09/28/2005
This is why immigration enthusiasts scream "racist" all the time: they know their support is a mile wide but not an inch deep — even in the American Establishment. The October 3 issue of U.S. New & World Report carries a worthy hand-wringing column from the proprietor, Mortimer Zuckerman, on the plight of black America as revealed by Hurricane Katrina. Buried deep in it is this remarkable thowaway paragraph:So why haven’t overall poverty rates declined further? In a word, immigration. Many of those who come to the United States are not only poor but unskilled. Hispanics account for much of the increase in poverty — no surprise, since 25 percent of poor people are Hispanic. Since 1989, Hispanics represent nearly three quarters of the increase in the overall poverty population. Immigration has also helped keep the median income for the country basically flat for five straight years, the longest stretch of income stagnation on record.
This, of course, is the sort of thing that VDARE.COM, specifically Edwin S. Rubenstein, has beeen saying for years. e.g. here.
Even more remarkable, this is not new for Zuckerman. He and I were on a panel together in New York in 1994 (hard to believe now) and I remember telling him I would not have strained my family’s patience writing Alien Nation, then in press, if I had seen a wonderful U.S. News column he had just published succinctly summarizing the immigration disaster. Yeah, maybe you say this sort of thing to media moguls, but, partly because my wife was still steaming with rage, I meant it.
I don’t know for sure why Zuckerman’s stone-cold take on immigration isn’t reflected in his New York Daily News or for that matter why he doesn’t force his employee Michael Barone to stop his, ah, systematic inexactitude on the issue.
But the immigration enthusiasts don’t know either. That’s why they have to repress all criticism with such hysteria.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.