A nation of immigrants?

February 10, 2023

With all the yelling, jeering and booing at the State of the Union
address — all the disruptive antics from ill-mannered and
immature members of Congress — viewers needed a sweet
moment that came in the latter half of the speech: the introduction
of Maurice and Kandice Barron, parents of a four-year-old cancer
survivor. President Joe Biden invited them as White House guests
to highlight his cancer “moonshot” initiative, the quest for a cure
for a constellation of diseases that take far too many lives.
The image of the Barrons, though, held more than the hope and
relief of parents whose young child may yet live a long and
healthy life. It was also a portrait of a racially and ethnically
diverse America, a nation that celebrates its immigrants in myth if
not in practice. Maurice Barron is a white immigrant from Ireland,
and his wife, Kandice, is a black woman whose parents
immigrated from Panama, according to Biden.
Ironically, much of the jeering from Republicans in attendance
was on the subject of immigration. For decades, the GOP has
been frozen in a rigid xenophobia that rejects all efforts to ease
the pathway to citizenship for any immigrant who crossed the
border illegally, even in childhood. That’s because the
overwhelmingly white and aging GOP base is resentful of a
browning America, afraid of changing demographics, angry about
the prospect of losing its place at the top of the cultural heap.
Another of the White House guests for the State of the Union
address was Mitzi Colin Lopez, a “Dreamer” whose parents
brought her to the United States from Mexico when she was just
three years old. As a beneficiary of the Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals program, she was able to graduate from
college. But Republicans have refused to grant a pathway to
citizenship to even model young adults such as Lopez, so they
are stuck in limbo, unable to contribute as much to nation as they
might.
Conservatives often attempt to veil their xenophobia with
legitimate concern about border security and crime, especially
traffic in illegal drugs such as fentanyl. But just last year,

Republicans rejected a compromise which would have set aside
an additional $40 billion for border security along with a path to
citizenship for Dreamers.
While demographers have been forecasting a browner America
for many years, most white Americans weren’t paying attention to
the trends until the 2008 election of Barack Obama as the nation’s
first black president, powered into office by a “rainbow coalition” of
voters of every race and ethnicity. While he won two terms, his
tenure nevertheless provoked a backlash from a substantial
minority of whites.
Among those was Pat Buchanan, the paleoconservative who ran
for the GOP nomination for the presidency three times. In his
2011 nativist polemic, “Suicide of a Superpower,” he forecasts a
swift decline for a nation that has allowed itself, in his view, to be
overrun by people of color.
He writes, “White racial consciousness is rising and has begun to
manifest itself in politics because, for tens of millions of
Americans, this is no longer the country they grew up in.
Buchanan succinctly sums up the view that the current ideological
struggles are a war for the soul — and skin color — of the nation.
It’s no wonder, then, that those disaffected whites found their
savior in Donald Trump, who pandered to racist views more
explicitly than any presidential candidate since George Wallace.
Even if Trump is no longer Republicans’ great white hope, the
party remains a festering sinkhole of extremism, racism, fascism
— all on display during Biden’s recent speech.
That doesn’t bode well. The nation is inextricably on the path
toward a browner, more pluralistic future. That’s baked in. By the
year 2040 or so, whites will no longer constitute a clear majority of
the population. Already, Christianity is declining as a major
cultural force as fewer Americans identify as religious and more
Muslims migrate to these shores.
If we cannot adjust to this new reality and live out the promise of a
pluralistic democracy, we’ll be on the path to giving Buchanan the

gift of a prescience he doesn’t deserve: we’ll be committing
suicide, indeed.