[Bret L]

Unexpurgated Afterword to the Harper Collins Paperback Edition of
Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster

by Peter Brimelow

[An expurgated and somewhat bowdlerized version was published in
National Review, April 22, 1996]

"He does not seem to know what an argument is. He never uses arguments himself. He never troubles himself to answer the arguments of an opponent. . . . It has never occurred to him . . . that when an objection is raised, it ought to be met with something more convincing than "scoundrel" or "blockhead."
LORD MACAULAY, "Essay on Southey's Colloquies"

Alien Nation ("one of the most widely discussed books of 1995"—Jerry
Adler, Newsweek) was published in April and was immediately and almost
universally reviewed, somewhat to my surprise although not, I must say
in tribute to their professional judgment, to that of my hardcover
publishers, Random House. I also found myself defending the book on a
multitude of national and local television and radio shows, so that by
the fall I was being recognized on the streets of New York. This was
an unusual experience for a humble financial journalist. And, under
the circumstances, rather alarming.

(Actually, everyone who approached me was very nice. I received only
one death threat, on my voicemail at Forbes from an East European—
accented woman. She was apparently incensed by my deriding, in a
bitter exchange in The New York Times, both A. M. Rosenthal and
American Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Ira Glasser for
their obsession with Alien Nations single reference to my son
Alexander’s blue eyes and blond hair. This scandalous revelation—it’s
on page 11—was probably the most cited passage in the book.

(And not once, as far as I can see, was it cited in its context: the
paradoxical and destructive effect of the interaction between non-
white immigration and affirmative-action quotas upon those native-
born Americans who are not members of the so-called "protected
classes," as Alexander manifestly is not— I regard this hysterical
reflex as further proof of my opening thesis in Alien Nation: current
immigration policy is Adolf Hitler’s posthumous revenge on America.)

"We at AEI [ American Enterprise Institute]," Judge Robert Bork told
me with mock ceremony during Norman Podhoretz's retirement dinner in
May, "are very grateful to you for drawing fire away from Charles
Murray"." Later in the summer I got a call from Murray himself, Bork’s
colleague at AEI and co-author of The Bell Curve, professionally
curious to see how I was holding up.

In fact, the first (and in the publishing business most important)
reviews, in The New York Times—twice—The Washington Post and The
Atlantic, were at least respectful, serious and sometimes,
particularly the Times’s Richard Bernstein— strikingly generous. But
after that, as Wellington said at Waterloo, it was hard pounding—the
only question being who could pound hardest.

"Hateful, racist" "gentrified racism,’’ "openly racialist." (there was
a lot more of this, exactly as predicted on p. 9). "narrow-minded,"
"poppycock’ "deliberately misleading," "an ugly jeremiad," "tirade,"
"diatribe," "a fervent and obsessive polemic," "breathtaking
disingenuousness," "inflammatory?’ "incendiary," "conspicuous bad
faith," "utterly wrong," "beyond the pale," "bigoted,"
"intellectualized white rage . . . in-your-face vileness." Etc., etc.,
etc. I was blamed for the Oklahoma City bombing (by Ramon Mestre in
the Miami Herald) and compared to Hitler and Germany’s neo-Nazi
skinheads (by Jeff Turrentine in the Dallas Morning News.) My favorite
hostile review: probably Lawrence Chua in the Village Voice—"His fear
is justified. We will bury him."

Then there were the attacks that might actually have concerned me: on
my prose. Even some friends muttered about Alien Nation's
"sledgehammer style," unfamiliar (lucky them) with the brutal
techniques devised by American financial writers to explicate
dismaying quantities of detailed information. The London Economist,
familiar but superior, said I had "the quality of an embarrassing
dinner-party guest—boorish, noisy and loquacious but also,
maddeningly, often right." My slogan: "Don’t be misled by this book’s
simple style: it is interlaced with material that can challenge the
acutest mind."—Paul A. Samuelson, preface, Economics, seventh edition,
1967.

It is always fascinating for an author to see one reviewer complaining
that a book is a "struggle to get through" (John J. Miller in Reason),
while another, just as hostile, says the book is "witty and
conversational, full of clever asides" (Philip Kasinitz, New York
Newsday) and a third, still by no means uncritical, announces that "it
is a pleasure to read Peter Brimelow at length. He writes
straightforwardly, with wit, honesty and good humor" (Boston
University’s Glenn C. Loury in National Review). When the latter views
are the majority, as I can modestly report was the case with Alien
Nation, it becomes hard to avoid the conclusion that the more
infantile critics are just fumbling for any off-the-shelf insult. I'm
surprised they didn’t claim my hair, in the hardcover jacket photo
graph, was too long. My mother would have agreed.

"I expected Brimelow to smell of sulfur," wrote Arizona Republic
editorial writer Linda Valdez of her interview with me in September,
after my diabolical status had been well established. (Her conclusion:
I didn’t smell of sulfur. But I was still diabolical.)

Naturally, I found these reactions encouraging. After all, exactly the
same incredulous rage has greeted the American conservative movement
at each successive stage of its triumphant three-decade- long march
through the institutions, beginning with the nomination of Barry
Goldwater in 1964.

I also had a simple test that I applied to every review: did it
discuss the 1965 Immigration Act? Or did it instead just burble on
about the glories of immigration in principle, missing Alien Nation's
key point—that the operations of 1965 Act in practice have resulted in
an influx far larger, less skilled and far more dominated by a few
Third World sources than anything envisaged at the time. In other
words, even if you want a million immigrants a year—and the American
people overwhelmingly do not—why this particular million?

