BLOOD & SOIL:

This was not the first time Wax has made unpleasant declarations about race. In 2017 she told Glenn Lowry on the video chat site Bloggingheads: "Here's a very inconvenient fact, Glenn: I don't think I've ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half." She later admitted that she had no data to support this statement. [...]

The definition of what it means to be "white" in America has always been fraught. Unlike ethnicity, which has at least some basis in shared DNA, the quality of "whiteness"--or "non-whiteness"--is both amorphous and transitory, defined differently at various points in our history, usually depending on who was doing the defining.

The eugenicists who pushed through broad-scale immigration restriction in 1917 and 1924 were obsessed with classifying races. Madison Grant's influential book The Passing of the Great Race defined a hierarchy of European races, with "Nordics" at the apex, "Alpines" in the middle strata, and "Mediterraneans" on the lowest rung. Grant and other restrictionists of the era argued that the United States was being flooded with inferior peoples from Southern and Eastern Europe, who were diluting the stock of native-born Americans, namely from the British Isles and Northwestern Europe. He argued that native-stock Americans "will not bring children into the world to compete in the labor market with the Slovak, the Syrian, and the Jew," who, he claimed "adopt the language of the native American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name, and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals, and while he is being elbowed out of his own home, the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race."

Wax and her fellow travelers among nationalist conservatives make the case that today's immigrants are culturally unfit to become Americans. Using a metaphor associated with the alt-right, Wax dismisses the idea that the "magic dirt" of American soil will transform immigrants into Americans--a straw man argument not made by any serious immigration proponent--and claims that there is no reason to believe that "people who come here will quickly come to think, live, and act just like us."

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