When does an “overeager and ill-considered contrariness” crossover from mere assholishness into what we properly consider to be race-hatred or white/cultural supremacy? That’s really not the question, though, because the National Review is the only magazine/webzine of its type that regularly has to fire people for going too far on the race-hatred. And, frankly, they have a pretty low standard for that anyway.

But enough with that political correctness, amirite?

The point is to be provocative.

Oh, the point is also to put some butts in the luxury cabins on the National Review’s latest cruise (the Danube sounds nice), but I digress.

In any case, it’s true that there are countries in the world that really haven’t signed up for our kind of pluralistic mixing of races, religions, languages, and cultures. The Swiss, for example, and the Japanese. And it’s true that these countries can seem pretty racist by our standards when our standards don’t necessarily fit them. Fortunately, however, the Swiss never got much involved in the human flesh trade and when the Japanese attempted it they got microwaved. The question could be better framed by trying to understand what kind of place a country must be rather than what kind of country most of their citizens might want to be.

Here in America, we need immigrants to fill our labor needs, just as Europe discovered they needed Turks and Arabs in their workforces. Our choices really were to not have the kind of economy we needed or to accede to an influx of folks whose first language isn’t English or German or French. It’s pretty much always been this way in America, at least once we’d established an industrial base. And we’ve always welcomed our new immigrant friends with a giant middle finger.

That is, we’ve always had lots of folks who were genuinely incensed if not outright panicked about the influx of Wops and Micks and Pollocks and Wetbacks. You could call these people assholes or “nationalists” or “know-nothings,” but I think it’s okay to call them racists, too.

In America, at least, the constant presence of a new generation of unwelcome immigrants is as much a part of what characterizes our culture as the beret or the baguette are for the French.

Because we’re also incredibly bighearted and generous to these folks. For all the whining about “pressing ‘1’ for English,” the majority of Americans accept that we’re a nation of immigrants and likes it this way.

For us, what makes America distinct and great isn’t anything that exists prior to these immigrants coming in and adding their contributions, but the fact that they’re always coming and always contributing.

The Swiss and the Japanese don’t have the same history with immigration, and they haven’t historically had the same labor needs. But, here’s the key, if they need immigrant labor then they need to adapt their cultural expectations rather than form nationalist parties based on the idea of preserving their cultural identity. It’s okay to be proud of your Japaneseness or Swissness or Frenchness, but once your country has to become diverse for economic reasons, you lose the right to expect that everything will remain as before.

What happens is that some people always figure out that there’s political power to be had in representing and stoking people’s discomfort with change. Racism is how this manifests itself. So, you tell people that you’re going to slow the pace of change (reduce immigration) or you’re going to roll it back (you’ll deport all the undocumented workers). You suggest to people that all their tax money is going to lazy immigrants. You spread the fear that the immigrants carry disease. You feed off the natural annoyance people have of not being able to understand foreign languages that are being spoken in their communities. You play off religious differences and schisms.

Oh, and you also constantly tell people how great they are, how great they were before all this change, and how great they can be again if we can just roll back the clock to some idyllic period that (in this country) never really existed.

Needless to say, this is all bullshit. It always makes people worse people than they were before they were exposed to your exploitative hate-mongering. And it’s always a distraction from the real issue, which is the demand for labor.

When states crack down on undocumented workers, the first thing that happens is that their produce rots on the trees and in the fields.

So, yeah, it’s kind of a natural human response to immigration that some percentage of people will feel very uncomfortable, but the people who live off and heighten that discomfort are worse than mere contrarians. They’re sociopathic manipulators whose net effect is basically evil.

Just like the poor, they are always with us.