Until a generation ago the South was relatively free of immigration due to the extreme poverty forced upon it by the US. After the US war against the South and period of military occupation and social experimentation there followed a long period of economic exploitation where the South functioned as a colony for the North, providing raw materials for Northern industries. This poverty, while extremely burdensome on a people that had been one of the wealthiest in the world prior to US invasion, kept immigration to a bare minimum. Combined with the US laws which prevented non-Western immigration, the South maintained homogeneous populations and native cultures from Virginia to Texas. Meanwhile, a tidal wave of southern and eastern European immigration (including peoples and cultures which had never been part of the US population to that point), flooded many regions of the Northeast and Midwest, changing the demographics in those regions. The process began in the decades leading up to Southern secession with large numbers of liberal-democratic German (in stark contrast to the sort of Germans who came to America during Colonial times) refugees who fled after the failed 1848 revolution in the German States settling almost exclusively in the North, especially in the Midwest. Many of these immigrants became enthusiastic supporters of the forced-Unionist cause in the 1860s, as noted by Patrick Young, law professor, program director of the Central American Refugee Center and founding chairman of the Long Island Immigrant Alliance (who possesses an amazing ability to use the mis-nomer “Civil War” in reference to the US invasion of the South in virtually every sentence on the subject):

The fact that the overwhelming portion of these 1848 new Americans went to the free states would have no small impact on the outcome of the Civil War [sic]. The North absorbed 90 percent of the new immigrants, adding tremendously to its economic power and military strength in the Civil War [sic] era.  Ultimately, the decisions immigrants made on where to settle would help determine the outcome of the war.

The 1848 immigrants and those who followed didn’t just help win the Civil War [sic], they began the construction of the vibrant multicultural America we live in today.

The flow of European immigrants to the North continued throughout and after the 1860s. Prior to this time most of the immigrants who settled in America were of British or German origin, closely-related peoples who shared a common civilisation and many ethnic, cultural and historical connections. The new immigration that began especially in the late 1800s was quite different, incorporating large number of Slavic, Latin, and Jewish people. Again, the South was largely spared this influx and retained its distinctly British/German population (which by this time had merged into a common Southern identity):

Historians estimate that fewer than one million immigrants—perhaps as few as 400,000—crossed the Atlantic during the 17th and 18th centuries. The 1790 Act limited naturalization to “free white persons”; it was expanded to include blacks in the 1860s and Asians in the 1950s. In the early years of the United States, immigration was fewer than 8,000 people a year, including French refugees from the slave revolt in Haiti. After 1820, immigration gradually increased. From 1836 to 1914, over 30 million Europeans migrated to the United States. The death rate on these transatlantic voyages was high, during which one in seven travelers died. In 1875, the nation [sic] passed its first immigration law.

The peak year of European immigration was in 1907, when 1,285,349 persons entered the country. By 1910, 13.5 million immigrants were living in the United States. In 1921, the Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, followed by the Immigration Act of 1924. The 1924 Act was aimed at further restricting the Southern and Eastern Europeans, especially Jews, Italians, and Slavs, who had begun to enter the country in large numbers beginning in the 1890s:

In response to the massive demographic change and unchecked immigration, so-called “nativist” groups sprang up in Midwestern and Northern States in the 1920s to promote US nationalism and oppose the new immigration. One of these groups was the Second Ku Klux Klan. Inspired by the Southern nationalist paramilitary organisation which fought the Union occupation and Reconstruction governments in the South after the US conquest, Midwesterners and Northerners brought back the Klan in a new form to promote their own national identity and oppose their displacement as a people:

The second Klan arose during the nadir of American race relations, in response to urbanization and industrialization. Massive immigration of Catholics and Jews from eastern and southern Europe led to fears among Protestants. The Great Migration of African Americans to the North stoked racism by whites in Northern industrial cities; thus the second Klan would achieve its greatest political power not in any Southern state, but inIndiana. The migration of African Americans and whites from rural areas to Southern cities further increased tensions. The Klan grew most rapidly in urbanizing cities which had high growth rates between 1910 and 1930, such as Detroit, Memphis, Dayton, Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston. In Michigan, more than half of the members lived in Detroit and were concerned about urban issues: limited housing, rapid social change, competition for jobs. Stanley Horn, a Southern historian sympathetic to the first Klan, was careful in an oral interview to distinguish it from the later “spurious Ku Klux organization which was in ill-repute—and, of course, had no connection whatsoever with the Klan of Reconstruction days“.

