Immigration and Cultural Sabotage

Welcome to Episode 62 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will be talking about immigration. To be more precise, we will be talking about immigration in a context that has become so fashionable among Christians and conservatives in general in America: the context of cultural sabotage. Is immigration a good, viable tool for cultural sabotage? Can a civilization be brought down by immigration? The current conservative propaganda in the US says, yes, immigration can be a tool for cultural sabotage and a war against a civilization. This is, however, a rather recent belief among conservatives; as late as the 1990s, they still believed the opposite. But then, again, this is not the only area where conservatives have changed into leftists in the last 20 years. There is almost nothing left of the old conservatism – ironic, isn’t it – in what today passes for conservatism. All of it is just a warmed-over version of the old leftism. Anyway, our purpose here is not to discuss conservatism, but to discuss whether it is at all possible to use immigration as a tool for cultural sabotage. Is it? Can a culture be brought down by immigration?

Before I continue to the topic, I want to tell you a true story. It may sound to you as a fantastic story or a Hollywood movie, but it is a true story; and this true story will reveal to us a characteristic of the minds of men, a property of our psychology which is important to our understanding of how cultural influence and cultural sabotage work.

The character of our story is a German young man by the name of Albrecht Dittrich, who is better known today to those of us who know his story under his American name, Jack Philip Barsky. Albrecht was born in 1949 in East Germany, in the family of hardcore Communists who had decided to stay in the Soviet part of Germany as a matter of ideological convictions. In his later years he even remembered how his father used to speak very highly of Stalin and cried when the dictator died in 1953. With parents so ideologically committed and reliable, Albrecht had no problem being accepted in elite schools, and later to the University of Jena where he was on his way to earn PhD in chemistry and become a university professor. What also helped was that he was exquisitely intelligent and had a superior work ethic. As far humanly predictable, he was being prepared to become part of the Communist elite in East Germany.

This changed abruptly in 1969, when he was only 20 years old. He was approached by an officer of the German secret services, Stasi, and asked if he wanted to get a job with Stasi. He was free to turn down the offer and continue in the same path he had chosen, but if he wanted to take it, he had 24 hours to decide. Intrigued, Dittrich decided to accept. When he was invited to his interview in Berlin, however, it turned out that the real offer was working not for Stasi but for the Soviet KGB. And the job they offered him was not a simple agent in Germany but a spy in the United States.

Over the next several years Dittrich worked on two fronts. He continued studying for, and eventually got his PhD in chemistry, and he taught chemistry to university students. Behind the scenes, however, unknown to his friends and even to his family, he was being trained in all the skills and practices of foreign espionage – like what we see in the movies, but much more applicable and practical – and also English. It took him several years to master the English language and New York accent to the point that he spoke like a true New Yorker. He also learned all the mannerisms of the American culture, watched movies and TV shows and sitcoms and reality shows until he was so immersed in it that he could easily assume the identity of an American and not be caught. By 1978 he was ready to go. He told his parents that he was hired by the Soviet space program and was leaving to the Baikonur Cosmodrome; in order to maintain the story, he wrote dozens of letters which the KGB would regularly drop in the mail in Baikonur over the next several years. Everything was prepared so that he just disappears from his old life in Germany and no one would ask any questions and raise any doubts.

In October 1978, nine years after his recruitment, Dittrich arrived in Chicago with a fake Canadian identity. In the United States, already resident Soviet agents handed him $6,000 and a fake birth certificate for the name of Jack Philip Barsky. They took it from a tombstone in Maryland; the real Jack Barsky was born in 1944 and died at the age of 10 in 1955. His parents were still alive, but the rationale behind the fake identity was that if Dittrich kept a low profile for the first several years, it would be highly improbable that the parents will ever hear of him or suspect anything. He rented an apartment in New York City and settled there.

