Many other issues (crime, healthcare, education) have an unspoken immigration dimension.
02/15/2024
VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow writes: It’s a strange feeling when you find that someone you don’t know has very carefully read, and gone to the trouble of scrupulously excerpting, a book you published nearly thirty years ago. I want most deeply to thank Xer/tweeter @arctotherium42 (he also has a Substack) for paying such heart-warming attention to my 1995 critique of immigration policy, even though an entire generation of politicians and Conservatism Inc. publicists did not. Too bad for them. (And, of course, for America.)
I chronicled the vitriolic reaction to Alien Nation in the Afterword to the paperback edition published in 1996; I updated the story 17 years later when we published the Kindle edition (still available). This update included how, when at the height of the 2006 Amnesty/ Immigration Surge battle Ann Coulter wrote a characteristically generous column (Read My Lips: No New Amnesty, May 24, 2006) causing the paperback to spike on Amazon and sell out, Harper Collins refused to reprint it; and how, when I pressed my celebrated literary agent Andrew Wylie to represent a sequel, he responded by severing our relationship on the ground that my views had become too extreme aka the post–Cold War interglacial was over and communists were back in control of the fashionable New York publishing world.
Of course I wish I had been allowed to write a sequel to Alien Nation. But at least (unless New York Attorney General Letitia James gets her filthy paws on it) I have the VDARE.com archive.
Our Featured Image includes the original hardcover dust jacket picture of myself with my then four-year-old son Alexander. My one (1) reference to him in the text — pointing out that because of his blue eyes and blond hair he would, because of the interaction between Affirmative Action quotas and non-white Third World immigration, inevitably be discriminated against — excited hysteria.
But, needless to say, this has turned out to be true. Alexander, a U.S. Marine sergeant whose MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) was Intelligence and who subsequently earned a B.A. from Southern Methodist University, has not even been granted an interview by the FBI or the NSA.
The Great Replacement is the point.
To hell with them.
Arctotherium42’s thread below includes his comments in italics and many screenshots from Alien Nation:
Book thread on @peterbrimelow’s Alien Nation. This book was published in 1995, but unfortunately it is still relevant almost 30 years later. If anything, it was too optimistic. pic.twitter.com/Fta4Ep5YQv
— arctotherium (@arctotherium42) February 5, 2024
It is not just illegal immigration that is out of control; legal immigration is too. Immigration is in effect an imitation civil right, extended indefinitely to a group of foreigners selected arbitrarily and without regard to American interests. Many other issues (crime, healthcare, education) have an unspoken immigration dimension.
America’s ethnic core has always been white. Libertarians, like Virginia Postrel (who is still writing) have a tendency to flip out about this fact. The racial reshaping of the country post-1965 is unprecedented, not a natural continuation of what made pre-65 America great.
A very common position in the immigration debate is “my grandparents were Ellis Islanders, they would’ve been kept out if there were restrictions, thus Open Borders.” But the Ellis Islanders differed in many ways from the current wave.
First, European immigrants are now shut out by Third Worlders. Second, Ellis Islanders were white. Third, America was aggressively assimilative rather than multicultural. Fourth, there was no welfare state and much return migration. Fifth, there was a 40-year pause.
American immigration is historically high, surpassing even the Ellis Island wave once low native fertility is accounted for, and unlike pre-65, it is constant rather than intermittent and responsive to economic conditions thanks to the welfare state.
Operation Wetback was phenomenally successful. Turns out, it’s easy to stop illegal immigration if you actually try. It would be much easier today.
If there were no immigration at all to the U.S. post-1790, the U.S. population would still be ~49% of what it was in 1990.
Over 90% of U.S. immigration is from the 3rd World, and the stock is functionally limitless. Not a self-solving problem.
Post-65 immigration is less skilled than prior waves, and this lack of skill is persistent. American immigration policy permanently degrades the quality of its workforce.
Population projections from 1990 seem incredibly optimistic today. ~53% white by 2050? We’re at 59% in 2020 (compared to projected 64%), and that’s including MENA as white.
The creators of Hart-Celler did not intend it to revolutionize the country and indeed promised it wouldn’t. They were wrong.
Why care about race? 1) Affirmative Action; 2) Politics. The U.S. was 80-90% white until 1965, and politically ~100% white. The only big racial faultline was white-black and it was confined to the South. 3) QOL. Whites, empirically, dislike living around nonwhites, and vice-versa.
