Unexpurgated Afterword to the Harper Collins Paperback Edition of Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster

Updated on December 29, 2004

You can now buy Alien Nation on your Kindle.

[An expurgated and somewhat bowdlerized   version was published in National Review, April 22, 1996]

He does not seem to know what an argument is. He never uses arguments himself. He never troubles himself to answer the arguments of an opponent. . . . It has never occurred to him . . . that when an objection is raised, it ought to be met with something more convincing than "scoundrel" or "blockhead." LORD MACAULAY, "Essay on Southey's Colloquies"

Alien Nation ("one of the most widely discussed books of 1995"—Jerry Adler, Newsweek) was published in April and was immediately and almost universally reviewed, somewhat to my surprise although not, I must say in tribute to their professional judgment, to that of my hardcover publishers, Random House. I also found myself defending the book on a multitude of national and local television and radio shows, so that by the fall I was being recognized on the streets of New York. This was an unusual experience for a humble financial journalist. And, under the circumstances, rather alarming.

(Actually, everyone who approached me was very nice. I received only one death threat, on my voicemail at Forbes from an East European—accented woman. She was apparently incensed by my deriding, in a bitter exchange in The New York Times, both A. M. Rosenthal and American Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Ira Glasser for their obsession with Alien Nation's single reference to my son Alexander's blue eyes and blond hair. This scandalous revelation—it's on page 11—was probably the most cited passage in the book.

(And not once, as far as I can see, was it cited in its context: the paradoxical and destructive effect of the interaction between non-white immigration and affirmative-action quotas upon those native- born Americans who are not members of the so-called "protected classes," as Alexander manifestly is not— I regard this hysterical reflex as further proof of my opening thesis in Alien Nation: current immigration policy is Adolf Hitler's posthumous revenge on America.)

"We at AEI [ American Enterprise Institute]," Judge Robert Bork told me with mock ceremony during Norman Podhoretz's retirement dinner in May, "are very grateful to you for drawing fire away from Charles Murray"." Later in the summer I got a call from Murray himself, Bork's colleague at AEI and co-author of The Bell Curve, professionally curious to see how I was holding up.

In fact, the first (and in the publishing business most important) reviews, in The New York Times—twice—The Washington Post and The Atlantic, were at least respectful, serious and sometimes, particularly the Times's Richard Bernstein— strikingly generous. But after that, as Wellington said at Waterloo, it was hard pounding—the only question being who could pound hardest.

"Hateful, racist" "gentrified racism,'' "openly racialist." (there was a lot more of this, exactly as predicted on p. 9). "narrow-minded," "poppycock' "deliberately misleading," "an ugly jeremiad," "tirade," "diatribe," "a fervent and obsessive polemic," "breathtaking disingenuousness," "inflammatory?' "incendiary," "conspicuous bad faith," "utterly wrong," "beyond the pale," "bigoted," "intellectualized white rage . . . in-your-face vileness." Etc., etc., etc. I was blamed for the Oklahoma City bombing (by Ramon Mestre in the Miami Herald) and compared to Hitler and Germany's neo-Nazi skinheads (by Jeff Turrentine in the Dallas Morning News.) My favorite hostile review: probably Lawrence Chua in the Village Voice—"His fear is justified. We will bury him."

Then there were the attacks that might actually have concerned me: on my prose. Even some friends muttered about Alien Nation's "sledgehammer style," unfamiliar (lucky them) with the brutal techniques devised by American financial writers to explicate dismaying quantities of detailed information. The London Economist, familiar but superior, said I had "the quality of an embarrassing dinner-party guest—boorish, noisy and loquacious but also, maddeningly, often right." My slogan: "Don't be misled by this book's simple style: it is interlaced with material that can challenge the acutest mind."—Paul A. Samuelson, preface, Economics, seventh edition, 1967.

It is always fascinating for an author to see one reviewer complaining that a book is a "struggle to get through" (John J. Miller in Reason), while another, just as hostile, says the book is "witty and conversational, full of clever asides" (Philip Kasinitz, New York Newsday) and a third, still by no means uncritical, announces that "it is a pleasure to read Peter Brimelow at length. He writes straightforwardly, with wit, honesty and good humor" (Boston University's Glenn C. Loury in National Review). When the latter views are the majority, as I can modestly report was the case with Alien Nation, it becomes hard to avoid the conclusion that the more infantile critics are just fumbling for any off-the-shelf insult. I'm surprised they didn't claim my hair, in the hardcover jacket photo graph, was too long. My mother would have agreed.

"I expected Brimelow to smell of sulfur," wrote Arizona Republic editorial writer Linda Valdez of her interview with me in September, after my diabolical status had been well established. (Her conclusion: I didn't smell of sulfur. But I was still diabolical.)

Naturally, I found these reactions encouraging. After all, exactly the same incredulous rage has greeted the American conservative movement at each successive stage of its triumphant three-decade- long march through the institutions, beginning with the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964.

I also had a simple test that I applied to every review: did it discuss the 1965 Immigration Act? Or did it instead just burble on about the glories of immigration in principle, missing Alien Nation's key point—that the operations of 1965 Act in practice have resulted in an influx far larger, less skilled and far more dominated by a few Third World sources than anything envisaged at the time. In other words, even if you want a million immigrants a year—and the American people overwhelmingly do not—why this particular million?

I gave the shamefully large number of reviews that flunked this test a big fat "F" without any further ado. For the purposes of America's current immigration debate, they were just not in the game. Unsurprisingly, Mestre, Turrentine and Chua were all "F" Others prominent examples: Christopher Hitchens, Los Angeles Times: Linda Chavez, USA Today: Clarence Wood, Chicago Tribune: Peter Skerry, Commentary.

Even more encouraging: throughout the print media barrage I was spending hours a day on television and, through the miracle of telephone hook-ups, on talk radio all round the country. And there it was not at all unusual to get 100 percent supportive calls—from real Americans. The only exception were the shows on National Public Radio, which, whatever else you can say about it, has clearly found an audience. But even there, the calls were usually 50-50.

Indeed, as a print journalist I am appalled to say that my experience with Alien Nation has left me gloomily convinced that electronic media, particularly talk radio, really does now carry the brunt of American public discourse. This is not just because a lot of talk show hosts—Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, David Brudnoy and many others, thanks to them all—were totally supportive in a way that no self-respecting print journalist seems ever able to be. Even my critics were generally at least polite and reasonable. When an angry caller complained to Larry Mantle, a liberal host on Los Angeles KPCC-FM, that I was being allowed to spread my noxious propaganda without anyone to oppose me, Mantle reprovingly said no one ever objected when he had liberals on alone. (I remember this particularly because I looked up to see through the soundproof glass my Random House escort, the beautiful Sheryl Benezra, locked in ferocious battle with the other young women in the studio on my behalf.)

Beyond personalities, however, the discipline of live electronic media makes it intrinsically more honest than print. When Linda Valdez suggested in the Arizona Republic ("F," of course) that I had revealed my underlying racism by urging Eastern European immigration rather than Mexican, her readers could not know that in reality I was giving this as an example of the potential use of immigration s a foreign policy tool—and saying it has been precluded by statutory inflexibility and the immigrant binge of the last thirty years (pages 84-85) When Bryant Gumbel made the same suggestion on NBC's Today show, I was able to whack him smartly on the snout.

On live radio and television, unlike print, I could compel questioners to address the central question on page 119: why do you want to transform America? Quite often they were honest or naive enough to answer—as did Larry Josephson on his "Bridges" NPR show—that America in 1965 was just too homogeneous ("white bread") for their taste. Then I could move in for the kill: "That's great! Now let's ask the American people if they agree."

In addition, of course, events continued to move Alien Nation's way This undercut my critics logically, albeit not emotionally. House Speaker Newt Gingrich's bipartisan task force on illegal immigration reported, recommending among other things reform of the Fourteenth Amendment interpretation whereby all children born in the United States, even of illegal immigrants, are American citizens. (I had been reproached in various debates by Peter Skerry for suggesting such an outlandish idea; reviewing my book for Commentary, Skerry was prudently silent on this point, while continuing to claim my other proposals were outlandish). And former Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Jordan's Commission on Immigration Reform reported, recommending a one-third cut in the legal influx, in effect rolling back the 1990 Immigration Act and conceding that the system was broke and needs fixing. This was precisely my much-denounced point on page xx of Alien Nation.

President Clinton actually endorsed the Jordan Commission's findings, to the utter shock and horror of the immigration enthusiast community in Washington. ("We know he's seen your book," the National Immigration Forum's Frank Sharry, the nicest of my regular debate opponents, told me darkly, as we waited to go on CNN's Crossfire together.)

I suspect that, as a Southerner, President Clinton may be plotting a daring Chancellorsville-style march around the Republicans' right flank on the immigration issue, perhaps during the 1996 election campaign. His administration and key liberal Democrats, like California Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, have al ready been significantly tougher on illegal immigration than Presidents Reagan and Bush.

By contrast, Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey reflexively denounced the Jordan Commission. "I'm hard-pressed," he said later in the summer, "to think of a single problem that would be solved by shutting off the supply of willing and eager new Americans."

This was an astonishing comment, and indicative of the fatal intellectual inertia still prevailing among many leading immigration enthusiasts. No doubt Armey was too busy to read the free copy of Alien Nation sent him by Random House. But even a nanosecond's thought would have revealed to him that, if immigration drives the U.S. population up 50 percent by 2050—the Census Bureau's cur rent estimate—it must inevitably cost the taxpayers massive additional monies far schools, prisons and other infrastructure, regardless of whether it also offers some particular benefit (which it does not).

Events, large and small, continue to move Alien Nations way. As I was preparing to write this at the end of 1995, I randomly picked these two stories out of the same newspaper (The New York Times. December 10):

MEXICO WOOS U.S. MEXICANS, PROPOSING DUAL NATIONALITY

Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo supports an amendment to the Mexican constitution allowing Mexicans to retain their nationality when they take out U.S. citizenship."You're Mexicans—Mexicans who live north of the border," Mr. Zedillo told Mexican-American politicians in Dallas this year. He said he hoped the amendment would not only permit Mexican-Americans to better defend their rights at a time of rising anti-immigrant fervor, but also help create an ethnic lobby with political influence similar to that of American Jews.

See Alien Nation, pages 193-195. And —

FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION BY IMMIGRANTS IS BECOMING CAUSE FOR CONCERN IN THE U.S.

"As you get more and more immigrants from countries where this is a practice, particularly from Somalia, there are pockets of it [clitoridectomy] popping up wherever you see concentrations of settlements," Representative Pat Schroeder, the Colorado Democrat, said in an interview.

. . . Ms. Schroeder [has] proposed laws similar to ones in Britain and France making genital mutilation a crime.

Of course, this is completely hypocritical. Either values are relative or they are not. What it shows once again is that immigration enthusiasts' enthusiasm for "diversity" is highly selective. They fully intend to pick and choose among diversities. In effect, immigration just gives them an excuse to remake America. See Alien Nation. pages 105—6, 231—32.

Ironically, Pat Schroeder had been the 563rd critic to have the brilliant idea, when she got her free copy of Alien Nation from Random House chief Harry Evans, of pointing to our common British origins. "We welcome immigrants, even crabby ones," she wrote back grandly. "Somehow they all find their niche."

Hmm. Did the shock of finding out what some crabby immigrants are really like contribute to her subsequent decision to quit politics?

Nah, probably not. Immigration enthusiasts are a notably impervious lot.

It must be said, however, that America professional politicians are being relatively pervious about immigration. They know an electoral earthquake—Proposition 187—when they see one. In both parties, they are prepared at least to contemplate immigration reform. Even House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who has privately made it clear he does not want to see the legal immigration issue raised at all, probably because he fears accusations of racism, now says flatly in To Renew America that illegal immigration should and can be stopped. (He is silent, of course, about deporting illegals already here.)

By contrast, the Wall Street Journal editorial page has never formally rescinded its annual July Fourth call for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing "open borders," probably the high water-mark of loony libertarianism. (Still, this instant tradition did cease in 1995, abruptly and without explanation, after the publication of Alien Nation)

My conclusion: it is not so much elected officials who are the barrier to rational immigration reform in America: it is the "permanent government" of bureaucrats, mediacrats, educrats, assorted policy wonks and intellectuals—in alliance with ethnic and economic special interest groups.

