The Culturalist: Immigration from Ancient Rome to the US Border

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Welcome to the next episode of The Culturalist.

It's one of three shows that Victor Davis Hansen does on his podcast, The Traditionalist, The Classicist, and The Culturalist.

In The Culturalist, we look at the cultural impact of political, but also other value changes and moral expectations in our culture.

And today our topic is immigration.

So we will be looking particularly at the immigration or what's usually called the barbarian invasions in Rome and then the new immigration into the United States.

Victor Davis Hansen has written a book on the immigrants that are coming from Mexico which he published in 2003 and we'll be asking him some questions on that book.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Nilly Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution, and the Wayne and Marsha Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He has a website called Private Papers.

I understand it's under some reconstruction right now and make it a new name, but it will always be available at victorhanson.com.

That's victorhanson s-o-n.com.

And he is as well available on social media, Facebook at V D Hansen's Morning Cup.

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But the participants in that fan club are excellent at bringing out all sorts of different speeches Victor has given, his writing as well.

So it's a great place to go if you do engage in Facebook.

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All right, Victor, today we want to look at Roman.

I would like to do the Roman immigration first or the barbarian invasions as it's called.

And then we'll turn to your book, Mexifornia, again published in 2003, and look at some of the things that and observations about the immigration coming in from the south here and some very prescient things you said in that book.

I would like like to recommend it to the reader because you'll, at every page, you'll turn and say, wow, this is prescient that he was writing already in 2003 about that.

And we'll talk about a few of those things, but let's look at Rome first and what happened and the significance of that fourth and fifth century as German tribesmen came into the Roman region.

We like to always start with empirical understanding of things.

So I thought maybe we could start with where is and what is the evidence of these barbarian invasions in the historical record and then talk about the significance and the consequence.

So I would entertain in whichever direction you'd like to answer those three questions.

What is the evidence?

What's the significance?

And what's the consequence?

Well, when we look at Rome and we ask ourselves, why did it fall or when did it fall?

I wish I could tell you there was any consensus, but the old date of 476,

when the Gauss finding took over formally is under a debate.

And I think most people can't agree on the causes.

I think a French scholar at one point in the 1950s said there were over 200 causes for Rome's fall.

Most people agree that it was a debased currency.

They did not have the material wealth to support a bureaucracy.

a church hierarchy and a military that were enormous drains on the imperial revenues.

In other words, they were not able to collect taxes or that the economies were not integrated in the way that they had been or they lost the ability to secure the Mediterranean as a nexus for commerce and trade.

That said, it was the view of Edward Gibbon, I'm not a fan of Edward Gibbon's primary view, that the advent of Christianity created less of a martial tradition at a time when Rome's frontier enemies had no such beliefs, Sermon on the Mount versus

paganism, and he believed that paganism both on the frontier and in Rome's own past was more attuned to military preparedness and deterrence.

I don't think that's necessarily true because as you know Christianity was an integral part of the empire for 400 years and then formalized under Constantine in the early 4th century.

More likely, I think it was the inability to assimilate, to integrate, to intermarry tribal peoples on the Danube, on the Rhine, and up through what I guess you would call northern Germany and Eastern Europe, the Vandals in particular, Huns, Osgoths, etc., etc.

And so how do we know this?

And whenever you ask that question about classical antiquity, you have to kind of compartmentalize.

There's archaeological evidence, there's epigraphical, that is contemporary documents, mostly governmental, official on stone.

There's artistic evidence, statuaries, paintings, and then there's literary evidence.

Literary evidence is the oldest and the most valued because this is what people said at the time.

For the decline of Rome, though, we have this wonderful historian almost who writes at the end of the fourth century in the tradition of Thucydides, Ammianus Marcellinus.

And he gives us a lot of internal symptomology of what's going wrong at Rome.

Corruption, the militarization of the government.

In other words, whoever was going to be an emperor or his cadre had to pay a particular take to a particular military unit.

The idea that provincial administration was not seen in the interest of the empire, but as a way to get a local militia and then seize power in a province.

We also have Augustine confessions, we have Jerome's letters, and these are more about the moral decay or what's happened to Rome or life as they know was ending it.

We have some evidence from the barbarian side, so to speak.

