ABSTRACT
The modern temper shows a fatal tendency to break large moral and historical questions into smaller technocratic ones and to tinker with each of these as a separated "policy problem". Many of the proponents of continuing immigration into the United States at current or increased levels insist that immigrants are good for our economy. It is considered "humanitarian" to fret about population growth and its effects on the natural environment at the global level. There are further dangers inherent in multiculturalism beyond the foreseeable submergence of European-American culture and governance in the United States. In the light of America's immigration problem, James Burnham's "suicide of the West" takes on a newer meaning. From the time when the Puritans landed in Massachusetts, Americans have tended to think of themselves as members of a church whose reality has a secular dimension beyond the religious one.
