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Default Otis Graham And The Long War For Patriotic Immigration Reform

Last Of The Nice WASP Progressives: Otis Graham And The Long War For
Patriotic Immigration Reform

By Steve Sailer

“We are trying to go beyond being Good Citizens, and be also Good
Ancestors.”—Gov. Richard Lamm.
quoted on p. 476 of Immigration Reform and America’s Unchosen Future

"Immigration is probably the single broadest, deepest, most intellectually challenging topic in all of public policy. There’s no broader or more significant question you can ask than: When the government elects a new people, how many and whom should it elect?


Not surprisingly, the sheer cognitive challenge involved in having an
informed and intelligent opinion on immigration is one reason why
immigration is the least favorite major issue among mainstream public
intellectuals. (Check out the Atlantic Monthly’s listing of the 50
pundits “who shape the national debates” to see how unmentionable
immigration is among the leading lights of polite society—with the
exception of broadcaster Lou Dobbs, none of them discusses immigration
on a regular basis.)

To conceal how far in over their heads they are, Main Stream Media
(MSM) staffers often vilify anyone well-versed on immigration as
“ignorant” and motivated by “hate”. No matter how thoughtful and
judicious your insights on immigration, no matter how respectable your
curriculum vitae, you’ll just be smeared directly or by association by
the hucksters at the Southern Poverty Law Center ($outhern Poverty Law
Center to VDARE.COM), whose word will then be taken on faith by the
press.

The endless ramifications of immigration are closely analyzed in
historian Otis L. Graham’s just-published big book, Immigration Reform
and America’s Unchosen Future It’s a combination of memoir, insider
history, and analysis by a scholar who was “present at the creation”
of much of the organized resistance to immigration expansion.

Graham, a professor emeritus at UC Santa Barbara and Visiting Scholar
at the University of North Carolina, is a leading expert on American
reform movements such as the Progressives of a century ago.

(Graham’s late brother Hugh Davis Graham, a Vanderbilt historian,
wrote the 2002 book Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of
Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America that has had so
much influence on my own thinking about the onrushing future in which
the beneficiaries of racial preferences will outnumber the
benefactors.)

And Otis Graham practices what he teaches. He was a founding board
member of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) lobby
and the Center for Immigration Studies thinktank. He’s also on the
board of the Californians for Population Stabilization
environmentalist group.

Patriotic immigration reformers (as we call them at VDARE.COM, to
distinguish them from Bush/ Kennedy/ McCain amnesty types) have
enjoyed few outright successes. But it’s alarming to imagine how much
worse things would have become without them. Graham’s book recounts
his slow, painful education:

“The central theme of this book is we reformers’ progressive
discovery, from the 1970s forward, that the American policy system had
become hopelessly irrational and disabled on immigration (and many
other) matters, and could not free itself from the rule of organized
elites and factions.”

Like so many of his allies in the patriotic immigration reform
movement, such as the energetic Dr. John Tanton and Governor Dick
Lamm, the Democratic governor of Colorado from 1975-1987, Graham’s
fundamental concern is, not culture or economics, but the putatively
“liberal” cause of environmentalism.

Indeed, Graham, Tanton, and Lamm are all more intellectual versions of
Jimmy Stewart’s Jefferson Smith—nice, public-spirited, center-left
Good Citizens who went to Washington to fight against the special
interests. As in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, their civic-mindedness
has brought them defamation.

Unlike in the movie, however, there hasn’t been a happy ending—yet.
And may not be at all.

If the modern environmental movement was born in a single time and
place, it was in Graham’s Santa Barbara in the winter of 1969, when
the beautiful beaches were engulfed by an oil spill.

Like so many environmentalists of that era, Graham was deeply
concerned about the impact of population growth on America’s
ecosystems.

Yet, over the last 40 years, discussion of birth rates has almost
completely vanished in fashionable environmental circles. For example,
one of the most important numbers in modern American life—3.7, the
birthrate of babies per lifetime among immigrant Latinas in
California, a total fertility rate more than 50 percent higher than in
Mexico itself—has, as far as I can tell, never been publicly mentioned
by environmentalists or by MSM pundits.

It’s not Hispanics who are taking the lead in keeping these kind of
numbers hidden from the public. There aren’t any Latinos on the
Atlantic 50.

As Graham explains, the decline of the overall American birth rate
after the Baby Boom ended in the mid-1960s was welcomed by
environmentalists.