I gave the shamefully large number of reviews that flunked this test a
big fat "F" without any further ado. For the purposes of America’s
current immigration debate, they were just not in the game.
Unsurprisingly, Mestre, Turrentine and Chua were all "F" Others
prominent examples: Christopher Hitchens, Los Angeles Times: Linda
Chavez, USA Today: Clarence Wood, Chicago Tribune: Peter Skerry,
Commentary.

Even more encouraging: throughout the print media barrage I was
spending hours a day on television and, through the miracle of
telephone hook-ups, on talk radio all round the country. And there it
was not at all unusual to get 100 percent supportive calls—from real
Americans. The only exception were the shows on National Public Radio,
which, whatever else you can say about it, has clearly found an
audience. But even there, the calls were usually 50-50.

Indeed, as a print journalist I am appalled to say that my experience
with Alien Nation has left me gloomily convinced that electronic
media, particularly talk radio, really does now carry the brunt of
American public discourse. This is not just because a lot of talk show
hosts—Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, David Brudnoy and many others,
thanks to them all—were totally supportive in a way that no self-
respecting print journalist seems ever able to be. Even my critics
were generally at least polite and reasonable. When an angry caller
complained to Larry Mantle, a liberal host on Los Angeles KPCC-FM,
that I was being allowed to spread my noxious propaganda without
anyone to oppose me, Mantle reprovingly said no one ever objected when
he had liberals on alone. (I remember this particularly because I
looked up to see through the soundproof glass my Random House escort,
the beautiful Sheryl Benezra, locked in ferocious battle with the
other young women in the studio on my behalf.)

Beyond personalities, however, the discipline of live electronic media
makes it intrinsically more honest than print. When Linda Valdez
suggested in the Arizona Republic ("F," of course) that I had revealed
my underlying racism by urging Eastern European immigration rather
than Mexican, her readers could not know that in reality I was giving
this as an example of the potential use of immigration s a foreign
policy tool—and saying it has been precluded by statutory
inflexibility and the immigrant binge of the last thirty years (pages
84-85) When Bryant Gumbel made the same suggestion on NBC's Today
show, I was able to whack him smartly on the snout.

On live radio and television, unlike print, I could compel questioners
to address the central question on page 119: why do you want to
transform America? Quite often they were honest or naive enough to
answer—as did Larry Josephson on his "Bridges" NPR show—that America
in 1965 was just too homogeneous ("white bread") for their taste. Then
I could move in for the kill: "That’s great! Now let’s ask the
American people if they agree."

In addition, of course, events continued to move Alien Nation’s way
This undercut my critics logically, albeit not emotionally. House
Speaker Newt Gingrich’s bipartisan task force on illegal immigration
reported, recommending among other things reform of the Fourteenth
Amendment interpretation whereby all children born in the United
States, even of illegal immigrants, are American citizens. (I had been
reproached in various debates by Peter Skerry for suggesting such an
outlandish idea; reviewing my book for Commentary, Skerry was
prudently silent on this point, while continuing to claim my other
proposals were outlandish). And former Democratic Congresswoman
Barbara Jordan’s Commission on Immigration Reform reported,
recommending a one-third cut in the legal influx, in effect rolling
back the 1990 Immigration Act and conceding that the system was broke
and needs fixing. This was precisely my much-denounced point on page
xx of Alien Nation.

President Clinton actually endorsed the Jordan Commission’s findings,
to the utter shock and horror of the immigration enthusiast community
in Washington. ("We know he’s seen your book," the National
Immigration Forum’s Frank Sharry, the nicest of my regular debate
opponents, told me darkly, as we waited to go on CNN’s Crossfire
together.)

I suspect that, as a Southerner, President Clinton may be plotting a
daring Chancellorsville-style march around the Republicans’ right
flank on the immigration issue, perhaps during the 1996 election
campaign. His administration and key liberal Democrats, like
California Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, have al ready
been significantly tougher on illegal immigration than Presidents
Reagan and Bush.

By contrast, Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey reflexively
denounced the Jordan Commission. "I’m hard-pressed," he said later in
the summer, "to think of a single problem that would be solved by
shutting off the supply of willing and eager new Americans."

This was an astonishing comment, and indicative of the fatal
intellectual inertia still prevailing among many leading immigration
enthusiasts. No doubt Armey was too busy to read the free copy of
Alien Nation sent him by Random House. But even a nanosecond’s thought
would have revealed to him that, if immigration drives the U.S.
population up 50 percent by 2050—the Census Bureau’s cur rent estimate—
it must inevitably cost the taxpayers massive additional monies far
schools, prisons and other infrastructure, regardless of whether it
also offers some particular benefit (which it does not).

Events, large and small, continue to move Alien Nations way. As I was
preparing to write this at the end of 1995, I randomly picked these
two stories out of the same newspaper (The New York Times. December
10):

MEXICO WOOS U.S. MEXICANS, PROPOSING DUAL NATIONALITY

Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo supports an amendment to the Mexican
constitution allowing Mexicans to retain their nationality when they
take out U.S. citizenship."You're Mexicans—Mexicans who live north of
the border," Mr. Zedillo told Mexican-American politicians in Dallas
this year. He said he hoped the amendment would not only permit
Mexican-Americans to better defend their rights at a time of rising
anti-immigrant fervor, but also help create an ethnic lobby with
political influence similar to that of American Jews.

