Their Eugene Katz Award For Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration have often been a bit heavy on the NRO side of the triangle and raised a few of our eyebrows. For example, In 2003 they gave the award to Joel Mowbray for his reporting in National Review on the Saudi visas. Mowbray was not there to accept the award, so National Review immigration John Miller accepted it with a note from Mowbray who indicated that he does ”not agree on the key question of immigration levels.” Last year Ramesh Ponnuru gave a speech.
I’m happy to say that there is absolutely nothing to criticize about this year’s awards. Both the speaker and the award recipient–William McGowan and Heather Mac Donald respectively–were excellent choices.
MacDonald has done more than anyone to expose the pathologies of the Hispanic underclass with her pieces in City Journal that expose the depth of immigrant gangs, the lack of ”Hispanic family values,” as well as issues like Mexico's meddling in America's immigration policy and other topics that few conservatives would tread. She spent the majority of his speech going after Open Borders conservatives like Jason Riley and Linda Chavez who believed in the ”Myth of the Redemptive Hispanics” who would save America through their Catholic family values. She found it particularly odd that many conservatives are willing to talk about social pathologies among the African Americans, but not Hispanics–a point that I’d like to address at length in a future column.
The opening remarks were made by William McGowan, the author of the invaluable Coloring the News. McGowan has not written much about immigration and I was pleasantly surprised at how hard-hitting some of his speech was. For example, he said that there was a ethnic conflict of interest with the large number of Hispanic journalists. He also made the exact same observation I made at the VDARE blog about the NY Times’ failure to note that virtually all the corrupt border patrol agents were Hispanic.
Most likely unaware of Peter Brimelow’s criticism of CIS’s triangulation, McGowan praised the early anti-immigration progressives for ”triangulating” (his word) between the open borders libertarians of the day and the Nativists.
CIS will post the transcript next week on their website. Let’s hope that they continue to lean more towards Heather Mac Donald and further away from Ramesh Ponnuru.
