Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster. - book reviews

Reason, June, 1995 by John J. Miller

Peter Brimelow never comes right out and says it, but he clearly thinks that today's immigrants threaten America's future more than southern secession, the Great Depression, or the Cold War ever did. "America has never faced a greater challenge," he claims in Alien Nation. Indeed, the very first sentence of this scaremongering book outlandishly invokes the image of goose-stepping Nazis: "Current immigration policy is Adolf Hitler's posthumous revenge on America," writes Brimelow. He never really explains why this is so, but that's fairly typical for this disappointing book of half-explanations and half-truths.

It had promised to be so much more. As a writer for Forbes, Brimelow for years has deservedly earned high marks for his reporting on the environment, regulation, and other issues. His exposes on teacher unions are classic. So when he penned an issue-length essay for National Review in 1992 arguing to cut back on immigration, Brimelow was taken very seriously by the free-market conservatives who intuitively oppose such measures. He set off a fierce debate on the right and quickly became a standard-bearer for anti-immigrant forces. Alien Nation is ostensibly a set of marching orders, a book that could do for immigration what Dinesh D'Souza did for political correctness or what David Brock did for Anita Hill.

It won't. Alien Nation spends so much time blaming so many things on immigrants that it rarely bothers to stop, take a deep breath, and focus on one matter at a time. To Brimelow, just about every aspect of the current wave of immigrants represents an unmitigated tragedy for the United States. Today's newcomers, he argues, fracture American culture. They hurt the environment. They bring diseases. They have the curious habit of both stealing jobs from Americans and going on the dole. Pick a problem--any problem--and somewhere in this book Brimelow will find a way to blame it on immigrants.

This tendentious fault finding pervades Alien Nation. Consider, for example, how Brimelow cites the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute's 1990 poll of leading economists. In this survey, 80 percent concluded that the United States has profited from 20th-century immigration and another two-thirds thought that increased immigration would boost U.S. living standards. Brimelow's spin: "[I]mmigration is a subject that much of the American elite gets emotional about" and "economists are part of the elite benefiting at the expense of their fellow Americans." Both of these points may be absolutely true, but they hardly negate the opinions of a group that included James Buchanan, Milton Friedman, and John Kenneth Galbraith.

To engage its topic seriously, Alien Nation would have to dispense with its ad hominem cynicism and deliver a full-blown discussion of the good, bad, and unquantifiable impacts of immigrants on our economy, culture, and society. It never does. Like a kid with a short attention span, it's too eager to rush off for more fun somewhere else. The book's arguments mimic a blunderbuss as they blast scattershot in a dozen different directions at once; most miss their targets entirely or just fizzle into failure.

Brimelow fritters away far too many pages discussing how he came to write his book, comparing himself to Thomas Paine, and revealing his astrological sign (he's a Libra). He also relates many irrelevant details about the personal lives of other people, especially pro-immigrant economist Julian Simon. (Brimelow refers to Simon's odd sleeping and working habits, talks about how Simon went through a long period of severe depression and contemplated suicide, etc.) These details tell us nothing about immigration, which Brimelow is ostensibly writing about. Brimelow tries to cast Simon as a slightly odd person, which in turn is supposed to detract from his pro-immigration views. It's strictly ad hominem stuff, and rather repugnant. Upon finishing the last page, with its allusions to flying pigs and the French Revolution, one conclusion is certain: Alien Nation isn't a struggle to think through, it's a struggle to get through.

Perhaps the worst thing immigrants do is fuel Brimelow's feverish prose. "The nearest thing to a precedent" for today's influx, he argues, is the 5th-century Roman empire, which was overrun by Vandals, Visigoths, and other assorted villains. Yet we moderns actually have it much worse than the Romans ever did: "[T]he Germans were Western Europeans. They were virtually identical to the populations they conquered and with whom, in most cases, they proceeded quickly to merge." Americans should be so lucky! The dusky hordes of Mexico won't go nearly as easy on us. (The Huns, by the way, weren't exactly "Western Europeans.")

This sentiment--white barbarian armies aren't as bad as nonwhite migrants--highlights the unsettling racialist vision underscoring Alien Nation. America, says Brimelow, has a "specific ethnic core" of "white" people. What he seems to forget is that this supposed core is actually made up of many ethnicities. They may seem more or less alike today (don't tell my Irish-American father-in-law!), but only by way of a certain historical blindness.