There is plentiful historical evidence that cultural diversity and immigration need not undermine a society’s cohesion. They can be sources of enrichment and renewal. Especially in a vital civilization, groups of different religious, ethnic, and national origin may be pulled, however reluctantly in particular cases, into a dynamic arid fertile consensus. One problem with immigration...
Forty years ago in Commentary, Ruth Gay created the American Jewish essay as an art form of dignity and eloquence, and in this wonderful book she brings her life’s work to its glorious climax in a sustained statement of remarkable purity. In the beginning, she took the raw materials of everyday life as lived by...
Earlier this week, Michael Gerson, formerly a speechwriter for George W. Bush, now a scribbler for The Washington Post, trained his sights on those he termed “Rust Belt revivalists.” These are the Republicans who have noticed that “the GOP has been dominated by corporate interests and needs to identify more directly with the economic frustrations...
We told ourselves we would never forget. We put bumper stickers bearing that slogan on our cars, we hung flags in front of our homes, and we repeated the names, deeds, and last words of the day’s heroes. We read books and watched movies about what happened. We gave the impression of a people grimly...
The United States Commission on Civil Rights has degenerated into an appendage of the Clinton reelection campaign through its attempt to stop, through intimidation, the petition drive in Florida to clamp down on illegal immigration; at stake are 25 electoral votes for the Democratic incumbent. The commission was established under the Civil Rights Act of...
By the time you read this, nine Americans may well have declared the United States a nonentity. In April, the U.S. Supreme Court was supposed to decide on the constitutionality of Arizona’s SB 1070, the now-famous law that sought to stem the tide of illegal immigration into the state. The Obama administration struck quickly after...
Until recently, thinking and writing in dubious terms about immigration has been, well, something that polite and right-thinking folks just didn’t do. But now that taboo seems to be lifting, as evidenced by the recent publication of such books as George Kennan’s Around the Cragged Hill and Paul Kennedy’s Preparing for the Twenty-First Century: both...
The recent emergence in Western Europe of increasingly successful political parties based on opposition to Third World immigration and the utter failure of such parties to appear in the United States raise the question posed in the headline of this column. Most Americans of sensible political views have assumed for the last century that Europe...
From the June 1993 issue of Chronicles. There is plentiful historical evidence that cultural diversity and immigration need not undermine a society’s cohesion. They can be sources of enrichment and renewal. Especially in a vital civilization, groups of different religious, ethnic, and national origin may be pulled, however reluctantly in particular cases, into a dynamic...
Over the past two decades, Western Europe’s populist right has steadily consolidated its power. According to Professor Betz, the issue that galvanizes supporters of the populist parties is Third World immigration. Whether the right-wing parties will ever muster the popular support they need to win parliamentary majorities depends on how successfully the governments of Western...
Kamala Harris’s contrived photo-op visit to the border demonstrates how Trump’s immigration nationalism has become the norm.
In troubled times, we look for something to hold on to as the dangerous currents are sweeping us downstream to destruction. Some will have the clear sight (or unthinking prejudice) to grab on to some rooted feature of the landscape—the limb of an oak tree, the steeple of a church, the arm of a brother;...
The better future which Americans propose to build is nothing if not an idea which must in certain essential respects emancipate them from their past. American history contains much matter for pride and congratulation, and much matter for regret and humiliation. On the whole, it is a past of which the loyal American has no...
By now, most have heard—sometimes with sorrow, sometimes with delight—of the latest fashion in the working-class suburbs of France: setting fire to cars at night. There is a lot more to this than a nocturnal rite for rival juvenile gangs. It is probably exaggerated to forecast a civil war: Two sides are necessary to make...
A week or so ago, the Never Trump crowd at National Review was chortling that Trump was softening on immigration. The chortling wasn’t prompted by any genuine concern over immigration. After all, NR was a stalwart defender of George W. Bush and had no trouble supporting John McCain as the Republican nominee. Instead, the grandees...
The writing is at long last on the wall for a world-famous migrant utopia that was founded in a tiny medieval town overlooking the Ionian Sea. It has been a con from start to finish. The little town of Riace in Calabria on the toe of Italy has been eulogized by the global left for...
