Multiculturalism: It’s All Greek To Me

   “We should insist...immigrant(s)...become in every facet an American (with)...one flag...one language...and...sole loyalty...to the American people." Theodore Roosevelt, 1907. Bully!

   A Greek tragedy is playing out on the world stage with world changing implications. Owing to a failed immigration policy, Greece’s population is about ten percent immigrants. Many, as well as other Greeks, rioted in response to drastic 11th hour emergency government reforms. Greece’s deficit is 14 percent of GDP and her debt is almost 100 percent with Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Great Britain not far behind.

   The slowly rotting fruits of failed socialism - universal health care, shorter work weeks, higher minimum wages, lax immigration policies, early retirements and ubiquitous unsustainable pensions - squelched the private sector. Worker numbers fell, average age and percent retiring rose and a trillion dollar bailout was fashioned by the European Union (EU) and International Monetary Fund. One fifth of the latter is American dollars.

   If Greece does not follow through with the wildly unpopular cuts and defaults, the damage may be too extensive for the EU to sustain as Greece’s creditors will demand increasing rates of return because of a currency with less value.

   This should sound familiar to Americans, as well as Californians in particular. Public sector layoffs and program cuts have begun. As with Greece, our public sector is out of control and growing with a 14.5 percent increase in the number of federal employees in just two years.

   Compounding the delusion of believing in some sort of miraculous alchemy from deficit spending is our failure to enforce sound immigration policy. Furthermore, we are spinning uselessly towards relabeling the core problem as class warfare or racial profiling while extolling the virtues of a mythical so-called multiculturalism. We are also ignoring problems of profound consumption of resources in excess of productivity and our failure to lead here and abroad.

   America’s culture has a rhythm and rhyme all its own that resonates from the first pounding of pilgrim’s hammers erecting hope in new world hearths to the sloshing of GI’s sea soaked leggings at Normandy, saving the world. Our culture has poetic meter with beautiful meaning stitched into every fiber of its founding documents. It’s in the brilliant scribbling of a soon to be martyred president on plain brown paper, standing on a freshly bloodied battlefield, exhorting his divided beloved nation to heal.

   The culture of America is one where legal immigrants assimilate one language and one love of a very special nation where opportunity is provided for those able to pursue it, with compassion and care for those who cannot. It is not a culture of where you came from as much as one of where you’re headed where perhaps, in your productive labors, you bring others along.

   Ours is a culture that rewards literacy, inspires invention and observes the rule of law, its enforcement and protects its borders.

   Immigration should not be a playground for political agendas, a tool to foster further enfeeblement or a short term way to avoid the cost of business. Immigration, done rightly, is a good thing and is not free passage to a land of hyphenated names.

   We need no further examples of failed European socialism and social welfare states. A nation whose leaders are not willing to protect its borders cannot hope to preserve qualities that have made this country what it is.

   Finish the fence, ignore hypocritical complaints from our southern neighbor, adequately staff the border patrol, develop a reasonable, safe and fair identity system and then return to address the "path to citizenship" issue of non hyphenated Americans ready, willing, able and deserving to work and pay their way.

   The status quo of free immigration to welfare and not to jobs and an impotent federal response is not sustainable.

©Kevin Ryan 2010