I wrote this a long time ago: “Immigration decides whether America will be saved. Abortion determines whether it deserves to be.”

That sums up most of my politics. Not because I don’t care about other issues. Of course I do. But these two are what you might call “existential.” And they are also connected.

Immigration Turns Red States Blue. That’s Literally All That Matters.

You see, the immigration issue decides a lot of others. In fact, it’s the tipping point for most of the topics conservatives care about. This for a simple and bluntly practical reason: Most immigrants vote Democrat. Not just right off the boat, but often for multiple generations. The Irish in Massachusetts are still mired in this addiction.

This has been true for decades. But decades ago it didn’t really matter. As of say, 1960, and even 1970, the Democrats were still a mainstream, patriotic political party. They still defended traditional marriage. And gun rights. And property rights. Even a mostly free economy. The party still held enough socially conservative members that you could be a Democrat and a Christian.

The Democrats: A Huge Fringe Party

I don’t think that’s possible today. If you watched the Democratic presidential debate, you understand why. Not one candidate proposed the slightest restriction on killing unborn kids for our sexual convenience. And not one supports natural marriage. Not one spoke up for our Second Amendment rights. Each of them to one degree or another supports the poisonous, anti-Christian ideology of socialism.

The Democrats are now a huge extremist fringe party. That may sound strange at first. But only to us as Americans. In the Weimar Republic, the two largest political parties, the National Socialists and Communists, were both fringe parties. The “mainstream” parties were small and shrinking. In today’s Britain, the Labour Party as led by Jeremy Corbyn is also a fringe party.

You see, we shouldn’t define “fringe” by some relativistic standard like the existing political spectrum. We decide that by comparing a party’s programs with a) the natural law, and b) a nation’s historic culture and traditions. So when the Communists captured China, or the Khmer Rouge conquered Cambodia, their programs remained “fringe,” even though they’d come to power. North Korea’s ruling party is a fringe party.

Not Partisan But Patriotic

And so are the Democrats. Which makes the tendency of new immigrants, especially from Latin America, to vote for that party much more serious. It’s not just partisan but patriotic to try to keep a fringe party from flooding swing states with new, tame supporters whose votes they have already bought — with our promised tax money. We should no more put up with their influx than the Christians in Lebanon should have welcomed millions of Muslims. Or than the Indians should have welcomed the Europeans who conquered them.

What I wrote back in 2011 alas still holds true today:

In many states that last year elected a pro-life, pro-family member of the Senate or the House, the vote margins were relatively close, and Hispanics voted two-to-one in favor of the pro-abortion Democrats. Had the voting rolls been padded with recently legalized immigrants … how many of these seats would still be in the hands of liberal Democrats who favor abortion on demand for all nine months (if need be, paid for by the taxpayer), gay “marriage,” explicit sex education and countless other measures that violate the most fundamental premises of the natural law?

…

[Let’s say we] grant amnesty — the full rights of citizenship, including the right to vote, collect government benefits and use affirmative action at the expense of (for instance) impoverished white male war veterans — to the estimated 10-12 million illegal immigrants in America. We would be adding at the very least 6.3-8 million liberal, pro-abortion voters. No, these recent illegals need not, by the laws of physics, vote for liberal, pro-abortion Democrats. But that is how they will vote, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.

Voting for Free Money from the Government

Let me offer some evidence here. Al Perrotta and I turned it up while writing The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration. As we wrote last year:

[N]ew arrivals overwhelmingly tend to vote liberal and pro-choice. … Don’t believe us? Ask the Pew Research Center, which found in 2012:

“Hispanics are more likely than the general public to say they would rather have a bigger government which provides more services than a smaller government which provides fewer services.

“Some 75% of Hispanics hold this view; just 19% say they prefer a smaller government. By contrast, just 41% of the public at large voice support for a bigger government.

“Support for a larger government is highest among immigrant Latinos, with 81% holding this view.”

Socialism Means Forced Abortion

Some critics will say that the GOP needs to turn itself inside out, and embrace the open borders and big government such immigrants demand. Then maybe, just maybe, they’ll dig out their deeply-hidden pro-life sentiments and start voting to save babies. But that will never happen for many reasons. First, because socialism doesn’t just mean legal abortion. It leads to forced abortion, as it did in China, and almost did last week in Britain.

Second, if Latino immigrants are so overwhelmingly pro-life, but merely held back from voting that way because of other GOP issues, why haven’t they rallied to the remaining pro-life Democrats? Why don’t we see Latino Democrat candidates in dozens of states challenging their party orthodoxy?

Where are the Bishops?

The U.S. Catholic bishops, who beckon these immigrants into the country and profit from their arrival, could help. They could make it a priority to evangelize such new Americans on their duty to vote for just laws that preserve innocent life. Instead of voting for their own perceived tribal and economic interests (i.e. more free money from the government). No sign of the bishops attempting that, alas.

America’s bishops ignore the actual text of the Catechism on immigration. That sounds too much like the 2016 GOP Platform on the topic. Instead, virtually all of them denounce any effort to enforce our laws. In 2017, some 24 bishops labeled all our immigration laws unjust and called on Catholics to defy, evade, and “disrupt” them.

As I’ve pointed out here before, the bishops collected 40% of their budget last year from federal contracts for non-profits. Most of those contracts were for serving immigrants. So their bottom line is at stake. Likewise filling the pews, since 40% of U.S.-born Catholics leave the Church and never come back. Immigrants briefly warm their empty seats, before leaving too. So immigration is a bottom line, life-or-death issue for these bishops. Abortion’s only a life and death issue to the babies. And the bishops don’t get a check from the feds for each baby saved.

Maybe if we could figure out some kind of bounty like that, we’d see the bishops fighting as hard for unborn babies as most do for de facto open borders.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author, co-author or editor of twelve books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration.