Carl Wells Books

Here are a few loose ends, in regard to the wall and immigration.

A brief snippet from the Louisville “Courier-Journal” newspaper from July 21, 2018, notes that a Guatemalan man, an illegal alien living in the United States, has pleaded guilty to driving drunk. What did driving drunk lead to? Not too serious a crime–just crashing into and killing two American citizens, residents of my home state, while he was operating a motor vehicle. So now, after having killed two of our citizens, this illegal alien will spend quite a few years in jail. Paid for by me and my taxpaying neighbors.

This is the reality of permitting illegal immigration: death and misery for U.S. citizens. Those two men would be alive, if the U.S. took seriously its responsibility to keep out illegal aliens.

Sometimes we are told that Hispanics (and other immigrants) will assimilate. My question is, assimilate to what? The U.S. is no longer a place where individual responsibility is crucial. We don’t want to leave other people alone and mind our own business. We are a bite and devour anti-Christian welfare/warfare state. There is no longer a U.S. where freedom included a concomitant sense of individual responsibility.

When we bring in illegal Hispanic immigrants, we also bring in their deadly drug culture. In fairness, it is important to note that the drug culture is mostly fostered by American gringos wanting to buy illegal drugs. Hey, we just want the drugs, we don’t want the violence. We prefer you keep the drug killings in Mexico, while we just enjoy the drugs. But when we permit Hispanic illegals into the U.S., we get along with the drugs, deaths and the other violence. Who could have guessed?

The recent brouhaha concerning Hispanic children separated from their parents by U.S. border officials, in which the Trump administration was supposedly acting with satanic evil, is simply an example of how unprincipled is the left. The commentators want to manipulate us, so that illegal immigration continues. You don’t want to be separated from your children? Then don’t come to the U.S. illegally, and don’t bring your children if you do come illegally. The left wants power, not truth. We shouldn’t be suckers for their propaganda.

As disastrous for the U.S. as is the illegal immigration coming from Hispanic countries, even more disastrous is the U.S. willingness to permit Muslim immigration to this country. Islam is not compatible with a nation that wants to become semi-sane. It is heartbreaking to read about the rapes and other horrors committed by Muslims in Sweden, in England, and in Europe in general. Islam needs to be quarantined. Not invaded by the U.S. Not threatened with invasion. Not punished by sanctions for not toeing the U.S. line. The U.S. behavior to Islamic countries has been horrific, indefensible, evil. But that does not mean we should permit Muslim immigration to this country. I repeat, Islam is not compatible with a free and responsible country, or a country that wants to move toward becoming free and responsible.

The elite scumbags which have foisted Muslim immigration on Europe and on the U.S., are traitors to God, to their countries, to their families. However, fairness requires us to acknowledge that we ordinary people sort of asked for it. We have been passive peons, letting the elite do what they want. We had no right to resign our personal responsibility to these mindless, unprincipled traitors. Why did we do it? We have to accept a lot of the blame for what has happened.

In general, we ordinary people in Europe and in the U.S. have thrown the God of the Bible overboard. Multiculturalism became our new god. We aborted our children. We constructed the welfare state, which destroys souls. We told God to take a hike. Even in our churches, we favored a truncated brand of Christianity that applied to very little of life. Now we are “shocked, shocked” to discover that crazy, suicidal attitudes are the principles that guide us.

We are a culture committing suicide. The Bible warned us. Wisdom (a personality trait of the God of the Bible) said this: ‘”But he who sins against me injures himself;/All those who hate me love death.”‘ (Proverbs 8:36) We hated wisdom, and therefore we are committing suicide.

Two final points. 1/There is no doubt at all that some Hispanics are good people who will help our country. I have two people in mind as I write. One is a member of my extended family. He is a gem, a strong Christian, and a builder rather than a destroyer. But then he came here legally. The second person I have in mind I did not get to know well. I waited on him maybe a couple times when he was a customer at my mother’s place of business, about two decades ago. The last time I dealt with him, it occurred to me that this was a person it would be good for me to get to know better. Instinctively I liked and respected that young man. I planned, the next time he came into the store, to try to get to know him better. Alas, that was the last time I saw him. I don’t know if he was in this country legally or illegally. My point in this paragraph simply is that I am by no means saying that all Hispanics are automatically bad people who should never be permitted to enter the U.S. But we need to be the dog, and not let the tail wag us.

Finally, 2/The world is at war. The war is spiritual. There are dozens of various sides in the war, but right now the most prominent participants are four in number. They are: a/Islam, b/humanism, c/pietist/antinomian Christianity, d/biblical Christianity.