I am deeply honored to receive the Richard Weaver Award, to stand in the ranks of the distinguished men who have received it, and to have an award in the name of a man who has always been one of my heroes. As a lifelong libertarian, I have been moved by the occasion to reflect...
Today President Obama accelerated his Anschluss of illegal aliens into the country whose Constitution he has sworn to uphold, but which he has shredded at every chance. Assuming America even survives, he perpetually will be held in obloquy by the people he has so harmed. But his brazen edict finally drew the lines clearly. Republicans,...
President Clinton has vowed to correct portions of welfare reform that are “carried out on the backs of immigrants.” About half of the projected savings from the reform comes from limiting immigrant access to welfare. Refugees, who make up about one in seven legal immigrants, were spared most of the restrictions placed on other immigrants...
America’s political leaders are obligated to enforce all the laws on the menu, whether they like them or not.
President Trump “said things which were hate-filled, vile and racist. . . . I cannot believe . . . any president has ever spoken the words that I . . . heard our president speak yesterday.” So wailed Sen. Dick Durbin after departing the White House. And what caused the minority leader to almost faint...
Everything we know about the so-called “bipartisan” border bill suggests that it is has been worked out at the behest of powerful interests that have nothing to do with the will or interests of the American people.
Browsers of our metropolitan dailies are well aware of these papers’ attempt at rebranding our national holidays. Thanksgiving has become Immigration Day, and so has the Fourth of July. But, as we should have learned by now, it can get worse. Readers of the editorial page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (founded in 1878 by...
Immigration proponents make obvious contradictory claims. They repeat endlessly that recent immigrants are integrating just as fully as earlier immigrants did. Yet they also want to turn the idea that “America is a melting pot” into a prohibited microaggression. If it really is happening, why is it a moral crime to mention it? They lose...
Biden is welcoming destitute migrants, instead of newcomers who are educated, have job skills to succeed in today's economy, speak English and arrive ready to provide for their families.
One’s kindest possible response to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s typical attempt at a sitcom is Mark Twain’s quip about The Vicar of Wakefield: “Nothing could be funnier than its pathos, and nothing could be sadder than its humour.” Hence the astonished pleasure inspired by the Corporation’s dazzling new comedy Frontline. A merciless skewering of current-affairs...
Amnesty for illegal immigrants is an idea whose time not only has ]3assed but, like Elizabethan collars and virginity, can hardly be imagined—unless what Peter Brimelow calls “immigration enthusiasts” are more fanatical still than the Muslim terrorists who struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11. Then before the strike, a major...
The presidential election of 2012 was no ordinary contest. The University of Colorado’s political-science department had developed a model, based on the state of the U.S. economy, that had accurately predicted the outcome of every presidential election between 1980 and 2008. This year, the model predicted a Romney victory. The explanation for Obama’s victory lies...
Last November, a delegation of citizens from the far West Texas border city of El Paso made the long journey to Plymouth, Massachusetts. The purpose of the El Pasoans’ visit was to challenge Plymouth’s long-held—and nearly universally accepted—claim that it was the site of the first Thanksgiving to be held on what is now United...
Laken Riley’s death was the product of deliberate policy choices that delivered predictable results with the precision of a Swiss watch.
Nearly every film using Europe as a backdrop for international intrigue, especially those featuring Nazis in black leather trench coats, employs a scene in which the hero is crossing transnational borders on a slow-moving train. As he nervously exhales a cloud of blue smoke from an unfiltered cigarette, the authorities move from berth to berth...
Poll after poll shows that the vast majority of Americans want stricter controls on immigration. Yet it should be clear that our ruling class is not going to impose stricter controls or even enforce its own laws. What does this mean? The first thing to note is that immigrants, as such, are not the problem....
By the end of 1998, it was no longer possible for any informed and honest person to claim that the massive immigration experienced by the United States since the 1970’s was not significantly altering the culture, economy, and politics of the nation. Last summer, the Washington Post, long a zealous opponent of immigration restriction, published...
Immigration is to Donald Trump what Central America was to Ronald Reagan. It’s where a presidency would succeed or fail. When Reagan left office, the Sandinista were still in power in Nicaragua, but the Cold War, as anyone could see, was winding down. And it did just that, on Nov. 9, 1989, with the collapse...