Then the 1972 Rockefeller Report on Population Growth and the American
Future broke the shocking news that, despite Americans’ increasing
reproductive restraint, immigration—illegal and legal—would keep the
U.S. population growing indefinitely.

To Graham, unchecked immigration hadn’t previously been a concern. In
his mind, as in those of most educated Americans of his generation,
“Open Borders” had simply been one of many abuses of the Robber Baron
era, such as cartels, political corruption, and over-lumbering, that
had been more or less solved by the Progressives in the first few
decades of the 20th Century.

As a historian specializing in (as he says) “what we now call ‘the
Long Progressive Era’—the years of industrialization and state
building from the 1880s through the 1920s forward through the New Deal
to the 1960s”, Graham had learned that

“The long campaign to curb the ‘First Great Wave’ of mass immigration
that began after the Civil War was originally seen by historians
(correctly, I believe) as one of the several social reform movements
considered as part of the progressive era. Historians writing in the
first half of the twentieth century had folded the immigration
restrictions into the progressive reform narrative. This was
appropriate, since, along with the reformers aiming to dismantle
monopoly power, end child labor, prohibit consumption of alcoholic
beverages, or clean up the slums, the immigration restrictionists want
to bring under governmental control the forces unleashed by capitalist
energies—in this case, mass importation of cheap foreign labor.
Progressive reformers such as Teddy Roosevelt, E.A. Ross, Hiram
Johnson, and Samuel Gompers had added immigration restriction to their
agendas.”

Graham first hosted a seminar on how illegal immigration drove up the
U.S. population in 1976 at former University of Chicago president
Robert Maynard Hutchins’ soporifically respectable Center for the
Study of Democratic Institutions—with the Center’s patron Paul Newman
in attendance.

As Graham studied the immigration issue, he discovered that the
history of immigration restrictionism had been rewritten after WWII to
fit new prejudices. Rather than continuing to portray the 1924
immigration cutback as a triumph over business interests by a
coalition of high-minded Progressives and labor leaders (such as
Gompers, a Jewish immigrant who campaigned for immigration cutbacks
for decades), John Higham’s 1954 bestseller Strangers in the Land:
Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 set the new template for
denouncing the immigration restrictionists as psychologically warped
“nativists”. This caricature quickly became the conventional wisdom,
with which American school children are indoctrinated to this day.

Yet, as Graham pointed out in a 2004 VDARE.com column, Higham himself
quickly had second thoughts about the historical record. Higham even
wrote in 1958 that “nativism now looks less adequate as a vehicle for
studying the struggles of nationalities in America than my earlier
report of it”. He later endorsed immigration restriction and said it
would have been even better for the country if it had passed before
the 1920s.

Strangers in the Land attempted the difficult feat of excising
immigration restrictionism from Progressivism. But that kind of logic-
chopping has become less necessary as the old Progressives, who were
the heroes of the history textbooks when I was a kid, have fallen out
of favor—mostly for ethnic reasons: The Progressive reformers were
largely WASPs. Of course, so were most of their opponents.

(Political correctness has made the retelling of history increasingly
tricky. For example, the famous documentarian Ken Burns is currently
debuting on PBS his new six-episode series The National Parks:
America’s Best Idea. Burns’ problem is that the idea of the national
parks was dreamed up overwhelmingly by the kind of people whom the
staff of Burns’ chief funder, the Evelyn & Walter Haas Jr. Fund,
considers the worst sort. The conservationists of the early 20th
Century were Progressives: i.e., white Protestant American men—and
dubious about immigration to boot. So the promotional material for
Burns’ series emphasizes the purportedly huge role played by blacks
and immigrants in the history of the national parks.)

In 1978, Graham received a phone call from a Michigan opthamologist
and environmental activist named John Tanton, who had been the
national chairman of Zero Population Growth. Tanton asked him to join
the board of a new immigration reform organization, FAIR. Graham
protested that he didn’t know much about immigration, but the
persuasive and persistent Tanton pointed out that everybody else knew
even less. And at least Graham seemed like he wanted to find out about
immigration’s effects—which was more than you could say for almost all
other American intellectuals.

Because most of FAIR’s organizational impetus came from
environmentalists and others on the center-left, the spiritual
descendents of the old Progressives, they typically hired staffers
with similar politics—not that this has kept them from being denounced
as racists anyway.