The first two are complete destroyers. I prefer humanism to Islam, because “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.” I can maneuver in humanism, at least so far. There seem to be crevices in humanism, where one can say and believe things outside of humanist orthodoxy. Don’t misunderstand me. Humanism is very evil, and very dangerous. If the more virulently leftist version of humanism triumphs, those crevices may disappear. Both humanism and Islam are anti-human at the core.

Pietist/antinomian Christianity is far, far better than humanism and Islam. But it is not enough. It is too compromised, too unprincipled to be much more than a holding operation. A holding operation is infinitely better than nothing. Pietist/antinomian Christianity, like humanism and Islam, is numerically powerful. Given enough centuries, pietist/antinomian Christianity has a puncher’s chance, or even a much better chance than that, to defeat humanism and Islam.

Biblical Christianity is not numerous at all. But this is the faith that stands on solid ground and can change people’s lives for the better. If Christians begin to exchange their pietism and antinomianism for something more biblical, the long-term results will be spectacular. Spectacularly good, that is. Humanism and Islam will not be able to compete. Granted, p/a Christianity will be able to compete, because there will always be a market for a watered down faith. Mankind in general tends to favor a brand of Christianity that doesn’t ask a lot of us. But if biblical Christianity is competing with p/a Christianity, that would be fantastic! We would in essence be playing with the house’s money.

So, if we want to defeat humanism and Islam, we need to develop a truly biblical brand of Christianity. Let the four faiths compete–and throw in dozens of more faiths as well–and see which side prevails. We can all pick a side. In fact we do pick a side, whether we know it or not.

In part II of this series I said that the most crucial part of Plan B in dealing with immigration was to develop a more biblical brand of Christianity. That I think, strictly speaking, is true. So even if we fail to defend our borders, and immigration brings us lots more miseries which could have been avoided, the long-term battle can still be won. Stick around; mostly likely there are plenty more centuries to come, and the battle for Christian civilization is not over quite yet.

Do people have a right to have their own countries? To live among their own people, and not welcome outsiders, or welcome them only under certain strict conditions?

Let’s think about ancient Israel. Non-Israelites were permitted in the country–but only if the non-Israelites obeyed the rules. There was to be one law for all in the country, according to God’s instructions, and that law was from God. The tail was not to wag the dog. There was to be no open false worship.

Immediately we can see that to permit immigration from southern Hispanics (or to permit Muslim immigration) is a very bad idea. The tail wags the dog. The Hispanics often join the welfare rolls–their existence here subsidized by the productive native-born. The Democrats want Hispanics here, for a practical reason. The Hispanics can be counted on to be socialist voters for socialist Democrats.

Do the Hispanics bring a strong Christian culture, which will revive the flagging Christianity of this country? No, they bring an antinomian Christianity or a socialistic humanism, which will just make things worse.

Let’s look at unmarried births. Why? Well, those can be a shorthand way of seeing the degree of social competence a people group carries. “Things hang together,” as one of George Eliot’s character’s says in Middlemarch. People who can’t or won’t have their children in married adult (one man and one woman) families, are people who are going to have lots of other problems, and cause problems for the people surrounding them.

Here are statistics from the Center for Immigration Studies. The article is “Births to Unmarried Mothers by Nativity and Education,” by Steven A. Comarota, from May 5, 2017. First, here are the unmarried births among native born U.S. citizens: white 30%, Hispanic 56.9%, black 77.3%. Horrific for all three groups. We are a civilization in moral free fall.

Now let’s look at the unmarried births among immigrants: white 12.7%, Hispanic 48.9%, black 34.2%. Again, bad for all three groups. The immigrant Hispanics are doing slightly better than the native born Hispanics, but still are the worst of the three groups by a significant margin. The Hispanics are not going to bring us a family oriented brand of Christianity which will strengthen the nation as a whole. They are going to make us even more of a welfare state hellhole than we already are. And heaven knows the statistics show clearly that we native born Americans are quite capable of destroying our own country without any help from outsiders, thank you very much.

I think we are all (or almost all, if not quite all) more comfortable living among our own people. Is this wicked on the part of those of us who want to live among our own people? I don’t think so. Why not treat everyone with respect and kindness, but without forcing them to live together? Closer fellowship can develop on the margins, in some cases. But shoving some people down the throats of others is not the way to develop mutual respect.

Shoving immigrants down the throats of native born Americans is exactly what is happening. You don’t approve? Then you are a close-minded person terrified of the Other. Well, maybe not. Maybe you are just a person who wants to live among your own people.

As I stated in part I, it is likely that there is no chance to end or reverse the trend toward open immigration. It would have been better that the immigration had not happened, but we weren’t thinking clearly, and we let it happen. Now we are going to have to come up with a Plan B. Here is my Plan B, in three brief segments.

