The Transformation of America: Lesson for the Rebirth of Russia, Part II

American Heartland

Having earned enough money to pay for my first two years of study, I could begin as a graduate student at North Carolina State University at the beginning of 1995. The campus is located in the state capital, Raleigh. In comparison with New York, Raleigh gave me the feeling that at last, I had arrived in normal, traditional America!

Studying at the university presented quite a few surprises and interesting observations, the main one being that it allowed me to understand, in many ways, the mentality of native-born Americans, since despite knowing many people in cosmopolitan New York, the majority of them were either new arrivals or first-generation immigrants.

Honestly speaking, the high level of the requirements of the Aerospace Engineering Department, where I was undergoing my academic training, was a surprise to me. After my studies at the Moscow Aviation Institute in Soviet times, I presumptuously thought that I would be somewhat difficult to surprise. But in my first semester, I literally had to bring all my efforts to bear in order to keep up with the coursework. Term papers on learned theory were assigned every week, not once per semester, and they had to be turned in no later than the assigned day, and no later than the assigned hour of that day, or the work would not count. The theoretical level was generally very high, and the practical work on the learned material was very intensive.

In my department, around half of the students were foreigners, mostly from China and India. Many of them were financed by their governments, with guaranteed work upon their return home. In the Computer Science Department, for example, the number of foreign students was generally as high as 70 percent. I recall that students from India and China spoke respectfully of Russia and told me that many textbooks that they had studied were issued by the Soviet Union and then translated in their countries.

Americans preferred to study the humanities, or in the business-oriented departments, because they considered studies of the natural sciences or technical specialties too complicated, and with uncertain prospects for future employment. However, the “geeks” — Americans with whom I studied — made the very best impression. Working in good faith, some kind of “hack work” could not even be considered. In the American academic world, plagiarism is generally considered a serious offense, and I heard of cases of expulsion from the university for that.

After two years of theoretical study, I passed my qualifying exams and began work on my dissertation. At the same time, I had the opportunity to teach students working on their Bachelor’s degrees, and from that time onward, the university began to pay for my tuition.

Naturally, through interaction in the academic process, and through participation in various activities outside of school, there was a mutual rapprochement and the opportunity to speak openly on many topics. American students and graduate students could well understand their own concerns and some related areas. We could carry on interesting conversations about some kind of hobbies or sports, but they all had pretty weak notions of what was happening in the world around them. That narrow, limited worldview is my most vivid impression. Our conversations never touched on politics, or crime, or the flood of immigrants into the country, who were literally changing the landscape before our very eyes. That is, those problems that Americans collide with every day, and especially the very causes of those problems, are never discussed in conversation, either one on one or in groups. These themes are factually taboo in the United States.

Later I was not very surprised at the existence of some unwritten list of taboo topics, which is called political correctness in America. I would say that Americans are distinguished by an alienated individualism, some kind of apathy toward the future of “this” country, as they said. Their thoughts are directed exclusively toward their own survival and success. The exceptions were those Americans who have studied or worked abroad. Their worldview after that was significantly changed. No wonder they say that everything is relative.

Golden State

After defending my dissertation in 2000, and receiving my Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering, they proposed that I continue my research as an employee at NASA Ames Research Center, which is located near San Francisco. The Space Exploration Initiative of the late 1980s under Bush senior was quietly buried in the mid-1990s, and NASA’s main priority became the the International Space Station. Therefore, at Ames, instead of working on a manned mission to Mars, we were busy building landers capable of delivering to the planet’s surface autonomous Mars rovers, significantly larger than the first successful Mars rover “Pathfinder,” which arrived on Mars in 1997. As a result of this work, the Mars rover “Spirit” landed successfully in 2004, and in November of that year, the Mars Science Laboratory launched with the Mars rover “Curiosity,” weighing about a ton and as large as a light automobile.