Dittrich’s task was complex and strategically long-term oriented: He was supposed to first establish himself in the American society and eventually get an American passport. Then, he was expected to become active politically, become involved with foreign policy think-tanks, and make political connections that would take him to the top advisers of the US presidents, placing him in a position to influence policy. His specific target was Zbigniew Brzezinsky, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, but any rise through the political ranks would have been a success. He was also given smaller, tactical tasks of espionage and counter-espionage, including tracking KGB spies who had gone rogue, transmitting information, and others.

The work on the main task, however, didn’t go as planned. His instructors never told him how specifically he was to proceed with getting close to Brzezinsky. Barsky then decided to try to fit as deeply as possible in the American society, and wait for opportunities. He started attending computer science classes at the Baruch University while working as a bicycle messenger in NYC. He earned a degree in computer systems in 1984 with a 4.0 grade point average. As a class valedictorian, he was picked by the dean to deliver a speech to 4,000 students from one of the biggest stages in NYC, Madison Square Garden. Yes, an illegal resident and a cover KGB spy. In the same year he got a computer science job with MetLife in NYC, and started rising through the hierarchy in the company. He still couldn’t figure a way to infiltrate the political circles, but he was in a position to do economic espionage, which the KGB was very happy with, given that in the 1980s, the Soviet Union was lagging disastrously behind the United States in terms of computer technologies.

He continued traveling back to East Germany every two years with fake passports. On his first trip back he married his fiancee there and had a son with her. But then he met a woman in the US, an illegal immigrant from Guyana, and he married her as well and had a daughter with her. It was at this time when he started having a change of mind concerning Communism, America, and his work as a spy. He realized that he was falling in love with America, and more and more he felt like it was his true home and his true country.

In 1988, due to a false alarm, KGB decided that his cover had been blown and he was ordered to return home. He ignored the orders; his family and work in America were everything to him now. A few months later a KGB agent approached him in the subway and warned him that if he didn’t return, he was dead. Barsky then lied to his superiors that he had contracted HIV and had to stay in the US for treatment. At the time, the KGB was scared of the perspective of an HIV epidemics in Eastern Europe; Barsky knew that and correctly gambled on those fears. They left him alone, and a year later his wife in East Germany was officially informed that Albrecht Dittrich was dead. For the first time in 10 years, Barsky could live his American life without having to do espionage. He was still technically illegal, but there was no danger that he would ever be discovered. The KGB’s fears that his cover had been blown turned out to be ungrounded. For over a decade, no one in the US even suspected anything, not even the FBI or the CIA. In terms of efficiency and secrecy, Barsky seems to have been the most successful KGB agent in the US – never discovered, never even suspected. His training and his intelligence might not had prepared him for the task of infiltrating the political circles, but it certainly enabled him to live a fake identity as if it was his own.

One day in 1991, Vasily Mitrokhin, a high-ranking officer in charge of the KGB archive in Moscow, walked in the US Embassy in Riga, the capital of the newly independent republic of Latvia, and requested a meeting with CIA officers. At the meeting, he told them that he had doubles of 25,000 pages of KGB archives in his house, and he offered some samples, telling them that he had everything in his home back in Russia. The CIA operatives didn’t consider his credible and ignored his offer. Mitrokhin then went to the UK embassy and made the same offer to operatives of MI6, the British intelligence service. The Brits took him seriously, paid for his family’s exfiltration to Britain, and sent resident agents of MI6 to retrieve the copies from under the floor of his country house. By 1992, MI6 had the names and residencies of all KGB’s sleeper agents in the West. In 1994, the Brits informed the FBI about Jack Barsky, a KGB agent in New York City.

This information must have come to the FBI as a bolt out of the blue. Spies are human, and they often make mistakes which, if not conclusive evidence, at least create suspicions and draw the attention of the security services. Very few active spies in history have managed to go undetected for long periods of time, even if they maintained a low-key existence. But Jack Barsky managed to go undetected for over 16 years!

By 1994, Barsky had moved from New York to Mount Bethel, PA. With his wife and daughter, he lived in a single family house in a small community. The FBI established a 24-hour surveillance of the family: they wiretapped their house, searched regularly through their trash, they even bought the house next door and moved in a male and a female agent as a “family,” to keep visual surveillance around the clock. And yet, for another three years they couldn’t harvest a single piece of evidence that the man was really a KGB spy. It was only as late as 1997 that Jack Barsky made his first mistake; and he wouldn’t make it if it wasn’t for the fact that his marriage was going downhill. In one of his conversations, in an attempt to earn compassion from his wife, he told her that he had been a spy. This confession was the only thing the FBI had against him. A few days later, he was pulled over by a Pennsylvania state trooper, accompanied by FBI agents. They took him to a local hotel where he was interrogated for the first time.

However, by 1997 – or even ten years earlier, as a matter of fact – Albrecht Dittrich, born in the family of hardline Communists, raised as a Communist in privileges that only children of faithful Communist families enjoyed in Eastern Europe, trained for 9 years ideologically and professionally as a Communist spy, had come to love America with all his heart and mind. It didn’t take much to convince him to co-operate with the FBI. Within two hours after the start of his first interrogation, Barsky was let free to go home with the agreement that he would come back to give the FBI all the information he had. The FBI decided not to charge him, and eventually, he was legalized and was granted US citizenship for his co-operation.

As of today, the US citizen Jack Philip Barsky, now 68 years old, is retired and lives in Atlanta GA. After 1997, he continued his career in computer science and technologies; he was responsible for the developing the software for the new computerized power grid of the state of New York. Oh, and did I forget to mention, while Albrecht Dittrich of 1978 was raised and trained as an atheist, Jack Barsky of today has found and embraced the Christian faith.

As many of my listeners know, about three years ago I delivered three lectures on immigration where I developed the case that the current legal system of immigration restrictions in the US, is neither Biblical, nor historically Christian, nor even Constitutional, according to the Constitution of the United States; and certainly not logical and practical. The true Biblical, historically Christian, Constitutional, and logical and practical system is open borders and limited political franchise. (And contrary to what many Americans believe, even in the context of a welfare state, it is still better and more logical to have open borders; immigration restrictions do not help with a welfare state, they make the situation much worse.) My purpose here is not to repeat my arguments; you can find the lectures on Reconstructionist Radio, under the tag Christendom Restored. What is important to to us here is a question asked in the fourth audio of that series, the Q&A session, namely, “If we open our borders, couldn’t the Chinese government use it to send 40 million Chinese who through voting would eventually influence the political life in the United States in favor of China?”

In other words, if we open our borders, wouldn’t that also open America to cultural sabotage? Wouldn’t that make us vulnerable, for governments around the world would eagerly take the opportunity to plant as many of their residents as they can and make America a servant of their interests? What’s going to happen to our beautiful American culture if we allow all these foreign governments to infest the land with their residents, millions of them? We will see in a moment how absurd these fears are, but keep in mind, this is major scare among many Christians and conservatives in general. I have been asked this same question even by people who are otherwise intelligent and some are even professors of economics or sociology – and they truly believe that such an absurd scenario is possible, even though it has never been observed in history.

My reply in the Q&A session started with the technical analysis of the scenario. (Later, I will give you the ethical/judicial analysis as well.) In short, for the Chinese government to be able to plant 40 million immigrants in the United States, it will have to organize the logistics for transporting them and helping them settle. The average cost per immigrant person – from the preparations back home, through the transportation costs, through finding a home in the US and settling until the immigrant finds a job – is about $5,000. And this is the lower end of it; the costs may be much higher if the immigrant can’t find a job in the first several months of his stay in the US. But for our purposes, we will take the lower end of it.

