Time to rethink immigration?

National Review, June 22, 1992 by Peter Brimelow

Of course, immigration is lower in relative terms than in the first decade of the twentieth century--the total U.S. population at that time was less than a third of today's. However, this was not a proportion that could extend indefinitely. Immigration has never been relatively higher than when the second Pilgrim Father came down the gangplank, increasing the Plymouth Colony's population by 100 percent. As it is, the U.S. takes half of all the emigrants in the world.

But it also is crucial to note a point always omitted in pro-immigration polemics: in 1900, the U.S. birthrate was much higher than today. American Anglos' birthrates, for example, are now below replacement levels. So immigrants have proportionately more demographic impact. By the early 1980s, immigration was running at the equivalent of about 16 percent of native births--including births to immigrants--and rising. This is eminently comparable to the 19.9 percent of 1901-10. Hence the steadily shifting ethnic balance.

"The government should dissolve the people and elect another one," quipped the Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht after the East German riots of 1953. For good or ill, the U.S. political elite seems to be acting on his advice.

Immigration Sleight of Hand

Perhaps BECAUSE the 1965 Immigration Act was slipped through in such a deceptive way, many Americans, and many conservatives, just do not realize that it is directly responsible for this transformation of their country. They tend to assume that a kind of natural phenomenon is at work--that Hispanics, for example, increased from 4.5 percent of the U.S. population in 1970 to 9 percent in 1990 because they somehow started sprouting out of the earth like spring corn.

But no natural process is at work. The current wave of immigration, and America's shifting ethnic balance is simply the result of public policy. A change in public policy opened the Third World floodgates after 1965. A further change in public policy could shut them. Public policy could even restore the status quo ante 1965, which would slowly shift the ethnic balance back.

It's often said that Europeans no longer want to emigrate. But in fact the 1965 Act cut back a continuing flow: the number of British immigrants, for example had been running at around 28,000 a year and was immediately reduced by about half. Along with other Europeans, the British seem simply to have been diverted to the countries that compete with the U.S. for skilled immigrants: above all Australia and Canada.

And all such dogmatic assertions about immigration are dangerous. Witness the sudden influx of more than 100,000 illegal Irish immigrants in the late 1980s--and the wholly unexpected unfreezing of a sea of potential immigrants from Eastern Europe in the early 1990s.

Since 1965, moreover, U.S. public policy has in effect actively discriminated against Europeans. This is because, in another reversal, the 1965 Act placed a higher priority on "family reunification" than on admitting immigrants with skills. And "reunification" meant relatives no matter how remote. So the new immigrants arriving from countries that had not been traditional sources were able to sponsor so many additional immigrants that they crowded out European applicants with skills but no family connections from the "overall quota"--before spilling over into the special category of admissions outside the "overall quota," which turned out to be vastly larger than predicted.