1/Split the U.S. into many smaller entities. Each small country could do what it liked. Love open immigration? Fine. “Do your thang, do what you wanta do.” Prefer to have a different type of country, where the dog wags the tail, and immigrants come in only on the terms of your country? Well, it is worth a try, in my opinion. This is covenantal thinking. This permits Christian countries to exist, and permits non-Christian or anti-Christian countries to exist. We each do our own thing. God will show what works, if He exists. Meanwhile we leave each other alone. The U.S. is far too big, and has done so much evil in recent years that it needs to cease existing. Break up the monster.

2/What about a viable third political party that represents ordinary people? Well, I much prefer the creation of numerous small political parties, each one arising out of local or state conditions. The way to responsibility is to start small, and grow gradually as you demonstrate that you stand for something good. Why not several dozen or several hundred small political parties? To develop parties that stand firmly by godly principles would be a very hard thing to accomplish. But it seems very unlikely that we are going to have a microwave quick solution to our problems. We need to spend several decades trying to develop politics for adults; now we have politics for kleptomaniacs, and most of us have klepto leanings ourselves.

3/The third point is the most important. We need to develop a biblical brand of Christianity. A Christian population which gives the church only one-quarter of the tithe required of us, which cheerfully steals our neighbors’ property via taxation to educate our children in public schools, which cheers at preemptive wars and shrugs or cheers at torture, which refuses to excommunicate fornicators and baby-killers, is a Christian population which is committed to suicide, and is not going to help anybody, native born or immigrant, learn how to think and live.

So Plan B is pretty radical. Are we going to do any of them? Well, circumstances push us to things, eventually. Right now almost nobody is ready to split up the U.S., to start a local political party (or even just run for office as an independent), or to help move the church to a more biblical brand of Christianity. But circumstances can help us learn. If the U.S. welfare/warfare state goes belly up, maybe a few of us will start to look for better ways of living–including for a more biblical brand of Christianity. Until then, probably not much is going to change. Meanwhile, each of us can improve our own thinking and living, as individuals. Some can have influence on their families.

Christians who support open immigration do not understand the Bible, do not understand human nature, and are doing what they can to bring Christian civilization to an end on this continent. But we Christians have been doing a lot of destructive things for a very long time, so it is no surprise if we add another. For my part, I want to be clearly on record: close the borders, end the welfare/warfare state, and evangelize seriously–starting with our own selves, since our Christianity is currently a faint mockery of biblical Christianity.

Should the U.S. put up a wall on its southern border, to keep third world Hispanics from entering this country? I think such a wall would be very wrongheaded. If you want to stop or reverse immigration, there are far better ways to do it.

A few points. 1/The wall would be incredibly expensive. Just what we need–another government make-work project costing billions of dollars we don’t have. 2/The wall wouldn’t work. There would be ways around, under, or over it. 3/Even if the wall worked perfectly, keeping out 100% of southern immigrants, so what? The next time a Democratic administration takes over–and that is likely to happen sooner or later, quite possibly sooner–they would simply open up the wall to large immigration, legal or illegal. It is very much to the advantage of Democrats to permit large immigration, because immigrants tend to vote Democratic rather than Republican. 4/The people who run the country, whether Democrats, many Republicans, Mainstream Media, and assorted globalists, want there to be large immigration. What ordinary people want has little to do with what happens. Democracy is just fine and dandy, until we proles want something our rulers don’t want. Then “the adults” (adults in their own minds, at least) take over and do what they want.

Can anything be done to stop or reverse immigration? Yes, theoretically.

In fact, something has been done in the past–and it worked pretty well. It could work again, and it could work even better. Read an article by John Dillin written for “The Christian Science Monitor” for July 6, 2006, entitled “How Eisenhower solved illegal border crossings from Mexico.” It is available on the Internet. Mr. Dillin reports on what happened in 1954. Under the guidance of President Dwight Eisenhower, Operation Wetback–even the name would end the operation in our day–cut off illegal immigration quickly and effectively in just a few months. Lots of illegals were rounded up. By the end of the summer about 80,000 had been arrested, and taken deep into Mexico before released. Another half million or more illegals simply left the U.S. voluntarily, to avoid arrest and deportation.

