Dr. Fleming has posted the parts of his essay that were missing from the first two parts: Poor Mexico, Poor America: Extracts Omitted

What he says may surprise some who think they have the paleos figured out on immigration, or believe them to be racists.

The future of American culture is the heart of the immigration question, and if the cultural question remains taboo, the doom of America is fixed, even if the means and the will were found to seal the border and repatriate large numbers of illegal Mexican immigrants. Economic analysis of immigration, important as it is, does not touch this most fundamental issue, which is the kind of country we are leaving our children and grandchildren. Economics is a blind science that cannot tell the difference between citizens and foreigners, friends and enemies. We are told, for example, that the soundest criterion for legal immigrants is their educational level and potential earnings. This may be, but if 400 million hardworking and intelligent Chinese immigrants were admitted, our economy would boom, but our grandchildren would be Chinese, not American. Chicano activists understand this reality, which is why they talk about Reconquista and dream of rebuilding the Aztec world of Aztlan. Professional critics of immigration policy who pretend this question does not exist are like the coward who hears burglars invading his home and pulls the covers up over his head.

America’s weakness and self-hatred were not forced upon the American people at the point of a bayonet. We accepted the propaganda and paid for the soft-core Marxists who shoved it down the throats of our schoolchildren. In the decades following World War II, American culture was transformed. Our historical and cultural roots were torn up, and, to the extent we have an historical imagination, it is of ourselves as the descendants of oppressors, exploiters, and murderers. Now in our weakness and self-contempt, we fear high Mexican birth rates, because Anglo-Americans refuse to have children, and we cannot stanch the hemorrhaging border for precisely the same reason that we insist on teaching our children to hate the people and habits that made their country. The fault, my dear American Brutuses, is not in the stars–nor in demographic forces or tectonic shifts of geopolitical power–but in ourselves that we are underlings.

The first step toward addressing and resolving the cultural problems presented by mass immigration is to quit denying their existence. The second is to give up the glib and futile language of assimilation and recognize the fact that immigrants will affect us as much as we affect them. The third is to recognize that the larger part of the problem is of our own devising: American mass culture, including the schools that purvey mass education, are breeding grounds for anti-American resentment and American self-hatred.

To halt and reverse this process, Americans must be willing to take several boldly conservative steps. Quite apart from whatever is done to control legal and illegal immigration, we have to transform the teaching of humanities, in elementary and high schools as much as in universities. The conservative defense of the “traditional” curriculum has been, up till now, predicated on liberal and leftist concepts like “freedom of expression” and “respect for diversity.” Western culture is not valued as something good in itself or as our precious heritage but only as the foundation for an “open society” that encourages toleration of opposing points of view. It is time to dispense with such fantasies, which have little to do with the flesh and blood people who created and defended the West, and to revive the older understanding, that the purpose of a nation’s educational system is to form the character and historical imagination of the nation’s citizens. In our case, this would mean that European and American history must be taught from a Western and American point of view; that, beginning in the lower grades, the classics of English and American literature are required reading, and that the Greek and Latin classics, which, along with the teaching of Latin, were the foundation of our civilization for over two thousand years, be given once again their honored place in the curriculum.
The celebration of American history and the revival of our civilization should not be made at the expense of the rich cultural heritage that Mexicans and other Latinos bring with them. Although many, if not most recent immigrants have been poorly educated, there is no reason why they and their children cannot be encouraged to learn real Spanish and to imbibe the literary and cultural traditions of Spain and Latin America. Study of their authentic history and culture would replace the narcissistic and inflammatory Chicano Studies programs that indoctrinate Latinos into a culture of victimology that can only retard their social and economic progress.

The theory of assimilation encouraged educationists to think they could impose a uniform culture on this vast continental empire of diverse regions and states. The result was the sterile ideology taught in civics classes and expounded every four years at the two parties’ national conventions. Instinctively, students turned away from the lies and embraced either the culture of revolution or the mass commercial culture of self-gratification. True diversity would mean a revival of regional and ethnic identities within the context of a broad Anglo-American paradigm. Just as individual states and counties are beginning to control illegal immigration, they might be allowed to develop their own variations on the European American civilization that is our heritage so long as the traditional core is strengthened. Yankees and Southerners alike respect Thomas Jefferson; Polish and Italian Americans love Shakespeare. We all, as American citizens, revere the rule of law and the British liberties preserved in our Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Elsewhere people focus on questions of economics and such. Dr. Fleming rightly looks at the question of culture. One might respond that it is enough that immigrants share the same moral norms. But is that enough to sustain a community? It may be necessary for concord, but does the human animal require more than that? Is it enough for norms to be transmitted through law, or do we need our heroes and stories, and the other tools of culture?