U.S. Border Control

Immigration and its ramifications for the U.S.


By Frosty Wooldridge
November 15, 2007

Over a year ago, Peter Brimelow, author of “Alien Nation” as well as director of Vdare, addressed the Philadelphia Society. Brimelow addressed immigration and its ongoing ramifications for the United States of America.

He said, “To begin at the end, we're talking about "What is an American?" My answer is that Americans just are— they are Americans. We're told this is a nation of immigrants. But I say it's a nation. Immigration is not as central to the American experience as a lot of romantic intellectuals would like you to think.

“We should see serious immigration reform in this country—by which I mean an immigration moratorium.

“Will Rogers once said, “It’s not what people don't know that hurts them, it's what they know that ain't true.”

“When I came in to look at the technical literature on the economics of immigration in the early 1990s, I was amazed to find that the consensus among labor economists— the consensus— was that the great inflow triggered by the 1965 Act, and the simultaneous breakdown of the southern border, is not beneficial in aggregate. It brings no net aggregate economic benefit to native-born Americans.

“In a micro-study, the NRC found the cost to every native-born family in California of the immigrant presence, as of 1996, was something like a thousand dollars a year. Every native-born family is subsidizing the immigrant presence by a thousand dollars a year. Essentially, Americans are subsidizing their own displacement.”

For the past seven years, I’ve sat with Peter Brimelow at conferences in Washington, DC. He’s an immigrant with a greater perspective than most Americans can muster. He takes nothing for granted. He creates discussion. This speech gives you a smarter understanding of our immigration dilemma. As I’ve said many times in the past, we’re displacing ourselves out of our own country from a line of immigrants that never ends.

Brimelow continued, “Now, actually, I would say something similar may be true— although we don't know, because it hasn't been properly researched— of last Great Wave of immigration between 1880-1920.

“We were always told, particularly by the descendents of that Great Wave of immigration, that "immigrants built America." But, actually, it may be more like they got on a rolling band wagon. The thing was already underway before they arrived.

“Even though immigration doesn't raise the per capita income of the native-born, it does cause immense redistribution between the native-born communities— amounting at that point to about two percent of GDP shifted from labor to capital:

1. It is extremely beneficial to have immigration—for people who go to country clubs and vote Republican. It is extremely unbeneficial if you are a blue collar worker. It is particularly unbeneficial for African Americans. I am about to publish on an article that shows black unemployment has actually risen— risen— since this recovery started 13 quarters ago.
   
   Booker T. Washington was highly aware of this. His famous Atlanta exposition speech was half about how blacks had to "cast down your bucket where you are", and acquire technical skills. But the other half was a passionate appeal— it's actually one of the great speeches in the language— to whites, and particularly to Southerners, to stop mass immigration, what he described as people of "strange habits" and "foreign tongues," because it was displacing blacks.
   
2. Now the second thing that people think they know about immigration, which isn't true— I guess Professor Hanson illustrated it last night. He referred at one point to America being a "multiracial nation."
   
   Before 1965 America stood at 90 percent white; it shouldn't have been that way— but it was. The U.S. remained a substantially homogenous nation well into living memory.
   
   As you know, John Jay wrote this famous passage in Federalist Number Two:
   
   He said, in effect, we can make federalism work in this country because we are "one united people -- a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion," —and he didn't mean Christianity, he meant Protestantism— "attached to the same principles of government very similar in their manners and customs."
   
   This isn't a theoretical point. It goes to the roots of American order. If you think America is an organic nation that has evolved like every other nation, then you have to be careful how you introduce people into it, about immigration policy. Whereas if you think it's a Proposition Nation, sort of like a credit agreement— just sign on the bottom line— you can be much more relaxed about it.
   
3. This brings me to the third thing that people think they know about immigration which ain't true: that the U.S. is "a nation of immigrants."
   
   Of course all nations are nations of immigrants.
   
   What happened in the US did happen faster than elsewhere— America was put together faster. They did in 200 years what it took England over a thousand years to do.
   
   But that raises the prospect that it can be undone just as fast as it was done— that the American union may not hold together if discordant elements are introduced.

There are two specific qualifications to this "nation of immigrants" idea that I recommend to you:

A. One qualification is that people think that immigration has existed throughout American history. But if you actually look at the data in Alien Nation— I went to the trouble to chart it— immigration is in fact highly discontinuous. There are floods of immigration followed by long periods with no immigration; there are pauses. These pauses were essential to assimilation.

B. It's also true the intellectual elite tends to think America was built by immigrants because they live in New York or Los Angeles or somewhere like that— which are heavily immigrant cities, entirely immigrant cities.

But the last estimate that I saw, when I was researching Alien Nation, was that if there had been no immigration at all after 1790— none at all— the population of the US would still be about half of what it is now, through natural increase.

Brimelow said, “What is a nation? It seems to me the only rational definition is that it has to be an ethno-cultural unit. It is not entirely ethnic— anybody, individuals of any race, can usually assimilate. But it's not entirely cultural either, as we are currently led to believe. There is a substantial ethnic component to a nation. And that has consequences which we are not really clear about, but which we know exist.

“What we face now, with the post-1965 wave of immigration, is an unprecedented act of social engineering being performed by the government. The government is second-guessing the people on population size, because Americans of all races have spontaneously got their family size down to replacement levels. The American population has stabilized, absent immigration— but in fact it's projected to go up to 400, maybe 500 million, by 2050, because of immigration. And also, of course, we are rapidly shifting the racial balance. In 1960 the U.S. was 90 percent white; by 2050, whites will be about to go into the minority.

“It seems to me that it's up to those who favor this to explain why they want to transform America. What do they have against the America that existed in 1965?

“And why don't they explain it to the American people, so we can have a democratic debate about it? Why does America have to be transformed?

“The classic conservative point of view, it seems to me— though you don't see it on the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page— is that if it's not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change. I don't think it's necessary to change the U.S., certainly by as much as is being changed right now.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn said in his Nobel Prize speech that:

"The disappearance of nations would impoverish us no less then if all men had become alike with one personality, one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities. The very least of them wears its own special colors, and bears within itself a special facet of God's design."
“It seems to me that the U.S., as it had evolved by 1965, did reflect a special facet of God's design.”

Brimelow finished his speech with, “And I want to know why the government wants to monkey around with it.”

In 1908 President Teddy Roosevelt said, “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.

Frosty's new book is "Immigration's Unarmed Invasion"