Elon Musk is an undoubted asset to a counter-revolutionary movement in need of elite friends. His acquisition of Twitter, his crusade on behalf of free speech, and now his active support for Donald Trump all amount to an encouraging set of developments, barely imaginable in 2020, that could prove decisive in the upcoming U.S. election.
Musk has even been calling out the Democrats’ long-standing strategy of weaponizing replacement migration to rig the balance of political power in what is meant to be the world’s model republic. “If Trump doesn’t win this election,” he lately reiterated to Tucker Carlson in an interview, “it’s the last election we’re gonna have.”
While the rhetoric might seem unduly alarmist, the reasoning is watertight. A vast illegal immigrant population heavily indebted to the Biden-Harris administration for throwing open the borders and fleecing American taxpayers to subsidise their presence in the country, combined with criminally loose voter ID laws and the prospect of a fresh amnesty if the Democrats win Congress next month, will guarantee that there are no longer any swing states to keep elections competitive. Enough illegals have already moved into the key battleground states since 2021 to render the country a permanent slave to one-party-rule in very short order. Without mass deportations, the United States will become California writ large.
This was the predictable result of swapping out America’s historic people, hardwired to feel an instinctive ancestral attachment to their nation’s traditions and an immediate stake in its destiny, with foreigners motivated at best by a desire for personal gain. When the left-wing strategists John Judis and Ruy Teixeira salivated at book-length about “the emerging Democratic majority” that mass immigration promised to deliver, they did so for good reason.
That someone as competent and influential as Elon Musk is drawing attention to such gerrymandering, the treacherous replacement of a settled demos by a client xenos, is significant and valuable. What follows is a gentle suggestion that he pushes his own logic a little further.
After all, Musk’s main complaint against illegal immigration applies just as much to legal immigration. Yet this latter form of entry he not only supports but wishes to see made easier for greater numbers of foreigners. Of course, the only meaningful difference between legal and illegal immigration relates to the power of the host to engage in quality-control: legal immigrants will by definition have been screened, whereas faceless chancers marauding across a porous southern border are not just incapable of being vetted but are likely to perform poorly on any such vetting given their refusal to volunteer for the process. Why cheat in an exam if one has prepared so intensely that any result other than top marks is out of the question? Illegal immigrants are disproportionately unintelligent, prone to crime, and dependent on federal largesse. All of these pathologies, runs the essential Muskite argument, can be weeded out by a rigorous, law-governed process that makes immigration through an authorised port of entry utterly unlike its illegal counterpart.
This would be well and good if Musk’s case against illegal immigration hinged purely on the sort of concerns listed above. All else being equal, a high-skilled Indian with a STEM degree is considerably less likely to commit murder and will integrate much better into the American job market—perhaps at one of Musk’s own factories—than a Venezuelan gang member who just happens to have misplaced his passport somewhere between Caracas and the Darién gap. In the short run at least, admitting the Indian and deporting the Venezuelan is the best option for the American people.
But, of course, Musk goes much further than this. His argument is that the Democrat Party machine favours illegal immigration as a means to alter the electoral map of the United States for good. The unpopular truth is that, when considered at scale, our Indian friend just as much as our Venezuelan foe helps them to deliver this lamentable outcome. If anything, he does so in a more surreptitious—because innocuous-seeming—way.
The evidence is as overwhelming as it is bleak. Whether we like it or not, non-European immigrant and immigrant-descended groups break reliably for the Democrats and strongly favour their policy agenda. They are considerably less attached to American traditions and much more ethnocentric about their own tribe. Worst of all, there is a problem of radical entitlement, reflected in the belief among many immigrant groups that their new adoptive country should change to appease their own needs and preferences. A majority (55%) of American citizens under 30, the most diverse generation in U.S. history, support abolishing the Constitution and designing a new one to put in its place.
When all generations are thrown into the mix, it becomes clear that immigration-fuelled demographic change is doing a lot of heavy lifting to produce such iconoclastic preferences among Gen Z respondents. As many as 73% of black people and 60% of Asians want to see the Constitution ditched. (56% of Hispanics, it must be said, oppose such vandalism, but this is still an alarming figure given their growing numbers and the fact that the younger ones are more left-wing than their parents and grandparents.) College-educated white women are the targets of much exasperated humour in right-wing circles, but in fact only a piddling 6% of them believe that the Founding Fathers should be considered “villains” of history, compared to 26% of non-white men and 35% of non-white women drawn from all age groups and educational backgrounds.
This carries over into radically different attitudes to free speech—something of a sacred tradition to the Englishmen who built the United States. As Helen Andrews documents in the Summer issue of The American Conservative:
When polled on questions such as whether the government may censor speech that is offensive or disrespectful, every race except whites consistently shows majority or supermajority support for censorship.
Simply making sure that the immigration driving such wholesale erasure and replacement of American culture is legal, as Musk urges, does nothing to change the result.
