Have we gone mad?

""Observing the pro-immigration demonstrations in Phoenix, Los Angeles, Atlanta and elsewhere in recent days, I wondered: whose country is this? Why are many illegal aliens who broke our laws to get here and who continue to break our laws to stay here demanding that the United States not only allow them to remain, but support them with the taxes of law-abiding citizens? Have we gone mad?" —Cal Thomas"

The Patriot Post (PatriotPost.US) explains the historical basis for our current debate on immigration issues:

E pluribus unum?

"[T]he policy or advantage of [immigration] taking place in a body may be much questioned; for, by so doing, they retain the Language, habits and principles which they bring with them. Whereas by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures and laws: in a word, soon become one people." --George Washington

Out of many, one.

That was the national motto proposed by Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1776. Both simple and elegant, it embodied the notion that all who had come to America's shores, and all who would come, must be united -- must all form one front -- in defense of freedom and liberty. For 200 years, we were, largely, one people united behind constitutional republicanism. But soon after the social turbulence of the '60s and the economic woes of the '70s, that unity began to crumble. This was the era in which multiculturalism emerged -- the era in which ethnocentricity became chic.

Arthur Schlesinger, a former Harvard professor and senior advisor to JFK, published a retrospective on this era in 1991 called "The Disuniting of America." Schlesinger wrote primarily about the orthodoxy of self-interested hyphenated-American citizen groups -- who, rather than unifying to become one, were diversifying to become many. He warned that the cult of ethnicity would result in "the fragmentation and tribalization of America," the natural consequence being that these special-interest groups would be co-opted by the political parties.

"Instead of a transformative nation with an identity all its own," Schlesinger wrote, "America increasingly sees itself in this new light as preservative of diverse alien identities -- groups ineradicable in their ethnic character." He asserts, by way of inquiry, "Will the melting pot give way to the Tower of Babel?"

The disuniting of America is a foundational concern underlying much of the current security, economic and social debate (both rational and irrational) about immigration. This is the concern that a nation, which is already ethnically fragmented internally, risks complete disunity of its national integrity in the absence of borders."

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