Migrations and Cultures: A World View. - book reviews

National Review, Nov 25, 1996 by Peter Brimelow

IT was the audience I had hoped to face since I began the stormy publicity tour for my book Alien Nation: Common Sense about America's Immigration Disaster: a roomful of liberals, gathered by the courageous Clarence Woods of the Chicago Human Relations Council, for a serious discussion of the impact of immigration on native-born blacks.

That such an impact must exist is obvious, analytically and empirically. No economist denies (unless perhaps writing in the hope of publication on the Wall Street Journal opinion page) that specific native-born workers are displaced by immigration -- they just occasionally claim that output is increased in aggregate . . . somewhat. Theoretically. And all economists accept that there is no guarantee that this increase goes to those specific workers displaced.

But the effect upon America's exquisitely vulnerable blacks of the influx accidentally triggered by the 1965 Immigration Act is almost never discussed. Yet post-1965 immigrants and their descendants now outnumber blacks -- whose progress has indeed simultaneously and suspiciously stalled.

For example, black sociologist William Julius Wilson's much-ballyhooed magnum opus, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, contains only a few fragmentary references to immigration. This is particularly astonishing since the fragments tantalizingly imply that the impact of immigration is (and is viewed by blacks as) profound.

Notwithstanding these worthy considerations, my Chicago meeting was an utter fiasco. The audience, it turned out, had come only to denounce my subjective, i.e., racist, motivations for raising this improper topic. After the usual brutal exchanges, they stomped off into the morning sunshine, raving and making signs against the evil eye. We sold only one book, to a stray Arab-American who had somehow wandered in.

"They weren't very interested in the impact on blacks," I said ruefully to my host.

Woods calmly agreed. He'd already told me he'd been attacked by his foundation peers for providing me with a forum at all. Now he also noted that, apart from himself, his daughter, and his assistant, there had been no blacks whatever at this meeting ostensibly organized to discuss their community's plight. "African-American leadership in this country has collapsed," he said.

I thought about my experience while reading Roy Beck's welcome and valuable The Case against Immigration. From his first sentence recalling his "annual summer treks leading high-school students in building houses for the poor," Beck, an active Methodist layman, systematically attempts to appeal to liberals. He shows conclusively that the current mass-immigration policy has again begun to hurt blacks, blue-collar workers (whence the spearhead role of organized labor in ending the last great wave of immigration at the turn of the century, before unions were captured by leftist bureaucrats), and finally the environment (by second-guessing the implicit decision of native-born Americans, in choosing smaller families, to end their country's population growth -- far and away the main pressure on its ecology).

Liberals say they care about these things. I say: Phooey! Liberalism remains now what James Burnham defined it as 32 years ago: the ideology of Western suicide. And immigration must certainly transform, and may arguably destroy, America as we know it.

This explains why most liberals are not merely uninterested in what immigration is doing to their ostensible causes; they are vehemently opposed to the issue being discussed at all. With conservatives, by contrast, you can usually get an argument. Or at least a reaction --perhaps because so many establishment conservatives have so plainly been waiting so long for the chance to call someone else a you-know-what.

Beck seriously weakens his book to avoid offending the liberals' taboos. For example, he suppresses any discussion of immigration policy's unprecedented racial transformation of America. And they have rewarded him, in the seven months since The Case against Immigration was published, with indifference. There has to be a moral here.

Only now, with the manifest refusal of the immigration issue to go away, are major reviews coming in. Their grudging but cautious tone recalls Hilaire Belloc's advice to toddlers: "Always keep a hold of Nurse/For fear of finding something worse." We happy few at NATIONAL REVIEW like to think that something worse is us.

Beck's strength is reporting rather than analysis. But his reporting turns up many gems that are new even to me.

For example, Beck has found a crushing answer to the point, recently much touted by immigration enthusiasts, that foreign students earn extraordinary proportions of U.S. advanced degrees in science and technology. He cites Rand Corporation and National Institute of Science studies proving that these proportions simply reflect government financial aid -- subsidies -- available to foreigners. Result: a vicious circle of overproduction, local labor-market gluts (as for physics PhDs), and an even greater reluctance of native-born Americans to enter these fields. American taxpayers are in effect just financing their own children's dispossession.