…In the new social environment of 20th century America, the new Klan found it necessary to shift and broaden its focus away from Reconstruction-era issues. [William J] Simmons initially met with little success in either recruiting members or in raising money, and the Klan only gained momentum as a mass movement after 1920, when he handed its day-to-day activities over to two professional publicists from Atlanta, Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke. In reaction to social changes, and under the influence of Tyler and Clarke, the Klan adopted anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, anti-Communist and anti-immigrant slants. It now sold itself as a nativist and strenuously patriotic organization, and it focused on support for vigorous enforcement of prohibition laws. In the 1920s it became an organization with its core in the Midwest, and a majority of its members lived north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Indeed, the influential silent film The Birth of a Nation, which inspired the rise of the Second Klan, concludes with the quote “The former enemies of the North and South are united again in common defence of their Aryan birthright.” Federal symbolism accompany this quote. Southerners might have cheered the movie for its pro-Confederate story, but it’s hard to miss the fact that the original Southern nationalist First Klan had been altered on the silver screen to promote a message of US nationalism that appealed mostly to Northerners. Approximately four million men, primarily in the Midwest, joined the Second Klan:

The Klan had major political influence in several states, and it was influential mostly in the center of the country. The Klan spread from the South into the Midwest and Northern states. It also arose in Canada, where there was a large movement against Catholic immigrants. At its peak, Klan membership exceeded four million and comprised 20% of the adult white male population in many broad geographic regions, and 40% in some areas. Most of the Klan’s membership resided in Midwestern states.

In another well-known example from 1924, the Klan decided to turn Anaheim, California, into a model Klan city. It secretly took over the City Council. When the members’ affiliation became known, the city conducted a special recall election, and citizens voted out the Klan members.

The Klan issue played a significant role at the bitterly divisive 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York City. The leading candidates were Protestant William Gibbs McAdoo, with a base in areas where the Klan was strong, and Catholic New York Governor Al Smith, with a base in the large cities. After weeks of stalemate, both candidates withdrew in favor of a compromise.

…The Ku Klux Klan rose to prominence in Indiana politics and society after World War I. It was made up of American-born, white Protestants of many income and social levels. Nationally, in the 1920s, Indiana had the most powerful Ku Klux Klan. Though it counted a high number of members statewide, (over 30% of its white male citizens) its importance peaked with the 1924 election of Edward Jackson for governor. A short time later, the scandal surrounding the murder trial of D.C. Stephenson destroyed the image of the Ku Klux Klan as upholders of law and order. By 1926 the Ku Klux Klan was “crippled and discredited.”

As massive and disruptive as southern and eastern European immigration to the North was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a new and far more destructive immigration from the Third World began in the 1960s. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was sponsored by Democratic Representative Emanuel Celler of New York and Democratic Senators Philip Hart of Michigan and Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. It’s impossible to ignore the fact that the supporters of eliminating the Immigration Act of 1924, which put an annual cap on immigration to 2% of the existing US population and banned Third World immigration completely, were Northern Leftists within the traditional party of the South (this and Democratic support for the so-called “Civil Rights” Movement prompted most Southerners to change their allegiance to the once-hated Republican Party). Senator Kennedy defended the ’65 bill by promising the public that it would not re-make the demographic composition of the United States:

First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same…. Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset…. Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia…. In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think.

Kennedy’s promises proved not to be worth the hot air with which they were spoken:

By changing long-held immigration policies, the act resulted in new immigration from non-European nations which changed the ethnic make-up of the United States. Immigration doubled between 1965 and 1970, and doubled again between 1970 and 1990. The most dramatic effect was to shift immigration from Europe to Asia and Central and South America.

