“The belief that immigrants from non-Western countries can morally improve Americans is a by-product of the ideology of democratic universalism. The establishment conservatives (who, to paraphrase Richard Nixon, are all neoconservatives now) seem to believe that moral behavior is a kind of universal essence that can be transfused from one culture to another simply by placing the two cultures side by side within the same borders. Obviously the world does not work like that. Moral values, while they have a universal dimension, cannot be embodied or transmitted apart from common membership in a particular tradition – apart from the shared faith, habits and institutions of a particular people. The cultural difference between immigrants and Americans thus raise an insuperable obstacle to the neoconservative moralist argument. If the ‘values-carrying’ immigrants are assimilated into our culture, they will lose the moral values that are suppose to improve the rest of us. But if they remain culturally separate from the rest of society, their values will have no effect on us in any case.”

▪ Lawrence Auster, Huddled Clichés (American Immigration Control Foundation, 1997) extract from pages 30 to 31.

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