Excoriated as "racist to his bones" for speaking the truth about Britain's emerging immigration crisis, Enoch Powell and his "Rivers of Blood" speech continue to divide to this day.
The Sierra Club’s reactivation of its eight-year intra- and extra-mural war over its policy concerning immigration is the latest exhibit opening at the Great American Madhouse. In 1996, the club officially announced itself neutral on the subject of immigration and population control. Two years later, a faction proposed a measure advocating immigration restriction in behalf...
Shortly after Barack Obama’s inauguration, rumors began spreading in the immigration-restrictionist movement that the President would attempt to accomplish the “comprehensive immigration reform” that Congress had denied his predecessor by imposing it on the country through executive order. Now he has used his claimed executive powers to announce a partial amnesty for young illegal immigrants...
The Biden administration’s chaotic, illegal approach to immigration prioritizes importation of people with questionable health records over the well-being of U.S. citizens.
Donald Trump’s call for a moratorium on Muslim immigration has drawn fire from the establishment right. “It’s a violation of our Constitution, but it also undermines the character of our nation,” Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina told the Des Moines Register. National Review’s Jim Geraghty opined that Trump’s plan created a forbidden “religious test for...
“Trump’s immigration proposals are as dangerous as they are stunning,” railed amnesty activist Frank Sharry. “Trump . . . promises to rescind protections for Dreamers and deport them. He wants to redefine the constitutional definition of U.S. citizenship as codified by the 14th Amendment. He plans to impose a moratorium on legal immigration.” While Sharry...
On the same day last year that the Supreme Court sliced a few ounces of flesh out of its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision on abortion, it also carved up an American tradition governing the public observance of Christmas. In the case of Allegheny v. ACLU, the Court held that Allegheny County in Pennsylvania could...
Pat Buchanan’s new book is another tour de force. Suicide of a Superpower builds on the prophetic warnings first articulated in such earlier books as The Great Betrayal; A Republic, Not an Empire; and, most importantly, Death of the West. The current work exhibits the most famous paleoconservative’s trademark word-crafting verve, encyclopedic knowledge of history...
“All the evidence shows that differentiation which is not fragmentation is a source of strength. But such differentiation is possible only if there is a center toward which the parts look for their meaning and validation.” —Richard M. Weaver One of the most interesting of many superb memoirs of the American Civil War is that...
Team Biden is going to great lengths to conceal data on the high and growing number of family separations occurring at America’s southern border, which have resulted from their bad policy and are happening on their watch.
Your Excellency: I trust you are in robust spirits as you face the rigors of the Christmas season. Surely, nowhere is there greater evidence that sin is a good wrongly twisted than in the manner in which we Americans celebrate Christmas. Contrary to our Church’s teaching, which emphasizes the penitential and preparatory aspects of Advent,...
Politicians and businessmen do not always see eye to eye. In ancient Rome the political elite, the Senatorial Order, squabbled with the wealthy Knights of the Equestrian Order. Cicero advocated a “Concord of the Orders,” where senators and knights would work together against the political ambition and military might of Crassus and Julius Caesar. Neither...
On Monday, the Supreme Court in Arizona v. United States struck down three of four challenged provisions of Arizona’s S.B. 1070, eliminating the law’s penalties and therefore leaving a shell of the former law in place. Not satisfied with this overwhelming victory, the Justice Department has helpfully set up a hotline for Arizona citizens who feel their “civil...
The Hundredth Meridian is now a decade old in conception, though a year short of that in reality. It had its origin in a biweekly column I was hired by James Hill to write in the winter and spring of 1993 for the Sunday Perspective section of the Arizona Republic, which James was editing at...
The Republican candidate for President of the United States in 2016 made major immigration restriction the broadest and thickest plank in his platform. That candidate went on to defeat 16 other GOP candidates, all of them to a greater or lesser degree pro-immigration. (The difference in degree largely corresponded with the candidate’s honesty, or dishonesty,...
Total strangers hug one another. People dance for joy in the streets. Tears pour down their faces. It is Germany, November 1989. The Berlin Wall has fallen and for the first time in decades people can move freely back and forth in Germany’s old capital. A people feels its solidarity, in the truest sense of...