How Many Americans? Population, Immigration, and the Environment. - book reviews

National Review, Oct 24, 1994 by Peter Brimelow

This time around, the immigration issue has just snuck up and mugged the American nation, as opposed to the protracted debate before the last immigration cut-off in the 1920s. Partly this is because of deeply deceptive advertising for the 1965 Immigration Act, which ended the forty-year immigration lull and began effective discrimination in favor of Third World immigrants. Mostly it is because establishment conservatives and liberals are uniquely allied in their complacency and complaisance.

For example, Chinese immigrants no doubt deserve the "model minority" title pressed on them by the media and vote-hungry Republican politicians, at least in contrast to other recent arrivals. Nevertheless, they have also brought with them massive organized crime, rooted in history and fertilized by heroin. Chinese crime, like Chinese cuisine, varies according to regional origin. So Americans can now savor Cantonese (vice and extortion), Taiwanese (fraud, money laundering), and Fukienese (violence).

Which is a benefit of multicultural diversity that you will not read about in the New York Times - or on the Wall Street Journal editorial page for that matter. Demand creates supply, however, and you can now read about this and many other delights in Wayne Lutton and John Tanton's The Immigration Invasion, a treasure trove of facts on the most critical but worst-covered issue in American politics.

The Immigration Invasion symbolizes a lot about the present state of the immigration debate. Americans at the grassroots are organizing in opposition to immigration, around and increasingly across traditional political battle lines. A remarkable 200,000 copies of this book are reportedly already in circulation, thanks to various anti-immigration groups. It is frankly a handbook, almost a work in progress in its frantic pack-rat compilation of press clippings, the assimilation and accuracy of which lrft me sometimes uneasy. ("Between April 1, 1985, and December 31, 1992, the number of foreign-born inmates in New York [jails] rose 194 per cent." Hmmm. Original base? Proportion of total? State, city, or federal jails?)

But in the kingdom of the blind, or deliberately unseeing, the one-eyed pack rat is king - or at any rate can keep his snout pointed in the right direction.

John Tanton himself exemplifies both the ferment and the fluidity Out There, beyond the Beltway. He is simultaneously a practicing eye surgeon and a formidable political entrepreneur who helped organize both the Federation for Immigration Reform and U.S. English (and more recently English Language Advocates, its harder-line rival). In this capacity, he is editor and publisher of The Social Contract, the definitely unfrantic scholarly quarterly magazine that sponsored the book. (Copies of the latter are available from the former. Call 616-347-1171.)

Dr. Tanton came out of the environmental movement - there's a lot of environment around his home in Petoskey, up at the northern end of Michigan's Lower Peninsula. He had links with Planned Parenthood and with the campaign to legalize abortion in Michigan (before the Supreme Court deprived Americans of the right to decide the question, a development of which he creditably disapproves). Yet he reports that in the 1992 presidential primary he voted for Patrick J. Buchanan. The single issue that overcame all others: Mr. Buchanan's criticism of immigration.

Dr. Tanton's choice may seem astounding viewed from the perspective of Washington's ritualized Left-Right trench warfare. But in fact it was intensely rational. Population growth puts far and away the greatest pressure on the environment, particularly from the perspective of those, like Dr. Tanton, who value wilderness for its own sake, as an amenity, rather than wailing on about imminent economic or ecological collapse.

And in the U.S., population growth is increasingly driven by immigrants and their descendants. In How Many Americans? Leon F. Bouvier and Lindsey Grant project that the U.S. population will rise to 396 million by 2050 and 492 million by 2100 - that is, nearly double today's total of 250 million. But if immigration is stopped - even as late as the year 2000, by which time another 10 to 15 million immigrants will have arrived - Americans seem likely to stabilize their numbers voluntarily in the 300-million range.

Population growth has its blind boosters, on whom it has not yet dawned that quality is infinitely more important that quantity. Logically, however, environmentalists cannot be among them. The fact that the highly professional environmental lobby in Washington has been so silent as immigration has soared is a measure of the extent to which it has been seduced by its liberal allies.

Which means that How Many Americans?, like Lutton and Tanton's book, has a significance beyond its content. The publication by the Sierra Club of this explicit account of the inexorable relationship between immigration, population growth, and environmental stress certainly suggests that the other hiking boot is about to drop, and that this most powerful of liberal lobbies is about to act on the immigration issue. At last.