As American migrant workers took to the fields in the first harvest season after the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (the sweeping new federal law to control illegal immigration), Herminio Muñoz, a sixty-five-year-old Mexican-American from Progreso, Texas, told the Dallas Times Herald: “We think there is going to be a...
The debate over immigration policy has been marked by inaccurate reporting in an astonishing number of instances. Errors and material omissions by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the Census Bureau, and the Department of Education are only the beginning of misinformation about immigration. News releases and publications by experts, including some associated with...
It should be obvious to anyone who has taken the slightest trouble to examine the immigration question that America is faced not with an immigration “problem,” or even a “crisis,” but with a massive ...
Females dominate U.S. immigration policymaking, media, and legal positions. The gender imbalance is liberalizing the country’s immigration laws.
“Who would call in a / foreigner—unless / an artisan with skill to / serve the realm, / a healer, or a prophet, or / a builder, / or one whose harp and song / might give us joy. / . . . but when have beggars come by / invitation?” —Homer It should be...
Saying “I told you so” is never very polite, but sometimes, especially when trying to explain things to the Republican Party, it’s advisable to say it. For the last year or so, the Republicans and their pet eggheads have been telling each other that they had just better shut up about immigration, immigration reform, and...
“Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed to me.” —Emma Lazarus The publication of a Julian Simon book is a cause for rejoicing among advocates of laissez-faire and open-border immigration. According to Dr. Simon, who teaches business administration at the University of Maryland and is an adjunct scholar at the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute,...
“My opinion with respect to immigration is that, except of useful mechanics and some particular descriptions of men or professions, there is no need of encouragement . . . ” —George Washington “It’s not you, it’s me” has become a popular phrase with which to terminate a romantic relationship. It is considered a more polite...
Mass immigration is changing the fundamental character of America—our culture, institutions, standards, and objectives. Until recently, our society was the envy of the world, so why are these changes even necessary? In addition to the ruling class’s commitment to globalism and multiculturalism, the chief reason that is given in support of open borders is the...
Almost immediately after the attacks of September 11, the open-borders lobby knew it was in trouble. The immediate, obvious, and logical implication of 19 aliens legally entering the country and proceeding to carry out the biggest single act of mass murder in human history is that the United States needs to close its borders, at...
Last week saw the publication of Ann Coulter’s new book on immigration, Adiós America! This is an important book. Although Coulter sounds a number of themes that will be quite familiar to Chronicles readers, she also breaks new ground, particularly in her detailed description of how mass immigration is harming ordinary Americans. It also comes out...
Immigration is exclusively a federal responsibility, but all states, like California, must pay for federally mandated medical, educational, and social services for immigrants. As Newsweek recently reported, 10.4 percent of all new immigrants received welfare in 1990, as compared to 7.7 percent of native-born Californians, and each immigrant welfare check was on average more than...
Jacob Neusner, Graduate Research Professor of Humanities and Religious Studies, University of South Florida Martin Buber Professor of Judaic Studies, University of Frankfurt Immigration nourishes America, affirming the power of its national ideal: a society capable of remaking the entire world in the image of humanity in democracy. No country in the world other than...
“Dangers by being despised grow great.” —Edmund Burke Although preelection polls indicated that likely voters would favor candidates who supported immigration control, Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Ross Perot did not consider the issue worth mentioning during the recent presidential contest. But if our leaders wish the “i” word would go away, in the future...
“My opinion with respect to immigration is that, except of useful mechanics and some particular descriptions of men or professions, there is no need of encouragement.” —George Washington In May 1991 rioting Central American immigrants looted and burned stores and destroyed police cars in Mount Pleasant, a declining, “multicultural” Washington neighborhood that overlooks the White...
Ron Unz, the neoliberal publisher of The American Conservative since the departure of Patrick J. Buchanan and Taki Theodoracopulos, penned an article for the March 1 issue of TAC entitled, like Geraldo Rivera’s recent pro-immigration book, “His-Panic,” where he argues that the notion of widespread Hispanic crime is largely a myth. He writes that conservatives...
We live in interesting times. In June of this year, the U.S. national soccer team played an “away” game against Mexico—in Los Angeles. Many of the 93,000 fans in the Rose Bowl booed the U.S. squad, chanted obscenities directed at the U.S. goalkeeper, and blew air horns during the U.S. national anthem. After Mexico won...