And these, as it happens, are also the people who review books. Reading through the notices of Alien Nation, the sensation I get is exactly that of putting a recalcitrant three-year old to bed crying, screaming, struggling, kicking, proclamations of hatred.

Then—and this is significant—sudden, serene sleep. And you go off for a quiet scotch and a heart attack. Or in my case to finish some mundane article on the stock market, further building the Forbes family fortune and thus financing, indirectly, Steve Forbes's race for President.

(He's no good on immigration, alas. By contrast, Pat Buchanan bless his heart, was photographed holding up my book when he announced his support for an immigration moratorium. I think I might tug my forelock and respectfully hold out for whichever presidential candidate does the most to promote my Alien Nation. Of course, it could be Bill Clinton).

There are basically two views about how you can influence public debate. The Thin End of the Wedge Theory, favored by gentle souls like James W. Michaels and John O'Sullivan—respectively my editors at Forbes and National Review magazines—is that while emphasizing how much agreement there is between you and everyone else, you politely but firmly insinuate modifications into the discussion, all of such an eminently sensible character that no-one can possibly (or. at least, reasonably) object. Over time, you turn people around.

In contrast, there's the Thick End Theory. You pick up the wedge by' its thin end and pound the opposition with the thick end, as hard as possible. Then you stand back and see what happens.

I have to admit that I lean toward the second approach. This is probably a fault of personality. I lack the patience to maneuver opponents in detail, especially since it means I may never get to state my own very important opinion directly. Indeed, I think that re pressing an opinion in this way can be harmful to everyone's health. Such tactfulness in the face of the hyperemotional minority is why most Americans now lack the language to express their common private conviction that, since America has been historically a white nation, it might very well matter that public policy is at present so rapidly shifting the country's racial balance. (Of course, it might not. But if not, why not discuss it? See page 107.)

Anyway, as Alan Abelson, the great editor of Barrons, used to reassure me when I worked for him, sadism is a professional requirement for a journalist. So in Alien Nation I hit the immigration enthusiasts head on.

Some reviewers appreciated this. Jack Miles, in his very thoughtful essay in The Atlantic Monthly, said I was "an inspired controversialist, determined to storm the enemy's redoubt where it is strongest, not where it is weakest."

But other reviewers simply could not stomach the resulting bloodshed. For example, Jacquie Miller in the Ottawa Citizen worried—all too presciently, for what it is worth—that "phrases can be plucked out of Brimelow's book that, shoved only slightly out of context, provide ammunition[for the inevitable charge of racism] She instanced my references to high black crime and Laotian welfare rates. Miller also felt that the "credibility" of my account of Robert Kennedy's ludicrous underestimate of Asian immigration resulting from the l965 Act (p. 78) somehow suffered from what she described as "a typical slur": my adding that "tragically, Robert Kennedy himself was to be assassinated by an immigrant counted by the INS as Asian."

My first reaction to this sort of thing, of course, is incredulity. I believe truth should be an absolute defense, as it is in libel law. Laotians do have disproportionately high welfare rates etc. And I said "tragically." didn't I?

Still, I recognize a problem. There is no point in repelling readers, at least those who show Ms. Miller's symptoms of open-minded ness.

The problem, however, is not easily resolved. The truth, we are told after all, shall set us free. And it is precisely because of the media's flinching from facts that many Americans are unaware of the immigration dimensions of major contemporary public policy dilemmas (see p. 7). It is because Americans are never reminded of the Jordanian origins of Kennedy's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, that they don't think to put him at the head of a list of infamous immigrants to counter the immigration enthusiasts' silly ploy of reeling off, in place of argument, the names of distinguished immigrants. In fact, many Americans can't think of a list of infamous immigrants at all—another example of the one-way nature of the immigration debate.

