Time to rethink immigration?

National Review, June 22, 1992 by Peter Brimelow

U.S. immigration policy was not transformed without debate. There was a debate. It just bore no relationship to what subsequently happened. In particular, staunch defenders of the national-origins quota system, like the American Legion, allowed themselves to be persuaded that the new legislation really enacted a sort of worldwide quota, no longer skewed toward Northern Europe--a policy easily caricatured as "racist" in the era of the civil-rights movement--but still restricting overall immigration to the then-current level of around 300,000. (A detailed account of Congress's deluded intent and the dramatic consequences appears in Lawrence Auster's devastating The Path to National Suicide: An essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism, published by AICF (*).)

Today, it is astonishing to read the categorical assurances given by supporters of the 1965 Immigration Act. "What the bill will not do," summarized Immigration Subcommittee chairman Senator Edward Kennedy:

First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants

annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level

of immigration remains substantially the same . . . Secondly,

the ethnic mix will not be upset . . . Contrary to

the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate

America with immigrants from any one country or area,

or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and

Asia . . . Every one of these assurances has proved false. Immigration levels did surge upward--they are now running at a million a year. Immigrants do come predominantly from one sort of area--85 per cent of the 11.8 million legal immigrants arriving in the U.S. between 1971 and 1990 were from the Third World, 44 per cent from Latin America and the Caribbean, 36 per cent from Mexico. Asia--and from one country: 20 per cent from Mexico. And about 33,000 Africans arrived in 1990, which looks small only by comparison.

Above all, the American ethnic mix has been upset. In 1960, the U.S. population was 88.6 per cent white; in 1990, it was only 75.6 per cent white--a drop of 13 percentage points in thirty years. (Indeed, the proportion of "European-Americans" is probably a couple of percentage points lower than that, because the Census Bureau counts all Middle Easterners as "white.") The demographer Leon Bouvier has projected that by 2020--that is, easily within the lifetimes of many NATIONAL REVIEW readers--the proportion of whites could fall as low as 61 per cent. Among children under 15, minorities could be approaching the point of becoming the majority.

These projections put into context the common claim that--as Professor Julian Simon put it in The Economic Consequences of Immigration (1990), a book that has been widely accepted by conservatives as their bible on the subject--"contemporary immigration is not high by U.S. historical standards." In fact, immigration is high, in terms of absolute numbers, by comparison with all but the peak decade of 1901-10, when about 8.7 million immigrants arrived, part of the great wave from Southern and Eastern Europe. And counting illegals, the 1981-90 decade probably matched and may have exceeded that total. Furthermore, this latest wave shows no sign of receding. Nor, given the Third World's demographic structure, is there any particular reason to suppose it will.