As the 2024 United States (U.S.) presidential election draws closer to an end, I’ve paid close attention to the issue of immigration. Reportedly 82% of Donald Trump supporters, 39% of Kamala Harris supporters, and an overall 61% of all voters list this matter as a concerning issue.
Lawful permanent residents, evacuees, refuges, asylum seekers, illegal aliens, migrants, immigrants, resident alien permit holders, undocumented citizens, illegal immigrants, permanent resident aliens, illegals, or whatever acceptable term is currently popular, I’m referencing people who’ve recently originated from outside of the U.S. and who are now within the country.
One needn’t guess my perspective on this matter. For the record, I’ve already expressed my stance on this issue in the following blogposts:
While I support legal and vetted immigration, I reject the current state of unfettered access to the U.S. by people from national, cultural, religious, ethnic, or racial backgrounds within a relatively recent amount of time. Also, I’m unmoved by irrational appeals to emotion concerning my perspective.
Simply because women and children, non-straight, religiously oppressed, or citizens of war-torn nations are put forward as the face of immigration to the U.S. doesn’t mean that I’ll set aside logic and reason (collectively “rational” thought) in regard to how I address this matter.
To elucidate this point, I’ll evoke the memory of nitape’skw, a Native American who befriended me. Growing up in Texas, I was taught a one-sided perspective of how Natives of the Americas were allegedly integrated into European culture by supposedly benevolent colonizers.
It was nitape’skw who challenged my perspective in this regard. Not only did she use subjective storylines of her people to present her case, she employed use of rational thinking. To share her stance, as I understand it, consider the following syllogism:
Form (hypothetical) –
If p, then q; if q, then r; therefore, if p, then r.
Example –
Major premise: If uninvited foreigners visit the land of your ancestors, then in due time these immigrants may overpopulate the land and outnumber you.
Minor premise: If in due time these immigrants may overpopulate the land and outnumber you, then people without a historical claim to your ancestral land may be considered a threat.
Conclusion: Therefore, if uninvited foreigners visit the land of your ancestors, then people without a historical claim to your ancestral land may be considered a threat.
The major and minor premises follow logical form. Being that a syllogistic conclusion is considered rational only when it is both logical and reasonable, how may one assess the reasonableness of the conclusive proposal?
A cursory glance at the historical record suggests that – whether direct or indirect, intentional or unintentional – Natives of North, Central, and South America did have their way of life threatened by European presence within the Americas. Herein, I’ve drawn no moral or ethical claims to suggest the overall good, bad, or otherwise outcome of such an obvious threat.
I don’t know if nitape’skw would agree with my interpretation of her proposal, as she wasn’t critiquing contemporary immigration. Rather, her historical perspective, as I understand it, was that Europeans were a threat to the indigenous people of the Americas. That’s a rational claim.
Similar to how I refuse to make use of irrational thinking in regard to this matter, I reject ad hominem attacks concerning my perspective. Uncharitably referring to me as being racist, xenophobic, bigoted, or hateful is an ineffective strategy in regard to one who rejects shame, because I value rationality over juvenile name-calling behavior.
Having outlined my shared perspective regarding that of nitape’skw, I’m reminded of the song “Nature of the Threat” from lyricist Ras Kass which was released on his 1996 album Soul on Ice. Notably, I don’t agree with his historical and racial perspective, though I think one particular section of the song is worth addressing:
Now since people of color are genetically dominant
And Caucasoids are genetically recessive
And whites expect to be predominant, meaning survive as a race then
They simply must take precautions
That’s why they’re worried about their future now
‘Cause by 2050 almost all the Earth’s population will be brown
Then black, so understandin’ that, whites counter-react
(Man I’m saying, the fools ain’t nothing but a teaspoon of milk in a world color majority)
In “Nature of the Threat,” Ras Kass proposed that “by 2050 almost all the Earth’s population will be brown.” To some people, this rhetoric is presumably associated with what is known as the great replacement theory. Of this, Wikipedia reports:
The Great Replacement (French: grand remplacement), also known as replacement theory or great replacement theory, is a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory espoused by French author Renaud Camus.
The original theory states that, with the complicity or cooperation of “replacist” elites, the ethnic French and white European populations at large are being demographically and culturally replaced by non-white peoples—especially from Muslim-majority countries—through mass migration, demographic growth and a drop in the birth rate of white Europeans.
Since then, similar claims have been advanced in other national contexts, notably in the United States. Mainstream scholars have dismissed these claims of a conspiracy of “replacist” elites as rooted in a misunderstanding of demographic statistics and premised upon an unscientific, racist worldview. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Great Replacement “has been widely ridiculed for its blatant absurdity.”
Whoever wrote and/or edited the Wikipedia entry used a disingenuous perspective on what was noted as far back as 1996 by Ras Kass. Why is the so-called “conspiracy theory” rendered to “blatant absurdity” when its allegedly “unscientific” claims are readily observable?