Since the ’65 act, Republicans and Democrats alike have worked to open wider the doors to the Third World, allowing in tens of millions of immigrants, continuing the process of displacing native Western populations and cultures within the US:

While European immigrants accounted for nearly 60% of the total foreign population in 1970, they accounted for only 15% in 2000. Immigration doubled between 1965 and 1970, and again between 1970 and 1990. In 1990, George H. W. Bush signed the Immigration Act of 1990, which increased legal immigration to the United States by 40%. Appointed by Bill Clinton, the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform recommended reducing legal immigration from about 800,000 people per year to approximately 550,000. While an influx of new residents from different cultures presents some challenges, “the United States has always been energized by its immigrant populations,” said President Bill Clintonin 1998. “America has constantly drawn strength and spirit from wave after wave of immigrants [...] They have proved to be the most restless, the most adventurous, the most innovative, the most industrious of people.”

Nearly eight million immigrants came to the United States from 2000 to 2005, more than in any other five-year period in the nation’s history. Almost half entered illegally. Since 1986, Congress has passed seven amnesties for illegal immigrants. In 1986, Ronald Reagan signed immigration reform that gave amnesty to 3 million illegal immigrants in the country. Hispanic immigrants were among the first victims of the late-2000s recession, but since the recession’s end in June 2009, immigrants posted a net gain of 656,000 jobs. 1.1 million immigrants were granted legal residence in 2009.

The long-term demographic, cultural and political implications of the ’65 act and the subsequent expansion of Third World immigration have been nothing less than a complete re-making of the United States population:

A Boston Globe article attributed Barack Obama’s win in the 2008 U.S. Presidential election to a marked reduction over the preceding decades in the percentage of whites in the American electorate, attributing this demographic change to the Act. The article quoted Simon Rosenberg, president and founder of the New Democrat Network, as having said that the Act is “the most important piece of legislation that no one’s ever heard of,” and that it “set America on a very different demographic course than the previous 300 years,” which is contrary to Ted Kennedy’s initial claim during debate of the Act that “the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.”

The tidal wave of new-comers, especially from Latin America, continues with millions of legal and illegal immigrants pouring into the United States:

The United States admitted more legal immigrants from 1991 to 2000, between ten to eleven million, than in any previous decade.

…By 1970 immigrants accounted for 4.7 percent of the US population and rising to 6.2 percent in 1980, with an estimated 12.5 percent to this date. As of 2010, a quarter of the residents of the United States under 18 are immigrants or are immigrants’ children. Eight percent of all babies born in the U.S. in 2008 belonged to illegal immigrant parents, according to a recent analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data by the Pew Hispanic Center.

…Legal immigration to the U.S. increased from 250,000 in the 1930s, to 2.5 million in the 1950s, to 4.5 million in the 1970s, and to 7.3 million in the 1980s, before resting at about 10 million in the 1990s. Since 2000, legal immigrants to the United States number approximately 1,000,000 per year, of whom about 600,000 are Change of Status who already are in the U.S. Legal immigrants to the United States now are at their highest level ever, at just over 37,000,000 legal immigrants. Illegal immigration may be as high as 1,500,000 per year with a net of at least 700,000 illegal immigrants arriving every year. Immigration led to a 57.4% increase in foreign born population from 1990 to 2000.

Nearly all of the new immigration is non-Western from the Third World, exactly the opposite of immigration to the US prior to 1965:

The top twelve emigrant countries in 2006 were Mexico (173,753), People’s Republic of China (87,345), Philippines (74,607), India (61,369), Cuba (45,614), Colombia (43,151), Dominican Republic (38,069), El Salvador (31,783), Vietnam (30,695), Jamaica(24,976), South Korea (24,386), Guatemala (24,146).

Thanks to economically-destructive protectionist and pro-union policies in the Rust Belt States combined with massive Federal spending in the South (especially military spending), increased Southern prosperity and Northern migration to the South, Southerners has borne the brunt of recent Third World immigration. Immigrant ghettos have sprung up in previously homogeneous towns and cities across Dixie. The chart below highlights the massive growth of foreign populations in the Southern States between 1990 and 2000.

Where is this demographic revolution heading? It seems clear that the end result will be a Third World America with a small Western minority, much like present-day South Africa. CBS News reported in the summer of 2011 that minorities now make up the majority of US babies. A minority-majority USA is only a generation or two away.

For the first time, minorities make up a majority of babies in the U.S., part of a sweeping race change and a growing age divide between mostly white, older Americans and predominantly minority youths that could reshape government policies.

…Demographers say the numbers provide the clearest confirmation yet of a changing social order, one in which racial and ethnic minorities will become the U.S. majority by midcentury.