See Alien Nation, pages 193-195. And --

FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION BY IMMIGRANTS IS BECOMING CAUSE FOR CONCERN
IN THE U.S.

"As you get more and more immigrants from countries where this is a
practice, particularly from Somalia, there are pockets of it
[clitoridectomy] popping up wherever you see concentrations of
settlements," Representative Pat Schroeder, the Colorado Democrat,
said in an interview.

.. . . Ms. Schroeder [has] proposed laws similar to ones in Britain and
France making genital mutilation a crime.

Of course, this is completely hypocritical. Either values are relative
or they are not. What it shows once again is that immigration
enthusiasts’ enthusiasm for "diversity" is highly selective. They
fully intend to pick and choose among diversities. In effect,
immigration just gives them an excuse to remake America. See Alien
Nation. pages 105—6, 231—32.

Ironically, Pat Schroeder had been the 563rd critic to have the
brilliant idea, when she got her free copy of Alien Nation from Random
House chief Harry Evans, of pointing to our common British origins.
"We welcome immigrants, even crabby ones," she wrote back grandly.
"Somehow they all find their niche."

Hmm. Did the shock of finding out what some crabby immigrants are
really like contribute to her subsequent decision to quit politics?

Nab, probably not. Immigration enthusiasts are a notably impervious
lot.

It must be said, however, that America professional politicians are
being relatively pervious about immigration. They know an electoral
earthquake—Proposition 187—when they see one. In both parties, they
are prepared at least to contemplate immigration reform. Even House
Speaker Newt Gingrich, who has privately made it clear he does not
want to see the legal immigration issue raised at all, probably
because he fears accusations of racism, now says flatly in To Renew
America that illegal immigration should and can be stopped. (He is
silent, of course, about deporting illegals already here.)

By contrast, the Wall Street Journal editorial page has never formally
rescinded its annual July Fourth call for a constitutional amendment
guaranteeing "open borders," probably the high water-mark of loony
libertarianism. (Still, this instant tradition did cease in 1995,
abruptly and without explanation, after the publication of Alien
Nation)

My conclusion: it is not so much elected officials who are the barrier
to rational immigration reform in America: it is the "permanent
government" of bureaucrats, mediacrats, educrats, assorted policy
wonks and intellectuals—in alliance with ethnic and economic special
interest groups.

And these, as it happens, are also the people who review books.
Reading through the notices of Alien Nation, the sensation I get is
exactly that of putting a recalcitrant three-year old to bed crying,
screaming, struggling, kicking, proclamations of hatred.

Then—and this is significant—sudden, serene sleep. And you go off for
a quiet scotch and a heart attack. Or in my case to finish some
mundane article on the stock market, further building the Forbes
family fortune and thus financing, indirectly, Steve Forbes’s race for
President.

(He's no good on immigration, alas. By contrast, Pat Buchanan bless
his heart, was photographed holding up my book when he announced his
support for an immigration moratorium. I think I might tug my forelock
and respectfully hold out for whichever presidential candidate does
the most to promote my Alien Nation. Of course, it could be Bill
Clinton).

There are basically two views about how you can influence public
debate. The Thin End of the Wedge Theory, favored by gentle souls like
James W. Michaels and John O'Sullivan—respectively my editors at
Forbes and National Review magazines, is that while emphasizing how
much agreement there is between you and everyone else, you politely
but firmly insinuate modifications into the discussion, all of such an
eminently sensible character that no-one can possibly (or. at least,
reasonably) object. Over time, you turn people around.

In contrast, there’s the Thick End Theory. You pick up the wedge by’
its thin end and pound the opposition with the thick end, as hard as
possible. Then you stand back and see what happens.

I have to admit that I lean toward the second approach. This is
probably a fault of personality. I lack the patience to maneuver
opponents in detail, especially since it means I may never get to
state my own very important opinion directly. Indeed, I think that re
pressing an opinion in this way can be harmful to everyone’s health.
Such tactfulness in the face of the hyperemotional minority is why
most Americans now lack the language to express their common private
conviction that, since America has been historically a white nation,
it might very well matter that public policy is at present so rapidly
shifting the country’s racial balance. (Of course, it might not. But
if not, why not discuss it? See page 107.)

Anyway, as Alan Abelson, the great editor of Barrons, used to reassure
me when I worked for him, sadism is a professional requirement for a
journalist. So in Alien Nation I hit the immigration enthusiasts head
on.

Some reviewers appreciated this. Jack Miles, in his very thoughtful
essay in The Atlantic Monthly, said I was "an inspired
controversialist, determined to storm the enemy's redoubt where it is
strongest, not where it is weakest."

But other reviewers simply could not stomach the resulting bloodshed.
For example, Jacquie Miller in the Ottawa Citizen worried—all too
presciently, for what it is worth—that "phrases can be plucked out of
Brimelow’s book that, shoved only slightly out of context, provide
ammunition[for the inevitable charge of racism] She instanced my
references to high black crime and Laotian welfare rates. Miller also
felt that the "credibility" of my account of Robert Kennedy's
ludicrous underestimate of Asian immigration resulting from the l965
Act (p. 78) somehow suffered from what she described as "a typical
slur": my adding that "tragically, Robert Kennedy himself was to be
assassinated by an immigrant counted by the INS as Asian."

