Paleoconservatives have been warning for decades about the problem of unchecked immigration and have been slandered, cancelled, blacklisted for daring to tell the truth.

“There was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run…” 

As a repeat-offender immigrant (from Britain to Canada and then to the U.S.), I naturally feel the need to respect host nations’ traditions. Thus, while I’ve always thought folk singer Gordon Lightfoot’s much-touted Canadian Railroad Trilogy was magniloquent twaddle, still it does come to mind when I contemplate the prolonged period when the immigration issue emphatically “did not run.” From the 1960s through the 1990s and arguably as late as Donald J. Trump’s celebrated 2015 campaign announcement declaration that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” it was forbidden to discuss immigration critically, and specifically to mention the unexpected and disastrous surge unleashed by the epochal 1965 Immigration Act and the simultaneous collapse of enforcement at America’s southern border.

Discussion of the invasion and destruction of America from within was forbidden everywhere during this time except, it must be said, for paleoconservative publications like Chronicles and VDare.

I had a sharp introduction to fact that the immigration issue would not run in 1982, when I was working for Fortune Magazine, then just past its peak as the legendary apex of U.S. business journalism. Fortune’s peculiar medieval guild structure meant that writers had to submit article proposals in writing to a hierarchy of editorial committees. I proposed an article on immigration, which I pointed out was already obviously vastly larger and more transformatively nonwhite than advertised. Senator Edward Kennedy, floor manager of the 1965 Immigration Act, had notoriously promised that “the ethnic balance of this country will not be upset.” But, in fact, American whites have fallen from 88.6 percent of the population in 1970 to less than 60 percent today. Significantly, Kennedy also asserted that any disagreement would “breed hate of our heritage”—a smear presaging what would become the immigration enthusiasts’ main tactic against their critics: repression.

My innovative idea was met with complete incredulity. None of Fortune’s top editors had seen immigration discussed in The New York Times. Therefore, immigration simply did not exist as a subject to cover. Remember, this was before the internet—and even before the talk radio explosion that was to occur after the Federal Communications Commission relaxed the “Fairness Doctrine” in 1987. The “Gray Lady” was even more dominant as a gatekeeper in those days; without her approval, the railroad did not run.

To be fair, the immigration issue was always surprisingly nonexistent. Thus, during what should have been a great debate over the 1965 Act, National Review ran only one article that I have been able to find—admittedly a ruthlessly logical assessment of the demographic implications of abandoning national origin quotas. The article was by the late, great Ernest Van Den Haag, an immigrant like myself, but alas he wrote it with Mittle European prolixity. 

like a Chinese executioner’s sword, the nation-breaking 1965 immigration legislation passed through America’s neck almost unnoticed—until, after 50 years or so, the country’s head has fallen off.

So, like a Chinese executioner’s sword, the nation-breaking 1965 immigration legislation passed through America’s neck almost unnoticed—until, after 50 years or so, the country’s head has fallen off.

This nonexistence isn’t really surprising. Generally speaking, people don’t learn anything after they’re 21 or so. At the time of the 1965 Act, two generations of politicians and publicists had come to maturity during a period when immigration was just not an issue, because of the dramatic reductions in immigration enacted in the early 1920s. 

Conversely, the 2024 presidential election featured remarkably articulate statements on the politics and economics of immigration from vice presidential nominee J. D. Vance, who was born in 1984, two years after I was denied the chance to acquaint Fortune’s readers with these arguments. But in the interim, they have been rendered unavoidable by the relentless immigration influx. 

Vance must be peculiarly aware of this influx because his own wife is the child of Indians who immigrated in the 1980s. But she is a Brahmin, so maybe they’re both also aware of the importance of selectivity.

Now, quite why a Boomer like Donald J. Trump (born in 1946) spotted the immigration issue as an election
decider is a conundrum. Of course, it’s far from clear that he understands the details as well as Vance does. And he has recently flip-flopped on reducing legal, as opposed to illegal, immigration.  

But Trump did indeed spot the issue and won on it. And it’s obvious to everyone he’s quite capable of moving against legal immigration—maybe even advocating an immigration moratorium—if he feels that’s what the popular will demands.