Jordanus, it was probably a Gothic historian that wrote in the eastern part of the empire about what made the Huns dynamic.

That could go on, but we have enough literary evidence to get a pretty good idea.

We know that after 500, things like glass and precious metals that were used in jewelry and graves start to drop off.

We know that by 550, that Roman road repair or walls were not being maintained in the same frequencies as they had in the past, just to give you some idea of material objects.

And then we know from epigraphical inscriptions, imperial decrees, that there's a greater thematic focus on security, security, security.

And so from all of that evidence, we get the picture that whereas Rome had recovered in the third century and recovered in the first century when it transitioned from first century BC from a republic, then to a principate, and then to an empire, that and it was separated, divided by Diocletian, that these things were not just isolated, they were cumulative, and the same causes were innervating the empire.

And then finally, let me just say that Rome fell in the east sometime at the end of the fifth century AD,

but for the next thousand years, it survived, thousand years in the east.

And at one point, remember in the 530s under that brilliant team of Belisarus and Narciss in the field and Justinian as emperor, they not only rewrote the law code, the Justinian law code, they not only purged the bureaucracy of all of their enemies, whether that was good or not, you can decide.

They built Santa Sophia Haga Siofia, the largest church

in the world, I think, until the Vatican, and then the largest dome really until modern, later times.

And then in addition to that, They tried to reconquer or reacquire the Western Empire, and they got close.

They rid North africa of the vandals in the late 520s and 530s and the invasion of sicily was successful and then the eastern greeks and the byzantines went all the way up to two-thirds of the italian peninsula and carved out areas of italy that were lost they recovered dalmatia they may have uh had they not had internal squabbling they may have recovered parts of spain i think according to edward lutwack whose strategy of the byzantine empire he made a good argument that had they not had the great epidemic at Constantinople that killed a half a million people, that that dynamism under Justinian, who actually did get the bubonic plague himself, might have continued and they could have actually reformulated the empire.

But they held on to areas, as you know, if you go to Italy today, you can see Byzantine churches spotted along the eastern coast of Italy, Ravenna, especially beautiful churches there.

All right.

Yeah.

So thank you, Victor.

And then I would like to ask you then, how do we want to define decline in this picture of later antiquity?

Well, it's a good question because when I was a student 50 years ago, began studying the ancient world, there was sort of a break off at the 5th century AD.

Everything from 500 AD was called the beginning of the Dark Ages and then the Middle Ages and then the Renaissance and on.

And then everything prior to that, Greece and Rome was classical antiquity.

And then there was a need for revision.

Peter Brown is a famous name.

Then they created this term called late antiquity, where

these so-called barbarians that came across the Danube and the Rhine were Christianized.

They, although they helped destroy what had been Rome, they reinvigorated it with a new sense of energy, in some cases, freedom, if you're a fan of the Germanic tribes.

And then

that

dispersion of Rome in this thinking was not all bad.

In other words, there were the new idea of the Franks that would lead to the Holy Roman Empire and Germans that were by conquering Rome, I guess the idea is they were conquered by Rome.

And people in this school of thought compared them to the strict orthodox, unimaginative Byzantines, who only by

suppressing dissent and insisting on rigid orthodoxy, so the stereotype goes, they were surviving.

I think that's a little bit in question now that people are starting to look at Byzantium and thinking,

whatever they did, it was very successful in keeping Western culture alive, classical texts, classical learning, sophisticated science in a way that was lost in the West.

And you can, you know, when the Crusaders arrived in 1203 and they sacked...

1202 sacked Byzantium, they were confronted with a society and a civilization that materially, scientifically, technologically was superior to their own.

And so

I'll just finish by saying what's even more disturbing is a lot of recent work in classics has suggested that the fall was good, that you got rid of this oppressive,

one-way, Christian-only

dogma, Orthodox Christianity, Orthodox Western ideas, oppressive laws, customs, uniformity throughout.

And then you had indigenous peoples and more diversity, and it was a liberation, so to speak.

But again, if you look at the sources and the number of people who were killed when Roman law vanished, Roman order was non-existent and Roman science and production and communications and commerce was

shaky because of the lack of security.

I think the average person in the empire no longer could count on clean water in an aqueduct or the protection of habeas corpus when arrested or the idea you might have glass on his home and see the sunlight rather than just in the winter having everything shut, closed.

