This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto by
Calcutta-born NYU journalism professor Suketu Mehta takes
pro-immigration polemics to their logical conclusion: “Immigration as reparations.” Historically white
countries must open their borders because whites have sinned and deserve
punishment. But just lie back and think of diversity:
Indeed, a
huge bill is coming due to the West. And it is one that the West is not only
morally obligated to pay, but one that it should look forward to paying.
Mehta’s
book is rife with anecdotes about deplorable white people saying insensitive
things to his family. (His clannish loyalty to concentric circles of his people might
be his best quality.) He begins with a tale of which he’s particularly proud:
An Englishman in London asks his grandfather why he is in his country:
“Because
we are the creditors,” responded my grandfather, who was born in India…. “You
took all our wealth, our diamonds. Now we have come to collect.” We are here,
my grandfather was saying, because you were there.
Who
wouldn’t want to let in more Mehtas? They sound like a delightful family, folks
who definitely have your best interests at heart.
On the other hand, the author isn’t, technically, in Britain.
He’s been living in the United States of America since his Gujarati
diamond-merchant family arrived in Queens in 1977. As he sums up his manifesto:
I claim
the right to the United States, for myself and my children and my uncles and
cousins, by manifest destiny…. It’s our country now.
Of course,
exactly why Americans merit vengeance for the sins, real and imaginary, of the
British Raj isn’t fully explained in This Land Is Our Land. But
that’s not the point; the point is that you white people have money, which
means you are guilty, and therefore you must pay.
Seriously,
in the current Scramble
for America, the potential profits for colonizers like the Mehtas
are so vast that it’s only natural for their pundits to not wait around to
publish until they’ve first figured out arguments that can pass the laugh test.
“The only way to keep the Alliance of the Margins from turning
on each other in endless battles over Who Is More Intersectional Than Thou is
to demonize whites as their mutual hate object.”
But Mehta
isn’t just spewing racial hate for the money. Like so many immigrant Indian
intellectuals, such as Angela
Saini, author of the hysterical science denialist book Superior, Mehta
has a giant chip on his shoulder against whites. He feels humiliated that Europe
was once able to colonize India, rather than vice versa:
It is
every migrant’s dream to see the tables turned, to see long lines of Americans
and Britons in front of the Bangladeshi or Mexican or Nigerian Embassy, begging
for a residence visa.
To soothe
his wounded amour propre, Mehta has retconned a vision of South Asian
history that is Indian supremacist crackpottery:
Consider
the subcontinent. For five thousand years we had been one people, ruled
undivided from the borders of Persia to China by emperors from Ashoka to
Akbar…. Then the British came and ruled us for two hundred years by pitting us
against each other so that we couldn’t be pitted against them…
Actually,
it’s not that hard to get South Asians to divide up, in part because they’ve
been genetically dividing themselves up into a
mind-bogglingly elaborate caste system of petty apartheid at least since the
Aryan Invasion. For example, late in his book Mehta admits:
I
immigrated over with not just my immediate family, not just my extended family,
but a large part of my subcaste, the Dashanagar Vaniyas. It’s a subcategory of
Gujarati merchants from the villages around Ahmedabad, “the merchants of the
ten towns.”
And then he recounts how he delights in his subcaste’s annual
picnic:
It was a
fine day at the subcaste picnic. All my caste-fellows, young, old, were playing
cricket, eating, strolling by the New Jersey lake, and the old ladies were
pleased that not one of us had yet married an American.
It’s absurd, of course, for Hindus, the world’s most racist,
reactionary, and inegalitarian culture, to be paid to lecture white Americans
on our crimes against wokeness. It’s relevant to note that most of the new generation
of South Asian pundits on the make, such as Mehta and Saini, aren’t egalitarian
progressives in any abstract sense. They are regressives, loyal to their
families, clans, and races. They wish their people to drive before them their
enemies and hear the lamentations of their women.