Right there, in order to send 40 million Chinese, the Chinese government will have an initial tab of about $200 billion to pay, and the very minimum. While this is nothing compared to the Chinese economy, remember that this is still 5% of their government budget. 5% devoted to a single specific task is a little too much. And this is only part of the cost. For these people to be able to survive in the United States for several years, before they get their citizenship, they need to be educated better than the average Chinese citizen: They need to speak English, they need to be able to find jobs, etc., otherwise their stay in the US until the time they can take the citizenship oath would have to be sponsored by the Chinese government, and living in the US is way more expensive than living in China. So it’s much cheaper if they educate their residents back home to prepare them to live and survive on their own in the US. But the average – that’s only the average, not the above average needed for that better level of education – cost of education in China is about $1,600 per year. (In the Q&A session I mentioned $1,000, but in the last year, the American National Center for Education and the Economy came up with the $1,600 figure based on data from the Ministry of Education of China.) Even if all these people have only high school – not university education – this is 12 years times $1,600 times 40 million, an additional cost of about $800 billion. Total of $1 trillion – at the very minimum – before these people even begin establishing themselves in the US.

But the real cost doesn’t stop there. There are hidden costs which, while not always visible, can prove to be devastating to a national economy. Remember, nations invest in education because they expect that that education will eventually pay off through the future productive labor of the students. GDP, after all, is produced by people; if you remove these people, you also remove the possibility for them working and covering the cost for their education. China’s GDP is about $8,000 per person – that is the average, and includes everyone, including the non-working parts of the population, students and retirees. In reality, the average working person in China adds about $16,000 dollars to their GDP every year. The removal of 40 million people in active working age will mean the loss of 640 billion from the GDP every year. In addition, sending them to the US, where the GDP per capita is a bit lower than $60,000, and the GDP per working person is over $100,000, China thus will add about $4 trillion worth of GDP per year to the US economy – and for workers whose education cost zero to the US economy. That is, over their first 5 years in the US – needed to obtain citizenship – China would have lost over $3 trillion in forgone productivity, and the US will have gained $20 trillion from these 40 million immigrants. And that before they are even eligible to become citizens and vote. Does such an operation even make sense? It would rather be a Pyrrhic victory of gigantic proportions, a guaranteed enormous loss now for some skimpy chance of success in the unforeseeable future.

Thus, even before we get to the ethical/judicial analysis of the issue, the technical analysis shows that if China decided to take advantage of open borders and send 40 million Chinese to the US, this would mean a major loss to the Chinese economy, and will be a serious contribution to the American economy. No matter what you believe about the economy, people are an asset, and all thing being equal, the more of them you have, the larger your economy becomes. Remember, America shot up to be No. 1 economy in the world exactly during the era of open borders. From a small regional power in 1870, she grew to produce 25% of the world’s GDP in 1920. And during much this time, she took about a million immigrants every year. People are an asset.

So what about the ethical/judicial analysis? Yes, the Chinese government may still invest all that money, and may still decide to forgo the benefits of having these people working back home. But wouldn’t it be worth the task of cultural sabotage? Wouldn’t the long-term benefits of subverting the American culture and political life be worth the effort and the investment?

And here is the place to ask that one-trillion-dollar question: even if the Chinese government – or any other government in the world – invests so much money to send so many residents to the US with the purpose to use them in the future to influence elections and the culture in general . . . how are they going to be able to control the individual decisions of so many people? How would they know who votes how? How would they be able to force even a small minority of these people to not do what’s in their personal interest and work for a government that has kept its people so poor compared to Americans? Once these people are US citizens, their previous government has no mechanism whatsoever to control their voting or any of their decisions. Remember Jack Barsky: he wasn’t even a citizen, his position was so precarious, and yet, even he couldn’t be kept under control; and remember, he was specifically trained for his job, a training that cost way more than just 12 years of school!

