America Is A Nation, Not An Idea

Last week President Trump said farmers in South Africa who are facing confiscation of their lands without compensation under a new land expropriation law could be offered an expedited pathway to U.S. citizenship. 

The South African law, which proponents claim is designed to redress apartheid-era grievances of the country’s black majority against its white minority, prompted Trump to announce last month that his administration will cut all U.S. subsidies to South Africa and launch an investigation into alleged human rights violations against the white Afrikaner minority perpetrated by the regime of President Cyril Ramaphosa and his African National Congress party.

To the extent the corporate press has covered these developments in South Africa at all, it has been mostly to dismiss any concerns about the land expropriation law and violence against white Afrikaner farmers as “conspiracy theories” pushed by Trump and Elon Musk, himself an Afrikaner who has recently decried the racist anti-white laws and policies in his native country (such as the fact that Starlink isn’t allowed to operate in South Africa because Musk is not black). But these aren’t just conspiracy theories, they’re real problems that portend very bad things for Afrikaners and all South Africans.

What was important about Trump’s response, though, is that by offering Afrikaner farmers an expedited pathway to U.S. citizenship, the president acknowledged that America isn’t just an idea but a nation. Prioritizing certain foreigners over others is a repudiation of the popular but fatuous notion that any person from any culture or part of the world can become an American simply by going through a neutral administrative process. In other words, it matters where you come from, what you believe, and how you live.

In practice, that means it’s going to be easier for some foreigners to become Americans than it is for others. It’s not racist or bigoted to say this, but simply to acknowledge reality—a reality, by the way, that was the basis of our entire immigration system until 1965.

Before the 1965 immigration changes, U.S. immigration law reflected the fact that America is a particular people with a particular culture and traditions—a nation, in other words, with a shared past and a common future. That being the case, foreigners with more points of cultural contact with America will find it much easier to assimilate and become full-fledged Americans than foreigners who have very few cultural connections to us.

This is just common sense. If we prioritize the Afrikaner farmer, as Trump proposes, it’s because his cultural and ancestral roots are largely the same as the pioneers and pilgrims who first came to America from Europe and whose descendants founded our republic. Last week Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said Trump’s “vision is the right one: this is the sort of immigrant we want, and if the South African regime now — kleptocratic, anarchic, and increasingly incompetent — does not want this historic class of entrepreneurs, then America does.”

Rollins is correct, and her characterization of Afrikaner farmers as “the sort of immigrant we want” gets to the heart of the matter—and it’s not about race or ethnicity. We don’t want the Afrikaner because he is white, we want him because of his many cultural ties to America. Rollins mentioned some of these in her statement, lauding “the Afrikaner devotion to land and heritage. Pioneers in the best tradition, they made gardens of the wilderness and transformed their country into the breadbasket of a continent.”

The plain fact is that an Afrikaner farmer, a descendant of Dutch Calvinists who settled in South Africa more than three centuries ago, will assimilate to our American way of life much faster and more easily than a Muslim from the Middle East or a villager from the Peruvian highlands—or even a computer programmer from India.

Some foreigners, like Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University grad and pro-Hamas activist who was arrested over the weekend on charges he was providing support to Hamas, are so far removed from American culture and ideals that they might never really become Americans, even if they are allowed to stay. Our immigration system should reflect that reality. That means it should not take the Afrikaner farmer nearly as long to become an American citizen as it might take someone like Khalil. So far from being racist or xenophobic, such a policy would simply reflect the reality of assimilation and prioritize social cohesion over fake process neutralism.

It’s hard to overstate how much these things really matter—and how ignoring them produces misery in a nation. If you want to see what an immigration policy that rejects these realities produces, look at what has happened to western Europe over the last decade. Millions of unassimilated migrants from Africa and the Middle East have taken up residence in cities and communities across Europe. It has produced chaos, social disintegration, and lawlessness.

There’s a reason anti-immigration parties are gaining traction across the continent: the native citizens of these countries, who must live with the disastrous effects of mass immigration, are realizing that their leaders have prioritized the needs of foreigners over the needs and wellbeing of their own people. They are rightly enraged by this betrayal, and the conflict it has engendered is only going to grow as time goes on.

Some will object to this entire line of reasoning about cultural points of contact. They will argue that American culture isn’t really derived from Christian Europe, that America is just a mish-mash of different things from all over the world that has inexorably led us to the multiculturalism of our time. Hence, prioritizing Afrikaners (or any other group) based on a shared ancestral or cultural heritage is at best simply wrong, and at worst is cover for racist immigration policy.

To this argument, one can only reply that multiculturalism is a polite fiction that’s been foisted on us by liberal ideologues beginning in the 1960s. It was and is part of a broader program of cultural revolution that aims to dismantle western civilization, destroy the Christian faith on which that civilization depends, and replace it with a flattened globalist corporatism that uses process neutralism to reduce people to economic units and nations to GDP output. The policies multiculturalism inevitably produces are those favored by global corporatists: open markets and open borders.

That is to say, there is nothing organic or authentic about multiculturalism. It’s a false construct deployed as a weapon against the West. By contrast, the historical and cultural reality is that America is the creation of the English people. Our culture and way of life are indelibly English, our religious sensibilities and civic morality are thoroughly Christian.

To the extent that foreigners are able to adopt these things and make them their own, they will become Americans. And of course, foreigners who share these cultural roots will have an easier time of it. There’s a reason that successive waves of European immigrants in the 18th and 19th centuries were able to assimilate relatively quickly to American culture and the American way of life: it was a way of life and a culture they substantially shared with America already.

We need to find our way back to being able to talk about these things without incessant accusations of racism and xenophobia. For most of our history, U.S. immigration policy served the interests of the American people above all. Their well-being, not those of would-be immigrants or asylum-seekers, was the first priority of our leaders, as it should be. Any nation that wishes to maintain its identity, heritage, and social cohesion must have such an immigration policy. We did, once, and we can again.

But to get there, we have to recover the idea of American nationhood and shed the false notion that America is just a series of propositions open to every person from every corner of the world. In his RNC speech last summer, Vice President J.D. Vance described a cemetery plot on a mountainside in eastern Kentucky near his family’s ancestral home. He knows he will be buried there among his family and his people, who “love this country, not only because it’s a good idea. But because in their bones, they know this is their home, and it will be their children’s home, and they would die fighting to protect it. That is the source of America’s greatness.”

Vance is right. America is great because it is our home—the only home we’ll ever have. We need to guard it carefully, and that means insisting to outsiders that unless they are willing to assimilate completely and make this country their only home, they can never become Americans.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.