01/02/2010
Immigration to the U.S. is an enormous subject. It’s much bigger than a mere issue
because mass immigration, both legal and illegal, affects — adversely! — nearly every aspect of our national life. Over time, regular visitors to VDARE.com read about all these aspects.
But could someone create a Short Course
to help patriots more quickly develop expertise on immigration’s baneful effects?
This isn’t just an academic question. With the new amnesty peril looming, our country needs a legion of patriots armed with the intellectual resources to defeat, in direct confrontations, the well-funded and shameless onslaught of the Open Borders zealots and greedheads and to educate our alarmed-but-poorly-informed fellow citizens.
That Short Course
notion was the motive for my 10,500 word article in the current, Fall 2009, issue of The Social Contract Magazine: Reading Assignment: Gird For Looming Battles With The “Great Books” Of Immigration Sanity, which VDARE.com has thoughtfully archived here [PDF]. [To subscribe to or buy a copy of the tree-based Social Contract, click here].
My purpose in this article is to announce the placement of my “Short Course” in VDARE.com’s archives — and encourage you to give it a look.
Despite the Great Books
trope in the title, my article isn’t actually about books! Instead, it’s effectively a review article — a guide to notable, web-accessible literature about immigration.
The referenced literature comes in easily digestible chunks, with most chunks requiring reading times between five and ten minutes, and a few items ranging between a minute and two hours.
From my Introduction:
“There are, of course, some (literally) great books on America’s immigration madness, too. But my aim here is to put before you seminal readings that are less daunting projects than reading whole books. The approximately 30 items cited below, with links provided in the Endnotes, are articles (plus a video and a poster) that have impressed me, over about the last dozen years, as particularly memorable and instructive.”
Of course, since all these items, which also include a brief video and some sound clips, are available online, I could just provide a list of links, or links and titles, and urge people to go look at them.
So why did I, instead, wind up with 10,500 words (probably 30 to 45 minutes straight-through reading time for most folks)?
Well, about 60% of it consists of meaty quotes from the cited articles, passages that are long enough and striking enough that I hope they’ll entice you to go read the full articles, thus working your way through the promised short course.
The remaining 40% of the article consists of my attempt to tie the referenced items together and into a logical flow.
What kinds of articles make up my list? They are all discursive and qualitative — although, when necessary, tightly argued. In other words, these aren’t articles about the best estimate for the number of illegal aliens in the country, nor about statistics on the educational attainments of the grandchildren of immigrants, nor about the net financial burdens on taxpayers caused by immigrants and illegal aliens in different states, etc. etc.
In my experience, most people — including our ill-informed fellow citizens whom we need to persuade or buttress — aren’t very numerate and don’t easily grasp quantitative arguments. For them, arguments involving culture, language, and ways of life are generally more gripping.
Altogether, then, these are the articles that have shaped my own view of the facts and of what’s at stake for our American civilization; and which I think will also impress others.
My “Short Course” is divided into nine sections, as follows:
Besides the several writers mentioned just above, a non-exhaustive list of the articles’ authors includes Lawrence Auster, Mark Cromer, George F. Kennan, and Thomas Sowell.
These authors, and the others not listed here, have produced a treasure trove of facts, observations, arguments, and wisdom.
I hope my Short Course,
by introducing this trove to a larger audience, will help strengthen the capabilities of patriots working in the trenches, nationwide, for immigration sanity.
If it, indeed, helps you, please spread its contents far and wide!
Nachman note for VDARE.com readers: As I said, there are, of course, some (literally) Great Books on America’s immigration madness too. Should you be in the market for such a book, instead of a medley of articles, Peter Brimelow’s Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster (1995) is instantly downloadable, for free, here [PDF]. So is Roy Beck’s The Case Against Immigration (1996), here [1.4-MB PDF]. (Brimelow’s seminal article Time to Rethink Immigration?, published in National Review in 1992, was the precursor to Alien Nation and is archived here.)
In my view, three other books, not available for free, also fall into the Great Books category.
First is Victor Davis Hanson’s finely observed Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (2002). Brenda Walker reviewed it here; Peter Brimelow reviewed it here.
More recently, Mark Krikorian’s The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal (2008) is encyclopedic, yet slim and readable. (Marcus Epstein reviewed it here and I reviewed it here.)
And Otis Graham’s brand new Immigration Reform And America’s Unchosen Future (2009) is a history for immigration-sanity patriots who would like to know what happened before they entered the fray. Steve Sailer reviewed it here.
Paul Nachman is a retired physicist and immigration sanity activist in Bozeman, MT. Read his VDARE.com blogs here.