But this article of his, which is about America's attempt to do the impossible, is a rather useless argument in favor of America being able to absorb the Third World population.
Someone says 'but he's only talking about absorbing finite numbers of immigrants, not the entire Third World.' But let's be realistic; it's hard to deny that there are practically limitless numbers of potential Third World immigrants. Africa's population continues to grow by leaps and bounds, which is strange for a supposedly starving and disease-plagued continent, and the populations of Asia and much of Latin America are growing too. Add to this the fact that our borders are wide-open, and that our government has made a de facto pledge to welcome as many as wish to come, and you have a never-ending influx of mass immigration.
Lowry, as with most pro-immigration xenophiles, mentions that America always assimilated the immigrants of the past (pre-1965) era of our history. Well, to an extent, yes. And that's a very qualified 'yes' on my part. But the fact that made any assimilation possible was that, by far, most immigrants then were from European Christendom. Plain and simple.
He invokes the ever-popular-among-respectables 'Judeo-Christian heritage' as another factor that made assimilation succeed. But there is no 'Judeo-Christian' heritage. Judaism and Christianity were not Siamese twins then, and even less so, now.
Most Jews who did immigrate here were fleeing from Christian Europe. Where was this 'Judeo-Christian heritage' then? It had not been invented yet; that was to come with the 'Ecumenical Movement' of the Cold War era, an attempt to establish 'brotherhood' among all Western faiths.
Along the way to his shaky conclusion, Lowry cites some oddball 'facts', such as that in recent surveys, many Hispanics identified themselves as 'White.' Well, people can self-identify as anything, as we've seen with Elizabeth Warren. Even 50 years ago, before the Reagan Amnesty and the flood of Hispanic illegals, many Hispanics identified themselves as White. A small percentage in this country do have some European ancestry, but honestly, few are White enough to be objectively called such.
Again, Lowry cites a poll response (which I believe I cited on this blog recently):
"A Pew Hispanic Center survey found that the longer Hispanics are here and the more money they make, the more likely they are to call themselves “typical Americans.”
But what does that mean? It is true that many Latin Americans are adamant that everybody in both North and South America are just as much 'American' as citizens of the USA. They resent that people from our country call ourselves just 'Americans'. And I feel sure that even if they think they are 'typical Americans' they remain as ethnocentric as ever. Lowry is grasping at straws here, as most pro-Hispanic Republicans do, arguing that Latinos will all become super-patriots as soon as they 'arrive' financially.
Do people like Lowry really believe that people are interchangeable and that if we just rally around a flag, a document, and a 'common culture', that we can all blend happily together?
I suppose if you add intermarriage to the mix, which is what Lowry subtly promotes in his article, citing with apparent approval that many Asian women marry out, usually with White men.
Lowry's ideal America, then, would be one of indeterminate mixed race, one vague ecumenical religion, and apparently, a common language -- probably Spanglish.
In what real sense would this be 'America'?
And to whose culture would this amorphous group of people be assimilated? I am 100 percent certain it would have little of the original ingredients of this country at its founding.
But if you are a Lowry-style Republican, or even a Glenn Beck style 'conservative' or Republican, that would be just fine with you.
As for the rest of us, we've never been consulted.
