I spent an afternoon the other day strolling through the Valley View Shopping Center in Dallas. Its once-fine stores are slowly closing one by one. In their place, quaint Mexican vendors with amateurishly painted signs and sparse stores now hawk their wares as they would in a seedy swap meet.
In 1984, there was a Bloomingdales in this mall.
Valley View was never upscale like ritzy Highland Park. But 17 years ago, when I arrived in Dallas, Valley View was a place where you could wander among big name stores and professional marketers. Clothes were always top fashion. The restaurants were havens of delectable eating. You could spend a day there and feel like you were immersed in value. It was an uplifting experience.
Today it is Death Valley. Today it is tamales and rap music, velvet paintings of Christ and plump Latina women chattering like magpies. South of the Border culture is slowly snaking its way into Dallas.
How long will it be before it is seriously encroaching on Yankee territory?
Is Valley View just a normal part of an ever-shifting marketplace brought on by Schumpeter’s “creative destruction,” as libertarians maintain? Are complaints just knee-jerk reaction to the nature of capitalism?
Not at all. In 1996, the apartment complex I moved into upon arrival (and lived in for 12 years) was a nice, middle-class complex nestled among beautiful homes in a North Dallas surrounding neighborhood. The residents were 85 percent white Americans. Today that complex is down to 10 percent white Americans, 10 percent black Americans, and 80 percent Mexicans, largely illegals. And it’s uninhabitable.
This is not capitalism and “creative destruction” at work. This is ideological insanity at work. This is multiculturalist dogma hammered in by the educational system for 40 years, coupled with a federal government outrageously negligent about one of its most fundamental duties—the protection of the nation’s borders.
“It gets worse every day,” complains one local businessman. “I have owned a contracting business here for 25 years, and I can no longer find any employees that can speak English (nor do they have a desire to). Having been around them for the last ten years on a daily basis, they make no bones about it.”
“Yes, Dallas is full of illegals,” says a former resident who moved to California. “I lived there for years and still work in Dallas at least once a month. You will find illegals working everywhere, living in every suburb. You cannot insulate or isolate yourself from them completely – unless you live in a castle surrounded by a moat.” [ Is there an influx of illegal immigrants living in Dallas, Texas? Ans: Are You Kidding?,CityData August 21, 2007]
Bianca Mercado summarizes this transformation of the great metropolis of historically white, Protestant north Texas:
In 1980, one out of every eight Dallas residents was Hispanic. By 2000, the statistic changed to one in three. By 2004, Hispanics had become the largest single ethnic group in Dallas, comprising nearly 42 percent of the Dallas population, or nearly one in every two Dallas residents. The Catholic diocese of Dallas, moreover, grew from 200,000 in 1990 to 950,000 in 2007, with Hispanics accounting for most of that growth.With their Hearts in their Hands: Forging a Mexican Community in Dallas, 1900-1925, Masters Thesis, University of North Texas, May 2008
Class and taste, of course, still exist throughout Dallas (and America). But the writing is on the wall. A lower culture has invaded a higher culture. And all the lying Political Correctness of our Establishment is not going to be able to cover it up if our Republican quislings in Washington D.C. grant Amnesty to the 12-20 million illegals spearheading the invasion.
With Amnesty will come the next wave, which will be 20-30 million, then 40-50 million, then the death of the America that the Founders envisioned.
The liberal lie of multiculturalism has done this to us. And not one in a hundred of our pundits grasps the connection that this ideological perversion (coupled, in my view, with another liberal myth—Keynesianism) has to death throes such as Valley View and countless neighborhoods throughout America today.
Where patriots see amateurishly painted signs and an illiterate dumbing-down, multicultural ideologues see “democratic culture” and “egalitarian justice.” The squalid decadence and economic tumult of life with Open Borders (and fiat money malfeasance) escape them.
What else has the illegal alien invasion brought to Dallas? For starters, the city is now being used as a main office by the La Familia Mexican drug cartel.
Dallas makes a perfect command and control center for Mexican smugglers to distribute drugs throughout the U.S. because highway I-35 runs from Laredo on the border to Dallas and then to Kansas City and north to Duluth, MN. Hundreds of thousands of Mexican illegals make for a nice cover. Spanish-speaking “entrepreneurs” don’t stand out in such an environment.
“Dallas is the new Miami for transiting drugs,” the DEA tells us.
Mexican gangsters are now fighting over turf in Chicago. Why not soon in Dallas? Mexicans consider Southwest America to be their rightful land anyway. How long will it be before the violence level escalates to that of Laredo, Nogales, and Juarez?
“You name it. There’s no city limits sign for these guys. Wherever they can fit in, they’ll move in, sometimes as normally as a normal family,” said Daniel R. Salter, the acting special agent in charge of the Dallas DEA office.
Suburbs worst impacted: the low rent, southeast sectors of Dallas proper and suburban cities like Seagoville, Duncanville, Carrollton, Richardson.
Here is the DEA list of the most wanted immigrant fugitives in the Dallas area.