And if you wanted to visit a local, you know, if you were in Gaul and you wanted to make your way into Spain, the road would not be there for you any longer.

It wouldn't be maintained.

Yeah.

You know, I noticed something, I was in Slovenia at Ljubljana, which is their capital city, and they have a Roman city, ruins from it, which are under the current city, and it's right by the river, so it's kind of on the lowlands.

But they also have a medieval castle up on the hilltop.

And is that common that from Roman times when cities were down on the flatlands near the rivers

and open and roads, right, and not easily defended like a castle top?

I think it is.

I think it's true of all civilizations, that civilization is a a phenomenon of the plains and rivers.

That's where the good farmland is.

That's where water is accessible.

That's where the climate is more tolerable, that's where communications and travel are the easiest, and that's also where taxes can be collected if people are one with the government.

But when the government starts to fail and tribal chieftains take over and you have ethnic or

religious or racial war, or you have a foreign oppressor, then to find safety, people go up into the mountains.

If you take a country like Greece and you go to Greece, you notice that the flat plains in Messenia or in Mantinea or Megalopolis or Attica or Laconia or the white plains in Thessaly, that is where people lived.

And they had a little acropolis, that's true, a hill, but it was mostly flat.

And then in the mountains, there were sanctuaries or religious, you know, areas like Delphi, etc.

That said,

once the Byzantines lost control

and they were at war with the Ottomans or the Crusaders and life was very dangerous by the 1100.

You start to see 1200, you start to see castles and then by the 15th, 16th, 17th century, you see these Greek villages up in the mountains.

It was very problematic for modern Greece because it's so uneconomical that villagers, when I first went to Greece nearly 50 years ago,

You'd go up to these mountain communities in the Peloponnese, especially.

They were very vigorous.

Everybody was there.

They were not just a bunch of old men and women.

Now you go there and the government has seen that it's very uneconomical.

The land is not good.

People cannot commute.

The power and road maintenance is difficult.

And so although they're integrated, people were encouraged to come to Athens and Thessaloniki.

And now, because of the destruction of the Euro, at least for a while, and fears about immigration and COVID, you start to see that people are returning to their villages.

So

you see in the United States too, people, real estate right now in Wyoming or Idaho or Utah or Montana is booming.

And the idea is that people feel that if you're in a high-rise in New York or San Francisco, the government either cannot or will not protect you.

and the IRS will find you, et cetera, et cetera.

These are not just mere conspiracy theories.

They have historical precedence.

So people are trying to do what Romans did in the fifth century.

Yeah.

Go into the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, say, in North Africa when the Vandals approached.

So if I could sum up what you've said, and this is going to be very short, it seems to me you're suggesting that the biggest failure of the Roman Empire in terms of its fall was its inability to assimilate into citizenship all the vast reaches of the Roman Empire and the new migrating and invading German tribesmen, is that correct?

Yeah, German, Polish, Northern Europeans.

Earlier, you know, 400 years earlier, Tacitus' Germania had shown in a very kind of naive, romantic way that was typical, not that he was naive, he was cynical, but Tacitus had shown that there were hardy folk on the other side of the Danube and the Rhine.

And this became very important in later German historiography and cultural myth-making.

And it was kind of the foundation, to tell you the truth, of 19th-century genetics, eugenics, and

Hegel, Nietzsche, proto-Nazi doctrine that the Germans had never been assimilated.

They were pure people, blood and soil, on the right side, not the wrong side, the right side of the Danube and Rome.

But that came from Tacitus and other writers.

And it's a little bit in Caesar's Gallic Wars about building a bridge across the Rhine that these people were large, they were healthy, they were not corrupted by urban living or multiculturalism, etc.

So that was a theme as well.

But the main problem was that in an empire that had 70 million people and over a million square miles from Scotland to the Atlas Mountains and from the Persian Gulf all the way to the English Channel, you needed a network of communications and safety.

And that was provided by a very small military, a quarter million people in the legions and maybe 20 or so active legions, maybe more.

120,000, 150,000 active soldiers, then another 100,000 in reserve.

But that meant that if there was a problem in North Africa, you could transport legions from Egypt or what is now Libya, or you could even send them across to Sicily and then across to North Africa.

