Steyn-"Not Just Immigration: It's societal transformation"

The cause: failure of the perfidious institutions of government, rapacious special interest groups, the so-called watchdog press and the interference of a meddling foreign government.

You probably can tell that I am INCENSED about that immigration problems that have been ignored over several decades by several administrations of both parties and by the mainstream press that has chosen to ignore the issues and the fact that our illustrious elected leaders have failed in their duty to uphold the Constitution and to protect the American people against..whom? Not armed force lobbing shells over the border to assault people in the streets. Not against the terrorists and suicide bombers that are reported every day in the press. No, our elected officials have failed to protect us against Middle Eastern oil sheikhs..but that's another story. Today's target is the horde of the innocent looking, the workers, blue and white collar, that have come in a tidal wave that was not reported or, at least under-reported.

The effect: societal transformation on a massive scale.

This is not an "immigration" issue. "Immigration" is when you go into a U.S. government office and there's a hundred people filling in paperwork to live in America, and there are a couple of Slovaks, couple of Bangladeshis, couple of New Zealanders, couple of Botswanans, couple of this, couple of that. Assimilation is not in doubt because, if you're a lonely Slovak in Des Moines, it's extremely difficult to stay unassimilated.

This is not an "illegal immigration" issue. That's when one of the Slovaks or Botswanans gets tired of waiting in line for 12 years and comes in anyway, and lives and works here and doesn't pay any taxes, so the money he earns gets sluiced around the neighborhood supermarket and gas station and topless bar and the rest of the local economy, instead of being given to Trent and Arlen and Co. to toss into the great sucking maw of the federal budget.

But a "worker class" drawn overwhelmingly from a neighboring jurisdiction with another language and ancient claims on your territory and whose people now send so much money back home in the form of "remittances" that it's Mexico's largest source of foreign income (bigger than oil or tourism) is not "immigration" at all, but a vast experiment in societal transformation. Indeed, given the international track record of bilingual societies and neighboring jurisdictions with territorial claims, it's not much of an experiment so much as a safe bet on political instability.

By some counts, up to 5 percent of the U.S. population is now "undocumented." Why? In part because American business is so over-regulated that there is a compelling economic logic to the employment of illegals. In essence, a chunk of the American economy has seceded from the Union. But, even if you succeeded in re-annexing it, a large-scale "guest worker" class entirely drawn from one particular demographic has been a recipe for disaster everywhere it's been tried. Fiji, for example, comprises native Fijians and ethnic Indians brought in as indentured workers by the British. If memory serves, currently 46.2 percent are native Fijians and 48.6 percent are Indo-Fijians. In 1987, the first Indian-majority government came to power. A month later, Col. Sitiveni Rabuka staged the first of his two coups.

Don't worry, I'm not predicting any coups just yet. But, even in relatively peaceful bicultural societies, politics becomes tribal: loyalists vs. nationalists in Northern Ireland, separatists vs. federalists in Quebec.

Sometimes the differences are huge -- as between, say, anything-goes pothead bisexual Dutch swingers and anti-gay anti-drugs anti-prostitution Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands. But sometimes the differences can be comparatively modest and still destabilizing. Pointing out that America has a young fast-growing Hispanic population and an aging non-Hispanic population, the Washington Post's Bob Samuelson wrote that "we face a future of unnecessarily heightened political and economic conflict."

The key words are "unnecessarily heightened." In Europe, the political class sowed the seeds of massive social upheaval for the most short-sighted of reasons. If America's political class wants to do the same, it could at least have the integrity to discuss the issue in honest terms.

No, law-abiding Americans, however incensed, are unlikely to rise up an effect a coup d'etat. The more like candidate could be meddler Vicente Fox, who manipulates American law and the foreign dignitary to be received at a state dinner by Arnold Schwarzenegger. It would be a bloodless coup as Fox wouldn't have to fire a shot: ten percent of his population is here already, the majority of our troops are in Iraq. The paltry National Guard force sent to back up the Border Patrol on the southern border would be no match for the superior numbers of well-armed, though corrupt and undisciplined forces on the Mexican side, reminiscent of the 19th Century Texas Rebellion that led to the Battle of the Alamo and all the rest that followed, something that most Mexicans have not forgotten nor forgiven. The prize: a developed countryside, several large cities and ports, and a state with the seventh largest economy in the world. Well worth the wait...don't you think.

And who knows, if he's smart he could extend his reach over the rest of North America.