The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal, Mark Krikorian(book review)

No contemporary American political movement has had more difficulty finding an effective tone than the immigration-reform lobby. Its aim of slowing down the rate of immigration has long been supported by popular opinion, but it has never found majority elite support in either party. The eloquent arguments pushed by National Review in the early 1990s, particularly Peter Brimelow’s powerful brief for the American nation as a product of shared culture and ethnicity, were for the most part rejected or shunned by the conservative establishment, which on this issue did not even pretend to follow the impulses of its populist base.

Yet for those convinced that the United States needed a better immigration policy, Republican establishment rejection did not end the matter. A dozen years ago, when I first saw Mark Krikorian—then the new director of the Center for Immigration Studies—I thought he was the best possible voice for making the immigration-restriction argument persuasive to Americans. Young, wonkish, sufficiently ethnic in background and sensibility to be empathetic to the immigrant experience, highly intelligent with a firm grasp of all the policy detail deployed by both sides in the debate, Krikorian had an uncanny ability to normalize the issue, to dampen its emotive aspects and defuse the smear words (nativist, racist, etc.) that proponents of high immigration habitually threw at their opponents. The growth in influence of the Center for Immigration Studies under his leadership confirms this judgment. Especially striking is the headway Krikorian has made in courting influential Republicans: this book is blurbed by both David Frum and Bill Bennett. But history works in curious ways, and the embrace of immigration reform by the conservative establishment presents some difficulties of its own.

I know this may be a shock, but the first permanent European settlement in what is now the US was St. Augustine, Florida, founded by the - shriek, horror, gasp! - Spanish, who were - shriek, horror, gasp! - CATHOLICS and spoke SPANISH. The British colonists nearly destroyed the colony on many occasions because they were coming down to recover their slaves, who had fled to Spanish territory. But St Augustine survived, and only became part of the US because of the settlement of a debt incured by Spain to the US.

One of the major influences on the Jefferson, btw, was the Spanish Jesuit Suarez, who wrote about freedom, natural law, and other related political topics. When Catholics dominated Maryland (founded by Catholics), it had a policy of tolerance; once the Anglicans took over, the state began to persecute Catholics and deprive them of their rights as citizens.

All immigrant groups form separate, mother-language communities when they come in, if they arrive in numbers dense enough to do so. The big difference is that past immigrants never had the government promoting this, and that’s what’s got to stop.

But if anybody thinks killing immigration - at any rate, killing Judeo-Christian or Western European influenced immigration, which includes that from Latin America - is going to be helpful, they’re crazy. We’ve aborted 47 million citizens in the last 40 years, and if it were not for immigration, we’d be about at the same depopulation level as Europe, which is on the verge of dying.

But we have to make sure these are immigrants who like us and our system. Indians, Christian or non-Christian, are fine; non-Muslim Asians are good; and Latin Americans are completely restoring parts of our devastated inner cities. There’s only one group we don’t need: Muslims.

We have way too many people in this country.

Our population has about doubled over the past 50 years, and overwhelmingly because of new immigrants and the first-generation children of those immigrants.

We are running out of resources.

More important, more people means bigger government, more laws, more taxes, more waste, less freedom.

If you want to know why our country has been going downhill for the past 50 years, look at mushrooming population growth from immigration as the underlying cause.

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