LTP News Sharing:
Romans in the late decades of their 5th-century A.D. empire
celebrated their newfound “diversity” of marauding Goths,
Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Huns, and Vandals.
These
tribes en masse had crossed the unsecured Rhine and Danube
borders to harvest Roman bounty without a care about what had
created it.
Their
agendas were focused on destroying the civilization they overran
rather than peacefully integrating into and perpetuating the
Empire.
Ironically,
Rome’s prior greatness had been due to the extension of
citizenship to diverse people throughout Europe, North Africa,
and Asia.
Millions
had been assimilated, integrated, and intermarried and often
superseded the original Italians of the early Roman Republic.
Such fractious diversity had led to unity around the idea of
Rome.
New
citizens learned to enjoy the advantages of habeas corpus,
sophisticated roads, aqueducts, and public architecture, and the
security offered by the legions.
The
unity of these diverse peoples fused into a single culture that
empowered Rome. In contrast, the later disunity of hundreds of
thousands of tribal people flooding into and dividing Rome
doomed it.
To
meet the challenge of a multiracial society, the only viable
pathway to a stable civilization of racially and ethnically
different people is a single, shared culture.
Some
nations can find collective success as a single homogenous
people like Japan or Switzerland.
Or
equally, but with more difficulty, nations can prosper with
heterodox peoples — but only if united by a single, inclusive
culture as the American melting-pot once attested.
But
a baleful third option — a multicultural society of diverse,
unassimilated, and often rival tribes — historically is a
prescription for collective suicide.
We
are beginning to see just that in America, as it sheds the
melting pot, and adopts the salad bowl of unassimilated and
warring tribes.
The
U.S. is now seeing a rise in violent racially and religiously
motivated hate crimes.
The
border is nonexistent.
Millions
of unlawful immigrants mock their hosts by their brazen illegal
entrance.
They
will receive little civic education to become Americans. But
they will learn that unassimilated tribalism wins them influence
and advantages.
In
contrast, America was once a rare historical example of a
multiracial, but single-culture democracy that actually worked.
Multigenerational
Americans were often energized by keeping up with new
hard-working immigrants determined to have a shot at success in
a free society long denied them at home.
Other
large nations have tried such a democratic multiracial
experiment — most notably Brazil and India. But both are still
plagued by tribal feuding and serial violence.
What
once worked for America, but now is forgotten were a few
precepts essential for a multiracial constitutional state wedded
to generous immigration.
One,
America is enriched at its cultural periphery by the food,
fashion, art, music, and literature of immigrants.
But
it would be destroyed if such diversity extended to its core. No
one wants Middle-East norms regarding gays or emancipated women.
No
one prefers Mexican jurisprudence to our courts.
No
one here wants the dictatorship of Venezuela or the
totalitarianism of communist China.
Two,
people vote with their feet to emigrate to America. They flee
their native culture and government to enjoy their antitheses
in America.
But
remember — no sane immigrant would flee Mexico, Gaza, or
Zimbabwe only to wish to implant in their new homes the very
culture and norms that drove them out from their old.
If
they did that to their new home, it would then become as
unattractive to them as what they fled.
Three,
tribalism wrecks nations.
Just
compare what happened in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, or Iraq.
Anytime
one ethnic, racial, or religious group refuses to surrender its
prime identity in exchange for a shared sense of self, other
tribes for their own survival will do the same.
All
then rebrand their superficial appearance as essential not
incidental to whom they are.
And
like nuclear proliferation that sees other nations go nuclear
once a neighboring power gains the bomb, so too the tribalism of
one group inevitably leads only to more tribalism of others. The
result is endless Hobbesian strife.
Four,
immigration must be measured, so that newcomers can be
manageably assimilated and integrated rather than left to form
rival tribal cliques.
Five,
it must be legal. Otherwise, the idea of citizenship is
reduced to mere residency, while the legal applicant is
rendered a fool for his adherence to the law.
Six,
it must be meritocratic, so immigrants come with English and
skills and do not burden their hosts.
And
last, it must be diverse. Only that way, can all groups abroad
have equal access to the American dream.
A
diversity of immigrants also ensures that no one particular
ethnic or political tribe seeks to use immigration to divide the
nation further.
The
old immigration once enriched America, but our new version is
destroying it.
