'Diversity' in Action

(BCN editor’s note: This is the first of two Thomas Sowell columns for Wednesday.)

Islamic terrorist attacks in Europe, and European governments’ counter-attacks are more than just a passing news story.

Europe is currently in the process of paying the price for years of importing millions of people from a culture hostile to the fundamental values of Western culture. And this is by no means the last of the installments of that price, to be paid in blood and lives, for smug elites’ Utopian self-indulgences in moral preening and gushing with the magic word “diversity.”

Generations yet unborn will still be paying the price, whether in large or small installments, depending on how long it takes for the West to jettison Utopianism and come to grips with reality.

Meanwhile, in the United States, no one seems to be drawing any lessons about the dangers of importing millions of people from fundamentally different cultures across our open border. In America, “diversity” has still not yet lost its magical ability to stop thought in its tracks and banish facts into the outer darkness.

Perhaps here, as in Europe, that verbal magic can only be washed away in the blood of innocent victims, many of them yet unborn.

To cross our open border with Mexico, you don’t have to be Mexican or even from Central America. You can be from Iran, Syria or other hotbeds of Middle Eastern terrorism.

It is one of the monumental examples of political irresponsibility that the southern border has not been secured during administrations of either party, despite promises and posturing.

Many fine people have come here from Mexico. But, as with any other group, some are just the opposite. With open borders, however, we don’t even know how many people who cross that border are Mexican, much less anything more relevant, like their education, diseases, criminal records or terrorist ties.

There are some politicians — both Democrats and Republicans — who just want to get the issue behind them, and are prepared to leave the consequences for others to deal with in the future, just as they are leaving a staggering national debt for others to deal with in the future.

These consequences include irreversible changes in the American population.

Ethnic “leaders” and welfare state goodies guarantee the fragmentation of the population, with never-ending strife among the fragments. People who enter the country illegally will get, not only equal benefits with the American people who created those benefits, they will get more than many American citizens, thanks to affirmative action.

We cannot simply let in everyone who wants to come to America, or there will be no America to come to. Cultures matter — and not all cultures are mutually compatible, as Europeans are belatedly learning, the hard way. And “assimilation” is a dirty word to multiculturalists.

State and local officials who blithely violate their oath to uphold the law, and indulge themselves in the moral posturing of declaring their domains to be “sanctuaries” for people who entered the country illegally, are unlikely to reconsider until disastrous consequences become far too big to ignore — which is to say, until it is too late.

Meanwhile, harsh punishments are reserved for people in business who fail to carry out the law-enforcement duties that elected officials openly declare they are not going to carry out.

To many in the media, the only question seems to be whether we are going to be “mean-spirited” toward people who want to come here — especially children who were brought here, or sent here, “through no fault of their own.”

It is as if those children had some pre-existing right to be in the United States, which they could lose only if they did something bad themselves. But those children had no more right to be here than children in India, Africa or other places with millions of children living in poverty.

Surely we can think ahead enough to realize that children living in this country illegally are going to grow up and have children of their own, with cultures and values of their own — and ethnic “leaders” to promote discontent and hostility if they don’t get as good results as people who have the prevailing American culture, beginning with the English language.

You can’t wish that away by saying the magic word “diversity” — not after we have seen what “diversity” has led to in Europe.

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Photo credit: By U.S. Navy photo by Steelworker 1st Class Matthew Tyson [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.