Years after he was discovered, Barsky was able to lay his hands on the Mitrokhin Archive: the same archive that uncovered him as an agent. He studied it carefully – Barsky spoke Russian fluently, given that two years of his training as a spy was done in Moscow, at the KGB center – and came to the conclusion that he was part of the third of total three waves of spies that the KGB tried to plant in the West. There were dozens of other agents who were sent years before him or about the same time as him. All of the three waves failed miserably to achieve anything close to the original objectives; and the main reason for the failure was – you could easily guess – that the agents kept defecting once they were on the American side of the border. Barsky himself was charged with tracking defected agents as part of his assignment; and when in 1988 he refused to return to East Germany, his superiors were afraid that he would defect. (He never officially defected, but at the time, his ideological commitment was already gone.) The question is: if the KGB couldn’t keep their own agents – trained so thoroughly, and having so much to lose, including their lives – in line, what makes us believe that any other government would be able to keep under control millions of its former citizens who are now US citizens? It would be ridiculous to believe that such control is even possible, let alone such a gigantic operation of cultural sabotage.

Ridiculous as it is, even great minds have fallen prey to such knee-jerk thinking and have imagined that such a scenario is even possible. One such mind was Murray Rothbard. Lew Rockwell related in one of his articles how Murray Rothbard, when he was still a young libertarian, used to support open borders (which, obviously, is the logically consistent libertarian position, no matter what Lew Rockwell imagines), but then, later in his life, he changed his mind against open borders and supported closed borders. Lew Rockwell’s explanation for this change of mind is an amazing testimony of how even the brightest minds have moment when they think at an elementary, simple, knee-jerk reaction level:

[QUOTE] He noted, for instance, the large number of ethnic Russians whom Stalin settled in Estonia. This was not done so that Baltic people could enjoy the fruits of diversity. It never is. It was done in an attempt to destroy an existing culture, and in the process to make a people more docile and less likely to cause problems for the Soviet empire.

Murray wondered: does libertarianism require me to support this, much less to celebrate it? Or might there be more to the immigration question after all? [END OF QUOTE]

One wonders: What was in Rothbard’s mind at the time that he couldn’t stop and see that government resettling of populations has nothing to do with open borders? But since our focus here is on the question of cultural sabotage, looking back historically, we can ask, did it really work? Was Stalin successful in destroying the cultures of the Baltic republics? The answer is: not at all. As much as Stalin tried to destroy the independent spirit of the peoples of the Baltic republics, it did not disappear.. To the contrary, it remained alive, and when the weakness of the Soviet Empire was obvious at the end of the 1980s, the three republics declared independence. Estonia, in fact, declared independence as early as 1988, before any other Eastern European country had thrown off Communist rule. And what about all these Russians that Stalin had resettled in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania? Most of them joined the independence movement. Even as today, Estonia and Latvia have about 30% of their population ethnic Russians. All these Russians can return to Russia, if they want to, instead of living in a “foreign” country. They all prefer to stay in Estonia and Latvia. And the culture? Well, the culture in these two countries is Estonian and Latvian. Contrary to Stalin’s plans, and contrary to Rothbard’s fears. Because a culture can’t be destroyed by immigration. Not a superior culture, at any rate.

And here is the most important concept of this episode: a superior culture can never be destroyed by immigration.

Ironically, one of the regular complaints of Christians, conservatives, and secular libertarians against the political Left and against the so-called “cultural Marxists” (which is an oxymoron, as I explained in a previous episode) is that the political Left insists that there are no superior cultures, that all cultures are equally valuable. The Christian, conservative, and libertarian part of the spectrum always replies: That’s not true, some cultures are superior to others, and some cultures are so inferior that they are not worth preserving. The goal of the political Left, however, is not an attack on the Western culture: such attack is impossible from the position of non-Western cultures. After all, who would want to abandon the prosperity of the West for the misery and poverty and chaos and injustice of the Third World cultures? The goal of the political Left is to prevent the Western civilization, with its at least remote Christian roots, from expanding and assimilating those inferior cultures. Why is it? Because the political Left knows one truth: In the interaction between a superior culture and an inferior culture, it is the inferior culture that loses, and eventually gets assimilated. Cultural sabotage never works in favor of the inferior cultures; even when the inferior culture is more powerful in terms of military power, population, money, etc. Like Stalin’s Communism was more powerful than the traditionally Christian Baltic cultures. Or like Pagan Rome was more powerful than the fledgling early Church. This process of defeating inferior cultures is known today as “evangelism.”