My first reaction to this sort of thing, of course, is incredulity. I
believe truth should be an absolute defense, as it is in libel law.
Laotians do have disproportionately high welfare rates etc. And I said
"tragically." didn’t 1’

Still, I recognize a problem. There is no point in repelling readers,
at least those who show Ms. Miller’s symptoms of open-minded ness.

The problem, however, is not easily resolved. The truth, we are told
after all, shall set us free. And it is precisely because of the
media’s flinching from facts that many Americans are unaware of the
immigration dimensions of major contemporary public policy dilemmas
(see p. 7). It is because Americans are never reminded of the
Jordanian origins of Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, that they
don’t think to put him at the head of a list of infamous immigrants to
counter the immigration enthusiasts’ silly ploy of reeling off, in
place of argument, the names of distinguished immigrants. In fact,
many Americans can’t think of a list of infamous immigrants at all—
another example of the one-way nature of the immigration debate.

Former New York mayor Ed Koch pulled this trick on me in the course of
a surprisingly disappointing and weak review in the New York Post;
"Albert Einstein, Arturo Toscanini, Madeleine Albright, I. M. Pei,
Patrick Ewing, John Shalikashvilli, Henry Kissinger, [etc.,
etc.] . . . Brimelow should squirm at their very mention."

My unsquirming answer, in part:

Sirhan; Giuseppe Esposito (founder of the Italian Mafia in the U.S.);.
Meyer Lansky, "Lucky" Luciano, Al Capone (all organized crime); V. K.
Ivankov (of the emerging "Russian Mafia"); Bruno Richard Hauptmann
(Lindbergh kidnapper); Rosario Ames (wife and co-conspirator of
traitor Aldrich Ames); Civil War Colonels John B. Turchin, USA, and
Henry Wirz, CSA (respectively dismissed from U.S. Army for atrocities
against Southern civilians and hung for atrocities against Union
prisoners of war as camp commandant at Andersonville) . . .

And Charles Ponzi (inventor of the type of financial fraud named after
him, whereby early investors are paid off with later investors’
monies, luring more in—just like the immigration enthusiasts’ fantasy
of how immigrants will bail out the Social Security system. Ben
Wattenberg was still repeating this in his syndicated column in late
1995, despite Alien Nation’, conclusive refutation, p. 153-4).

Still. I have hope for Koch. who is sensible about illegal immigration
and other things. It seems he was simply unable to focus on my book’s
content, a common failing, because of the memory of his own immigrant
parents. One of my happiest moments in taping the three-part
immigration debate television special for William F. Buckley’s Firing
Line is establishing through cross-examination that Koch did not
realize his parents could not immigrate under current law anyway
(because they came from European countries that have been shouldered
aside by the family-reunification inflow triggered by the 1965 Act—see
p. 18.) 1 expect that we can resolve our differences over the lunch to
which he has kindly invited me.

I am less hopeful about the ACLU’s Ira Glasser. in the second part of
the Firing Line debate, he so far forgot himself as to accuse me of
"lying" and bet me a year of his salary ($127,950 according to the
1993 American Institute of Philanthropy yearbook) that I had not
discussed in Alien Nation the fragmentary evidence that the proportion
of immigrants in state prisons does not repeat their over-
representation at the federal level. Of course, I had (p. 184).

Glasser has now conceded this, buried in a long abusive ink- cloud of
a private letter to me. Unaccountably, however, he neglected to
include his check. As a gentleman, he will no doubt have rectified
this oversight by the time this paperback edition is in readers’
hands. But you can fax him at the ACLU and ask: (212) 354- 5290.

It a mildly interesting question how Glasser could be such a fool as
to get himself in this mess. My theory is that it is partly be cause
of the pervasive influence of lawyers on American public de bate.
Trial lawyers have a reductionist and pragmatic view of arguments.
Their object is to convince the jury, not arrive at the truth. Glasser
automatically assumed I would suppress apparently unfavorable evidence
because, well, he would in my place.

But I wouldn’t. No. dammit. I wouldn’t. Twenty-five years ago, when I
had been in the U.S. only months, this passage jumped out of a book I
was illicitly reading at the back of a finance class at Stanford’s
business school:

I realize about myself that I am, for all my passions, implacably, I
think almost unfailingly fair: objective, just. This not vanity, it is
rigorous introspection…

The book: Cruising Speed (1970). The author: William F. Buckley Jr.

Perhaps it’s a conservative thing. The Glassers of the world wouldn’t
understand.

Or (what I really think) perhaps it has something to do with the great
civilization of the West. In which case it may be—not will be, may be—
threatened by immigrants from a different cultural tradition.

Virtue is more than its own reward, however. In spite of the ferocious
assault on Alien Nation, only one minor nontypographical mistake was
discovered. Raul Lowery Contreras, a radio host and professional
ethnic in San Diego, complained in a letter to the New York Times that
my sources had been wrong to suppose he was part-Anglo: he merely had
an "Irish step-father." (p. 274). Naturally he did not mention that he
had read this in the free, inscribed book he had bummed off me when we
ran into each other in KOGO's studios, where I had just appeared on
Peter Weissbach’s show.

And, of course, the change does not affect my fundamental point:
assimilating visible minorities is more difficult, even given apparent
social integration, than optimists assume.