I think it is fair to say that Operation Wetback is mostly forgotten by the ordinary American citizen. I didn’t remember it. I was seven years old when it happened, but one would have thought I would have read about it somewhere along the line. In fact I only stumbled on the facts late in my life, and most Americans have probably not had a similar stumbling. (Chapter 26 of my book Inconvenient Opinions deals with this historical event at greater length.) For relatively little money, and with one-tenth the number of Border Patrol agents available today, Operation Wetback accomplished wonders. Something similar could work again. Operation Help Our Hispanic Neighbors to Return to their Roots–just a suggestion for a more politically correct name–could get rid of illegal aliens, cause many to leave voluntarily as happened in 1954, and could discourage others from coming. A wall is ridiculous. What is needed is a will, not a wall. With a will, we could once again take control of the borders of our country.

At that point in 1954 the U.S. had the will to defend its borders–at least a significant portion of the leadership, led by President Eisenhower, still had the will to defend its borders. That is no longer true today.

However, it may be that the will to defend our borders is lost even among many (if not quite most) ordinary people. Even many Christians support open immigration. In part II of this discussion (next week) I will try to deal with what the Christian stance on immigration should be, and why.

Let’s conclude today’s post by briefly considering six things that could be done, to end and even to reverse illegal immigration to the U.S. These are practical things which would not cost an arm and a leg–unlike the impractical wall–and they would really work.

1/No compromise, no path to citizenship, no anchor babies, no nothing. You just can’t stay here. You have to leave. This is not your country.

2/Any employer who hired an illegal alien should be fined significantly. The fines would not have to be outrageous, but they would have to be appropriately high, so that no employer could afford to take a chance on hiring an illegal immigrant.

3/End welfare payments of any sort for immigrants. But at the same time we should end welfare payments to American citizens. You have to work to eat. That would encourage Americans to take jobs they previously were unwilling to take.

4/End the minimum wage laws, so that all of our current citizens can get a job and earn enough to feed themselves and their families, and to provide for the other necessities of life.

5/End Muslim immigration to the this country, completely. That has little or nothing to do with immigration from the south, but it is important nevertheless. Islam is not consistent with a semi-sane civilization. To permit Muslim immigration to this country is an egregious form of suicide.

6/American Christian churches should begin to do what they should have been doing all along–help people with problems find their way to employment and to practical ways of living. Christians currently give 2.5% of our increase to the church–one quarter of what God asks of us (Malachi 3:8-12). If we were tithing, we would have plenty of money to help people in every way, spiritual and practical.

Now look at the list of six things again. Are there any of them that we are going to do? Of course not. Are there any of them that most people would even consider as practical and useful? Nope. There is zero chance that any of the six things will get done, in the near or long-term future.

As a people, we don’t have the will to make changes that are needed, to deliver us from the problems we have put upon ourselves. So the battle to stop illegal immigration is likely lost, with no chance of illegal immigration being ended or reversed. We are going to have to find a Plan B.

Next week I plan to deal with immigration from a more theoretical point of view, and also to offer a Plan B.

Talking to my brother a couple weeks ago, he made the point that there were certain books one wished one could induce others to read. The reading of them would encourage clarity of thought about how life is put together, in the readers. Providentially, I had been thinking precisely the same thing just at that time, in my rereading of Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, by Theodore Dalrymple (published in 2001). I wish tens of thousands, or tens of millions, of people would read this book.

Theodore Dalrymple (p. 1949) is one of the living treasures of our civilization. He was a psychiatrist and doctor, currently retired from those jobs, but writing diligently. He has a large Internet presence, and publishes books regularly–about 35 or so to date. Most of them are non-fiction, a few are novels or books of short stories. He is a very talented writer, and extremely well-read. I have read about fifteen of his books–three of them a second time–and am reading another as we speak.

Life at the Bottom may be his most famous work, and that is probably deservedly so. It is a wonderfully insightful and thought-provoking book. I just finished my second reading of it. I had underlined large swaths the first time through, and added more the second time.

Life at the Bottom is a collection of essays written between 1994 and 2000. The essays detail his experiences as doctor/psychiatrist serving in both a hospital and a prison, in a large English city. (While the city is not named in the book, we know that it was Birmingham.) While the anecdotes are fascinating, what makes Mr. Dalrymple’s book so incredibly helpful is that he is able to see that there was a worldview which led to the formation of an underclass so debased and violent. He pulls no punches in his exposure of liberalism as father of “The Worldview That Makes the Underclass.”

Mr. Dalrymple has spent a lot of time as a doctor in poor countries in Africa, and in Latin America. He has seen a lot of poor people. The people in the British slum may not have been poor financially, when compared to other poor people, but their poverty was qualitatively different. “I have little hesitation in saying that the mental, cultural, emotional, and spiritual impoverishment of the Western underclass is the greatest of any large group of people I have ever encountered anywhere.” (p. viii)

Here are a few more quotations from the book’s Introduction.

