Pat Buchanun: Old-School Xenophobe

The Mortar of Assimilation – and the One Element That Won't Mix.
Puck. New York , 1889.

"Patty" Buchanan, who rightfully claims an Irish ancestry, has been quoted as saying this about how "things used to be":

“The guys I went to school with in the ’50s and ’60s and the ’40s, they were the sons of immigrants. They’d all been completely assimilated, Americanized. We were marinated in the same culture.”

In his book, on page 28, Buchanan then goes on to claim:

"Where the Italians wanted to be part of our family, millions of Mexicans are determined to retain their language and loyalty to Mexico. They prefer to remain outsiders. They do not wish to assimilate and the nation no longer demands that they do so."


Hmmm, seems like I have heard this somewhere before. Where could it be? Oh, yes. Benjamin Franklin:

"Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Languages or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion."


Then, Patty-boy has said this about Mexican immigrants:

"Many Hispanics, as a matter of fact, you know what culture they are assimilating to? — the rap culture, the crime culture, anti-cops, all the rest of it."

Once again, his blatant xenophobia, tinged with racism, is nothing new in this country where the debate on immigration is concerned. An 1868 editorial in the Chicago Post had this to say:

"The Irish fill our prisons, our poor houses. … Scratch a convict or a pauper, and the chances are that you tickle the skin of an Irish Catholic. Putting them on a boat and sending them home would end crime in this country."


The Leprechaun Who Would be President goes further still:

"Mexican-Americans can now become citizens of Mexico again. The whole idea is to create this giant fifth column in the United States which can leverage the American government in elections and pressure them to do what is in the interest of the nation of Mexico. "

That's funny, because in 1844, the American Nativist Party declared the same thing about Patty's ancestry:

"A set of citizens, German and Irish, wanted to get the Constitution of the U. S. into their own hands and sell it to a foreign power."

On page 221 of his "book", Pat "I want the Constitution in my own hands" Buchanan has this to say:

"Almost all immigrants today, legal and illegal, come from countries and cultures whose peoples have never before been assimilated into a First World nation."

Which sounds like a great summary of what Rep. Albert Johnson said in 1927:

"Today, instead of a nation descended from generations of freemen bred to a knowledge of principles and practice of self government, of liberty under the law, we have a heterogeneous population, no small proportion of which is sprung from races that throughout the centuries have known no liberty at all… In other words our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood, with all of its misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed."


But then, we come to the root of Buchanan's issue with immigration. They simply aren't white enough. On page 11, Patty lays it on the line:

"If we do not get control of our borders, by 2050 Americans of European descent will be a minority in the nation their ancestors created and built. No nation has ever undergone so radical a demographic transformation and survived."

European descent. I wonder what he could mean by that? It seems, our old friend, Benjamin Franklin can explain it for us:


"The number of purely white People in the World is proportionally very small…in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are Germans also, the Saxons only accepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth."