02/21/2010
Urban pundit Joel Kotkin has a new book out, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. As an enthusiastic academic cosmopolitan, he thinks diversity is a wonderful thing that benefits this country, rather than the twisted unrealistic ideology of radical utopians. He further believes that an American population of 400 million (a doubling since 1970) will be "challenging" yet he is brimming with "long-term optimism" despite a social engineering experiment that threatens the social fabric of the nation.NPR interviewed Kotkin for some cheerful remarks about America’s crowded future on February 8: Imagining 'The Next Hundred Million' Americans. (It’s slightly less painful to read the transcript rather than listen via the NPR link.)
I think Americans do have an intrinsic sense that this amazing ability to bring in and assimilate immigrants — and at the same time, in a sense, be assimilated by them. In other words, their food, their words, their customs, their way of looking at the world, their business practices, their business connections become assets for us. And I think that this is something that I find, actually, that — there are always going to be nativists and people who are negative, but I find most people are really kind of excited about that.Whatever happened to the traditional idea that it’s the immigrants who do the assimilating? It’s not an asset for Americans to accept criminal customs like honor killing, FGM and polygamy, but globalists are strangely positive about diverse cultures despite daily reports of disturbing brutality that are social norms in many places.
The paragraph below is taken from Kotkin’s new book, excerpted by NPR.
The United States of 2050 will look very different from the country that existed just a decade ago, at the dawn of the new millennium. Between 2000 and 2050 the vast majority of America’s net population growth will be in its racial minorities, particularly Asians and Hispanics, as well as in a growing mixed-race population. Our experiment with creating what Walt Whitman described as "the race of races" will continue to evolve. By midcentury the United States will be a "white country" no longer but rather a staggering amalgam of racial, ethnic, and religious groups, all participants in the construction of a new civilization whose roots lie not in any one country or continent but across the entirety of human cultures and racial types. No other advanced, populous country will enjoy such ethnic diversity.Americans never voted to swamp the country with alien cultures; it is a project of globalist elites stuck on their preferred ideology of diversity uber alles. On the rare occasion that immigration or related issues have been put to the ballot, the majority of citizens consistently prefer limits rather than crazed liberalism. One example was 1994’s Prop 187 in California, the initiative passed by 59% of voters which would have ended taxpayer-funded benefits for illegal aliens but for the back-room shenanigans which thwarted the will of the people.
Furthermore, the Census' recent projections indicate that America will reach 400 million by 2039, so the diversity and overcrowding so esteemed by Kotkin will arrive much earlier than 2050. Therefore the title of his book is a fabrication, at least according to the Census Bureau.
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