Every single one of them is Hispanic, and only one of the 17 is recorded as being born in the United States.
The sedate suburban city of Farmers Branch north of Dallas has been trying for years to ban illegals from renting within its limits. But constant legal harassment from Leftist vigilante groups like the ACLU and MALDEF has blocked it so far.
In 2010, a federal judge (Bush appointee Jane Boyle) ruled that the Farmers Branch ordinance was unconstitutional, and moreover, it was preempted by federal immigration law. This ruling was upheld in March of 2012 by a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.[VDARE.com note: The three judges on the panel: A 90ish white male Carter appointee , 40ish lady judge appointed by Bush and Perry (cf. Harriet Miers), and a black judge appointed by Obama .]
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is the attorney for Farmers Branch. He told the court that the plaintiffs “cannot identify a single federal statute that the Farmers Branch ordinance conflicts with.” He also stated further that the law not only allows such ordinances, the law “invites it.” He cited several federal statutes that support the Farmers Branch ordinance with language such as “governments should act to discourage illegal immigration” and another one that “forbids the harboring of unauthorized immigrants, which includes renting them apartments.” [A Texas town wants to ban undocumented immigrants from renting houses, by Griselda Nevarez, Voxxi.com, September 21, 2012]
Unfortunately, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans also ruled in late July that the Farmers Branch ordinance was unconstitutional.
But city officials, despite intense pressure to throw in the towel, have not given up. They say they have 90 days to decide on whether to appeal, citing a recent favorable Nebraska court ruling on a similar ordinance inspired by the Farmers Branch example.
Stay tuned to this David and Goliath case.
Why has Farmers Branch fought so hard? One obvious reason: property values.
Take that nice North Dallas apartment complex I lived in for 12 years. Today, it is a dreadful slum with boom-blaster music thundering everywhere, garishly painted automobiles being repaired in the parking lot, squabbling and fighting, torn trash bags deposited on the pavement in front of the metal dumpsters rather than placed inside (this even when the dumpster is totally empty), and a slew of other degrading eyesores.
Immigration enthusiast groups like the ACLU, La Raza and the Chamber of Commerce, claim there is no correlation between illegals and property values. But illegals travel in packs; they attract scores of friends and relatives. They live three and four families to a house. They spread ruin wherever they go. Sure, there are exceptions, but it’s safe to say illegals moving into a neighborhood are a definite negative that realtors do not like to see.
Garland, Carrollton, Richardson, Duncanville, Seagoville, and certain portions of Dallas proper have already experienced this tragedy. But it is not reported. Immigration Enthusiasts see what they want to see—exactly like the liberals who went to Russia in the 1920s-1930s and came back raving about the beauty and freedom they encountered.
A peculiar problem confronting Dallas: the city has always had a certain Mexican flavor, much of it not undesirable. This has led many Dallas residents into dangerous complacency about illegals and the future consequences of Amnesty—reinforced, of course, by relentless Educrat and Main Stream Media propaganda. Well-meaning and patriotic Dallasites go about their daily lives believing the nation’s immigration crisis is just reactionary alarmism from conservative troglodytes unable to face up to the flow of peoples and cultures.
Dallas residents, thus, continue to send politicians to Austin who see appeasement as a viable response to the invasion facing them. They cannot see back 27 years to 1986 and connect the dots of today’s 12-20 million onslaught to the Immigration Reform and Control Act’s granting of amnesty to 3 million illegals under Reagan.
And, as readers of VDARE.com well know, border security alone is not enough. Without an English language mandate, states ability to deny welfare and schooling to illegals, closing the Anchor Baby loophole, mandatory E-Verify, the tide will not be stemmed.
Texans know backyard honey pots must be removed to stop fire ants from streaming into their yards. The same applies to illegals.
But my sense is that Americans generally would rally around a principled stand against illegal immigration, like Americans rallied around Tom Paine and Common Sense 240 years ago. As Pat Buchanan recently argued, in times of crisis voters do respond to courage and principle. They will connect the dots, especially if a gutsy presidential candidate dares to buck the PC police and forcefully explain the dots to them—as Texan Ross Perot explained the coming debt crisis with charts and half hour TV lectures in 1992.
All great and successful nations protect their borders. Their intellectuals peruse history rigorously and learn from it. They respect the ethnic majority of their country. They do not malign its traditions and smear its heroes in the schools.
Our immigration crisis did not just pop upon the scene. It is the result of many aberrations that have been fostered by the Left over the past century.
Will the American people wake up and rally to a new “common sense” for our time? I believe they would…if only a principled political leader would emerge.
Let this be a plea to Texas’ own Senator Ted Cruz. Are you that kind of leader?
Nelson Hultberg (email him) is a freelance writer in Dallas, TX and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic www.AFR.org. His articles have appeared in such publications as the Dallas Morning News, San Antonio Express-News, American Conservative, Insight, The Freeman, Liberty, and The Social Critic, as well as on numerous Internet sites. He is the author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values and Breaking the Demopublican Monopoly: How to Unify America with a Third Party that Can Win.