The Bible speaks clearly of such cultural sabotage, in Deut. 4:5-8:

See, I have taught you statutes and judgments just as the LORD my God commanded me, that you should do thus in the land where you are entering to possess it. So keep and do them,for that is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples who will hear all these statutes and say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.” For what great nation is there that has a god so near to it as is the LORD our God whenever we call on Him? Or what great nation is there that has statutes and judgments as righteous as this whole law which I am setting before you today?

The superiority of a culture, therefore, is expressed not in its might and power, but in its justice, in the righteousness of its ethical and legal foundations. Foreigners, no matter how indoctrinated they are with their own original culture, will eventually submit and acknowledge the superiority of a culture that is more righteous and more just. Granted, there may be a few who, due to vested interests, or due to self-conscious commitment to evil, or because God has hardened their hearts, may resist the clear evidence in front of their eyes, but as a general rule, the majority of those who come to witness and understand a culture of superior justice and righteousness, will eventually come to love it.

Solomon as a king was known throughout the world for his wisdom; and his wisdom was expressed in the fact that he judged his people with righteousness, because this is what he asked of God in 1 Kings 3:9: “So give Your servant an understanding heart to judge Your people to discern between good and evil. For who is able to judge this great people of Yours?” Once his fame of a righteous judge was established, however, and he built the Temple, Solomon’s prayer was not that his kingdom’s borders were closed and no foreigners were allowed in, so that no one could sabotage their wonderful culture, but exactly the opposite:

Also concerning the foreigner who is not of Your people Israel, when he comes from a far country for Your name’s sake (for they will hear of Your great name and Your mighty hand, and of Your outstretched arm); when he comes and prays toward this house, hear in heaven Your dwelling place, and do according to all for which the foreigner calls to You, in order that all the peoples of the earth may know Your name, to fear You, as do Your people Israel, and that they may know that this house which I have built is called by Your name (1 Kings 8:41-43).

Other nations, of course, had temples just as magnificent and beautiful as the Temple of Solomon. There was no reason why strangers would come only to see the beauty of the Temple. (And remember, for several generations God had no Temple, only the Tabernacle, and He declared that the Tabernacle was enough for Him.) The real attraction of Israel was not architectural but ethical/judicial: Solomon’s wisdom in judgment. The Queen of Sheba could have brought her large retinue to any other land with magnificent temples – and, if Velikovsky’s chronology is correct, which I believe it is, she was actually the Egyptian queen Hatshepsut, which means she had magnificent temples back home, in her own land. But she came to hear of his wisdom, and she acknowledged that the Lord had established him to do justice and righteousness (1 Kings 10:9).

But under the New Covenant, such is to be the standing of every nation which acknowledges the God of the Bible and establishes its legal system and its culture on His Law. Under the Old Covenant, Israel needed specially inspired rulers and kings, like Moses, Joshua, David, Samuel, Solomon, to maintain justice and righteousness. Under the New Covenant, it is the very essence of the Gospel that a nation’s justice system should be founded on the Law of God (see 1 Tim. 1:8-11; “according to the glorious Gospel”). Israel under Solomon was a peculiarity under the Old Covenant; under the New Covenant, the Great Commission commands us to make every nation do justice and righteousness as Solomon was commanded. A Christian nation, therefore, would be a nation where the morals and the laws are in harmony with the Law of God. The closer to the Law of God a nation’s morals and laws are, the more attractive it will be in the eyes of the people from other nations. Such nation should not be afraid to let strangers come to it. No visitor or spy or immigrant can sabotage a truly Christian nation; but it will sabotage the hearts of those who come to it, and will turn them away from their paganism. Just like the KGB’s work was sabotaged and their plans thwarted, the hearts of men always eventually surrender. There is no reason for fear.