In California, near Los Angeles, there is another NASA center, and although it is formally known as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, there is assembly, testing and management of all interplanetary probes and landers. The establishment of two NASA centers in California in the 1950s was not an accident. After the Second World War, California became the most populated state, having the most powerful economy. Right up to the mid-1970s, California advocated the focus on aviation and space companies. At the same time, its schools and universities were considered the best in the country and the crime rate was very low. In those days Americans called California the “Golden State.”

I did not find that “golden” California; I saw, in many ways, a completely different state. In 2001 California already bore little resemblance to the rest of the U.S. in its character and in the makeup of its population. Even back in North Carolina, I heard from Americans more than once that California is not America; after all, it is a very liberal state. It seemed to me after the first two years of life in New York, that to see something less American would not be easy. But in California, sometimes I feel like I am more likely in Mexico than in America, because of the enormous quantity of Mexican immigrants, living wherever I went.

I recall that in 2005 California became the first state in the U.S. where white people became the minority. More exactly, they then comprised 48 percent of the population, and after all, in the mid-1970s their numbers were around 90 percent of the population. In the past decade, California underwent a colossal demographic transformation, as a result of legal and illegal immigration, the majority of which were peasant Indians from the villages of Mexico and Central America.

Immigrants from Mexico and other third-world countries form their ethnic enclaves everywhere that they settle, and continue to live by the same rules and habits that exist in their home countries. Receiving naturalization documents does not necessarily make them Americans. As a rule, these immigrants remain loyal to their countries of origin and hardly ever assimilate. Additionally, the authorities officially espouse an ideology of multiculturalism. Such fresh-baked “Americans” often do not want to respect American traditions and rules of everyday life, and actively impose their own way of life and their own norms of conduct. It happens that the children of immigrants have an even more damaging relationship toward America, than their parents. For example, many Mexican youths, though born in America, openly announce that they would like to return the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas — which became U.S. states according to the 1848 treaty — to Mexico.

Not knowing English, lacking an education, millions of immigrants receive various forms of assistance from the California treasury, which is considerately provided to them by liberal politicians. For the financial support of immigrants, in the form of payments for their housing, food for their nourishment, medicines and education, California had to impose taxes on its middle class at the very highest rate in the country. Inasmuch as the influx of immigrants numbers in the millions, the money is still insufficient, and this led to a catastrophic worsening of the school systems and health services in the state, and also an increase in the crime rate. And the middle class, that is, the taxpayers, began to flee California for those states where so far, the taxes are still lower, the schools are still better, and the crime rate is still lower. Thus, there is a gradual replacement of the native-born population of California by immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries. As a result of this constant influx of millions of tax beneficiaries, and the outflow of millions of taxpayers, the once “golden” state declared itself bankrupt in 2010.

Processes analogous to the California case are now ongoing in the states of Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. With a little delay, the states of Denver*, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey will follow them. With the uninterrupted flow of immigrants across the southern border of the U.S., and their significantly higher birthrates compared to the native-born population, it is only a question of that not-so-distant time when these tendencies will begin to appear in the remaining parts of the country. Changing these processes is hardly conceivable, because Republicans act in the interests of businesses which hunger for profits from cheap migrant labor, and the Democrats stimulate the influx of immigrants by providing them with social aid in exchange for their electoral votes, once they receive citizenship and can vote.

The large scale of this migration has such deep consequences, that it will lead to the cultural and social fragmentation of the country.

The dilemma which the U.S. will have to solve in the foreseeable future can be summed up thus: How will they avoid social anarchy, in view of the ongoing de-industrialization of the country, the steady reduction of the American middle class, and the ever growing number of immigrants, incapable of cultural assimilation? And, how will they preserve the integrity of the country under conditions of an ethnically and socially fragmented, multicultural society, into which the U.S. was transformed by liberal immigration and economic policies?

*Translator’s note: The author likely meant Colorado.

To be continued tomorrow: “Lib­eral Mon­e­tarism in Action (and Ruins),” part three in a three-part translation of Roman Jits’ “The Transformation of America: Lesson for the Rebirth of Russia.”