Some weeks ago, VDARE.COM instituted a new feature, "Miller Watch," for the purpose of monitoring notorious immigration enthusiast John J. Miller, National Review's National Political Reporter , and giving him the boot every time he makes a dumb remark on the subject of U.S. immigration policy (or lack thereof).
Wouldn't you know? - since then, Miller has fallen silent on the subject. We ask: "Where is he?"
Miller never actually says in his book The Unmaking of Americans that his support for continued mass immigration to the United States is contingent on the immigrants themselves assimilating to American civilization. But he implies it, by his emphasis on the essential need for assimilation and his certainty that the assimilation of current immigrants is achievable if the native-born elite abandons multiculturalism and rediscovers the assimilationist ideal. This produced—in his view—the glorious homogenized America that existed before 1965. By contrast, in my book The Immigration Mystique, I argued that the assimilation of immigrants to the U.S. since 1865 either failed to occur or did so only imperfectly, owing to their resentment of the WASP majority . It seems to have rankled Miller especially, judging from his review of my book in the Wall Street Journal, that an immigration policy devised by Chilton Williamson might have barred his Austro-Hungarian grandmother from the United States - thus depriving us of a priceless national treasure.
Miller's problem is not just that the elite has yet to give up on multiculturalism and reestablish the assimilationist ideal. Nor is it that the immigrants themselves are increasingly indifferent or hostile to American culture, up to and including the English language itself. It's that neither the elite nor the immigrants show the slightest sign of changing anytime soon - if ever; while ceaseless waves of immigration annually guarantee the annihilation of the historic American nation in the very near future, if steps are not taken to forestall it.
In fact, the cultural, ethnic, and racial wars in this country are accelerating by leaps and bounds. Mr. Miller's immigration-enthusiast (or anyway immigration-complacent) colleagues at NR have been compelled to take note. Rich Lowry, the magazine's editor, and Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online have both deplored the absurd affair of the Three Firemen statue (white, black, and Hispanic) in New York. The January 28 2002 NR cover-story was a defense by Lowry of racial profiling as a necessary weapon against terrorism. ("In a famous 1949 case, Justice Robert Jackson said that the Constitution is not 'a suicide pact.' Indeed, it isn't, but maybe our racial politics is.") Miller himself has recently lamented that, "The number of illegal aliens from Middle Eastern countries now living in the United States could fill two football stadiums, according to a new Census Bureau report." He deplored the "racial bean counting" at USA TODAY that led reporter Kathy Kiely to bemoan the fact that there are no blacks or Hispanics among the states' governors, and that "if the U.S. Senate and the National Governors' Association were private clubs, their membership rosters would be a scandal. They're lily white."
Most recently, Miller has deplored the California State Department of Education's decision to reinstate bilingual education in the public schools in defiance of Proposition 227, passed in 1998, as well as the cowardly reluctance of the state's leading Republican politicians to criticize this act.
Well, just what did the boys at National Review expect? The situation calls to mind Dr. John Tanton's famous apocyrphal test for insanity: Put a man in a room with open faucets spewing water and a mop to clean up with. A lunatic will continue mopping past the point where it becomes obvious that the mop is no match for the faucets.
What's going on at National Review is increasingly frantic mopping. No wonder John Miller's been lying low on the issue of the immigration policy faucet.
Rumor has it that John Miller has said privately that he is "losing interest" in immigration. If so, that is doubtless because he can no longer defend it on the grounds on which he professes to find it defensible. Miller (born in 1970) is a very young man still. Thirty-two is an age at which is it easy neither to abandon youthful ideals nor admit past mistakes.
We at VDARE.COM are not only sympathetic to John Miller (send him mail), we are anxious to be of help by way of an encouraging nudge. The nudge takes the form of a public challenge, as follows:
To John J. Miller, Esq.: INSOFAR AS you have consistently defended mass immigration to the United States as a means of assimilating worthy immigrants whose presence among us shall by that means become a boon to America as well as to said immigrants themselves; and INSOFAR AS assimilation is patently not occurring, and shows no sign of doing so in future; THEREFORE, we hereby call upon you to renounce, on or before the LAST DAY OF LENT (March 30, 2002), your support of a liberal immigration policy for the U.S., together with all arguments pertinent thereto, and join in the defense of our country and against the unmaking of America and Americans, their culture, institutions, and identity. (Signed), the Editors, VDARE.com"
(Click HERE to ACCEPT, John!)
Chilton Williamson Jr. is the author of The Immigration Mystique: America's False Conscience and an editor and columnist for Chronicles Magazine, where he writes the The Hundredth Meridian column about life in the Rocky Mountain West.
February 18, 2002
