Now He Tells Us: Norman Podhoretz Changed His Mind On Immigration
Maybe he did like the Historic American Nation after all
Norman Podhoretz receiving Medal Of Freedom from President George W. Bush in 2004. Now do Pat Buchanan!
Whenever I looked into Norman Podhoretz’s sad blue eyes across the lunch table—he died on Tuesday December 16 at the age of 95—I reflected that science suggested we must have shared a common ancestor, maybe 6,000-10,000 years ago.
Podhoretz himself was not impressed by this. I once remarked to him that the current high intermarriage rates among American Jews must be highly eugenic—importing supermodels, children of elite politicians etc. He stiffly responded that he thought the Jewish gene pool was already quite good enough.
Thinking about his passing, I remember that, while at Forbes Magazine, I played a role in reconciling him to then-Forbes writer David Frum, who had offended Podhoretz in some way or another—a very easy thing to do. Seems incredible, and I don’t seem to have derived any benefit from it. But at least Steve Forbes paid for lunch.
From my 1995 book Alien Nation; Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster:
While I was writing this book, National Review editor John O’Sullivan and I arranged a dinner in New York to introduce Ira Mehlman, the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s Director of Media Outreach, to Norman Podhoretz, the celebrated editor of Commentary magazine. Podhoretz, a neoconservative, is deeply committed to immigration. Eventually, he invoked their common forebears.
Mehlman, of course, spends all his time collecting arguments against immigration. He smiled the serene smile of one who knows his boxing glove is loaded with lead. Then he hit Podhoretz between the eyes with Stein’s stunner [Dan Stein, long-time Executive Director of FAIR and also Jewish, patented this argument]:
• Saying you can’t object to current immigration because your great-grandparents were immigrants in 1900 is just like saying that, because you were once a fetus, therefore you should be against abortion.
Norman Podhoretz is a heavyweight brawling champion in the toughest dinner-debate city in the world. You don’t just knock him down. He clinched, and the exchange ended in an inconclusive flurry.
But he was shaken. Watching closely, I could see him thinking, hard.
However, as it turned out, Podhoretz did not bring himself to think hard, or fast, enough.
Commentary Magazine gave Alien Nation a conventional Conservatism Inc. negative review—graded “F” in my rating system because it didn’t acknowledge that immigration is not a natural phenomenon like the weather but was actually a result of government policy, specifically the disastrous 1965 Hart-Cellar immigration Act. This was a common failing at that time.
More significantly, I believe Podhoretz was a key factor in William F. Buckley’s abrupt firing of National Review Editor John O’Sullivan in 1997 and the magazine’s subsequent abandonment of its immigration patriot stance that had begun with my “Time To Rethink Immigration?” cover story in 1992.
Podhoretz had already voiced to me general discontent with O’Sullivan’s editing, which I am sure he shared with Buckley. But certainly more important here: Podhoretz was aware of the general Ellis-Island hysteria among Jewish intellectuals that the issue of immigration restriction was again raising its ugly head.
Podhoretz had earlier responded with extraordinary violence when Chronicles Magazine ran its Nation Of Immigrants issue in March 1989, featuring a powerful essay by its Editor Tom Fleming that anticipated many of my 1992 arguments. (I discussed America’s evolving immigration debate in the January 2025 issue of Chronicles here).
Give that, I’m surprised that John O’Sullivan was able to get my 1992 cover story past Bill Buckley, always terrified of Neocon a.k.a. disapproval, at all. But in fact Buckley was enthusiastic…then.
By 1997, however, when O’Sullivan was fired, the entire Conservative Establishment had clearly been persuaded that the immigration issue could and should be simply suppressed. As Wall Street Journal Editor Paul Gigot proclaimed:
…the crusade by a few columnists and British expatriates to turn the GOP into an anti-immigrant party seems to have failed. Immigrant-bashing has proven to be lousy American politics. When even California conservatives admit this, the debate should be over.
Potomac watch: GOP confronts future without Hispanics: Adios! By Paul A Gigot, Wall Street Journal, Aug 22, 1997
This, of course, was a cowardly way of alluding to John O’Sullivan and myself without naming us.
Curiously, Gigot did not mention the interesting sociological that the support for immigration treason was predominantly led by Jews.
Like, as it turned out, Norman Podhoretz.
I was never worried by Gigot’s stupid proclamation. What drives the immigration debate is the objective fact of demographic dispossession. It can’t be suppressed—whatever Conservatism Inc. thinks.