Immigration of all kinds also has an alarming impact on attitudes towards Jews. The data suggests that antisemitism is today a greater temptation to non-Europeans than it is to those with roots on the continent. Less invested in the horrors of the Second World War, non-Europeans are less inclined to view Jewish people sympathetically through the lens of the Holocaust. Instead, Jews are likely to be regarded as effectively white at best and as settler colonialists at worst, profiting in Israel at the expense of a longsuffering Palestinian population. On this Third Worldist morality tale, the Palestinians come to be seen as oppressed members of the so-called ‘Global South’—fellow sufferers with all manner of popular interest groups from the blacks of South Africa to the Amerindians of the New World. While this need not degenerate into total antisemitism, it often does. And if one result among many of continued non-European immigration into the United States is a more antisemitic society, who cares if the process has the sanction of law?
The kind of credentials for which a legal immigration system can be designed to select is no saving grace either. When it comes to political loyalties, it matters nothing whether the immigrant group in question boasts high levels of educational attainment, as Asians do, or lower levels, as Hispanics do. In both cases, we are dealing with solidly Democrat constituencies.
Indians are the second largest immigrant group in America today. A comprehensive survey of their attitudes ahead of the 2020 election revealed that 72% of them planned to vote for Biden and just 22% for Trump. The evidence this year suggests that, while the proportion of Indians identifying with the Democrats has slightly declined, the overall number of them identifying with the Left has only grown since 2020. The Democrats can still count on comfortable majority support. Furthermore, this staunch loyalty to the American Left—markedly out of keeping with that shown by the host people themselves—is even more pronounced among U.S.-born Indians, indicating that, if anything, assimilation goes into reverse on an inter-generational timescale.
The 2020 survey also found that Kamala Harris’s half-Indian background boosted enthusiasm among Indians for the overall ticket. The persistence of ethnic blood ties, let alone ones so strong they spill over into politics, is not a sign of seamless assimilation. As the study concluded:
Looking forward, each year, approximately 150,000 Indian Americans will become newly eligible to vote—a third through naturalization and the rest are children of immigrants reaching voting age. Given these demographic trends, and the more liberal leanings of U.S.-born Indian Americans, it is likely that the median Indian American voter will become even more inclined to the policy stances of the Democratic Party.
Assimilation, if it means anything at all, is the process by which individuals or groups become indistinguishable in all relevant respects from the group that they have joined. The fact that Asian and Hispanic voting patterns set them wildly apart from the host population of America is thus definite proof that, whatever their other virtues, neither group has assimilated at all well. Indeed, it is because they do not assimilate very well that the Left is addicted to importing more of them—whether legally or illegally, it does not matter. Having ditched solidarity with the working man for a spiteful strain of identity politics, the Democrats can then appeal to their distinctive interests as tribal sub-cultures.
Given the loyalties and attitudes of non-European immigrants, whatever their mode of entry, the disparity between Musk’s opinions on legal and illegal forms of immigration is frankly untenable. Overall, he looks like a pedantic stickler for process: obsessively interested in how the mechanism of involuntary demographic transformation works, yet strangely indifferent to the untold damage that mechanism does.
Typical of tech titans, Musk clearly has a soft spot for the idea that national borders are a vexing obstacle—not to establishing some utopian cosmopolis in his case, but to assembling the best and brightest from all over the world for historic ventures. This hunger for high-skilled immigrants overlooks the unfortunate reality that assimilation is not merely an economic formula. Integration can indeed be thought of as a less demanding affair: a simple matter of whether immigrants work hard and obey the law. These are the kinds of nuts-and-bolts criteria that naturally preoccupy CEOs like Musk. Our standards of assimilation, on the other hand, should be set much higher, for we are dealing here with a question that cuts far deeper and quite rightly preoccupies everyone else.
Referring back to Indians, it is a testament to their giftedness as a people that they accounted for as many as half of the high-skilled H-1B worker visas issued between 2001 and 2015. On the criteria laid out above, this makes them strong candidates for integration. However, to be a fully assimilated citizen of a new country is not like being a well-fitted widget in a cybernetic collective. Human individuals are more than mere units of variable economic potential. “If capital knows no borders, why should people?” might have enough rhythm to unite the world’s midwits in a sentimental chorus, but are the moderately thoughtful among us forbidden from noticing the differences between Moroccan tomatoes and Moroccan men? People nurse loyalties, inferiority complexes, interests, habits, motivations, grudges, jealousies, resentments—all of the things, in short, that make us different from everything else.
Despite his status as a proto-liberal thinker, Thomas Hobbes would certainly have discounted the right of high-flying individuals like Musk to seek out limitless foreign labour. As he argues with characteristic eloquence in Leviathan (1651), the incentives that come with foreign capital are corrupting enough:
For if it did belong to private persons to use their own discretion therein, some of them would be drawn for gain, both to furnish the enemy with means to hurt the commonwealth, and hurt it themselves, by importing such things, as pleasing men’s appetites, be nevertheless noxious, or at least unprofitable to them.
Appetites can be more or less honourable. Musk’s, it is true, are especially grand and epic. Nevertheless, they should not prevail over the integrity and self-determination rights of an American people who, no less Faustian themselves, have blessed visionaries like Musk with the kind of free rein to fulfil his destiny that remains unthinkable in the increasingly dysfunctional South Africa of his birth. As well as being in his own best interests, it is Musk’s duty as a very fitting guest in a homeland built by pioneers to ensure that immigration of all kinds does not forever transform the country that has made his ambitions so much more than the vain daydreams of an ingenious misfit.