"A highly cogent presentation of what is going to be the benchmark
case against immigration," wrote Richard Bernstein in the New York
Times. "Those who think the system needs no fixing cannot responsibly
hold to that position any longer unless they take Mr. Brimelow’s
urgent appeal into account."

"Don be misled by the verbal pyrotechnics. . . no reformer can avoid
grappling with the formidable work of Peter Brimelow," wrote David
Frum, author of Dead Right and now a Contributing Editor with the
Weekly Standard (hope this doesn’t get him fired!) in his syndicated
column in Canada.

I agree, as a matter of fact. John Dizard, in a front page story in
the New York Observer reporting a civil war among conservatives
provoked by my book, quoted me as saying ("ominously") that "my
opponents are hopelessly overextended intellectually and empirically,
and are facing annihilation up and down the line." Nine months later,
having been confronted with no new contrary argument or fact, I still
think that.

And so, I suspect, do they. Unlike Charles Murray when he came to
review the reviews of The Bell Curve, I have essentially no intricate
technical counter-arguments to refute, because no one pro vided any.
My critics tended to behave like Macaulay’s description of Southey in
debate: either they simply reasserted their opinion, often using
points that I had just painstakingly refuted in Alien Nation, a
technique I found bewildering; or they resorted to abuse. Or, quite
often, both.

(As Alien Nation was going to press in 1994, the Urban Institute’s
Michael Fix and Jeffrey Passel published Immigration and Immigrants:
Setting the Record Straight, which claimed that there was
significantly less deterioration in immigrant skill levels and welfare
dependency than shown in George Borjas’ research. it materialized—
distressing to me, since Alien Nation takes other Urban Institute work
at face value—that Fix and Passel had abolished the immigration
problem by the ruthless expedient of abolishing problem immigrants.
For example, all Mexicans had been excluded from the education
calculations on the grounds that many are illegal. But Mexico is also
the largest source of legal immigrants. So excluding Mexicans gives a
falsely positive picture of the legal flow. This statistical
equivalent of anecdotal evidence, scrabbling through the immigrant
population to find some subgroup that out performs the native-born—
left-handed blue-eyed women’!—has become a common immigrant enthusiast
nick. However, although hyped by the usual guilty, and occasionally
brandished feebly by my regular professional immigration enthusiast
debating partners, the Urban Institute’s numbers played surprisingly
little role in print reviews. Critics just tended economically to
sweep aside my— George Borjas’—work without offering any explanation
at all: "rehashing tendentious research on immigrant welfare
dependency"—Tom Morganthau, Newsweek)

"What we need is a real debate about immigration," wrote Thomas
Sowell, who, while interested but not uncritical in two syndicated
columns, was visibly twitching at the unmistakable political
correctness of my immigration enthusiast opponents: "Peter Brimelow’s
Alien Nation makes him top choice for the contrary position."

But any debate about immigration is exactly what much of the
opposition absolutely does not want to see. As Milton Friedman once
remarked to me, many individuals in American intellectual life are not
truly intellectuals but frustrated activists. And the activist’s
characteristic concern with tactics rather than truth became pain
fully apparent as the controversy about Alien Nation got rolling.

A classic example: Ben Wattenberg. When I arrived at Diane Rehm’s
celebrated WAMU talk show in Washington at the beginning of my book
tour, I found Wattenberg was to appear with me. We had a perfectly
affable disputation, not surprisingly since (we agreed) we had
substantial policy proposals in common—such as the utility of an
English-language preference, which would have a dramatic impact,
particularly on the Hispanic influx. Wattenberg undertook to send me
his forthcoming book for a possible Forbes article.

A month later, with Alien Nation getting famous and legislation
reducing immigration being introduced by Rep. Lamar Smith and Senator
Alan Simpson, Wattenberg was transformed. He bristled with
determination to anathematize me for mentioning the fact that
government immigration policy is shifting the U.S. racial balance. He
was comically baffled because (at a Congressional briefing with him
sponsored by Jane DeLung’s Population Resource Center) I instead
talked about how immigration policy is also in effect second-guessing
the American people’s implicit decision, evidenced by their generally
smaller families, about the ideal U.S. population size overall

Even more comic was Wattenberg’s behavior when we taped his PBS TV
show Think Tank. (Me versus two critics and Wattenberg as a self-
declared ‘immoderator." Balance!) He made the very common error of
claiming that Alien Nation advocates a shift to white immigration,
instead the "time-out’ from all immigration I actually recommend on p.
262. I challenged him. Confidently, he started to read something from
his lectern. It began "Brimelow says. . ."

"That’s a review!" I interjected. It was a knockdown blow. So much so
that before the show appeared, Wattenberg (or his handlers) took the
unusual but masterful step of going into the tape and editing out the
exchange.

His book never arrived at Forbes, presumably because it tries to shrug
off Alien Nation as "half hokum, half racism." Without explanation, of
course. Its title: Values Matter Most.

You said it, Ben.

A more important, and sadder, example of an immigration enthusiast
attempting to suppress debate: Robert L. Bartley, Editor of the Wall
Street Journal Bob and I crawled out of the same conservative!
libertarian hole. I had known him and written for his editorial page
since the l970s. But he still published the nastiest, and most
incompetent, review to appear in any major paper, charmingly heading
it "Natterings of a Neo-Nativist."