The only question we need to answer now is: what about those cultures who disappeared and were defeated in history? What about Rome that was overwhelmed by the immigrating Goths and Slavs and Huns, and later the Muslims: a superior civilization overrun by Barbarians. What about Byzantium, another superior civilization overrun by Muslims? Aren’t these examples that a superior culture can be defeated by inferior cultures?

No, they aren’t. In all these examples, it was the superior culture that destroyed itself long before the Barbarians got to it. Rome was already rotten when the Germans started arriving at its borders; the old moral and civic virtues which characterized the Kingdom and then the Republic of Rome were gone by the time of Julius Caesar. Those old virtues – copied from the expanding influence of Solomon’s Israel several centuries earlier – helped Rome survive the Punic Wars and even expand. Their enemy, Carthage, an heir of the Phoenician city of Tyre, still practiced child sacrifice that was an integral part of the religion of their motherland, as described in the Bible. God wouldn’t let such culture survive and thrive for a long time. But later Rome, although never engaging in child sacrifice themselves, adopted similar practices, including abortion; and instead of a quest for justice, the Roman legal system became a tool for oppression and injustice. By the time of Julius Caesar, the only splendor Rome had was its architecture; ethics and justice had disappeared. When the Barbarians came a couple centuries later, few were eager and willing to defend a culture that had lost all sense of morality and justice. In fact, if anything, it was those same Barbarians who tried to restore it; and if anything survived, it was because of Christianity.

A superior culture, therefore, never dies from outside attacks or sabotage; it always sabotages the hearts of its enemies and converts the best and brightest of them to its own service. Just like Christendom converted its pagan enemies – the Celts, the Saxons, the Scandinavians, the Slavs – and then made out of them more fierce and committed defenders and evangelists of the faith than the Jews or the Romans ever were. But when a culture begins to give way before its enemies, it can be for one reason only: it has become rotten.

And when it has become rotten, it is not worth defending. And when it is not worth defending, no immigration restrictions will save it. They will only destroy liberty, and will make it even more rotten. But they will never save it.

In the final account, American Christians and conservatives in general need not fear. Immigration is not a good tool for cultural sabotage. Any foreign government which decides to spend the resources and send thousands or millions of immigrants to achieve cultural and political goals in the US, is taking serious risks, and will eventually lose those resources without achieving anything of value. Individual people have their individual interests, and most of the time their individual interests are on the side of that culture that can provide them with more justice; their dictators back home can’t compete with the US on that account. Eventually, even those specially trained and ideologically committed – like Jack Barsky – will surrender before the overwhelming evidence of the superiority of a culture.

But if you are concerned about America, you better start looking for dangers inside its culture. America can’t be brought down by foreign enemies; but her most dangerous enemies are those inside who want to deprive her of her freedom, and those who want to remove from her midst the religion that has protected that freedom for centuries. Look for these enemies in the seats of power, both in the civil government, and in the pulpits. Especially the pulpits.

The book I will assign for reading this week is Deep Under Cover: My Secret Life and Tangled Allegiances as a KGB Spy in America, by Jack Barsky and Joe Reilly. If you wonder who Joe Reilly is, he is the FBI agent who was with that Pennsylvania state trooper when Barsky was first arrested and taken for interrogation. The two men later became close friends. When you read the book, pay special attention to the change in Barsky’s mind year after year, while living in America and experiencing her culture first hand. Barsky is not alone. There are millions like him who have made the US their true allegiance, abandoning the allegiances to their former dictators and slave masters.

In your prayers and giving, consider Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization devoted to expanding the Kingdom of God in Eastern Europe through preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ to every area of man’s life and institutions. Our focus is not just on saving people’s souls but in building a culture that will reflect Jesus Christ and His righteousness and justice. Visit BulgarianReformation.com to learn more about our work and our view of how missions should be done in the modern world. Subscribe to the newsletter for updates, and prayerfully donate for publishing and translations, which will help us build the intellectual foundation for the Christian culture in Bulgaria. God bless you all.