America for white Americans!

Americans voting for their next president is the most important event today. This election is happening at a time when extreme right-wing politicians particularly in Europe have been making inroads. People are negatively reacting to the growth of migration that has disturbed the purity of cultures, added economic strains and has become a public safety problem.

In Germany and France, increased migration of people from Middle Eastern and African countries has brought previously ignored right-wing parties into serious contention for political power. The refusal of the new migrants to culturally assimilate into European societies has threatened the liberal values held by most Western Europeans. It didn’t seem to have started as a racial issue but it has become one now.

In the United States, today’s election has been the most divisive in its recent history. And whoever wins it, Trump or Harris, will have to preside over an America that is culturally, politically and economically split down the middle. “United” States will no longer accurately describe the still reigning world superpower. They are as united as the UniTeam that supposedly won our last presidential election.

Immigration is also a big issue in today’s US election. Being the world’s biggest economy which is also a democracy, the US has attracted people from Latin America and Asia, including China. Jobs and dreams of a better life inspire poor Latinos to get to the US by any means. The flood of essentially middle-class Chinese migrants paying big money to sneak into the US through Mexico was powered by dissatisfaction with the tough dictatorship of the Chinese Communist party.

The normal migration to the US through Mexico shouldn’t be a problem. Indeed, US businesses like it. The migrants provide workers to pick the agricultural fields in California and man the meat processing plants in the Midwest. From a demographic policy perspective, immigration prevented the US from experiencing the same population decline as Europe and Japan that economists now consider a serious worry for economic growth.

But as America has become more and more a nation of migrants of all sorts of colors and religions, White Americans, especially those without a college education, are pushing back. Demographic change is fueling social disenchantment as many White Americans, at the core of the blue-collar workforce, were displaced when the economy shifted from large manufacturing to high technology.

In Silicon Valley, the top jobs that pay the most are held by migrant Indian Americans. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, and the top bosses of IBM, Adobe and others are of Indian descent. Kamala Harris is part Indian, Nikki Haley is Indian and so is Usha Chilukuri, the high earning lawyer who is the wife of JD Vance.

In 2023, the median household income in the United States by race and ethnicity was: Asian: $108,700, the highest median income among all groups; White: $81,060; Hispanic: $62,800; Black: $52,860, the lowest median income among all groups.

By 2044, white Americans will represent 49.7 percent of the US population, down from 70 percent today and almost 90 percent in the 1960s.

Interestingly, a big number of Filipino-Americans are rabidly for Trump. That’s not surprising since Fil-Ams, including some of my in-laws, think of themselves as whites. They believe they have assimilated well and are accepted as whites.

In an article written for Project Syndicate, Edoardo Campanella of Harvard’s Kennedy School, observed: “For the first time in the country’s history, white Americans will be a minority – even if they remain more numerous than Black Americans, Hispanic Americans and other cohorts. Already, white voters’ waning political influence is creating a sense of lost status and marginalization, as partly reflected in surveys showing that nearly 60 percent of Republicans ‘feel like a stranger in their own country.’”

The major factor in this so-called crisis of democracy, Campanella observed, is demography. The threat to democracy tracks developments affecting white voters.

“Simply put,” Campanella writes, “today’s Democrats embrace the idea of a multiracial democracy, whereas Republicans want to make the country ‘great again’ by re-establishing elements of the old white supremacy.”

Campanella recalls that “Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 was a moment of reckoning for the white electorate, many of whom began to grapple with the implications of the country’s changing demographic structure… Another Trump presidency would intensify the battle to restore America’s historical racial and political hierarchy, given Trump’s plans to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.”

Campanella concludes that “a victory for Vice President Kamala Harris will not save American democracy, and a victory for Trump will not suddenly kill it. Instead, it will be yet another installment in the longer-running demographic conflict that started six decades ago, and which shows no signs of ending.”

Why is the outcome of today’s US election important for the rest of the world?

The world doesn’t pick the US president, but it will live with the consequences of whether Americans elect Vice President Kamala Harris or former president Donald Trump.

According to theconversation.com, “Unlike any election since 1945 the basic tenets of US relations with the rest of the world are in contention. The choice is between Donald Trump’s Republican party potentially offering a complete break from the US’ role in the international community, compared to Kamala Harris’ more international agenda under the Democrats.”

Harris visited the Philippines in November 2022 and while on board a Philippine Coast Guard vessel used in patrolling the West Philippine Sea, she confirmed that the mutual defense treaty applies to the South China Sea: “An armed attack on the Philippines Armed Forces, public vessels, or aircraft in the South China Sea would invoke US mutual defense commitments.”

An America First and isolationist Trump may not care much if we are attacked by China while Harris is likely to continue the assistance initiated by the Biden administration in enhancing our alliance.

By this time tomorrow, we will know.

Boo Chanco’s email address is [email protected]. Follow him on X @boochanco.