In the 1990s, a time of rapid evolution in thinking about the Immigration issue, the post of chief cheerleader for continued influx was accorded to Julian Simon, a University of Maryland business school professor who had published a book on the subject at the beginning of the decade. As Peter Brimelow noted in his 1998 obituary, Simon's principle method of dealing with new and uncongenial data and arguments was simple—he just ignored them. He was usually able to get away with this because in those days dissent on the immigration question was so repressed that he was often presented as an impartial witness. He rarely had to defend himself.
The Wall Street Journal published on Saturday what might be seen as a Julian Simon Memorial editorial: Immigrants and the GOP , August 30 2008. Apart from current dates and references, it could have been any time in the last several years: absolutely no notice is taken of well-known counter arguments and inconvenient facts: and there is nothing new in it. The Journal can get away with this, of course, because of its rigid policy of suppressing any counter-argument to its fanatical enthusiasm for reconstructing America.
This is a disgrace for a periodical which used to function as an intellectual clearing-house for conservative/free market thought.
Interestingly, and in keeping with this attitude, the "Comments" section has been hidden away and does not follow on the article itself, as is conventional with other newspapers. This was not the case some years ago. Starting off with the lie—which has been repeatedly refuted—that
more than 40% of Latinos supported George W. Bush in 2004.
The WSJ piece essentially advocates acceptance that the country is to be ruled by "ethnics and racial minorities" in the future because they
will comprise a majority of U.S. residents by 2042, thanks to higher minority birth rates, especially among Hispanics…A party that thinks it can win elections by alienating Latinos is going to be in the minority for a very long time.
It skates over the fact that trend could be stopped cold if America policed its borders and workplaces—rich targets as last week's raid on Howard Industries showed—and more particularly if the Anchor Baby loophole in the citizenship law was closed. The WSJ reports that at the Republican platform writing,
some of the more extreme proposals, such as denying citizenship to the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens, were defeated.
Maybe the WSJ does not want to draw attention to this jugular of the America-destruction monster, but the fact is that citizenship acquired by birthplace location is very rare nowadays internationally. Switzerland, with a proportion of foreign-born higher than to America, is able to entirely exclude them from the political process because of its extremely tight citizenship rules.
But then, the Swiss establishment likes being Swiss.
As for the WSJ discussion of the ebbing and flowing of Hispanic support for Republicans, it is severely marred by a failure to grasp elementary arithmetic: never once has Hispanic support ever come near a majority. The real question is how strong a landslide amongst this group the Democrats get.
Reading this strange document, the realization dawns: to the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal, White Americans don't count. Why else remark
In the 1990s, Republican support in California for Proposition 187, a ballot initiative that denied illegal immigrants access to social services, not only hurt the party with the Hispanic electorate. It also led to a drop in GOP support among the state's Chinese and Koreans voters, even though many of them are small-business owners with a history of voting Republican.
Proposition 187 won state-wide with 59% of the vote and saved the political career of Governor Wilson. If the Republicans had seized the chance, they could have energized the white vote and held the state. Why should a few Asians be more important?
Apparently historic America, its culture and traditions, is of no importance to the WSJ Editors. They would prefer a majority-minority situation.
It is time for them to realize that the Upper West Side is not a microcosm for America: and that Americans do not wish it to be.