This resounding F-minus performance by Tufts historian Reed Ueda not
only ignored the role of the 1965 Act but every other major argument
in Alien Nation—including, amazing for a business paper, my
demonstration that immigration is not an economic necessity—in its
eagerness to accuse me of resembling " late-19th-century forecasts of
Anglo-Saxon "race suicide"; i.e. (for most American intellectuals) of
proto-Nazism.

(Evading Alien Nation thesis about the workings of the 1965
Immigration Act is unusually important for libertarian imigration
enthusiasts—for example, it was also repressed by Alan Bock in the
Orange County Register, Stephan Chapman in the Chicago Tribune and,
needless to say, by John J. Miller in Reason magazine Otherwise they
would be forced to admit that this specific immigrant inflow is the
result, not of a free market, but—aargh!—government intervention.
Essentially, they are in the same position as the boosters of dams and
supersonic airliners who conned an earlier generation of libertarians
into thinking that these projects were the product of market processes
rather than federal subsidies and log- rolling. But at least the dam-
boosters were after a dishonest buck. What is the libertarian
immigration enthusiasts’ agenda?)

Random House was eager that I support Alien Nation with op-ed articles
in major newspapers. And in the end, I appeared in the Washington Post
Los Angeles Times. USA Today, Christian Science Monitor, Houston
Chronicle and related syndicates across the country. Even the New York
Times twice commissioned articles, but then reneged. However, it was
very fair in other ways. And I can see that running an article by me
would have caused the much- loved A. M. Rosenthal to burst a blood
vessel. He attacked me twice in his columns, childishly trying to
avoid mentioning in by name, finally concluding (June 20):

Just a few words, no more needed, about that British-born immigrant—
Peter Brimelow is his name, I remember now. His book is much too
farbissen, my mother’s Yiddish word for embittered, to be of
value.. . . That British immigrant really must go home. Mercy extends
just so far.

Well, if Rosenthal doesn’t like being told what to do by immigrants,
he had better support restriction very soon. My mother’s word for all
this: daft.

Finally, on Nov. 27. I was the only non-immigration enthusiast (if you
don’t count Barbara Jordan) in an editorial page symposium of ten 200-
word mini-articles timed to demoralize immigration reformers in
Washington. The intellectual level of the enthusiasts was raised by
the presence of Dr—in psychology—Ruth Westheimer, the sexologist .She
advanced the novel arguments that immigration had saved her from the
Holocaust and solved her servant problem.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page, however, was a blank wall of
unreturned phone calls. Unreturned phone calls are a pet hatred of
mine, so when speaking to audiences on the road I began to amuse
myself, for this and other reasons, by describing the conservative
civil war: "Even the Editor of the Wall Street Journal has stopped
talking to me. At least, I think he has. It’s hard to tell with Bob
Bartley!" (An in-joke. Bob is a notoriously taciturn Mid-Westerner.)

Eventually, I must have said this on Brian Lamb’s extraordinarily
influential C-SPAN show Booknotes. Bob was inspired to return a call.
We talked, and he promised to check upon when he had last allowed an
article dissenting from the immigration enthusiast party tine. After
some weeks, I faxed him pointing out it had been two years.! added
"LOOK ON BRIGHT SIDE—LAST DISSENTER (poor Dan James, author of Illegal
Immigration) DIED."

Of course, I heard nothing further. Bob’s sense of humor is somewhere
in the same latitude as his loquacity.

But during our conversation, he did say something profoundly
significant. Defending his inflexible private opinion that nothing can
ever be done about illegal immigration, he remarked: "The destiny of
Europe has already been decided in North Africa [ of the population
explosion there)."

"That’s a poor look-out for the nation-state," I said, surprised.

"I think the nation-state is finished. I think [Kenichi] Ohmae [a
prophet of economic regionalism popular among businessmen] is right."

I was thunderstruck. I knew the devoted fans of the Wall Street
Journal editorial, overwhelmingly conservative patriots, had no
inkling of this. It would make a great Wall Street Journal front page
story:

WALL STREET JOURNAL EDITOR REVEALED AS SECRET ONE-WORLDER—
CONSTERNATION AMONG FAITHFUL—IS POPE CATHOLIC?

Through much of this most crucial American debate, Wall Street Journal
readers have been able to follow the critics’ arguments only by
deducing them from between the lines of continuous denunciations,
rather like Pravda readers under Stalin. Curiously, Bob Bartley
presided over a similar shut-out in the early l980s, when I used to
beg him to editorialize against affirmative action, then rapidly
metastasizing. Finally, he said: "I’ll write about affirmative action
when you get me a black writer."

Later, he did find black writers—one of them, Joe Perkins now with the
San Diego Union-Tribune, bravely broke with immigration enthusiast
orthodoxy to defend Alien Nation in his column. But by then of course
it was too late. Quotas were entrenched.

Fortunately, Bob does not strike me as being as sensitive as the
shepherd hero of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd; "It had
always been a shadow in his life that his flock ended as mutton—that a
day came and found every shepherd an arrant traitor to his defenseless
sheep." The fact remains, however, that arguably the most brilliant
career in American journalism has failed its supreme test.

Other Highlights from the reviews:

* Harvard University's Stephan Thernstrom in the Washington Post:
Has recent immigration to the U.S. really been huge? Not really . . .
in proportion to total population, the more relevant comparison, it
continues to be fairly low by historic standards . . ."

