By Paul Nachman
04/06/2015
Amid these perilous times for the survival of First-World (i.e. Western) civilization in North America, I think it’s heartening that immigration as a major negative factor is mentioned more and more frequently in articles by prominent writers at websites that, unlike VDARE.com, don’t focus on The National Question.Three of the four principal writers at the popular PowerLine site have been making side comments or focused remarks about damaging immigration for some time now; I pointed to recent examples in a couple of VDARE.com blogs, here and here.
The latter example involved a March 29 piece by John Hinderaker that opened with a significant nod to unhelpful immigration but then didn’t mention it again. Just three days later, though, Hinderaker had a PowerLine entry with "immigration" in its title [A Ballplayer Illuminates Immigration, April 1, 2015] and this superb first paragraph:
We are living in a time of record-shattering immigration, both legal and illegal. This concerns many Americans for several reasons. Contemporary immigration is overwhelmingly unskilled and semi-skilled, which means that incomes of working class Americans, especially African-Americans, have been and will continue to be depressed. Worst of all, perhaps, is the fact that we have lost the will to integrate immigrants into American society. High schools populated by immigrants used to teach classes in “Americanism”; just try that today. We are becoming an increasingly bilingual (or multilingual) society, with all of the social fragmentation that implies.Hinderaker, who is based in Minneapolis, goes on enthusiastically about young Minnesota Twins slugger Kennys Vargas, a quasi-immigrant from Puerto Rico.
I wrote "quasi-immigrant" because native-born Puerto Ricans are automatically U.S. citizens, so Vargas isn’t really an immigrant. But he shares the immigrant experience of moving to an essentially foreign culture which operates in a language that’s not his own.
And the rest of Hinderaker’s piece is about how eagerly and capably Vargas is assimilating to Minnesota, notable because today’s frequent non-assimilation of immigrants is a primary downside of our immigration tsunami, for reasons of both economics and civic comity.
Then on April 3, in a City Journal review [Moynihan’s Mistake and the Left’s Shame] of several books about the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Cooper Union historian and Manhattan Institute fellow Fred Siegel wrote:
The farrago of interests and organizations spawned by the Great Society became, by way of public-sector unions, the organizational backbone of Obama-era redistributive liberalism. Today’s liberalism is nearly unrecognizable by Moynihan’s egalitarian standards. Liberals in New York and California are increasingly comfortable with a stratified society governed by crony-capitalist political elites. Their idea of reform is to make the lives of those in poverty more comfortable, even as they import cheap labor and reduce wages for working-class blacks.That’s a mere mention and doesn’t actually use the word "immigration," but it suggests to me that basic facts about the subject are — at last! — diffusing into the heads of people who think professionally about public policy.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.