Americans have just witnessed another historic moment: not only a new record for the most single-day border arrests ever made; or male, military-aged Chinese nationals illegally entering the country through California and joining the espionage nodes known as Confucius Institutes and a Chinese Communist police station in New York City — but a proposal for these illegal aliens to join the military.
The proposal last week was made not by some Twitter screecher or Ibram X. Kendi but by sitting Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin who, in a speech on the Senate floor, said:
Do you know what the recruiting numbers are at the Army, Navy, and the Air Force? They can’t reach their quotas each month. They can’t find enough people to join our military forces. And there are those who are undocumented who want the chance to serve and risk their lives for this country. Should we give them a chance? I think we should.
The military recruitment lows are not news. Funnily enough, that is what happens when you make it a point to drive away the people most likely to enlist and serve. There was Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s stand-down order to allow each branch “to discuss the threat posed by white supremacy and similar extremism.” And since “white supremacy” has become just another sponge term to signify positions that oppose the plans of the left, a routing out of white supremacy meant the removal of personnel with political beliefs anathema to the Democrat regime.
There was the second purge, this time of personnel who refused to take the Covid “vaccine.” There was the gayification of the military, which saw everything from recruitment ads to making so-called transitioning soldiers undeployable for almost a year. There was the killing of meritocracy for the sake of DEI baloney. And then there was the humiliation of the Afghanistan retreat (with the addition of financially punishing soldiers whose crime was following orders) and the tease that the whole thing might be repeated in Ukraine. When you tell people long enough that you don’t want them, eventually, they will get the message.
The recruitment shortage is a problem entirely of the left’s making, and now that the full consequences are in force, the same left is using the crisis as justification for not only weakening the military but also, potentially, attacking American citizens.
Both weakness and potential danger come from the same source: the lack of assimilation. If immigration were confined to legal channels and were manageable enough so that those coming into the country could actually melt into the melting pot, there would be no problem.
My own great-grandfather earned his citizenship by enlisting in the Army and fighting under the American flag in WWI. But he and my great-grandmother both made conscious efforts to become Americans after they arrived on Ellis Island from Sicily. They didn’t just get jobs, work hard, and save. They taught themselves English. They lived in an American neighborhood (not a Little Italy) and shopped at American businesses (rather than Italian ones). They made sure they were not just Sicilians living in the United States.
But assimilation now is considered one of the great evils of the white race nothing more than a “racist code word” “harkening back to a time when citizenship was contingent upon whiteness,” as if the 14th and 15th Amendments never existed. America’s race hustler de jour, the fraud known as Ibram X. Kendi, has repeated this mantra, saying that the racist roots of assimilation are the ideas that “there is something wrong with another racial group that needs changing or something right with our racial group that doesn’t need changing.”
The truth is that these ideas are fundamental to nations and peoples existing in the first place, a truth that Kendi himself tacitly admits when he stresses that minority groups cannot change. To do so would be to become white, to move from oppressed to oppressor, since, as he recently stated in plain English, white people (not just “whiteness”) consider themselves to be “over humanity,” not a part of it.
This is not a new problem. As far back as 1998, The Washington Post was running stories about how recent immigrants did not at all want to become Americans: “I think I’m still a Mexican,” Maria Jacinto said. “When my skin turns white and my hair turns blonde, then I’ll be an American.”
Military branches filled with people from all over the world who not only have not assimilated but are told not to assimilate will have zero social cohesion. They will speak different languages, have different personal reasons for enlisting (none of which will be love of and loyalty to country), and depending on where they fall on the left’s hierarchy of “oppressed people,” will have different requirements put on them that will have nothing to do with the mission at hand.
“Diversity is our strength” only has some truth when there is a foundational unity within the group. A chess army has diversity, which allows the game to be played. But throwing playing cards, dice, and Dungeons & Dragons figures into the mix dissolves the game into chaos.
The greater danger, however, lies in the potential threat such a military would pose to American citizens (which would be little better than a foreign military pretending to be an American one). A military with significant numbers of illegal aliens — foreigners with no ties to the United States, our ways, our traditions, our Constitution, our history — will have no loyalty to the land or its people. Such a military will be much more willing to open fire on citizens protesting another lockdown, another “secure” election, or the queering of their children via the education system. Instead, they will be loyal to whoever gives them the most prizes — which will be the left, as the current controller of all institutions of worth.
It is not as if this scenario has never been played out before either. The Founding Fathers were quite clear that the Roman Republic was one of their chief models and sources of inspiration for the new nation, but Durbin’s enthusiasm for illegal recruits smacks of the late Roman Empire. As the empire began to wither, emperors like Diocletian and Constantine were forced to look elsewhere for recruits. Foreign mercenaries were not strangers in the Roman legions, but the difference was that, in the past, they had been axillary forces and shock troops. But then, more and more Germanic barbarians had replaced Roman citizens as soldiers.
With no loyalty to Rome, the empire, or the emperor, these Germanic tribesmen worked for their own advantage. In a fit of irony, many of the barbarians who sacked Rome had honed their military prowess by fighting in the Roman legions. For all its wealth and power, even Rome could not Romanize infinite numbers of immigrants.
To give a generous benefit of the doubt, Durbin and his friends might think they are riding to the rescue, supplying the military with the manpower it needs. But manpower, like water, can destroy as well as nourish. Recruiting foreign nationals into the military will not nourish.
