“It is better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so,” is a bit of folk wisdom from Josh Billings that could be the official motto of our times. The El Paso shooter’s manifesto, for example, echoed Trump with its rant against “the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” Not surprisingly, the mass murderer was ill-informed.
There’s clearly a flood of immigrants from dysfunctional Central American countries trying to gain asylum in America, something several dozen generations before them (including most of our ancestors) have done before them.
A competent, robust, well-funded border security regime could manage it humanely. As the world grows more divided between rich and poor, habitable and unendurable such protection will be increasingly vital. And a less bungling government capable of providing it.
Still this “invasion” is far less than the whole story. Texas schools teach the ethnic and demographic history of the state which the shooter theoretically was exposed to. For 131 years the territory now called Texas was part of a province of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, populated by conquering Hispanics and native peoples.
Beginning in 1821 it became a part of an independent Mexico. If there was an invasion of that new Hispanic state it was by white Texians from the United States trying to crowd out the Mexican inhabitants. Still, when a Republic of Texas proclaimed its independence from Mexico in1831, many Mexican Texans or Tejanos fought side by side with the white Texians.
By 1970, Hispanics were approximately 23% of Texans, blacks 12% and whites 65%. By 2000 the numbers were 32% Hispanic, 53% white and in 2016, 39% Hispanic and 43% percent white, with blacks, asians and others the rest. According to projections, by the time of the 2020 census Hispanics should constitute the majority of Texans, not for the first time.
Some of this changing picture results from in-migration, but much more is homegrown.
Into this complicated history, one also has to factor in the higher birthrate of present day Hispanic Texans who are largely Catholic. Texans 65-74 in age are 63% white and just 19% Hispanic, but Texans 10 and under are 31% white nd 40% Hispanic. In 2017, 33% of births in the state were to non-Hispanic whites, 15% to blacks, 5% to Asians, and 47% to Hispanics. If there’s an invasion, much of it passes through the maternity ward.
If you are a white Texan, it might be possible to feel you no longer rank as a member of the alpha dogs of your state’s diverse population, but that doesn’t make you a second class citizen, just a part of an evolving society in which 17% of the population is immigrants and another 15% of natural born Texans have one or more foreign-born parents. And Hispanics are only one ethicity for you to worry about. Asian-Americans in Texans have increased by 42% since 2010.
One can either celebrate this multi-ethnic tapestry or freak out and believe an invasion of aliens will result in race-mixing mongrelization, polluting one’s pure-bred American wonderfulness. The imagined superiority of the current inhabitants to the newcomers is as old as the country. The smug Wasp ascendancy of the 19th century, the Brahmins of Boston, the Know-Nothings, the plantation masters all with their serial contempt for, African slaves, Scots, Irish, Germans, Italians, Chinese, Jews, Catholics.
By the turn of the 20th century the fictions concocted to flatter the vanity of one ethnic group over another were even aided and abetted by the pseudo-science of eugenics, an inspiration for none other than than Adolph Hitler and his toxic fantasy of a Master Race.
One would have thought by now we would have learned that DNA doesn’t lie. We are all pieces of the same humanity that came out of Africa and populated the Texas, like the rest of the planet, in a coat of many colors — the Spanish Conquistadors, the Comanches, Stephen Austin, Barbara Jordan, Selena, Willie Nelson, Janis Joplin, Jamie Foxx, and the El Paso shooter. White people, you are not alone. Get over it.