We Were Right About Immigration
Paleoconservatives have been warning for decades about the problem of unchecked immigration and have been slandered, cancelled, blacklisted for daring to tell the truth.
“There was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run…”
As a repeat-offender immigrant (from Britain to Canada and then to the U.S.), I naturally feel the need to respect host nations’ traditions. Thus, while I’ve always thought folk singer Gordon Lightfoot’s much-touted Canadian Railroad Trilogy was magniloquent twaddle, still it does come to mind when I contemplate the prolonged period when the immigration issue emphatically “did not run.” From the 1960s through the 1990s and arguably as late as Donald J. Trump’s celebrated 2015 campaign announcement declaration that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” it was forbidden to discuss immigration critically, and specifically to mention the unexpected and disastrous surge unleashed by the epochal 1965 Immigration Act and the simultaneous collapse of enforcement at America’s southern border.
Discussion of the invasion and destruction of America from within was forbidden everywhere during this time except, it must be said, for paleoconservative publications like Chronicles and VDare.
I had a sharp introduction to fact that the immigration issue would not run in 1982, when I was working for Fortune Magazine, then just past its peak as the legendary apex of U.S. business journalism. Fortune’s peculiar medieval guild structure meant that writers had to submit article proposals in writing to a hierarchy of editorial committees. I proposed an article on immigration, which I pointed out was already obviously vastly larger and more transformatively nonwhite than advertised. Senator Edward Kennedy, floor manager of the 1965 Immigration Act, had notoriously promised that “the ethnic balance of this country will not be upset.” But, in fact, American whites have fallen from 88.6 percent of the population in 1970 to less than 60 percent today. Significantly, Kennedy also asserted that any disagreement would “breed hate of our heritage”—a smear presaging what would become the immigration enthusiasts’ main tactic against their critics: repression.
(Glasshouse Images / via Alamy Stock Photo)
My innovative idea was met with complete incredulity. None of Fortune’s top editors had seen immigration discussed in The New York Times. Therefore, immigration simply did not exist as a subject to cover. Remember, this was before the internet—and even before the talk radio explosion that was to occur after the Federal Communications Commission relaxed the “Fairness Doctrine” in 1987. The “Gray Lady” was even more dominant as a gatekeeper in those days; without her approval, the railroad did not run.
To be fair, the immigration issue was always surprisingly nonexistent. Thus, during what should have been a great debate over the 1965 Act, National Review ran only one article that I have been able to find—admittedly a ruthlessly logical assessment of the demographic implications of abandoning national origin quotas. The article was by the late, great Ernest Van Den Haag, an immigrant like myself, but alas he wrote it with Mittle European prolixity.