And if you had a problem in

Dalmatia, you could bring in a legion.

But when it started to be tribalized and legionnaires started to marry and they were recruited from non-Roman territories, their first loyalties were regional.

And if somebody said, you know, I'm on a legion on the Rhine to make sure that nobody gets across, and the people who are trying to get across look like you and speak like you, and you're asked to go over to Dalmatia or into the Balkans or Greece to help put down, you're not going to do it.

And so you're going to find a commander who says, I'm not a Roman general.

I'm a general of this legion on the Rhine.

And then from there to, I'm a commander and I'm going to identify not by an idea of Rome, but the reality that I'm not Italian or I'm not Roman, I am German.

Okay.

So it's the lack of the shared values and particularly of citizenship that was

very destructive ultimately to Rome.

Well, that's a nice segue into our new immigration issues at the border.

So we have hundreds of thousands, it seems like, coming across the border in the last few months, and the administration is attempting to deal with it or not deal with it.

I'm not quite sure which one it is.

But you wrote a very prescient book called Mexifornia.

Again, it was published in 2003.

I highly recommend it to our readers.

You'll go through it as I did and prep for this discussion and just keep stopping at every point and say, wow, this was a very prescient idea.

So I would like to talk to you.

You have a chapter called the Universe of the the Illegal Alien, where you talk about the illegal aliens' experience as a manual labor.

And then the following chapter where you talk about the response of the host, which seems to suggest that the response of the host was inadequate.

But could you elaborate more for us on the experience first?

And then we'll ask questions about the cultural significance after.

Well, if you are a multiracial society such as the United States, and you have people have tribal affinities, then it's important that people put their first allegiance to the idea of America.

That is the Constitution, documents like the Declaration of Independence, custom and tradition found in the Gettysburg Address, and you have civic instruction that we are not, I'm not Swedish.

And this person is not German, this person is not Italian, this person is not Mexican-American, this person is not black.

Whatever grievances we have against the idea of the United States pale in comparison to the need to stick together.

Otherwise, you have no reason to exist.

That was the dominant idea that immigrants were told that they must adhere to when they arrived.

And as long as immigration, it could be in large numbers.

We had some large numbers, especially from Eastern Europe, Irish in the 1840s, the Eastern Europeans in the 1870s and 80s and 90s, Italians up until 1920, southern Mediterranean peoples, Asians very early on in the 19th century, and especially now, and then south of the border starting around 1945, 50

during the war, especially when we were labor short, but especially in the post-war period.

Okay,

as long as you had these Roman ideas that you are coming from your country because you are unhappy with it.

Now, what I mean by that is it could be it's corrupt, it could be it's economically unattractive, you don't have security, there's cartels, there's gangs, gangs.

The rich dominate.

There's no equality under the law.

There's no habeas.

We could go on and on.

But the United States is seen either by communication with relatives or in the media or word of mouth as a superior place.

Then you want to get there.

Now, as long as you fill certain criteria, it worked wonderfully.

The first was it was legal.

You just applied at a consul or you came across the border in the early days and said, I want to be a citizen or you registered for citizenship.

Or you came in diverse numbers, diverse, I should say.

That is, some people came from Central America, some came from Mexico, some came from Japan, some came from China, some came from Sweden, some came from Ireland, and we were all of various tribes, but there was not one dominant.

We tried to be careful when millions of Germans came and they said, you know, we have to have Franz Stegel as a German general in the Civil War.

We're during World War I were teaching German in the elementary schools.

Of course, nothing wrong with that, but progressive Woodrow Wilson tried to stop it.

So what I'm getting at is the idea was when you all came in one wave, you had to be careful.

And then some groups became harmonious very quickly, and that depended on their degree to which they matched the dominant or the majority population, which is true of every country.

So if you had people largely from

the British-speaking empire, Scotland, Ireland, not Ireland so much, but Scotland and Britain and Wales, then those were the original founders.

They'd been in North America for 150, 170 years.

They spoke English, they were acquainted, the elite were with the British and Scottish Enlightenment, etc., etc.

Once people came outside that paradigm, it was more difficult.

Maybe for if you were Irish and you did not speak English, you had a problem.

If you were Irish and you were at war with that culture back in the old world, then you brought that suspicion of that culture as it was manifested at the United States.

