My mother used to read from this old book of fables like Aesop’s called The Wonder Clock by Howard Pyle. There were twenty-four stories for every hour of the day, all with a moral, and most of them had to do with being unselfish, or greedy, or arrogant, ending in a good deed being inadvertently rewarded and selfishness resulting in self-destruction. The stories took a circuitous route, never obvious, and I was always wrong in my guess about what the lesson was until the very end. My favorite was How Three Went Out Into the Wide World about a Grey Goose, a Sausage, a Cock and a Fox because it had the twist of trust and gullibility and wanting to do good, where reason and common sense should have prevailed instead. The goose, the sausage and the cock were individualists who lived free and the fox wants to come into their forest. They unselfishly allow him in and everyone lives together for awhile until the fox starts to get hungry and over time demands that each one give up more and more of themselves, until he eats them. As much as the fox convinced them that he could share their world, the fox had his needs and had no desire to live as they did. The end of the fable said this: “Some folks say that it is not so, but I tell you that the ways of the world are the ways of the world, even in the deep forest.” Meaning well, the goose, the sausage and the cock wanted to share their world with some one they did not realize could not or would not conform to their way of life or respect their rules. One could also take away from this that no good deed goes unpunished. Unselfishness and good intentions are one thing, but handing over all your power so that you eventually are undermined, threatens your very existence.

The charity of feeling sympathy to illegals entering this country also has the gift of making you feel good, but its consequences are dire. With such large numbers as we have now, it offers the person no real opportunity to improve his condition in the long run without taking something away from others. This gesture of charity doesn’t help anybody else if the society cannot sustain it. Immigration works when it happens slowly; it does not work when it happens so fast and on such a large scale, that there is no chance to assimilate. The country is then fundamentally changed. And what that means is the end of Western civilization, not merely a Hispanization of America, and where then will you go to find it? My view is shared by a lot of thoughtful people. Because we are not just talking about being charitable here, we are talking about the cultural survival of our country as we have known it. The problem is far more endemic and goes to the core of whom and what we want to be as a nation.
We are all immigrants: my own mother was born overseas but my Dutch grandmother had to wait to come into this country like everybody else, and she was married to an American citizen, my grandfather. The “melting pot” is not simply an idea; it reflects our ethno-cultural core of what it means to be an American. If we do not have an over aching culture, by what are we held together? Rather than become a polyglot of nationalities resulting in a “Balkanization” of America with a lot of “nationals in exile” from other countries, we should set certain conditions for immigration. That is the right of any nation. We are called a “nation of immigrants” but the truth is we have never had more than 12% of the population at any time representing that segment until the last twenty years or so. Now the tide is rushing in so fast, we may be drowning. It is the biggest dilemma facing us today and we have to answer the question: can we survive open borders? And if we do, what will that survival look like? It does no good to put your head in the sand, deride others for their so-called xenophobia, and feel good about being a superior human being who cares about those who have less. All of us have ancestors from somewhere else, but we adapted ourselves to our new home and we are not just hyphenated Americans.