The classical argument in favor of free immigration runs as follows. Other things being equal, businesses go to low-wage areas, and labor moves to high-wage areas, thus effecting a tendency toward the equalization of wage rates (for the same kind of labor) as well as the optimal localization of capital. An influx of migrants into...
I foolishly used an early version of my article. Rather than repost everything, I am putting in a few omitted extracts: Introduction“Poor Mexico,” sighed Porfirio Diaz, “so far from God, so close to the United States.” Though a hero in the Battle of Puebla (May 5, 1862) in which the Mexicans defeated French troops supporting...
“An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may serve the needs of the spirit.” —Susan Sontag “Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents,...
“A nation scattered and peeled, . . . a nation meted out and trodden down.” —Isaiah Like Romans in ancient times, Americans are losing their country to immigration, and few seem to know it. One who does know is Peter Brimelow, himself an immigrant and recently naturalized citizen. In his book Alien Nation, he more...
“San Pietro si fece la barba prima per sé e poi per gli altri.” (“Saint Peter shaved himself first and then other people.”) —A proverb from Lazio, near Rome Americans believe that they are unusual. They use the word “unique” as a term of praise so often that it has lost its status as a...
On February 6, 1998, the Mexican consul general in California, Jose Angel Pescador Osuna, spoke at the Southwestern School of Law in Los Angeles as part of a symposium on the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gave the Southwest to the United States. Osuna proclaimed, “And even though I am saying this part serious,...
Any exploration of American nationalism must begin with the National Question: “Is there such a thing as the American people? And if so, what is it?” Most people do not ask such questions. A Frenchman does not wonder if he is French, nor the Pole if he is Polish, nor—notoriously—the Serb if he is Serbian....
This compendium on immigration by editors of the National Research Council (NRC) includes the work of 14 scholars, among them economists, demographers, and sociologists. At least one of the contributors is a strong advocate of high levels of immigration, while another has recently criticized current policy for ignoring the decline in skills and levels of...
The Common Problems of Assimilating Immigrants in Israel and the United States Parts of the United States are currently undergoing a radical cultural transformation. Demographers have documented that as a result of large-scale immigration, California—the country’s most populous state—will be composed of a majority of minorities by the first decade of the next century. Moreover,...
“Debate is masculine; conversation is feminine.” —A. Bronson Alcott For decades, a massive problem has been aborning in all Western countries: the increasingly difficult-to-ignore presence of ever-growing and restive ethnic minority groups alienated from the majority communities surrounding them. These disparate groups—emboldened by our enervation and in thrall to ethnocentric demagogues masquerading as “antiracists” and...
Congressman Chris Cannon of Utah and his open-borders cronies at the Wall Street Journal, who have embarked on a smear campaign against mainstream immigration-control groups, should learn to differentiate between real xenophobes (as found in an August 2004 Tennessee primary election) and the vast majority of people with legitimate rationales for favoring lower, tighter immigration....
Parents, some say, are people who use the rhythm method of family planning. One might better say that parents are optimists, people who think that the present is good and the future probably better. People who look forward with confidence often have an extra child; those who think that their situation may worsen are cautious...
I stopped paying attention to Time many years ago. My twin brother and I, already plotting our emigration to the United States, subscribed as college students in England in the 1960’s to get some sense of this world-straddling “indispensable nation”—as Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright later called it, possibly ...
Political correctness has it that immigration is a perennial phenomenon in Western countries. This is preposterous. Immigration as we know it today is an extremely recent phenomenon. The United States has always been a nation of immigrants, they say. This is just plain ridiculous. A small group of people leaving their country to found their...
The one certain thing about population control is that we do not yet know how to achieve it. That needs a bit of explaining. If human beings do absolutely nothing about controlling their populations, nature will do it for us, simply because the world—our world—is limited. Sure, a few human beings might eventually be shipped...
America’s immigration enthusiasts, which is to say her entire ruling class, have such untrammeled access to the mainstream media that they are able to launch obviously absurd memes in shamelessly coordinated fashion. Thus, in the wake of the Republican triumph in the 2014 midterm elections—which of course had no effect on them at all; being...