The energetic Tanton helped found other organizations, such as CIS,
Roy Beck’s NumbersUSA, U.S. English, and an annual writer’s workshop
that Tanton called Witan, “short for the old English term Witanagemot,
or National Council to the crown”, a Dark Ages harbinger of the Anglo-
Saxon affinity for open debate and non-arbitrary rule. (The name was
abandoned after MSM “anti-racism” hit job articles, which caused US
English president Linda Chavez to panic and resign. In homage,
VDARE.com uses as its email address for any message to
us that you don’t mind seeing published. Send private emails to
.)

One evening at a 1983 Witan in San Diego, attendees watched several
hundred illegal aliens swarm across the border in a mass rush intended
to overwhelm the Border Patrol: “During our weekend there, BP officers
arrested people from ninety-six foreign countries …”

One attendee at that particular Witan was Theodore H. White, the world
famous author of The Making of the President bestsellers. White, who
had been Time’s star reporter in China during WWII—where he had become
a close friend of Chou En-lai, the dazzling Communist diplomat)—was
not a fan of overpopulation. Graham writes:

“White had spoken passionately in our meetings about the negative
consequences of losing control of the border between a population-
stabilizing developed country and a population-exploding Third World
country sharing a 2,000 mile frontier.”

Significantly, White was raised by his father to be fair-minded about
immigration. In his autobiography, white In Search of History, White
recounts how in the mid-1920s he was chosen to demonstrate the
academic potential of Jewish children by making a speech to Boston
teachers explaining a current 1920s political topic: immigration. His
father explained to him that, as an immigrant and a Jew, he stood
staunchly for open borders, but as a socialist, he stood staunchly
with the unions for closed borders. Little Teddy’s speech echoed his
father’s passionate ambivalence.

But White’s childhood skepticism about immigration would get him
demonized in these less tolerant times. Graham reports that the 1983
Witan, when Tanton asked him to publish his views,

“White recoiled, almost frightened.

“‘My New York friends would never forgive me. No, you guys are right,
but I can’t go public on this.’ ”

At that point, the 68-year-old Teddy White was probably the single
most respected print journalist in America in 1983. White’s fear shows
you how severe are the penalties in the media business for questioning
immigration.

White, a strongly patriotic American, did conclude In Search Of
History with a rather opaque passage that we immigration patriots can
interpret as doubts about the Wall Street Journal-style Open Borders
ideology of “Propositionism”:

“The old English political culture had lost control over … the
polyglot peoples of America [who] had no common heritage but only
ideas to bind them together… What would be really at issue was whether
America would be transformed, in the name of Opportunity, simply into
a Place, a gathering of discretely defined and entitled groups,
interests and heritages; or whether it could continue to be a nation,
where all heritages joined under the same roof—ideas of communities
within government.”

But, as Graham recalls,

“Hearing White’s agitated response, I had my first glimpse of the
especially intense emotional Jewish version of that taboo [against
immigration skepticism]. His whole heritage, and his standing with all
his Jewish friends, was imperiled (he was certain) if he went public
with his worries about the state of immigration.”

To show how buried away from public discourse this crucial aspect of
modern America is kept, note that Graham, at that point a 47-year-old
tenured professor of American history, was only then becoming aware of
it!

Graham continues:

“I did not suspect it then, but this would become an important
subtheme of our experience as immigration reformers. American Jews
were exceptionally irrational about immigration for well-known
reasons. They were also formidable opponents, or allies, in any issue
of public policy in America.”

Indeed, on 2009’s Atlantic 50 list of most influential columnists,
bloggers, and broadcast pundits, almost exactly half are Jewish, even
though only about 2 percent of the population is Jewish. In
particular, white Jewish males are represented at rates more than 50
times higher than the average American.

What Graham calls the “filiopietistic” urge (“of or relating to an
often excessive veneration of ancestors …”) is particularly strong
among Jewish media figures. Italian-Americans, in contrast, tend to
approach the immigration policy question by thinking about the future
rather than by obsessing over the past. This anti-rational emotional
reflex about immigration contributes to the kitschy quality of MSM
discourse on the topic.

The best solution? Raising awareness. Why shouldn’t citizens know the
facts?

Please be aware, however, that only two of the 486 pages in
Immigration Reform and America’s Unchosen Future discuss this
widespread Jewish bias against unemotional logic on immigration.

I don’t want to get Otis Graham in even more trouble!

Graham’s book has much to say about dozens of other topics.

It will be a crucial resource for future historians in understanding
this turning point in American history."

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/090927_wasp.htm
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