The Free Market solution: wait for California to become unlivable (compared to India/Mexico) so people will leave. But this is not a free market problem.
The government has chosen to dissolve the people and elect a new one.
American discourse often treats the browning of America as a natural phenomenon like the tides, rather than the product of government action in the form of immigration policy.
The debate around Hart-Celler bore no resemblance to its effects. We were promised no increase in numbers OR change in ethnic composition, e.g., only 5,000 Asian immigrants. Every charge laid by opponents of the bill came true.
How the post-65 immigration system works: global gap, national quotas, no favoritism towards Europe (in fact, Euros are crowded out), family migration over skills (leading to chain migration and domination by a handful of countries). No restrictions on “refugees.”
Plus, there’s millions of illegals and a diversity lottery, which doesn’t even pretend to follow any sort of pro-America logic. Literally “let’s crowd in every ethnic group in the world for a thunderdome.”
America’s immigration system is anarcho-tyrannical. Difficult and tortuously bureaucratic for those who obey the law, which is not enforced against those who don’t.
The insanity of post-65 immigration policy leads to inflexibility. The U.S. can’t make exceptions (such as for post-Soviet Eastern Europeans) because the rules are so bad.
47% of foreign born U.S.ians don’t even speak English well.
Immigration has been wildly unpopular among Americans since 1965, yet is still perpetually increased. There is not even a credible fig leaf of democratic legitimacy for the country’s racial transformation.
Hart-Celler was passed as a form of ethnic revenge.
Occasionally, you see pro-immigration Jews invoke the Holocaust as a justification for Open Borders. But this is unreasonable; there is no limit to the number of potential atrocities that could have been averted if their victims were in the U.S. instead.
Just as there are nativists, there are alienists, who despise Americans and see immigration as a tool to punish us. Many immigrationists are shockingly open about this.
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Immigrationists rarely explain why the U.S. must be transformed via mass immigration. When they do answer, they are often absurdly anti-American, such as Earl Raab, who sees swamping white Americans as necessary to stop Nazism.
Diverse societies are far more bigoted and are at much higher risk of ethnic conflict, because ethnicity is a natural way of organizing politically. Only homogenous societies can be liberal. A man who wanted to minimize “racism” would want to Keep America White.
This is an excellent prediction in light of the rapid Republicanization of American whites in the 21st century.
While ethnic transfer between white ethnic groups was common in the Northeast in the 19th/ early 20th century, it never produced anything like white flight, unlike black and later Hispanic/Asian influxes.
Multiracial societies have an awful track record and were typically based around a dominant ethnic group.
Quite blackpilling. In the 90s, every European country was committed to stopping further nonwhite immigration.
Many immigrationists have browbeaten restrictionists into accepting the “immigration is Good for the Economy” claim. But it isn’t true.
Regardless, Actually Existing Immigration is almost totally uncoupled from economic needs, instead being driven by the welfare state and family reunification.
More on unskilled immigration:
Immigrants disproportionately use welfare, and are no longer deported as public charges. 80%+ of illegals have fraudulent SSNs, and they can use anchor babies to collect more benefits. Refugees are particularly bad, since they can legally collect benefits immediately.
Even under standard (optimistic) economic assumptions, which abstract away genetics/politics/culture/redistribution, the economic benefits of immigration on the natives are miniscule — around 0.3% of GDP!
The direct economic effects of immigration on the natives are small — in both directions. This is often used by immigrationists, since the effect on wages is small, but it goes both ways. So the question then becomes: Are the non-economic effects of immigration good for us?
Since the direct effects are so small, the political/cultural/genetic effects can easily outweigh them. Immigration undermines the institutions needed to keep market economies working.
One day, the myth of Hispanic family values and Natural Conservativism will die. One day.
Environmentalism and immigrationism are at odds. Keep this in mind the next time you see Leftists go into hysterics about the “climate emergency.”
Immigration very often threatens a country’s political balance. This has happened many times in both world and American history. The Mexican governmentt deliberately uses Mexican immigrants as a 5th column to subvert the United States.
Border control is not cruel, and there would be far fewer emotional scenes at the border if illegals were deterred, which could be done easily.
Nonwhite countries tend to be VERY strict about immigration; there is no reciprocality. They can come here, we can’t go there.
That’s the last Tweet of the thread:
Nonwhite countries tend to be VERY strict about immigration; there is no reciprocality. They can come here, we can’t go there. pic.twitter.com/JwvfoHyelL
— arctotherium (@arctotherium42) February 5, 2024
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