Mark Krikorian's Center For Immigration Studies is to be congratulated in eliciting from Dr. Stephen Steinlight, an official with the American Jewish Committee, a truly remarkable document: The Jewish Stake in America's Changing Demography: Reconsidering a Misguided Immigration Policy. Steinlight basically argues that, post 9/11, current immigration policy must be seen as Bad For The Jews.
He also continues the amiable CIS tradition, seen earlier in its paper on ethnic politics by Tufts political scientist Tony Smith, of triangulating against us rabid nativists at VDARE.COM while coming to essentially the same policy conclusion. (This tradition dates back to Mark's review of Alien Nation - we're going to start charging a commission.)
On this occasion, Dr. Steinlight expresses determination that
The white "Christian" supremacists who have historically opposed either all immigration or all non-European immigration (Europeans being defined as Nordic or Anglo-Saxon), a position re-asserted by Peter Brimelow, must not be permitted to play a prominent role in the debate over the way America responds to unprecedented demographic change.
This seems to be an hysterical caricature of my demonstration, in Alien Nation, that America has historically always had a very specific ethnocultural core - white, slowly evolved from British and Protestant - rather than being the atomistic, kaleidoscopic, infinitely malleable "nation of immigrants" of post-World War II intellectual fantasy. Interestingly, Professor Kevin MacDonald has argued that the claim that the immigration reformers of the 1920s were motivated by "Nordicism" was a similarly slanderous "agitational analysis" by opponents who were projecting their own ethnic preoccupations.
VDARE.COM bears Steinlight's smear with what might be called a patient shrug. And we strongly recommend Steinlight's essay. It bears careful study - not least for its frank, even brutal, ethnocentrism.
Of course, it is impossible to avoid the question: if it's OK for Steinlight to ask if immigration is "good for the Jews" – what's so wrong with others asking if it's good for "Nordics," "Anglo-Saxons"… or even "Americans"?
November 11, 2001
