraud in the 1986 amnesty act. Regular Americans have been paying the price for that blunder ever since.

It may be that optimism about immigration is unwarranted. Optimism about immigration “reform” in the form of a path to citizenship is certainly unwarranted. No ethnic interest group will say, “Thank you for the amnesties of 1986 and 2015, we won't ask for any more.” Instead, more immigration means more chain migration of family members, more clamoring to nullify American immigration law, and more gutless guilt and pandering on the part of politicians who cave to the ethnic pressure groups. This whole process creates a vested interest in the undermining of American sovereignty. Any path to citizenship would be a blueprint for perpetual illegal immigration and racial favoritism in response to that illegal immigration. No one with an appreciation for human nature and public policy should be optimistic about these circumstances.

We don't need reflexive optimism right now. Happy noise is not a strategy. We need to restore our sense of national self-preservation. We need leadership that will look at the world for what it is, put the interests of American citizens first, and limit immigration.