Once you were coming from Germany or Spain or Netherlands and you did not speak English, you had to catch up.

You had it easier because superficially you were indistinguishable from the original inhabitants.

If you were Jewish or if you came from southern Mediterranean, you faced greater prejudices and greater obstacles because you were outside the founding group.

that had created the United States.

I'm not talking about Native Americans or African Americans because they were persecuted and treated terribly, of course, but I'm talking about people who were assimilated in the body of politic.

But they too succeeded to the degree rapidly that they spoke English, had skills, came in diverse numbers, and did not overwhelm the system.

And we could go on and on, but you can see what I'm getting at.

Each different group.

After the Kennedy immigration reform in the 1960s,

then we changed.

We no longer took people on meritocratic basis.

Do they have a BA?

Do they match

the majority population in the United States, et cetera, et cetera?

It was based on family considerations.

And we started getting people who, for the most part, 70, 80% were non-European.

And also people from France or Germany in the post-war boom really didn't want to come to the United States.

There was no need to.

So we had poor people.

We had people from the so-called third world.

We had people who didn't speak English, that didn't have a high school school diploma, but the system still would have worked as long as it was in measured numbers, legal, and people learned English.

And the host, here's the key point, the host had confidence in its own values.

Somewhere around 1985, 86, I shouldn't even say that.

I wrote the first draft of Mexico in 2002.

Got to remember in 1992 and 1996, Bill Clinton's Democratic Party, if you read the platform at the convention in those, that time space, it was legal, legal, legal immigration.

We're going to punish illegal.

They use the word illegal alien, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi.

This is an invasion.

This is a threat.

Because there was about two or three million people that were here illegally from south of the border.

That, though, changed somewhere around 2008.

Barack Obama ran, remember, on the idea of closing the border.

But when you get up to 11, 12, and the numbers were always massaged, it's probably 20 million.

And that is a potent political force, second, third generation.

You've got 30, 40 million people.

Now I think we're up to about 50 million people that reside in the United States were not born here.

And 27% of the population of California was not born here.

Some are illegal, some are legal residents, some are illegal residents, some are citizens, some are not.

But the point is, as long as the host said you, not I, made the decision that you wanted this country and you did not want to stay in your home country, then I have a moral and legal right to instruct you on what is required of you to become an American.

And this is what it is.

But I'm not, and if you want to come and change this country, I've got to advise you about two things.

You have to become legal.

You have to become a citizen.

And you can't change the rules when you're not a citizen.

And second, you have to be very careful ideologically what you're doing, because remember the system that you may not like, you came to, so you de facto, maybe unconsciously, assumed it was better.

So if you come from Mexico, be careful about saying we need to emulate the Mexican judicial system or the Mexican class system or the attitudes of race or the economic crony capitalism.

Don't come here and say Mexico is a superior country.

Now, we're also saying,

look, everybody is ethnocentric and we all have senses of inferiority and not adopting and anger i can remember when i grew up my grandfather said we all you know gosh we're gonna have vovos in the united states in 1960 my dad went out and bought these breakdown unreliable ladybug looking 544 i think they were called volvos we had them used i can spend my high school years all i did was fix the the SU carburetors or take out the clutch on my vovo it was a piece of junk cute but a piece of junk rye crackers, Electro vacuum cleaners.

We had to do all of that.

Why?

Because we wanted to keep our Swedish features, but it was a failed effort.

Everybody understands that.

Columbus Day, Italian flag, Cincinnato Mayo, Mexican flag.

Everybody's proud of their heritage, no problem.

But when you cross the next line and you say to the host, you are racist, you are flawed, you've always been flawed.

I'm going to do blah, blah, blah.

And you're not a citizen, or you're just a newly assimilated legal citizen then that that causes problems and that suggests that immigration is not working because it's not diverse it's not legal it's too large in terms of numbers and it's not merucratic so what we say we're saying to somebody if your cousin lives in Oaxaca

and you're here illegally but you're you know and you're gonna

he's going to come across to live with you.

We're going to let him come in illegally because of family ties, but we're not going to let this brain surgeon from Nigeria come in unless he goes through the whole rigmarole.

Or this computer science from Mumbai, this computer scientist, we're not going to let him come in because it's going to take four years to vet him.

And we're talking about times of a, you know, just today I woke up and I was told the new variant, the Delta variant, the Epsilon variant, all of these.

Some of them started in Latin America.

Well, okay.

So what's your point of telling us that there's new variants?

And then the next thing is Brazil, Peru, they're doing terribly in terms of these new variants.

You say, okay, in Central America.

And then the next breath is, it's racist to vet immigrants that come in here illegally.

It doesn't make sense.

You can't have it both ways.

You can't say, we've got to make every American, Joe Biden said, we're going to knock on every door in America to make sure you're vaccinated.

And you have an obligation and we're going to go after underserved communities that were victims of racism and make sure they're vaccinated.

At the same time, you're in a 12-month period.

You're letting in 2 million people whose epidemiological history you have no idea about.

Yeah.

So could I interrupt here?

Because you really actually have flowed into something I wanted to talk about in the response of the host.

And I think in the chapter on which you talk about the response of the host, you

emphasize that they haven't educated these immigrants to value the things that, and that's one thing.

But then you go further than that and talk more about how the host itself is really changing for the situation and you say something that's much further along here and I wanted to read it because it was very prescient that you this is from Mexico

yeah this is from Mexico it's very prescient and to be written in 2003 you write We have not experienced all the consequences of the Big Bang of multiculturalism, authoritarian utopianism, and cultural relativism.

What I'm calling, and I'll stop here a second, what I'm calling the response of the host, right?

And you write the isms that tell young people that facts, dates, people, and hard data are either irrelevant or biased or simply not facts at all.

And that to question such a dogma could be quote-unquote racist.

And it seems like in our current last four, three, four, five years, that's been the actual story.

And yet, you wrote this probably 15 years before that came.

And I see this all under the rubric of the response of the host is not to say we have a culture that our new immigrants, legal or illegal, need to understand and learn, but we're going to change for them for some reason.

And it's the path of that.

What happened was, you know, people can say, well, the demography changed and people who came here illegally became politically powerful.

They and their second, first and second generation offscreen became politically powerful, at least in numbers enough to flip California, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, maybe Arizona, maybe Texas, maybe Georgia.

And that's true.

But it wasn't as if people came across the border and did that on their own.

They were invited in by laxity.

And if the first thing they did when they crossed the border was break the law and there were no consequences.

And the second thing they did was reside here without legality and there were no consequences.

And the third thing they did was to find some type of illegal identification to function and there were no consequences.

Then they must have assumed that people wanted them to do that.

And they were right.

And so who were the people traditionally who were responsible for open borders?

There was a lot of special interests.

Obviously, Mexico got, as it does now, $30 billion in remittances and Central America, 30 billion, those countries.

Now, what does that mean?

That means that if you're in Oaxaca or Chiapas

or Guadalajara, or if you're in El Salvador or Honduras, go to the United States and be an entry-level worker.

Get legal subsidies, educational subsidies, food subsidies, housing subsidies from the federal government.

And And there will be people who will give it to you.

Profess loyalty to them.

Make sure your family that were born on U.S.

soil, it's legal, honors the Democratic Party.

And then the money that that frees up, not a lot, maybe $200 or $300 a week, send back to Mexico to help your family and then alleviate.

the Mexican government from social obligations.

And that's what happened.

So that's the largest source of foreign exchange in Central America.

And I think it's almost the same as oil revenues now for Mexico.

Second, those countries then said angry young males are the source of social tensions throughout history.

If they're going to be angry

of the inequalities or the lack of quote-unquote equity, let them go north.

This is Frederick Jackson Turner's

idea of the frontier as an escape valve.

Okay.

Then there was the ethnic community here.

If you're a second generation somebody Latino and all of a sudden your constituency is intermarried, your niece is named Linda Garcia or her name is her Linda Wilson and then her children is named Brandy Smith, then there's not going to, it's going to be like the Swedish

assimilation that I noticed in Kingsburg, California.

There's not going to be loyalty to your tribe and you're going to have to compete on your own merits as a politician.

However, get 1 million people, 2 million, 3 million living illegally in enclaves in California, then you are a tribalist and you represent La Raza, the word for race, which incidentally in its modern manifestations comes right directly from Francisco Franco's novel movie La Raza and from Mussolini's idea of Raza.

