New Census data shows America is no longer America

We now have a greater share of immigrants in this country, from more extremely divergent cultures, than at any time in our history. Who voted for this, and who thought this was a good idea?

Imagine if we could go back in time to when Congress debated the 1965 and 1990 immigration bills. Lawmakers would promise the public that the nation was about to embark on the largest expansion of immigration ever — indefinitely — that would violate every principle of our balanced immigration system and values of assimilation.

Under the current trajectory, by 2065, 88% of our population growth will be from immigrants.

Those bills wouldn’t have been too popular, obviously. Indeed, sponsors of those bills promised quite the opposite.

But here we are today with record immigration and no end in sight. Isn’t it time for a mature discussion about a balanced approach to the numbers and types of immigrants we are admitting so that our system is deliberate and not chaotic?

According to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, as of October, there were 49.5 million foreign-born people living in the United States, representing an increase of 4.5 million since Joe Biden took office. The absolute number has long been a record, but the headline from an analysis of this data by the Center for Immigration Studies is that immigrants now compose 15% of the U.S. population, a greater share than at any time during the height of the “Great Wave” during the turn of the 20th century. The velocity of growth in immigration has been so overwhelming that just last month, the Census was still predicting we wouldn’t hit 15% until 2033.

Alas, here we are today.

Promises, promises

Nobody voted for this outcome. During the debate over the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, U.S. Rep. Patsy T. Mink (D-Hawaii) estimated, on average, fewer than 200,000 immigrants would be admitted per year and predicted that 82% of them would come from Europe. In fact, we’ve brought in over 1 million legally every year, and 90% of them have been from outside Europe, with an increasing number coming from Islamic countries.

That doesn’t include the plethora of foreign visas and illegal immigration. The U.S. admits over 1 million foreign students every year — many of whom are from China and the Middle East —with 200,000 of them remaining every year to compete for American jobs.

Although we’ve come close to a 15% foreign share of the population during periods in the 1890s and early 1900s, there are a number of fundamental differences between the Great Wave and today.

During the late 1800s, we were still a developing and growing country, with ample space and virtually unlimited opportunities. Today, we are a full and mature country. No established country has undergone this degree of demographic transformation and replacement at such a late stage in its formation.

A generation after the Great Wave, we had achieved the quintessential American melting pot, and it served us well until this era of national self-immolation.

Aside from the percentage of immigrants, raw numbers do matter in our ability to assimilate. Over the 29-year period from 1989 to 2017 — even before the Biden turbo-charged wave — the United States admitted 29.7 million immigrants. During a comparable 29-year period at the height of the Great Wave, from 1896 to 1924, only 17.9 million green cards were issued. Also, because of shorter life expectancy and other factors, the Great Wave of immigration didn’t result in nearly as many naturalizations and a new voting population as this one has.

After the Great Wave, we had a shutoff and then a slowdown of immigration to allow for absorption and assimilation. Since 1965, however, we have experienced wave after wave without a break.

One could argue that by the early 1990s, we had surpassed the size, scope, and cultural transformation of the equivalent period of the first Great Wave. At the time, even liberals like Harry Reid warned that we had never seen anything like this before and introduced a bill to “restore immigration to its traditional and more manageable level of about 300,000 annually.”

The fruits of unchecked immigration

Fast-forward 30 years, and we’ve admitted roughly 30 million more legal immigrants, admitted countless millions of illegal aliens, and established a trajectory through chain migration that will bring in even more immigrants, dwarfing the current unprecedented wave. Under the current trajectory, by 2065, 88% of our population growth will be from immigrants.

During the Great Wave, although immigration spiked between 1880 and 1920, the shutoff created a dynamic in which the foreign-born population in the country went down so that by 1970 — 90 years after the beginning of the Great Wave — the immigration population had only increased 44% in raw numbers. Over that same time period, the native-born population increased by 306%.

By 1970, just 4.7% of the U.S. population was foreign-born. Thus, a generation after the Great Wave, we had achieved the quintessential American melting pot, and it served us well until this era of national self-immolation.

Contrast that to the current super-wave, which has not crested yet and shows no signs of abating. At current levels, the total immigrant population will reach 58.9 million by the end of 2028, which is 17.3% of the total population.

Country of origin and culture do matter. Our society needed a shutoff (and benefited from it) after the Great Wave, when 90% of immigrants were from Europe. Contrast that with the great replacement wave of the modern era, in which just 9% of our immigrants come from Europe.

Today, we receive immigrants from some of the poorest countries in the world. The highest rates of welfare usage are now from the countries of origin most associated with illegal migration, as well as high levels of legal immigration, namely Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

Who would have voted to balkanize the English language? Nobody. Today, even in blue states, Americans overwhelmingly support a cool-off in immigration.

Moreover, one of the fastest-growing subsets of our immigration is those immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries. As we have painfully observed during the Hamas global jihad, these people are not exactly the same as those who came to Ellis Island kissing the ground of their new country. According to the CIS analysis of the Census, Middle East migration is up 14% since January 2021. Sub-Saharan migration, which includes a lot of Islamic countries, has increased by a whopping 21% over the same period.

The technology of communications and transportation of 120 years ago ensured that newly arrived immigrants were essentially cut off from their old cultures. It allowed for easy Americanization over a relatively short period of time.

Today, of course, we have satellite TV and the internet, which allow immigrants to remain connected to their past cultures in perpetuity. Thus, newly arrived Shiite immigrants in Dearborn, Michigan, can watch their fill of Hezbollah’s Al Manor TV from the comfort of their American homes while getting reinvigorated with the ideals of jihad.

Today we also have a welfare state and a mollycoddling cult of multiculturalism that has taken the taboos of welfare and balkanization and turned them into virtue.

Balkanization and no assimilation

We can see the results of this wave of immigration versus the Great Wave more than a century ago. Although we have 49.5 million immigrants today, the total number of people who speak a foreign language at home as of 2019, according to the CIS, was 67.3 million, or roughly one in five people. The numbers likely got worse since the Biden wave. In seven states, the percentage of foreign language speakers is over 30%. In California, it’s 45%.

What is even more disquieting is that the Census data shows more than one-third of adults who speak a foreign language at home are U.S.-born (19.3 million people). This means we are not just observing a trend of new immigrants or native-born children who speak English well but use another language to converse with their immigrant parents. This is a salad-bowl dynamic, where the velocity of immigration has been so intense for so long, with new waves from the same parts of the world reinforcing the old ones, that there is no assimilation. A Migration Policy Institute report claims 77% of the millions of school-age children enrolled in “limited English proficient” programs are native-born.

Thus, we have unprecedented numbers, a massive cultural transformation, and a public charge problem, none of which were ever supported by the American people. Who would ever have voted to give a monopoly over our immigration system to the poorest third world countries?

Who would ever have voted not just to admit Middle Eastern immigrants, but to make them the fastest-growing subset at a time when there is such a problem with radicalization among their youth that even the leaders of their countries are warning about the trend?

Who would have voted for a public charge? Who would have voted to balkanize the English language? Nobody. Today, even in blue states, Americans overwhelmingly support a cool-off in immigration.

Where is our political party, and where is our country? Perhaps we are the ones who must now immigrate. But to where?