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A Democratic Reader Wonders If He's Alone

From: Fred Fries

Your excellent piece on the morons at the WSJ says,

"Where there's a will, there's a way to sue in America. So it was probably inevitable that the anti-immigrant political right [Yawn, usual cheap smear. We're actually anti-immigration. There's a difference. But the WSJ Edit Page is manifestly part of the anti-American political right.] would join with..."

Must Vdare.com and like-minded folk endure being wrongly called "anti-immigration"? We're not "anti-immigration," only "anti-excessive immigration."

Advocating the return of the pre-1965 immigration policy isn't anti-immigration. It's pro-immigration and the only way to be pro-immigration, since immigration by definition presupposes distinct countries, whose distinctness it risks destroying if permitted to continue at wildly excessive levels.

Is the imposition of bag limits on hunters an anti-hunting measure, or of whale-fishery catch limits an anti-whale measure? On the contrary, they are the only possible pro-hunting and pro-whale-fishery policies. 

Imposing reasonable limits on immigration - the pre-1965 policy for example - would be pro-immigration and the only possible pro-immigration policy. There'll be no immigration once the world's been transformed into one big Mexico or China - just populations shifting about within one big country.

Can our side shake the "anti-immigration" label? (Or should that be the "anti-immigration libel"?) We're not anti-immigration — the other side is.

Peter Brimelow sighs Of course, this is true. It's a point the heroically reasonable Roy Beck over at NumbersUSA  makes all the time, and he's actually been able to get newspapers to stop calling him "anti-immigration." Roy wants NumbersUSA to be called "an immigration-reduction organization;" I prefer the term "immigration reform."  I do object strongly to being called "anti-immigrant," but, maybe it's because I'm an immigrant myself that I don't usually bother about being called "anti-immigration." Or maybe I'm just insensitive. Or tired of running.

May 21, 2002