“How will it be with kingdoms and with kings— With those who shaped him to the thing he is— When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world, After the silence of the centuries?” —Edwin Markham, “The Man With the Hoe,” 1899 “A state cannot be constituted from any chance body of persons, or in...
One way of telling the story of American culture and politics in the second half of the 20th century is to present it as a revolt against the group of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males who dominated the country from the time of William Bradford to that of Dwight David Eisenhower. This narrative helps to explain...
The economy Soviet émigrés leave behind is property called irrational. Consider the economy they enter in the United States as described in an article that recently appeared in the Soviet paper the Independent. “The benefits (in America) are real. Our son attended an excellent private school for which he didn’t pay a cent. Then he...
In a sane world, the sight of more than a half-million immigrants—many of them illegal—flooding the streets of downtown Los Angeles and waving Mexican flags would have been something of a wake-up call for Southern Californians. It wasn’t. No matter how in-your-face the protesters have become, conventional wisdom argues that these nice folks are simply...
Charles de Gaulle, on the subject of Algeria: “Pinay, the facts may prove me wrong, but History will prove me right.” Finance Minister Anoine Pinay: “But, Monsieur le Président, I thought History was written with facts.” Since for the vast majority of human beings historic myth, as André Malraux believed, is infinitely more appealing than...
I stopped paying attention to Time many years ago. My twin brother and I, already plotting our emigration to the United States, subscribed as college students in England in the 1960’s to get some sense of this world-straddling “indispensable nation”—as Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright later called it, possibly not for our reasons—and also...
Recently, VDARE.com published Hans Hermann Hoppe’s 2010 address to his Property and Freedom Society in Turkey. Hoppe’s speech included his account of the 1996 meeting of the John Randolph Club, the last at which there was an organized libertarian presence, and a broader attack on the ideas of Pat Buchanan and Sam Francis. Hoppe’s account...
“Truths would you teach, or save a sinking land? All fear, none aid you, and few understand.“ —Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man” Although the raw figures from Census 2000 have been in the public domain for months already, the American public’s response to the latest decennial survey is still not...
Beginning in 1991, for more than a year, a 22-year-old Salvadoran immigrant sexually abused an eight-year-old California girl. This permanent legal resident took advantage of her whenever he was at his cousin’s house, where he lived in Los Angeles. He was not always there, so the child would return to the home of her girlfriend...
“A nation scattered and peeled . . . a nation meted out and trodden down.” —Isaiah 18:2 “It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of looking insufficiently progressive.” Pat Buchanan quotes this aphorism of Charles Péguy in his latest book, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion...
“Some races increase, others are reduced, and in a short while the generations of living creatures are changed and like runners relay the torch of life.” —Lucretius Reading student applications for scholarships, as I have done on and off now for a dozen years on the undergraduate scholarships committee of the University of California, Davis,...
Early in December of last year, while President-elect Clinton was trying to come up with a Cabinet that would “look more like America,” the U.S. Census Bureau published a report that told us what America really looks like and what it will probably look like 60 years from now. Presumably, Mr. Clinton will have departed...
Migration is a reality that concerns no more than 200 million people on earth now living outside their country of origin—that is, only three percent of the world’s population. Why should we even talk about it? The reason is simple: Global statistics are worthless; the whole phenomenon is concentrated in Europe and the United States. ...
The most significant event of President George W. Bush’s second term (thus far) has been the defeat of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 (S.1348). This bill was initiated by President Bush in collaboration with the Democratic congressional majority, over the opposition of the Republicans and a few rebellious Democrats. The real winners of...
Roy Beck’s brief against immigration abounds in useful but also familiar statistics: e.g., since the Immigration Act of 1965, 30 million immigrants, mostly from Third World countries, have entered the United States; at least half of our births in the last 30 years are traceable to these immigrants; without them, the current population of the...
The Center for Immigration Studies recently issued two reports that show how transformative mass immigration has been in recent decades. The first study focused on the number of immigrants now living in the United States. Recent data from the Census Bureau show that 3.3 million immigrants, both legal and illegal, came to America between July...
In debate, it is always possible to be right for the wrong reason. For instance, in supporting the proposition that cannibalism is immoral, I might argue that, historically, cannibalism encouraged the killing of human beings who might otherwise have been kidnapped by Arabs or rival African tribesmen and sold ...