Immigration is changing
America — Forever.

he problem isn't just illegal immigration. Demographers say illegal aliens account for only about 8 million to 11 million of the huge numbers of Third World peoples colonizing the U.S. The rest of the estimated 33 million foreign-born living in the U.S. came here legally, with the full approval of Congress and the White House.

According to the 2000 Census, nearly 12 percent of the entire U.S. population are now foreign-born. A majority of them are from Third World countries and live in just four states: California (28 percent), New York (11.8 percent), Texas (9.8 percent), and Florida (8.9 percent).

In a rare acknowledgment by the corporate media of America's radical demographic changes, Knight Ridder News Service reported that the U.S. by 2050 will be "the first fully racially mixed nation" in the world, with no single racial or ethnic majority.

America's future is more uncertain now than at any other time in its history. No one can even be sure that our grandchildren will speak the same language we do.

Thus far, the signs are not good.

Native-born whites are fleeing eight of the nation's top 10 states where most immigrants are settling, according to the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. As large American cities from Miami to Boston, and San Diego to New York become the new home for millions of Third World colonists, native whites are leaving in droves. "Between 1970 and 2000, New York City's population ... shift[ed] from two-thirds white to one-third," Dewar reports.

Until the 1960's, America's immigration laws limited a country's immigrant contribution to the percentage of that group already in the U.S. Known as the national origins quota system, it was changed by Congress in 1965 to an open border policy. While the implications were never publicly debated, Congress adopted a host of additional legislation that is changing the ethnic and racial make-up of the country. In 1986 and 1990, Congress granted amnesty to millions of illegal aliens, and increased the overall numbers of legal immigrants by 40 percent. Congress removed limits on the number of allowed refugees, who are categorized separately from immigrants. Although most Americans think of refugees as destitute people fleeing war or famine, foreign nationals can claim refugee status in the U.S. merely for being disliked in their home country, or for behavior that differs from the majority, such as homosexuality.

The result: "By 2050, give or take a decade, European-born whites and their descendants will number about 48 percent of the population. One in 4 Americans will be Hispanic; about 1 in 8 will be African-American, with Asians, Native Americans [American Indians] and people of mixed race constituting the rest," reported Heather Dewar of Knight Ridder. The U.S. Census Bureau concurs: By 2050, legal and illegal immigrants will account for two-thirds of the country's net population growth.

Because most immigrants assemble in urban colonies where welfare and government services are available, or are imported by big corporations to work in factories scattered throughout the U.S., the racial mix taking shape is not evenly spread across the country.

"Some population experts think the United States is on its way to becoming a nation with 'brown edges and a white middle,'" according to Dewar.

The first big majority non-white state will be California. Sometime this year, the most populous state will be a "majority minority" - the word multiculturalists use to describe a mostly mixed, non-white population. They mean that no single race or ethnic group will make up as much as half the state's population. After 2010, Nevada, New Jersey, Maryland, and Texas are next in line.

Dewar said demographers see the small-town Midwest as the only section of the country that will escape the tide in the foreseeable future.

"The West already is the most diverse part of the country," she says, "with a lower proportion of whites and a higher proportion of Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans than any other region...

"The Northeast is also diversifying as Asian, Latin American, and African immigrants pour in, offsetting white flight westward and southward...

"The Deep South remains a study in black and white. Reversing the great northward migration of the mid-century, many Southern blacks and some Southern whites are abandoning the industrial cities of the North and returning home. The region has drawn some immigrants, but few venture outside of big cities such as Atlanta.

"Only the small town Midwest resembles the America of 'Ozzie and Harriet': nearly nine-tenths white, one-tenth black, with a sprinkling here and there of Cambodian refugees or Mexican farm laborers."

In the popular imagination, immigrants are hard-working, family-oriented people who are oppressed in their natives lands, but who yearn for the ideals of liberty and prosperity as expressed by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. But the sentimental stereotype routinely invoked by corporate executives, politicians and other elites, doesn't hold up under scrutiny.