Former New York mayor Ed Koch pulled this trick on me in the course of a surprisingly disappointing and weak review in the New York Post; "Albert Einstein, Arturo Toscanini, Madeleine Albright, I. M. Pei, Patrick Ewing, John Shalikashvilli, Henry Kissinger, [etc., etc.] . . . Brimelow should squirm at their very mention."

My unsquirming answer, in part:

Sirhan; Giuseppe Esposito (founder of the Italian Mafia in the U.S.);. Meyer Lansky, "Lucky" Luciano, Al Capone (all organized crime); V. K. Ivankov (of the emerging "Russian Mafia"); Bruno Richard Hauptmann (Lindbergh kidnapper); Rosario Ames (wife and co-conspirator of traitor Aldrich Ames); Civil War Colonels John B. Turchin, USA, and Henry Wirz, CSA (respectively dismissed from U.S. Army for atrocities against Southern civilians and hung for atrocities against Union prisoners of war as camp commandant at Andersonville) . . .

And Charles Ponzi (inventor of the type of financial fraud named after him, whereby early investors are paid off with later investors' monies, luring more in—just like the immigration enthusiasts' fantasy of how immigrants will bail out the Social Security system. Ben Wattenberg was still repeating this in his syndicated column in late 1995, despite Alien Nation', conclusive refutation, p. 153-4).

Still. I have hope for Koch. who is sensible about illegal immigration and other things. It seems he was simply unable to focus on my book's content, a common failing, because of the memory of his own immigrant parents. One of my happiest moments in taping the three-part immigration debate television special for William F. Buckley's Firing Line is establishing through cross-examination that Koch did not realize his parents could not immigrate under current law anyway (because they came from European countries that have been shouldered aside by the family-reunification inflow triggered by the 1965 Act—see p. 18.) 1 expect that we can resolve our differences over the lunch to which he has kindly invited me.

I am less hopeful about the ACLU's Ira Glasser. in the second part of the Firing Line debate, he so far forgot himself as to accuse me of "lying" and bet me a year of his salary ($127,950 according to the 1993 American Institute of Philanthropy yearbook) that I had not discussed in Alien Nation the fragmentary evidence that the proportion of immigrants in state prisons does not repeat their over-representation at the federal level. Of course, I had (p. 184).

Glasser has now conceded this, buried in a long abusive ink- cloud of a private letter to me. Unaccountably, however, he neglected to include his check. As a gentleman, he will no doubt have rectified this oversight by the time this paperback edition is in readers' hands. But you can fax him at the ACLU and ask: (212) 354- 5290.

It a mildly interesting question how Glasser could be such a fool as to get himself in this mess. My theory is that it is partly be cause of the pervasive influence of lawyers on American public de bate. Trial lawyers have a reductionist and pragmatic view of arguments. Their object is to convince the jury, not arrive at the truth. Glasser automatically assumed I would suppress apparently unfavorable evidence because, well, he would in my place.

But I wouldn't. No. dammit. I wouldn't. Twenty-five years ago, when I had been in the U.S. only months, this passage jumped out of a book I was illicitly reading at the back of a finance class at Stanford's business school:

I realize about myself that I am, for all my passions, implacably, I think almost unfailingly fair: objective, just. This not vanity, it is rigorous introspection…

The book: Cruising Speed (1970). The author: William F. Buckley Jr.

Perhaps it's a conservative thing. The Glassers of the world wouldn't understand.

Or (what I really think) perhaps it has something to do with the great civilization of the West. In which case it may be—not will be, may be—threatened by immigrants from a different cultural tradition.

Virtue is more than its own reward, however. In spite of the ferocious assault on Alien Nation, only one minor nontypographical mistake was discovered. Raul Lowery Contreras, a radio host and professional ethnic in San Diego, complained in a letter to the New York Times that my sources had been wrong to suppose he was part-Anglo: he merely had an "Irish step-father." (p. 274). Naturally he did not mention that he had read this in the free, inscribed book he had bummed off me when we ran into each other in KOGO's studios, where I had just appeared on Peter Weissbach's show.

And, of course, the change does not affect my fundamental point: assimilating visible minorities is more difficult, even given apparent social integration, than optimists assume.

"A highly cogent presentation of what is going to be the benchmark case against immigration," wrote Richard Bernstein in the New