Diversity isn’t strength Re
the guest column by James Van Patten, an alleged lifelong Fayetteville
educator who rants that we are a nation of immigrants: Ask what a true
nation of immigrants would be. Absent a founding group, it would be no
nation at all, but a random gathering of people united only by their
presence in the same land. The United States is a nation with
a distinct founding culture, one that remained dominant while
assimilating—and subtly changed by later arrivals. Revolutionary
Americans were fairly homogeneous: 60 percent English, almost 20
percent Scottish and Irish (the rest were Dutch and German), and
overwhelmingly Protestant. Immigrants are people who leave one
society and move to another. There has to be a recipient society to
which they move. In our case, the society was created by settlers who
came here in the 17th and 18th centuries. They weren’t immigrating to
some existing society. It was the settlers’ Anglo-Protestant society
and culture that attracted subsequent immigrants. We then, therefore,
are a nation with immigrants. American’s
integrity and sovereignty are strained by multiculturalism, affirmative
action and mass immigration. The pet phrase of American politicians is
“Strength in our diversity.” The much-repeated dictum “nation of
immigrants” is unquestioned by Americans and foreigners alike. Mass
immigration, both legal and illegal, has transformed our republic into
a Third World dumping ground, the majority not acculturating, coming
from countries exhibiting no concepts of individual rights and rule of
law. JOE McCUTCHEN Fort Smith
