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Frum comes out as immigration restrictionist, while calling all other restrictionists bigots
In my article the other day on the Frum/Sailer argument, I neglected to quote the passage from Frum’s article in the May 25 National Review that started the mess and made it necessary for Sailer (and me) to respond to him. Frum wrote:
The just-hatched Internet then started to sprout websites devoted entirely to the immigration issue. All too often, the immigration reformers decided to perceive no-enemies-to-the-racialist-right. They might be exclusionist at the borders of the nation; at their own port of entry, however, they lifted their lamp to welcome people who wanted to argue the intellectual inferiority of African Americans, or compared federal law-enforcement agents to the Gestapo, or insisted the Jews had brought the Holocaust upon themselves, or despised America’s Spanish-speaking neighbors as inferiors and enemies, or dined with David Duke. Has ever a cause been worse served by its alleged advocates? The immigration debate all too often reminded me of the description of the English Civil War in 1066 and All That: a battle between the Wrong but Wromantic and the Right but Repulsive.So, in the midst of a war against the immigration bill, in which neocons and paleocons have for once been fighting on the same side, Frum gratuitously revived his old attempt to delegitimize everyone to his right on the immigration issue. Sounding like the Church Lady of Political Correctness, he taints immigration restrictionists with everything he can think of, from presumed associations with David Duke to the belief that there are (gasp!) racial differences in IQ—which Frum evidently believes puts people beyond the pale. At the end of the article, Frum writes:
Out of this disaster, however, comes some hope. The national debate triggered by the Senate’s catastrophic reform has accelerated the great rethinking of immigration on the part of many millions of Americans. The backroom deal that produced this latest law epitomized decades of collusion between the two parties to suppress open discussion of this vital issue. This time, at last, the collusion failed. Democracy has erupted. I’m ready to make my voice heard. How about you?My first reaction is, why is Frum only ready now to make his voice heard, since, as he tells us at length, he has been a full-blown skeptic of our immigration policies since at least 1990? My second reaction is that it is ludicrous and cowardly of Frum, in the midst of announcing that he’s just now after 17 years (!!!!) going to speak out on immigration, to try to taint, as Jew haters and David Duke supporters, literally everyone who has actually been speaking out on immigration for those 17 years. I repeat that I have no personal animus against David Frum, but he needs to drop the pretensions, drop the endless attempts to make himself look better than others who have been serious about this issue while he was silent—and just fight the battle that needs to be fought.
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