Migration, Invasion, or Settlement?

In recent years, European advocates for mass immigration have taken up the euphemism “migration” to describe the process they champion. The abbreviated version of the word is less freighted with negative connotations, and serves to anesthetize the general public by evoking images of people who move from place to place occasionally — maybe seasonal farm workers or pastoral nomads — but certainly not a massive influx of hostile aliens.

In other words, nothing like the reality of 21st-century Europe.

Frequent arguments may be heard within Counterjihad circles about what term best describes what is going on now in Europe, since “immigration” hardly covers it. Other suggestions include “invasion” and “colonization”, and I would add “settlement” to the list. But none of these quite captures the essence of what is happening.

Invasion implies an armed incursion, and at least a token resistance by the population that is being invaded. None of that is in evidence in Europe — the target population is largely passive, thanks to generous amounts of soma provided by the welfare state, and the invaders have actually been invited in by the political leaders of the invaded countries.

Colonization also implies a coordinated effort by a militarily superior armed power to overcome the target population. Colonizing a foreign country is similar to invading it, except that any resistance offered by the colony is asymmetric and ineffective. Colonists are not invited in and welcomed by the leaders of the colonized country, unless the latter have already lost the battle and are accepting a fait accompli.

Settlement comes slightly closer, because it implies migration to a land that is open for occupation and exploitation. Yet such a land should be sparsely-populated or uninhabited. Iceland was settled. North America was settled. Europe is not being settled; it is being willingly ceded to an alien population.

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For a change of pace, we’ll take a breather from the Jihad and look at what’s happening today in the United States.

Islamization is the larger threat in the long term, but the immediate danger here in the U.S.A. is Mexicanization. Last night I happened to stumble across the following map, which I adapted from an article published by the Migration Policy Institute:


As we all know, California and Texas are the most Mexicanized states. But Illinois? What brings all those Mexicans to Chicago…?

The data used for this map and the rest of the article are from 2006. We’ll assume that the number of Mexican-born residents of the United States has only increased in the meantime, even if the current depression has induced some of the illegals to return home. The 2006 figures should suffice for the sake of analysis.

I made the following graphs from the tabular data in the accompanying article. The first is a chart showing the increase since 1960 in foreign-born residents of the U.S.A., Mexican and otherwise. As you can see, the overall increase in immigration is accelerating, and the number of Mexicans is increasing more rapidly than all the other nationalities:


The second graph shows the overall trend more clearly, charting the number of Mexican-born residents as a percentage of all the foreign-born:


When I was a kid — at the leftmost position on these graphs — Mexicans were an anomaly in America, unless you happened to live in Texas or California. Even there they were generally migrant laborers, the “exploited” workers whose rights were championed by Cesar Chavez just a few years later.

All that has changed in the last forty years. Southern California and parts of Texas have become virtual extensions of Mexico, and the “migrants” have become permanent fixtures in most major cities and many rural areas. We have our fair share of them here in Central Virginia, working on the tobacco farms, in construction, doing highway maintenance, operating equipment, and laboring in various other low-to-medium-skill occupations, including the stereotypical lawn-care services. All grocery stores now have large “Hispanic foods” sections.

So the Mexicanization of America is a very real and ongoing process.

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In Anestos Canelides’ post last night, a commenter objected to the description of ethnicities in the San Fernando Valley as “white and Hispanic”, saying that the phrase should be “Anglo and Hispanic”.

He has a point. However, both distinctions are inaccurate, because the vast majority of Mexicans in the current wave of settlers are not white. Yes, they are “Hispanic” in the sense that they speak a dialect of Castilian Spanish, and share at least some genetic material with the Iberians who colonized Mexico.

But they are not like Asturians or Catalonians. They are mestizos, or persons of mixed Iberian and American Indian descent. Many of them have more Indian blood than Spanish — some of those I see in our area look like pure-blooded Aztecs or Mayans, with faces straight out of the 16th-century codices illustrating temple rituals or human sacrifice in Tenochtitlan.

Large areas of our country are rapidly being converted to de facto mestizo territory. Like most Americans, this is not something I want to see. I like Mexicans just fine — but in Mexico. If I want to, I can book a flight to Acapulco or Mexico City, enjoy the local culture, and then return home to live amongst Americans. What’s wrong with that?

There was a time not so long ago when such sentiments were considered normal. Less than two generations back, mass illegal immigration from south of the border would have provoked outrage and condemnation, but today anyone who objects to it is considered “racist” and “bigoted”. We are enjoined to accept bilingual schools and government institutions, with the various dysfunctional behaviors that accompany the Mexican underclass as a byproduct. All this is billed as an enrichment of our culture.

Yet, funnily enough, the Mexicanization of America is deeply unpopular, and is opposed by a large majority of Americans who were here before the current surge of mestizos began arriving. We don’t want it, but very few national politicians of either party who oppose it ever make it to the ballot where we could vote for them — our only choices are to vote for “amnesty” or “more amnesty”.

To make matters worse, the federal government is working hard to ensure that the states cannot make or enforce laws that are simply locally-enacted versions of federal immigration laws.

We must have the Mexicans whether we want them or not.

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When you examine matters closely, it appears that the importation of Mexicans into the United States is occurring for the same reasons that Muslims are being settled in Europe.

The original motive seems to have been the need for cheap labor to make profits for large corporations and fill out the workforce of an aging population. But over the past forty years that intention morphed into something entirely different, as the socialist parties (in our case, the Democrats) realized that bringing in ignorant and unskilled masses of welfare-dependent immigrants could create a permanent electoral majority for socialism as soon as sufficient numbers of the new arrivals became eligible to vote. The widespread ideology of Multiculturalism simply provided moral justification for a cynical political calculus.

Recent revelations in the UK about the Labour Party’s machinations have confirmed this process in British politics, and it’s easy to see the same imperative at work elsewhere in the West. Socialists need illiterate foreigners to cement their hold on power. They also need to erode national feeling among the natives to help destroy any lingering urge to resist.

Muslims fill the bill by colonizing Europe. Mexicans do the same by invading the U.S.A.

Muslim settlers are the more efficient destroyers of Western Civilization, but the end result is the same.