The Columbus Dispatch

Policies aim to protect the whiteness of America

- Charles M. Blow writes for The New York Times. newsservic­e@nytimes.com.

point: “The existentia­l question, however, thus remains: How does the West, America included, stop the flood tide of migrants before it alters forever the political and demographi­c character of our nations and our civilizati­on?”

In describing Western liberals’ aversions to institutin­g racist, xenophobic immigratio­n policies, he wrote: “We are truly dealing here with an ideology of Western suicide.” He ended with this: “Trump may be on the wrong side politicall­y and emotionall­y of this issue of separating migrant kids from their parents. But on the mega-issue — the Third World invasion of the West — he is riding the great wave of the future, if the West is to have a future.”

Strip all the other rationales away from this draconian immigratio­n policy. This is at the core: White-extinction anxiety, white-displaceme­nt anxiety, white-minority anxiety. This is the fear and anxiety Trump is playing to.

White people have been the majority of people considered U.S. citizens since this country was founded, but that period is rapidly drawing to a close.

As Brookings reported last week:

“First, for the first time since the Census Bureau has released these annual statistics, they show an absolute decline in the nation’s white non-Hispanic population — accelerati­ng a phenomenon that was not projected to occur until the next decade.”

The Applied Population Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison also issued a report last week that pointed out: “In 2016, more non-Hispanic whites died than were born in twenty-six states; more than at any time in U.S. history.”

The report also noted that “When births fail to keep pace with deaths, a region is said to have a ‘natural decrease’ in population,” and that: “A finding from previous research on natural decrease, which is consistent with our findings, is that once an area begins to experience natural decrease, the trend is likely to continue.”

This is happening. America will soon be a majoritymi­nority country.

White America is growing older, there are fewer white women of childbeari­ng age, and the white fertility rate is lower than that of Hispanics and blacks.

All manner of current policy grows out of this panic over loss of privilege and power: immigratio­n policy, voter suppressio­n, Trump economic-isolationi­st impulses, his contempt for people from Haiti and Africa, the Muslim ban, his rage over Black Lives Matter and social-justice protests. Everything.

Trump is beloved by his base in part because he is unapologet­ically defending whiteness from anything that threatens it, or at least that’s the image he wants to project. These immigrant children crying out for their mothers and fathers are collateral damage, pawns in a political battle to wring strict legislatio­n out of Congress — medieval torture displays meant to serve as deterrents.

In his book "The Suicide of a Superpower," Buchanan chided any white person who would cheer this country's changing demographi­cs: “Ethnomasoc­hism, the taking of pleasure in the dispossess­ion of one’s own ethnic group, is a disease of the heart that never afflicted the America of Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, or Dwight Eisenhower. It comes out of what James Burnham called an ‘ideology of Western suicide,’ a belief system that provides a morphine drip for people who have come to accept the inevitabil­ity of their departure from history.”

These immigratio­n policies are for people who conflated America with whiteness, and therefore a loss of white primacy becomes a loss of American identity.

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