Thanks to all for your kind welcome.
Francis/Stephen:
Here in the United States, Roger Cardinal Mahony, Archbishop of Los Angeles, routinely denounces any attempt to strengthen or even enforce our existing immigration laws, and instructs priests to ignore provisions of current law that he doesn't find to his liking. As one of the most prominent bishops in the United States, his opinions carry considerable weight in the American church, and are echoed not just in the LA diocese, but from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine, and everywhere in between, including by the bishop here in northeastern Indiana.
The National Council of Churches, an umbrella organization representing the interests of churches ranging from the United Methodist Church, to the Episcopal (Anglican) Church, to the Presbyterian Church USA, to several different Orthodox churches--and many others--routinely denounces attempts to enforce existing immigration laws, calling such attempts "racist" and "anti-Christian."
I admit I'm not as familiar with the workings of churches in Europe, but from what I've heard, they're no better, and possibly worse.
Well, you're right, perhaps I was a bit inexact. Race & culture are not exactly the same thing--though really, often enough, one can be used as a proxy for the other without much loss. An interesting discussion related to the topic can be found in a book, published this summer in the USA, called "A Farewell to Alms", by UC, Davis economic historian Gregory Clark. (
www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princeton/dp/0691121354/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-8897021-3147803?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192021185&sr=8-1 ) According to the reviews I've read--I haven't myself yet read the book, it's in my Amazon queue--Clark discusses why England escaped the "Malthusian trap" (higher per capita economic growth negated by increases in population), and why the Industrial Revolution began there and successfully spread to some places (the rest of Western Europe, the USA, Japan) but not to other places.
His conclusions, simplified: These things began in England and spread to some parts of the world, but not to others, not by chance, but because of culture, culture which was shaped by certain evolutionary pressures--which gets us back to race.
As to your second point, that Western cultures are also overwhelming Third World cultures: there's truth to that, too, though in these post-colonial days, the Third Worlders largely choose to overwhelm themselves with Western culture. They see what we have created and want it for themselves. I'm afraid they end up just importing the worst of the West--much of the vileness and frivolity of most television programs and motion pictures--while they're unable to import what really counts, what allowed the West to achieve its technological heights:
our bourgeois values. (And actually, modern pop culture, spread by television, seems to be undermining
here in the West those very bourgeois values that allowed us to create a civilization which created the television.)
So, although Westerners once were colonizers--and ignoring the invasion of Iraq as the aberration I hope and pray it is--we no longer coerce non-Westerners to do anything. (Though an argument could be made that the liberal trade regimes we attempt to negotiate are coercive in some sense.) They, however, are putting a twist on the West's old colonial ways. They move here, using and abusing our immigration laws and, when enough of them are here, begin imposing their ways of life on us, in our own countries! No, we can't celebrate Christmas in the public squares, no, we can't insist women remove their head-coverings to be identified at the polling stations, no, we can't insist that they learn our language, no, we can't have toilets in our prisons facing Mecca, etc, etc.
There is some sort of irony in that we in the West are being colonized by those whom we used to colonize.
OK, I've rambled enough, especially since this is an introduction page! ha ha