However, in the case of Boomers like long-time Chronicles Editor Thomas Fleming (born 1945) and myself (born 1947), the reason we spotted the immigration issue was simple: we were actual conservatives. We always took for granted the reality of tradition and of human differences. That was completely antithetical to the libertarian and, I must admit to my surprise, the neoconservative world views.

Thus when Patrick J. Buchanan (a member of the Silent Generation, born in 1938) commented during his 1992 presidential run that a million Englishmen would assimilate better into Virginia than a million Zulus, we instantly knew what he meant. When Wall Street Journal editorialist (and later Editorial Page Editor) Paul Gigot harrumphed about Buchanan’s indelicacy, adding that the Zulus “would probably work harder than the English,” we just thought he was an idiot.

Unfortunately for us—and for America—Gigot’s idiocy become the dominant Republican conventional wisdom, enforced via The Wall Street Journal’s hegemonic editorial page and by the venal, donor-driven Conservatism, Inc.— a campaign consultant/foundation/think-tank complex that grew inside the Beltway during the Reagan years.

Indeed, surprising as it must now seem, for more than two decades after the 1965 Immigration Act, public resistance to its consequences mainly came from the left—more precisely, from the environmentalist and conservationist movements.

Thus FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, was founded in 1979 by Dr. John Tanton, a Michigan ophthalmologist and remarkable political entrepreneur, who created a number of similar organizations, notably two nonprofits (U.S. English and ProEnglish) that lobbied for establishing English as the U.S.’s only official language. In typical fashion, Wikipedia now describes Tanton as a “white nationalist,” but this is, of course, nonsense. He was a Midwestern WASP progressive who genuinely loved nature and disliked sprawl, which he rightly saw was caused by immigration-driven population growth. Tanton also had a remarkably open mind and reached out to many potential allies across the political spectrum, including me.

Tanton was very successful in raising money from environmentalist liberals. But, as he increasingly sensed, the energy and ideas for immigration reform—what at my webzine VDare we designated “patriotic immigration reform,” to distinguish it from just “immigration reform” after that phrase was hijacked and repurposed to mean “amnesty” during the Bush years—were actually coming from the paleoconservatives.

This paradox is one reason that FAIR, despite its relatively large resources, has proven so ineffective at actually influencing immigration policy. 

A vignette: the late Sam Francis (born 1947), author of Chronicles’ Principles And Powers column (1989-2005) and a nationally syndicated columnist was fired by The Washington Times in 1995 for saying in effect that America could not continue without actual, well, Americans—a profoundly paleoconservative point. I urged Tanton to have FAIR hire Francis to edit a newsletter, which, in those pre-internet days, was the most effective way to find and communicate with supporters outside the “regime media.” Years later, Tanton had trustingly given his papers to his alma mater, the University of Michigan—to the considerable dismay of many of the people he had reached out to. I learned that FAIR’s board had vetoed my brilliant suggestion because Francis was considered too controversial and was generally perceived as a “racist.” In other words, FAIR was mau-maued by the regime consensus.

So, FAIR didn’t get its effective newsletter. And, nearly 30 years later, we still don’t have patriotic immigration reform. And, despite its concern about being associated with Francis, FAIR was eventually named a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center anyway.

In retrospect, the idea that the post-1965 influx would be stopped from the left was always illusory. The modern American left is driven by minority and ideological factions and imposes an intense discipline upon its coalition. 

Thus, the Sierra Club abandoned its previous opposition to immigration because of pressure from a major donor, hedge fund manager David Gelbaum. A 2004 attempt by grassroots Sierra Club members to restore its traditional rational opposition to immigration-driven population growth was driven back, with help from the Sierra Club management’s regime media friends, with the usual accusations of “racism.” This was particularly distressing to the attempt’s organizers—I knew them personally—because they really were sincere liberal Democrats who just hadn’t gotten the message yet.

I believe that Chronicles was the first to break with the Conservative Inc./Ruling Class consensus in its March 1989 “Nation of Immigrants” issue. In his introductory essay, “The Real American Dilemma,” Editor Thomas Fleming explicitly dismissed the “nation of immigrants” myth (“as if every country were not a nation of immigrants”) and its economistic rationalization. “After we’ve done thinking about what’s in it for agribusiness and electronics, we just might begin to wonder what is in store for the American people,” he wrote.