And so, nearly thirty years later, here we are.
Donald Trump is President. And, even apart from immigration restriction, he’s imposed all kinds of policies, like tariffs, that the Wall Street Journal has opposed forever.
Couldn’t happen to nicer people.
I knew Norman Podhoretz for some 45 years. We had many collegial conversations. (I remember him enthusiastically agreeing that the much-touted GOP saviour Jack Kemp was “a fool”). I even wrote for Commentary magazine. (See here, here, here).
But latterly I became aware that he was avoiding me at social events. I presumed this was because of our disagreement on immigration. However, it was only after Steve Sailer’s (admittedly devastating but entirely reasonable) 2009 VDARE.com review of Podhoretz’ Why Are Jews Liberal that he absolutely refused to shake my hand. I don’t think he ever spoke to me after that.
It was his secretary who replied to my letter of condolence after his wife, Midge Decter, died in 2022.
Podhoretz once frankly told me that his father, often described as an immigrant milkman, was a Jewish nationalist. And, although it was left unsaid, that was true for him too.
The question remained: was he also an American nationalist?
Amazingly, after so many years, Podhoretz announced, in a 2019 interview to the Claremont Review of Books’ Charles R. Kesler, that he had changed his mind on immigration:
NP: I was always pro-immigration because I’m the child of immigrants. And I thought it was unseemly of me to oppose what not only had saved my life, but had given me the best life I think I could possibly have had. I wrote a book called My Love Affair with America, and that states it accurately. So I was very reluctant to join in Trump’s skepticism about the virtues of immigration.
CRB: And you used to debate immigration with John O’Sullivan and Peter Brimelow when they were at National Review in the 1990s, I guess. They were turning NR’s position on immigration around in a sort of anticipation of Trump.
NP: Yes, though if anyone deserves the epithet “rootless cosmopolitan,” which has been applied to the Jews, it’s John O’Sullivan, whom I’m very fond of.
N.b. Not fond of me? Boo hoo.
CRB: Do you find yourself repudiating the arguments you were maintaining then, or do you think the circumstances have changed?
NP: Well, both. I mean it’s hard for me to repudiate those arguments because I think there was a lot of validity in them….
In 1924, immigration virtually stopped and the rationale for the new policy was to give newcomers a chance to assimilate—which may or may not have been the main reason—but it probably worked.
What has changed my mind about immigration now—even legal immigration—is that our culture has weakened to the point where it’s no longer attractive enough for people to want to assimilate to, and we don’t insist that they do assimilate.
When I was a kid, I lived in a neighborhood that had immigrant Jews, immigrant Italians (mainly from Sicily), and immigrant blacks—that is, they had come up from the South recently.
It was incidentally one of the things that made me a lifelong skeptic about integration because far from understanding each other and getting to know each other, all we did was fight.
In any case, the stuff that went on in the public schools! I had an incident when I went to school at the age of five. Although I was born in Brooklyn, I was bilingual and Yiddish was in a sense my first language, so I came to school with a bit of an accent. And the story was: I was wandering around in the hall, and the teacher said: “Where are you going?” And I said: “I’m goink op de stez.” And they slapped me into a remedial speech class.
Now, if anyone did that now, federal marshals would materialize out of the wall and arrest them for cultural genocide.
But, of course, they did me an enormous favor. I imagine my life would have been very different if I had not been subjected to that “speech therapy,” as they called it.
And parents then did not object—on the contrary, they were very humble. If the teacher thought so, and the school thought so, they must be right.
That was the culture of the prewar period. You certainly wanted your children to be Americans—real Americans—even if you wanted them to hold on to their ancestral culture as well. You were free to do that on your own time and your own dime.
And it worked. It worked beautifully. What has changed my mind about immigration now—even legal immigration—is that our culture has weakened to the point where it’s no longer attractive enough for people to want to assimilate to, and we don’t insist that they do assimilate.
Now he tells us.
It’s possible that Podhoretz’s shift may have reflected the apparent current recognition by America Zionists like Ben Shapiro that they have to give ground on the U.S. immigration issue to retain conservative support for Israel.
But I prefer to think that Podhoretz, at some level, actually liked the Historic American Nation that he observed when he was drafted into the Army in the early 1950s. In one of his autobiographies, he recounts storming out of a German bar because of perceived anti-semitism—only to find that his army buddies hadn’t realized he was Jewish, but wanted to go back and beat up the offending German anyway.
Is there a moral here?
May light perpetual shine upon him.