Langley Park is a good example of where tiptoeing around on multiculti eggshells leads: there is literally no language in which what’s happening in suburban Maryland can be politely discussed, not if an ambitious politician of either party wishes to remain viable. America is a land where the NAACP complains about the use of the widely known scientific term “black hole” on a Hallmark greeting card, and Hallmark instantly withdraws the card;⁹¹ a land so obsessed by race that, in order to reverse an entirely fictional manifestation of “racism,” it invented the subprime mortgage and sat back as it came within a smidgeonette of destroying the housing market, banking system, and insurance industry. But, even if it had, at least we’d have demonstrated our anti-racist bona fides even unto self-destruction, so that’s okay.

To exhibit any interest in immigration or its consequences is to risk being marked down as, if not a “racist,” at least a “nativist.” And “immigration” isn’t really what it is, is it? After all, in traditional immigration patterns the immigrant assimilates with his new land, not the new land with the immigrant. Yet in this case the aura of Maryland dissolves like a mirage when faced with “the aura of Central America.”

Two generations ago, America, Canada, Australia, and the rest of the developed world took it as read that a sovereign nation had the right to determine which, if any, foreigners it extended rights of residency to. Now only Japan does. Everywhere else, opposition to mass immigration is “nativist,” and expressing a preference for one group of immigrants over another is “racist.” Until the Sixties, governments routinely distinguished between Irish and Bulgar, Indian and Somali, but now all that matters is the glow of virtue you feel from refusing to distinguish, as if immigration is like a UN peacekeeping operation—one of those activities in which you have no “national interest.”

Very few elderly, established residents of Langley Park knowingly voted for societal self-extinction, yet in barely a third of a century it’s become a fait accompli. And in a politically correct world there is no acceptable form of public discourse in which to object to it.

And so it just kinda happened. Another proposition: When large tracts of the United States take on “the aura of Central America”—laundromats doubling as money-transfer stores, jobless men drinking and sleeping in the sun, civic collapse, to cite only New York Times-observed phenomena—will such a land still be the United States? Or will it increasingly be the northern branch office of Latin America? None of us can say for sure, but, underneath the smiley-face banalities about hard-working families wanting a shot at the American Dream, I think most of us know which way to bet.

Human capital is the most reliable indicator of what society you’ll be.

Even liberals, even Martin Peretz, even the New York Times acknowledge that, at least in unguarded moments. For almost half a century, the human capital of the United States has transformed faster than at any time since the founding of the republic.

“Poor Mexico,” Porfirio Diaz, the country’s longtime strongman, is supposed to have said. “So far from God, so close to the United States.”

Today Mexico is America’s southern quagmire—farther from God than ever, and not close to the United States but in it.

After the Arizona court decision, Jon Richards published a cartoon in the Albuquerque Journal. It showed three Indians standing on the shore watching the Mayflower approach. “Are they legal?” wonders the chief.

“What do we do if they have babies?” asks his squaw. “Is it too late to build a fence?” says the brave.⁹²

What is the message of this cartoon? That America has always been a land of immigrants? Or that the tide of illegal settlement is going to work out as well for the United States as it did for the Algonquin nation? Is Richards’ cartoon just the cheap triumphalism of a self-loathing Anglo’s cultural relativism? Or is it actually a portent of the future? The latter isn’t so hard to imagine: a largely impoverished Hispanic Southwest, with a few tony Anglo gated communities—or, if you prefer, “reservations.”

SHADOWLANDS