Tuzi's about the racial superiority in the 30s of respectively Iberians and Italians.

Okay, so Raza joined then the foreign governments.

Then there was the corporate hiring.

It was agriculture, meat packing, landscaping, hospitality, food service.

Why pay in the way of this mentality, why pay $8, $9, $10 an hour when Miguel will work twice as hard because he comes from an impoverished society.

He's never seen such affluence and he wants it.

And he's going to wash dishes for 10 hours a day.

And you're going to pay him 75% off the books with no overhead.

And when he gets injured or he burns his hand, he just goes to the emergency room and you don't have to pay for him.

And you just bring in Miguel's brother to take his place.

Or when Miguel turned 60 or 50 and he hurt his back climbing a tree to pick peaches or carrying a carcass in a packing house, then he's replaceable.

So there was the corporate right, the ethnic left, the Mexican government.

And then there was what?

The aristocratic upper middle class.

When I was growing up, if you went to Menlo Park or Palo Alto or maybe even the Upper West Side, the average professional white and Asian American did not have a

nanny.

These were the elite that had them, the aristocratic families, the oligarchies, the big fortunes, but they did not have a housekeeper, a nanny, a landscaper, etc., etc.

And now they did.

as if they were royalty themselves.

The upper middle class did.

So they were invested into it.

So when you put all of those interests in it, the Democratic Party wanting to flip states, the Mexican and Central American governments wanting money and not wanting potential troublesome social justice issues.

When you look at the corporate world that wanted the labor and you look at, as I said, the Raza

industry that wanted tribal residence, then it was very hard.

The onlybody that you had saying, why don't we just stick by the rules?

measured legal meritocratic immigration, they said, you're a racist.

And everybody would prefer to be called a child molester instead of a racist.

Okay, just to finish very briefly, it's changed though now.

And what's driving illegal immigration is almost entirely just two constituencies.

That is the Democratic Party that thinks that they can still recalibrate the demography of the United States and the ethnic industry that has now said any criticism is racist.

And we're going to talk in racial terms and your ethnic appearance is essential, not incidental to who you are.

And we reject reject the melting pot.

We like the salad bowl.

Okay.

The Mexican government, the Central American government said, you know what, our fertility rates is down to about 1.17, 1.8.

We've got this Western disease of childlessness and lack of marriage.

And we need those guys.

Don't just take them, send them up to America.

That's new.

And then they're also saying, yeah, we want the remittances, but when you look at social life and the state of Oaxaca, it's chaotic when you have one out of every two males not there, and they have women and children that are without male leadership or companionship or guidance in their own state.

That's one of the most disruptive areas of Mexico now politically, largely because the villages and the urban districts have been emptied of their young males.

So they're not really as for it as much as they were.

And corporate America and Wall Street, the Koch brothers, the Libertarians, the Chamber of Commerce, they're under such attack now

that they have backed off from the idea of open borders and it's

it's really led to automation.

So whereas agriculture used to account for about 70%

of labor and I'm looking around my area where labor intensive crops, plums, peaches, grapes, strawberries, blueberry, whatever they are, they're not there anymore.

Those industries are almost all gone.

They've been outsourced south of the border, overseas, or Latin America.

And what it is now, we have a billion and a half acres of almonds.

Why?

Because everybody likes almonds?

Not really.

Because one man on a machine can harvest 40 acres and there's no pruning or thinning.

And that's true of a lot of the crops.

So agriculture share of the illegal alien workforce is down to under 20%.

It's mostly now hotels as the employer people who are here that are undocumented.

What I'm saying is that the whole dynamic is changing and that's why there's anger and that's why the Democratic Party that bought into initially opposing illegal immigration because of its workers and then saying you know what unionism is going down the white deplorable irredeemable class in the Middle West is shot it's done for get rid of them they're they're they don't even vote they're meth head all those stereotypes that we've heard from Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton Barack Obama dregs jumps etc etc clingers So they said, we're going to switch.

We're going to get a new constituency, the young ethnic voter from south of the border.

And that's changed.

But now the Democratic Party is saying, wow,

corporations don't want,

they're not out there, you know, hand in glove with us.

And even foreign governments are a little bit reluctant.

And the people are getting angrier.

