Dean,

Mark Steyn pointed out in a recent essay that the future belongs to those who show up. As the “blue states” tend to have lower birthrates than the “red states”, I think the blue-state way of thinking will tend to die out, given enough time.

Roger,

I think you paint the picture about recent immigration a bit darkly. Yeah, we’re taking in a lot of immigrants from Mexico and points south, but on a proportional basis, it’s probably less than what our grandparents and great-grandparents experienced from 1880-1910, when we got all those millions from Europe. And that professor “of Chicano Studies at the University of New Mexico [who] gleefully predicts that by 2080 parts of the Southwest United States and Northern Mexico will join to form a new country, ‘La Republica del Norte’” has no clue about what he’s talking about. Can he really predict what the world will be like in three generations from now, given the ever-accelerating pace of change in the last 75 years? And after those three generations have passed, does he really think that the great-grandchildren of people who fled Mexico (or wherever) are really going to have any loyalty to a country that they never lived in? What a clueless ninny.

Cheer up, man, and get busy with the job of encouraging these people to assimilate. And in any case, their children will speak English simply because it won’t pay to speak Spanish to anyone except the old folks.