10/26/2023
David Leonhardt has an article in The Atlantic called The Hard Truth About Immigration — If the United States wants to reduce inequality, it’s going to need to take an honest look at a contentious issue, October 23, 2023.
It starts out in a way that will be very familiar to readers of VDARE.com — or anyone who read VDARE.com editor Peter Brimelow’s 1995 Alien Nation:
“This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” President Lyndon B. Johnson said as he put his signature on the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, at the base of the Statue of Liberty. “It does not affect the lives of millions.” All that the bill would do, he explained, was repair the flawed criteria for deciding who could enter the country. “This bill says simply that from this day forth those wishing to immigrate to America shall be admitted on the basis of their skills and their close relationship to those already here.”
Edward Kennedy, the 33-year-old senator who had shepherded the bill through the Senate, went even further in promising that its effects would be modest. Some opponents argued that the bill would lead to a large increase in immigration, but those claims were false, Kennedy said. They were “highly emotional, irrational, and with little foundation in fact,” he announced in a Senate hearing, and “out of line with the obligations of responsible citizenship.” Emanuel Celler, the bill’s champion in the House, made the same promises. “Do we appreciably increase our population, as it were, by the passage of this bill?” Celler said. “The answer is emphatically no.”
Johnson, Kennedy, Celler and the new law’s other advocates turned out to be entirely wrong about this. The 1965 bill sparked a decades-long immigration wave. As a percentage of the United States population, this modern wave has been similar in size to the immigration wave of the late 1800s and early 1900s. In terms of the sheer number of people moving to a single country, the modern American immigration wave may be the largest in history. The year Johnson signed the immigration bill, 297,000 immigrants legally entered the United States. Two years later, the number reached 362,000. It continued rising in subsequent decades, and by 1989 exceeded 1 million.
How could the law’s advocates have been so wrong about their own policy? One explanation is that they engaged in motivated reasoning. They believed, justly, that they were righting a historical wrong by remaking the racist immigration system that the country had adopted in the 1920s, which allocated almost all of its slots to Western Europeans. The new law created a first-come-first-served system that treated all parts of the world equally, and it made the United States a fairer society. In their eagerness to achieve that victory, however, the reformers dismissed almost any criticism of the bill as unreasonable and even hateful. [Emphases added.]
Ted Kennedy said, in particular, that “the charges I have mentioned are highly emotional, irrational, and with little foundation in fact. They are out of line with the obligations of responsible citizenship. They breed hate of our heritage” [Senate Hearings, Volume 5, February 10, 1965]. But if you read So Much for Promises — Quotes Re 1965 Immigration Act. here on VDARE.com in 2006, you knew that.
But the point is that it was the wrong kind to patriotic Americans who were objecting to the potentially disastrous Immigration Act: members of the Historic American Nation:
In part, they were reacting to the identity of the bill’s critics: Many were opponents of the civil-rights movement who indeed made racist arguments against the immigration bill. Yet skeptics also raised legitimate questions about the bill, pointing to potential loopholes, including that its annual worldwide quota did not apply to many immigrants. These immigrants were considered “nonquota” entries, allowed to enter the country without being counted. The most consequential nonquota entries proved to be family members, including extended family. The law declared that immigrants who were coming to join relatives already in the United States would not count toward the quota. That loophole was not wholly new. But it had not mattered much before 1965, because the overall system was so restrictive. The new law opened the doors to the entire world without solving the nonquota problem.
All this is familiar. The wrong kind of people opposing the Act included the Daughters of the American Revolution, who asked, among other things, why, if LBJ had declared his famous “War on Poverty” inside the borders of the U.S., he was planning on importing more poor people? [IMMIGRATION LAW PRAISED BY D.A.R.: President’s Plan to Abolish Quota System-Assailed,WASHINGTON, June 25, 1965]
And of course, the effect of mass immigration on America’s native-born poor, and on the children of previous waves immigrants, is what Leonhardt means about “inequality.”
He writes:
For the lower end of the income distribution, the expansion of the labor pool has held down wages. For the higher end of the income distribution, these lower wages have held down the prices of frequently used services such as restaurant meals and landscaping.
For more on that, see Alien Nation (1995); America’s Assisted Suicide, by Peter Brimelow, National Review, November 25, 1996, here on VDARE.com; my own Labor Day In Mississippi — Job Openings For Americans After Raids, early 20th century protests by labor leader Samuel Gompers, an immigrant himself; and 19th century protests by black leader Booker T. Washington and Irish-American labor leader Denis Kearney.
I got a copy of Leonhardt’s book Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream, which is only partly about immigration. I checked to see if, in its discussion of the history of the Immigration Act it mentioned either Peter Brimelow (author of the seminal 1995 book Alien Nation) or Ann Coulter, who wrote the more recent Adios, America.
Nothing. But there are 26 instances of the word “racism” and 23 instances of the word “racist,” so that tells you all you need to know about Leonhardt’s history of the 20th century.
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