On February 17, 2015, when he was the Vice President of the U.S., Joe Biden gave a speech in which he stated:
An unrelenting stream of immigration – nonstop, nonstop. Folks like me who are Caucasian, of European descent, for the first time in 2017, we’ll be an absolute minority in the United States of America. Absolute minority! Fewer than 50% of the people in American from then and on will be of white European stock. That’s not a bad thing. That’s a source of our strength […] It’s not going to stop. Nor should we want it to stop.
Biden used a preferential should statement when expressing that not only were white people on track to being a minority within the U.S., people should want what he presumably considered to be the inevitability of change. Imagine if the same argument was proposed to Natives when Europeans arrived in the Americas.
A little over a month following Biden’s speech, one source reported on May 19, 2015:
There are 3.7 million individuals who would benefit from DAPA [Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents]. Combined, these individuals have 5.5 million
U.S. citizen children—all of whom already are or will eventually become eligible to vote. If DAPA were implemented, these 5.5 million individuals would no longer have to fear that their parents could be detained or deported at any time.
More than half a million of these children—nearly 600,000—are currently of voting age, and 1.7 million will be of voting age by the 2020 presidential election. These numbers could provide sizable contributions to the margin of victory in swing states.
In 2015, Biden openly bragged about the existence of white people prophetically being threatened by foreign populations of the world. In that same year, the aforementioned source boasted of an apparent attempt to swing elections in favor of those who supported DAPA (Democratic Party).
Not one to refrain from reiteration of a contentious point, Biden later stated on September 7, 2016:
One of the reasons why we’re the most innovative country in the world is we’ve had an unrelenting stream of immigrants picking — cherry picking the most courageous, the brightest, the most adventuresome, the most optimistic because it takes an awful lot of courage to pick up and go.
They happen to be the people who caused the greatest consequential loss for their own country because they have this sense of “I’ll take a chance to make it better for my family.” That’s what built the United States of America.
Biden committed the logical fallacy of an appeal to tradition. Describing this irrational phenomenon, one source states:
Using historical preferences of the people (tradition), either in general or as specific as the historical preferences of a single individual, as evidence that the historical preference is correct. Traditions are often passed from generation to generation with no other explanation besides, “this is the way it has always been done”—which is not a reason, it is an absence of a reason.
From the perspective of European immigrants, changing the national, cultural, racial, or ethnic identity of a North American country is good, because “that’s what built the United States of America.” From the outlook of Native American ancestors, perhaps that appeal to tradition isn’t so good.
Now, given the so-called great replacement “conspiracy theory,” non-U.S. citizens may consider it good to change the demographics of this nation. However, those who are more nationalistic or populistic may argue that such change isn’t so good.
According to one source that commented on Biden’s role as U.S. president, “Since January 2021, more than 7.1 million illegal immigrants have been apprehended at the southern border alone—a figure that does not include “got aways” that evade U.S. [Customs and] Border Protection [CBP]. In September 2023, there were roughly 305,000 births in the United States.”
A separate source reports a slightly lower number, stating, “Of those 6.5 million encounters by CBP, 2.5 million people have been released into the U.S. with notices to appear in immigration court or report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the future, or other classifications, such as parole.”
Being charitable to the perceived nature of the threat regarding a demographic shift, consider the lower number of proposed immigrants. 6.5 million people – a presumably sizable number of whom are of non-European ancestry and who will have children born within the U.S. – could unalterably change this nation.
Keeping in mind that a scientific theory is testable and serves as a well-supported attempt to explain reality, based on the scientific method and corroboration, the nature of the threat outlined by Ras Kass and suggested by the so-called great replacement theory appears to be true.
Unlike so many people I’ve observed who naïvely believe that voting for one presidential candidate over another will lead to substantive change in this regard, I’m not affected by such irrational belief. Therefore, I’m far less likely to self-disturb if or when an ostensible nature of the threat isn’t stopped.
Likewise, I don’t use unhelpful global evaluations regarding a perceived threat to the existence of the U.S. – a country to which I devoted 11 years of active duty military service. In particular, I don’t waste time labeling mass immigration as good, bad, right, wrong, or otherwise.
Moreover, I devote what little time I have left in this life toward controlling my reactions to matters with which I disagree and attempting to influence other people so that they may stop upsetting themselves with unproductive beliefs. That’s about all I can actually do at this time.
Am I personally being threatened by the changing demographics within the U.S.? No. Do I suspect that the U.S., as I’ve known it for just under five decades, is being threatened by changing demographics? Yes.
Can I rationally do anything other than focus on my reactions to the perceived nature of the threat and draft a poorly written blogpost to potentially influence others? No. Thus, I’m doing what I can.
In closing, when telling me the story of her people, nitape’skw expressed how changing demographics almost completely decimated her tribe. Likely, if I regrettably live to an elderly age, I’ll be the one telling others about how mass immigration almost devastated my country.
Perhaps the one key difference between nitape’skw and I in this regard is that I’ll be able to say I didn’t needlessly upset myself with unfavorable beliefs about an existence I’d already unconditionally accepted as impermanent and uncertain. Tahu!
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Deric Hollings, LPC, LCSW
References:
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