And so we've only got one thing left.

And that's racist, racist, racist, racist.

And that's where we are now.

You're very optimistic about what's the future of immigration here.

What I see at the border is a Biden administration basically

welcoming in these immigrants and then sending them to diffuse the problem, sending them throughout the United States.

And so

I feel like they haven't really given up on that agenda yet, but that might be a...

something that will have to be found out in the future whether they

stop this process of bringing in hundreds of thousands and sending them throughout the United States in the hopes that there won't be too much trouble in any one place.

At least that seems like the policy to me at this point.

We are scheduled from February of 2021 to February of 2022

to have two million, two million people.

That's two entire Greater Fresno areas into the United States who come illegally.

Almost all of those people will cross the southern border.

Almost all of them will not have English facility.

Almost all of them will not have sophisticated skills.

Almost all of them will require subsidies of some sort for a semblance of parity.

And almost all of them will be constituents, future constituents of the democratic or progressive movement.

That's just a fact.

So they know that.

So if they were intellectually honest, they would say the following.

We don't believe in borders.

That's a 20th century concept.

We believe in globalism.

And we're all children of the same planet.

So what does it matter if we bring in people from El Salvador or Honduras or whether they come from

Vietnam or whether they come from Ireland?

Or it doesn't matter whether they come legally, illegally.

Oh, they're just people.

Just let them all in.

And you know what?

It'll make us, it'll enrich.

This is a tapestry.

Diversity is our strength.

Why don't they just say that?

yeah but they don't they say the following very few people are coming in there's no such word as chaos i'm going to go down to el paso and show you if i'm camela harris that everything's fine there's a wall there we didn't like it but it's there i'm not going to go to central texas where it's chaos we're going to hide that or they're going to say if you're worried you're a racist, that you just don't like brown people.

You're a racist, even though the Mexican-American community is about 55% opposed to illegal immigration immigration for obvious reasons.

People in that community have to put up to a greater degree with crime from illegal immigrants, from higher taxes, crowded social services, schools that are not as competitive, et cetera, et cetera.

But my point is they cannot be honest about the issue.

They cannot be honest about the issue.

Just as Angela Merkel could not be honest about immigration issue.

She said it's just going to be a small number.

It's just going to be temporary.

It's not going to be affect life at all.

We can, I think she said to her Germans, we can do this.

And that's how they are.

They're never honest and transparent because to do so would mean that the people don't object it.

Because think about it.

You're a citizen of a sovereign nation and somebody comes to you and says, I have a great idea.

I don't believe that your country has a physical space that's unique.

I don't believe it has a culture that is inclusive of the people within its borders.

I think like Rome did in the fifth or fourth century, it can expand throughout the entire world and bring its benefits to everybody.

And then they can bring their benefits through osmosis.

And we won't really have an America.

We'll have sort of a, I don't know what it will be, a Mexicornia.

And that's what they're trying to do.

And they can't be honest about it.

And now they're scared stiff because people within their own party are getting very upset.

If you look at a recent poll of a Democratic poll,

I think it was called a Majority Future Poll, or you look at some of the Trafalgar polls, it shows very clearly that on about a basket of 10 issues, Joe Biden is polling beneath 50%, except on COVID, which he was wisely and carefully just

plagiarized Donald Trump and said it was his while he kept the contracts for the new vaccinations and outsourced their administration to the states.

Very smart.

It was suddenly not to be tampered with.

But he tampered with everything else, the economy, and he tampered with immigration.

And

so that's where we are.

But most people say, you know what?

I don't like that.

I mean, you see these polls showing 65% disapproval of the border.

You know they have to lie to continue it.

Thank you, Victor.

We're at the end of our time here, so we'll have to close it off there.

But I would like to, for our listeners, highly recommend that they read Mexicornia, which seems like a micro study of what might be going on for the greater America.

And then two, to pre-order your coming book, A Dying Citizen, that's all about citizenship as it seems to be a central issue in our nation.

And then also with this problem of immigration that we're currently experiencing.

So, pre-order A Dying Citizen, and please look at the new edition that's just been put out, I think, this July by Roger Kimball's The Encounter Press.

And

we thank you very much, Victor Hansen.

And this is Victor Davis Hansen and Sammy Wink signing off.

Thank you very much.