…Currently, non-Hispanic whites make up just under half of all children 3 years old, which is the youngest age group shown in the Census Bureau’s October 2009 annual survey, its most recent. In 1990, more than 60 percent of children in that age group were white.

William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who analyzed the data, said figures in the 2009 survey can sometimes be inexact compared with the 2010 census, which queries the entire nation [sic]. But he said when factoring in the 2010 data released so far, minorities outnumber whites among babies under age 2.

The preliminary figures are based on an analysis of the Current Population Survey as well as the 2009 American Community Survey, which sampled 3 million U.S. households to determine that whites made up 51 percent of babies younger than 2. After taking into account a larger-than-expected jump in the minority child population in the 2010 census, the share of white babies falls below 50 percent.

Southern States have responded by attempting to stem the Third World tide while Northern States have welcomed the change:

Alabama became the latest state this month to pass a wide-ranging anti-immigration law, which in part requires schools to report students’ immigration status to state authorities. That follows tough immigration measures passed in similarly Republican-leaning states such as Georgia, Arizona and South Carolina.

But governors in Massachusetts, New York and Illinois, which long have been home to numerous immigrants, have opted out of the federal Secure Communities program that aims to deport dangerous criminals, saying it has made illegal immigrants afraid of reporting crimes to police. California may soon opt out as well.

The Federal Government has consistently blocked attempts to prevent the displacement of Southerners. The most recent example of this comes from South Carolina,  a State hit particularly hard by immigration in recent years as indicated in the above chart:

A federal judge on Thursday blocked three key provisions of South Carolina’s controversial law cracking down on illegal immigration.

U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel granted the federal government’s request for an injunction against the law that’s set to take effect Jan. 1.

The ruling applies to portions that require law officers to check the status of anyone they stop for something else and suspect is in the country illegally. Gergel also halted the implementation of sections pertaining to the transportation of illegal immigrants and immigrant registration cards.

Gergel has denied the state’s request that he suspend all court hearings on the case until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on a challenge to Arizona’s similar law. South Carolina prosecutors have said the nation’s [sic] high court will likely rule in six months or less.

It seems clear that Washington, DC will continue to promote Third World immigration and block attempts by Southern States to stem the immigrant tide. As long as Southern States and communities continue to go hat in hand before the US Federal Supreme Court to challenge Federal court decisions striking down Southern immigration laws there is no hope in stopping the displacement of Southerners and the transformation of Dixie into a Third World land. The Federal courts will continue to decide against the Southern States and Federal politicians will continue to vote for more more legal Third World immigration and more amnesties for illegal immigrants. A generation or two from now the South will be virtually unrecognisable. On the political front, if Southerners wish to preserve their people, culture, prosperity and security they will need the courage to defy Federal courts and government mandates. On the cultural and education front, Southerners will have to pull together to educate their own children to pass on their historical perspective and cultural norms and engage in institution-building rather than attempting to take-over institutions which are thoroughly controlled by those who oppose Southern identity and culture. On the business front, Southerners will have to need to do business with fellow Southerners and as much as possible avoid supporting those businesses which hire and empower immigrants. It will be an uphill struggle to prevent the elimination of the Southern people and culture, but it can be done. Many people are waking up to the demographic reality of the present, as indicated by strong public support for immigration restrictions and the passing of immigration laws in Southern States. As the demographic trend continues to play out, the backlash against Third World immigration will grow in strength. The security industry, already an exploding part of the economy in South Africa and other places where the government is actively working to eliminate and replace Western people with Third World populations, will continue to grow in the South. Southerners will continue to segregate themselves from immigrant and non-Western ghettos as is happening across the United States and the Western world in general. Well-known media figures such as Pat Buchanan have written and spoken about the on-going balkanisation of the United States into small, homogeneous areas and communities composed of people of a similar ethnic, religious or cultural identity. Southerners will need to enthusiastically support this trend and promote the well-being, growth and independence of Southern enclaves. This is how the Southern people and culture can be preserved and can ultimately survive the coming collapse of the US Empire and emerge on the other side of the collapse as a thriving nation of their own.

Tags: balkanization of the united states, german revolution 1848, immigration, immigration act of 1965, ku klux klan, mexican hispanic population, southern states demographics, third world immigration

This entry was posted on December 28, 2011 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Featured, News & Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.