This caused a shocking, and telling, reaction. As recounted in Edward Welsch’s “First Things First” Chronicles article (March 2020), it was the occasion of a celebrated divorce—it made The New York Times!—between Chronicles’ then-sponsor, the Rockford Institute, and Richard John Neuhaus, who went on to found First Things magazine, converting from a Lutheran pastor to a Roman Catholic priest in the process. Allegedly, the catalyst for this break was a letter to Neuhaus from Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine and dean of the neoconservative political/intellectual faction, in which Podhoretz denounced Fleming’s article as “nativist bigotry.” A New Yorker, Neuhaus was personally and professionally involved with the neoconservatives, and like them (and unlike Chronicles!) tantalizingly adjacent to the glamorous Manhattan media world.

Let the record show, however—and this may be evidence of the relentlessly emerging underlying strength of the paleoconservative critique of immigration—that both Neuhaus and, incredibly, Podhoretz eventually changed their minds. 

Neuhaus reviewed my own 1995 book, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, very respectfully. And, in the late 1990s (he died in 2009), Neuhaus told me with obvious foreboding that he believed the U.S. Catholic hierarchy was dissolving its historic alliance with American nationalism in favor of a pan-Hispanic hemispheric identity.

The evolution of Norman Podhoretz (he’s still alive, I’m happy to say, at the age of 94) is perhaps even more remarkable. The man who once denounced Chronicles for nativism, in 2019 told the Claremont Review of Books: 

What has changed my mind about immigration now—even legal immigration—is that our culture has weakened to the point where it’s no longer attractive enough for people to want to assimilate to, and we don’t insist that they do assimilate.

Now he tells us! 

I am naturally personally interested in this because I believe Podhoretz (and probably also some major New York donors) were key in persuading William F. Buckley, Jr., to abruptly fire John O’Sullivan as editor of National Review in 1997. This ended the brief period at that magazine, after my 1992 “Time To Rethink Immigration?” cover story, when National Review under O’Sullivan joined Chronicles in daring to challenge The Wall Street Journal-enforced immigration enthusiast consensus. 

About my cover story: O’Sullivan has said  it “launched the modern American debate on immigration.” Perhaps this is true, given National Review’s then-greater media salience. With that story, immigration finally did “run,” however briefly, as I broke through the regime media’s iron curtain and was cited on The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. 

Reading Fleming’s 1989 Chronicles essay now, however, I am struck by how many of my themes he anticipated. But at that time, I had taken my eye off the immigration ball temporarily to ghostwrite Rupert Murdoch’s autobiography. (Never published, but that’s another story). So I didn’t see it, and alas in those pre-internet days, didn’t find it. If I had, I would have credited it, as I did the even more quarrelsome Larry Auster’s brilliant monograph on immigration, The Path To National Suicide. 

One unique point I do think I made in my 1992 National Review cover story: there is no economic justification for these modern massive immigrant inflows. It may increase gross domestic product, but virtually all of that is captured by the immigrants themselves. American workers don’t benefit—in fact, they are disadvantaged, because immigrant wage competition shifts income within the native-born community from labor to capital. I discussed this in Chronicles’ June 2009 issue, in an article titled “The Economic Impact of Immigration.”

There are more than 30 years of economic studies to back my point up. But I have to say that despite all the evidence of immigration’s harmful effect on the economy, I have made absolutely no impression. Both Canada’s Liberals and Britain’s Conservatives, as well as both Democrats and Republicans in America, have rationalized allowing their recent immigration surges on the grounds that it would stimulate economic growth.

Of course, these surges were not really motivated by economics. All these governments simply hate their underlying nations.

The Biden administration, needless to say, has not even bothered to offer any economic rationale at all for its enabling an unprecedented immigration surge.

Reviewing the situation now, it seems clear that the paleoconservatives at long last have won the argument over immigration within the right—and have even, in some sense, elected a president.

Immigration is now being discussed. Whether this is enough to change the legal immigration influx, and reverse America’s drift to demographic destruction—and whether President Trump will be true to his deportation promises—remains to be seen. 

But, hey, at least Kamala Harris is not president!