In reality, many aliens in the U.S. are criminals. More than 25 percent of all inmates in the federal prison system, for example, are immigrants. The Immigration and Naturalization Service admitted in congressional hearings that it granted citizenship in 1996 to nearly 200,000 immigrants with criminal records.

Facts also show that the sympathetic portrayal of immigrants as an oppressed population is false. Most immigrants do not come fleeing oppressive dictatorships or Communist countries. The largest share come from Mexico, which the U.S. regards as a free, democratic country with whom it conducts friendly relations and has extensive financial agreements such as NAFTA. Mexico is one of America's major trading partners in the world economy.

Other top countries that send immigrants include India, El Salvador, and the Philippines, with whom the U.S. conducts important diplomatic, trade and financial activity. The U.S. believes they have responsible, democratic, freely-elected governments that respect human rights.

Many arriving aliens, particularly from Latin America, are young men in their twenties who never graduated from high school. Unlike the TV portrayals of them as docile, loving fathers and dedicated husbands, many of these young men abandon their wives and children back home in pursuit of adventure amid the glitter and excitement of American cities, never to be seen in their home towns again.

Still others, particularly parents and older immigrants, come to the U.S. for the lavish retirement and disability programs here that are unavailable in their home countries. In 1996 alone, more than 50 percent of the nearly $8 billion available to the disabled and elderly under the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program went to immigrant non-citizens. In Hong Kong and Taiwan, retailers sell a Chinese language book that advises would-be immigrants on how to qualify for the American SSI program.

"By 1990, the Census showed that immigrants were more likely to receive cash benefits than native households," says Prof. George Borjas of Harvard University. "In fact, if one adds non-cash programs (such as Medicaid, food stamps, and housing assistance), it turns out that 21 percent of immigrant households receive some type of aid, as compared to ... 10 percent of white, non Hispanic native households."

Some, of course, do come to the U.S. to find work. Here, if they have the right skin color or ethnic surname, immigrants can qualify for affirmative action racial preferences that give them first-in-line consideration for jobs, scholarships, college admissions, grants, low-interest loans, and government programs from which white, native-born Americans are excluded by law.

For social workers, churches, poverty workers, professional left-wing political activists and corporations, the immigration tidal wave is an important means to generate new government grants for community work, increased political influence, and cheap labor. In response, politicians provide new laws to grant welfare to immigrants, funds for bilingual education, and civil rights regulations that prevent natives from preserving the American character of their workplaces, neighborhoods, and communities. Congress even made it illegal to discriminate in favor of citizens over non-citizens in employment.

America's immense experiment in multiculturalism is a costly one. The National Academy of Sciences reports that immigration imposes an annual cost of $1,174 on a typical native household in California, and $229 on a typical native household in New Jersey. Immigration writer Peter Brimelow, author of Alien Nation, estimates that native households across the country pay an average additional annual tax burden of $166 to $226, or $15 to $20 billion a year to accommodate the newcomers.

"[T]his tax cost far exceeds all estimates of aggregate macroeconomic gain from immigration," he says.

The new emerging America is applauded by multiculturalists who have long despised the "whitebread" America of the white middle class, which they believe resembles a "neo-nazi" society, characterized by "racist" television shows like "Ozzie and Harriet." According to Dewar, America's multiculturalists hope "that the long, tragic story of racism in America may yet have a happy ending..." because whites will be a minority.

Some analysts tracking the trend predict a different outcome.

"The country's going to be balkanized," predicts William Frey of the Population Studies Center. He fears the U.S. will be reduced to a collection of warring racial and ethnic groups, with little in common except a national boundary.

But demographers, including those at the U.S. Census Bureau, at least agree on one thing - that unless America reverses course, the America in which most citizens grew up will be gone forever. The only remaining question is whether the American people want it to happen, or will let it happen.