But does
anybody get the joke? In The New York Times, for
instance, Lauren Markham gave This Land Is Our Land a rave review.
The title of the book is of course ripped off from American
communist folk singer Woody Guthrie’s famous campfire song:
This land
is your land, this land is my land/From California to the New York island/From
the redwood forest to the gulf stream waters/This land was made for you and me.
Mehta, however, claims the song as a
universal
migrant’s anthem, wherever in the world they come from, and wherever they are
going. This land is their land; this land is our land.
Ironically,
a Smithsonian publication, Folklife, just published a passionate denunciation
of Guthrie’s song by a different kind of Indian, Mali Obomsawin, who uses similarly woke clichés
to instead “interrogate,” usefully, the pernicious “nation of immigrants”
chestnut:
By
critiquing “This Land Is Your Land,” I don’t mean to imply that Guthrie himself
promoted conquest, but the song is indicative of American leftists’ role in
Native invisibility. The lyrics as they are embraced today evoke Manifest
Destiny and expansionism (“this land was made for you and me”). When sung as a
political act, the gathering or demonstration is infused with anti-Nativism….
Just as when Americans call this country a “nation of immigrants,” the
proclamation erases Native peoples’ right to exist in the collective consciousness.
Similarly,
erasing white nations’ right to exist is the intention of Mehta’s This Land
Is Our Land.
As this
Indian vs. Indian conflict over Guthrie’s song reminds us, the Democrats’ Coalition of the Fringes naturally tends toward
being a circular firing squad. What interests do, for example, American Indians
and Asian Indians have in common? (Of course, despite their better claims to
American concern, the generally taciturn American Indians don’t stand much of a
chance of avoiding being steamrolled by the usually glib Asian Indians.)
The only
way to keep the Alliance
of the Margins from turning on each other in endless battles
over Who Is More Intersectional Than Thou is to demonize whites as their mutual
hate object.
Thus, Mehta offers detailed stories about awful German and Irish
boys at his Catholic school in Queens saying unkind things to him forty years
ago. But he offers no details whatsoever on the identity of the criminals who
mugged him twice on the street in New York.
After all,
Mehta is consciously drafting behind Ta-Nehisi Coates’ call for reparations for
African-Americans when he demands open borders as reparations for racist
Americans’ crimes against foreigners who haven’t gotten here yet:
Ta-Nehisi
Coates has written about what America owes its black citizens…. Globally, too,
a giant bill is due…. They’re asking for fairness: for the borders of the rich
to be opened to goods and people…
Granted,
TNC isn’t the most acute thinker. But despite Coates’ manifest density, even TNC might eventually start to
wonder if the white man’s reparation pie is really big enough to accommodate
not just American blacks but also, potentially, every nonwhite grifter on the
planet.
Mehta rushes to reassure:
There are
enough houses. There is enough space in the United States alone to hold all 7
billion of our species…. Macau fits in 52,000 people per square mile…Bangladesh
2,980.
Actually,
the population of Earth hasn’t been 7 billion since 2010. The United
Nations’ new population forecast released on Monday shows
the world’s population has already grown 10 percent since 2010 and is headed
toward 9.7 billion by 2050.
Southern Asia is currently at 1.9 billion and is expected to add
another 500 million people by the middle of this century.
Of course, the world’s truly threatening population problem is
sub-Saharan Africa, which has grown from 640 million in 2000 to 1,066 million
today, and now is expected by the U.N. to double by 2050, and almost double
again to 3.775 billion in 2100.
The good news is it’s not impossible to avert such an
apocalyptic population explosion in Africa. For example, even impoverished
Bangladesh (current population: 163 million) has been cutting its growth rate.
The U.N. expects Bangladesh to peak in 2052 at 192 million.
But for the West to surrender to racist bullying by the likes of
Mehta and therefore increase immigration would instead send a truly disastrous
signal: that the rest of the world doesn’t need to solve their overpopulation
problems because they can offload their surplus citizens on the white saps.