“It will come as a surprise to American readers, perhaps, to learn that the majority of the British underclass is white, and that it demonstrates all the same social pathology as the black underclass in American–for very similar reasons, of course.” (p. viii)

“everyone has a Weltanschauung, a worldview, whether he knows it or not. It is the ideas my patients have that fascinate–and, to be honest, appall–me: for they are the source of their misery.” (p. ix)

“If anyone wants to see what sexual relations are like, freed of contractual and social obligations, let him look at the chaos of the personal lives of members of the underclass.

“Here the whole gamut of human folly, wickedness, and misery may be perused at leisure–in conditions, be it remembered, of unprecedented prosperity. Here are abortions procured by abdominal kung fu; children who have children, in numbers unknown before the advent of chemical contraception and sex education; women abandoned by the father of their child a month before or a month after delivery; insensate jealousy, the reverse of the coin of general promiscuity, that results in the most hideous oppression and violence; serial stepfatherhood that leads to sexual and physical abuse of children on a mass scale; and every kind of loosening of the distinction between the sexually permissible and the impermissible.

“The connection between this loosening and the misery of my patients is so obvious that it requires considerable intellectual sophistication (and dishonesty) to be able to deny it.” (p. xi)

“Does the fate of the underclass matter? If the misery of millions of people matters, then the answer must surely be yes. But even if we were content to consign so many of our fellow citizens to the purgatory of life in our slums, that would not be the end of the matter. For there are clear signs that the underclass will be revenged upon the whole pack of us.

“In the modern world, bad ideas and their consequences cannot be confined to a ghetto. Middle-class friends of mine were appalled to discover that the spelling being taught to their daughter in school was frequently wrong; they were even more appalled when they drew it to the attention of the school’s head teacher and were told it did not matter, since the spelling was approximately right and everyone knew anyway what the misspelling meant.” (pp. xiii-xiv)

“In what follows I have tried first to describe underclass reality in an unvarnished fashion, and then to lay bare the origin of that reality, which is the propagation of bad, trivial, and often insincere ideas.” (p. xv)

“And if I paint a picture of a way of life that is wholly without charm or merit, and describe many people who are deeply unattractive, it is important to remember that, if blame is to be apportioned, it is the intellectuals who deserve most of it. They should have known better but always preferred to avert their gaze. They considered the purity of their ideas to be more important that the actual consequences of their ideas. I know of no egotism more profound.” (p. xv)

And that’s just from the Introduction. Another 250 pages of anecdotes and insights follow.

I’m far from the only person to love this book. A couple summers ago I was talking to an 84-year old man who had compiled material for a book he wanted to publish. He was clearly a thoughtful person with ideas deserving of respect. You can imagine my surprise and delight to find Life at the Bottom among the books he recommended.

Thomas Sowell is a distinguished black free market economist who writes often on how ideas influence our thinking. Go to his website, check out the section he has called Suggested Readings. There are only 18 books listed there. One of them is–you guessed it!–Life at the Bottom. Dr. Sowell says this about the book:

“An incisive and brutally honest eye-witness account of the social degeneracy created by the welfare state among the white underclass in Britain–remarkably similar to the social pathology in American ghettoes but without such supposed causes as slavery or racism.”

So it’s not just me who thinks this is an important book. In the past, I have had very consistent fortune in getting people to read what I recommend–consistently bad, that is. I recommend a book, and people run away as fast as they can in the opposite direction. Well, I tried. My experience is that people don’t really want to try something new, or read outside of a narrow comfort zone. So skip Life at the Bottom, but if you do you are skipping a gifted writer with a love for truth.

Theodore Dalrymple, born in England, is the child of a communist father with a Russian ancestry, and a German Jewish mother who was a refugee from the Nazis. He says he became an atheist at about age 9. Can an atheist teach Christians anything? Mr. Dalrymple may be an atheist officially, but he is trying to tell the truth according to the light that is in him. I think there is a lot of light there. I think he writes to fight against chaos–potential chaos in his own thinking, and very real chaos in the world around him. He may be on the side of the angels, without believing that the angels are really there. He writes with sympathy and respect of those Christians in the slums, who try to find community with each other in a wretched and dangerous environment. Wikipedia says of him, “He is an atheist, but has criticised anti-theism.”

If one wants an introduction to the writings of Theodore Dalrymple, a good place to start might be the website The Skeptical Doctor: Dedicated to the work of Theodore Dalrymple.

Used paperback copies of Life at the Bottom can be found on the Internet for reasonable prices, ranging from a low of $6.56 total cost, shipping included (abebooks) up through seven or eight dollars at alibris and amazon. In my opinion the book is wonderful. I wish 10,000,000 people would read it, starting with my own Christian people.