I devoted all of chapter 2 to crushing this vulgar error, basically by
demonstrating that immigration is now high relative to population
growth But it still cropped in many reviews—another automatic "F."
When I politely pointed out Thernstrom’s mistake in a letter to the
Washington Post, he replied huffily, extemporizing that when
population growth is static, even one immigrant would be 100% of
population growth. True, and so would 100 million immigrants—which is
why I invented the Wedge Chart on page 47, showing the actual
situation (50% higher population by 2050). My theory: reviewers
notoriously don’t read books. But did Thernstrom even look at the
pictures?

* Nicholas Lemann in the New York Times Book Review:

"Judging from a couple of asides, Mr. Brimelow doesn’t consider Jews
to meet his definition of’white’ either; for example, he refers to the
Clinton Administration as ‘a black-Hispanic-Jewish-minority white
(Southerners used to call them "scalawags") coalition.’ Else where he
points out that Jews played a major role in the passage of the hated
1965 immigration law,

Of course, I also point out that Jews are prominent in the current
reform movement too, but Lemann didn’t mention that. After some
puzzling, I have decided that his first sentence means I should have
said "minority non-Jewish white." Bunk. Technically, I should have
said "non-Hispanic white" too, because some Hispanics are white. But I
do not throughout Alien Nation in the interests of minimal
readability.

Strangely, Lemann’s review was not particularly hostile, al though of
course passing over my chapters on economics in favor of race (like
virtually everyone else—this part of the immigration debate has not
even begun.) My theory: when Lemann referred to Alien Nation’s
"amazing absence of euphemism and disingenuousness," he meant just
that: he was literally amazed. Wandering around in his state of
amazement. he idly insinuated anti-semitism in much the same spirit as
a mechanical ignoramus in an automobile salesroom kicking a new car’s
tire.

* Jacob Weisberg in New York magazine: "Brimelow re sorts to
statistical abuses that would make a high-school debate blush. His
first distortion is a chart that shows immigration in absolute
numbers. By including those who applied for legal status under the
temporary amnesty of a few years ago, he succeeds in producing a
recent ‘spike.’"

In fact, of course, the IRCA amnesties are included in the INS
official figures. (Chart I, p. 30-31). And I discuss this problem and
correct for them (Chart 2, p. 32) Even if Weisberg had not turned the
page, he was present at my address to the Manhattan Institute when I
pointed this out. To its discredit, New York refused to publish a
correction letter from my researcher Joseph E. Fallon.

Interestingly, Weisberg was involved in a similar incident involving
The Bell Curve. He wrote that at a conference sponsored by AEI the
book’s linking of intelligence and race was only raised (by him,
although he didn’t say so) when Glenn Loury, who is black, left the
room. In fact, Juan Williams, who is also black, was present
throughout.

My theory: Weisberg is a type, common in New York, whose verbal
slickness exceeds his intellectual powers. Faced with an argument that
disturbs him emotionally, he compulsively lies about it, like a
lunatic exposing himself to a nubile woman.

* Michael Lind in the New Yorker "uses the rhetoric of an after-
dinner speaker at a Klavern banquet." etc. well, the meteoric Lind is
a special case. Once a hanger-on of the conservative movement and
National Review, he seems to have made the entirely rational decision
that there’s more money on the left. (My wife keeps telling me the
same thing.) You can more or less date this process: less than two
years earlier, Lind had written in the New Republic (August 23, 1993)
that my original National Review cover story, which constitutes about
a quarter of Alien Nation, was "an eloquent restatement . . of
traditional American conservative arguments." I even received an
effusive four-page, single-spaced private letter from him on the
subject.

Alien Notion posed a peculiarly acute problem for Lind. His own soon-
to-be-published book, The Next American Nation, actually called for
immigration restriction just like Alien Nation, although in a way that
tried to appeal to political liberals. Much of the debunking of
immigration enthusiast myths was eerily similar, including for example
a passage on Tom Paine that was almost identical (see page 17). Lind
had adopted many arguments first developed in National Review such as
the economic impact on blue-collar workers. (He had even acknowledged
this in a letter to National Review, published March 7, 1994.) He
could purge National Review from his footnotes, and he did. But he
could not afford to have his new friends making close comparisons with
Alien Nation. So he tried to drive it out of public debate in the
usual way.

It won’t last, of course. Although there are good traditional liberal
reasons to oppose immigration, modem liberalism is differently
motivated. And sooner or later, another even younger and equally
vicious Lind is going to come along and make his reputation with an
article on "Michael Lind’s Tainted Sources"—the title of a notorious
attack on The Bell Curve. Additionally, Lind himself is too restless
and quarrelsome. My theory: this strange, driven figure will next
become a Mormon. No doubt of a heretical kind.

John J. Miller in Reason. "Follow that reasoning? It goes something
like this: Colin Ferguson is an immigrant. Colin Ferguson is bad.
Therefore, all immigrants are bad."

A number of reviewers (Christopher Hitchens, Los Angeles Times:
Christopher Farrell, Business Week) were uncomfortable about my
mention of Colin Ferguson. the Jamaican immigrant and Long Island Rail
Road mass-murderer, and "immigration dimension" of some current
problems. But the most extreme treatment, typically, was by Washington
policy wonk John!. Miller.

Completely missing from these discussions was the context (page 6-7).
1 had noted that prevailing taboos make it virtually impossible to
report anything bad about immigrants, resulting in a "one-way
immigration debate." I then deliberately gave the Ferguson case as an
example of news that could have been treated as an immigration story,
but that in fact became a more palatable gun control story because of
the taboo. I am promptly denounced taboo. This is exactly like an AIDS
researcher contracting the virus.

(Alien Nation was attacked—for example, George Ramos, Los Angeles Times
—for not containing enough touchy-feely interviews with immigrants.
Partly this is because my view of what constitutes evidence is a
financial journalist’s: numbers, concepts, analysis. But my Ferguson
experience makes another problem clear: stories about immigrant
criminals, welfare cases and disease carriers would simply not be
tolerated by today’s book reviewers, regardless of the truth.)

My theory: never underestimate the intense emotion with which people
read books. You cannot rely on phrases, let alone paragraphs, being
read in context. I don’t believe that this applies to Miller, though.
Careful study has led me to view him as the most unscrupulous of
contemporary immigration enthusiasts.

So, having given the immigration enthusiasts a good pound with the
thick end of the wedge, what do I see when I stand back?

"It seems clear that the Wall Street Journal is losing, if it has not
already lost, this debate. . ." wrote Fr. Richard John Neuhaus who
regards himself as pro-immigration, in First Things magazine.
"Brimelow’s raising of the race question. however. . may also be the
reason why, if Brimelow’s argument wins in the political arena (which
seems more than possible), few people will give him and his book much
credit in helping transform U.S. immigration policy."

Could be. Who knows? This is the equivalent of having a heart attack
alter putting your three-year-old to bed.

But there’s also the blissful quiet. The professional immigration
restrict were quick to spot it. Contrary to allegations, they have
usually in the past confined themselves to environmental and economic
arguments. But writing in the Spring 1995 issue of The Social
Contract, the restrictionist movement’s house magazine. FAIR’s Ira
Mehlman, offered this penetrating insight under the evocative heading:
"Brimelow Drops The Big One.’

B Brimelow actually makes a very broad case against current
immigration policies, but not surprisingly, almost everybody has
focused on those chapters that deal with race, ethnicity and
culture. . . . By bringing up subjects that had heretofore been
considered taboo, Brimelow has scared a lot of people who have been
observing the debate from the sidelines into conceding that our
current immigration policies don't make economic sense.

[There is a] sudden willingness of many in the media (who are a good
barometer of the intellectual elite) to choose a side on the question
of whether immigration is beneficial or harmful to the economy.

In effect, I had won the economic debate by raising the question of
racial balance and culture. The pattern that Mehlman spotted was so
immensely powerful as to become funny. Again and again, reviews
denounced me and Alien Nation, and then go on to say in effect that
"of course" there are things wrong with immigration. . .just not the
things, or all the things, I had in mind. Examples:

Michael Lind, New Yorker; Christopher Farrell, Business Week; Tom
Morganthau, Newsweek; Jeff Turrentine, Dallas Morning News: Margo
Harakas, St. Petersburg Times; Jacob Weisberg, New York magazine...

"Glad to hear it, Mr. Weisberg," wrote Richard Brookhiser
sarcastically in the New York Observer. "where can we find those
earlier analyses of illegal immigration, and of the flaws of the 1965
Immigration Act? The ones you wrote pre-Brimelow?"

There’s no guarantee that this will have a permanent effect, of
course. Bad faith, intellectual laziness and unacknowledged agendas
are characteristic of immigration enthusiasts. But Ira Mehlman argued
that the change was irreversible:

The only question is in what context [reforms] take place. They can
occur because the intellectual elite are finally persuaded that the
cur rent policies do not make economic or environmental sense, or be
cause the general public rises up in revolt over policies that
perceive are irreparably altering the racial, ethnic and cultural
balance of their country.

The choice should be rather easy.

In Fort Lauderdale, I went into WFTL-AM’s studio to appear on Al
Rantel’s wild and woolly talk show. Rantel’s sometime sidekick Rick
Seiderman turned out to be particularly eager to challenge any idea of
criticizing immigration.

"Look at you," he said at one point across the microphone. "You look
like Adolf Hitler’s wet dream."

I believe that people like Seiderman actually have no idea what effect
this sort of attack, so casually and constantly made, has upon those
who have to endure it. It lights a small point of incandescent rage
deep inside you, like the steadily encircling campfires of a besieging
army at night.

Of course, you are not allowed to respond in anger. So I just said
mildly: "My father spent six and a half years fighting Hitler." (World
War II began for Britain in 1939.)

"Did he win?" demanded Seiderman, aggressively unimpressed. It was one
of those moments in debate when a reply comes unbidden, both for my
poor father, dead five years, and indeed for my mortally wounded land
of origin.

"No," I said with a sudden bitterness. "He lost."

Seiderman pulled a face and moved on.

But of course we have all lost to Adolf Hitler, native-born and
immigrant, white and non-white alike because the resulting emotional
spasm of a policy is inflicting upon America damage that will still be
felt in a hundred years. If indeed it does not prove terminal.

Some time before Alien Nation was published, a famous sociologist was
talking to a private dinner group in New York about a controversial
question of the day. He gave his position but added that he would not
lake it in public—"there’s a limit to what you can say in a
multiracial society."

I refuse to accept this. But judging by the reception of Alien Nation,
it is far from clear that he is wrong. In which case, the question
must be asked: can such a society can be truly free?

—Christmas. 1995

http://www.vdare.com/pb/041206_afterword_an.htm#former