Neocon criticizes immigration

When a reader sent me Roger Kimball’s long article at Pajamas Media about affirmative action, I thought, what’s the point? Why should I read the 10,000th—or is it the 50,000th?—article by a neocon about how terrible AA is, a fight the neocons were never serious about and effectively surrendered in 2003 with their passive and silent response to the Grutter decision, which their man, President Bush, endorsed?

Then I glanced ahead toward the end of the piece and saw something I never saw before: Kimball is criticizing mass non-Western immigration into the U.S. He writes:

The story is very different today. In America, there is a dangerous new tide of immigration from Asia, a variety of Muslim countries, and Latin America, especially from Mexico. [Italics added.] The tide is new not only chronologically but also in substance. First, there is the sheer matter of numbers. More than 2,200,000 legal immigrants came to the U.S. from Mexico in the 1990s alone. The number of illegal Mexican immigrants is staggering. So is their birth rate. Altogether there are more than 8 million Mexicans in the U.S. Some parts of the Southwest are well on their way to becoming what Victor Davis Hanson calls “Mexifornia,” “the strange society that is emerging as the result of a demographic and cultural revolution like no other in our times.” A professor of Chicano Studies at the University of New Mexico gleefully predicts that by 2080 parts of the Southwest United States and Northern Mexico will join to form a new country, “La Republica del Norte.”

The problem is not only one of numbers, though. Earlier immigrants made—and were helped and goaded by the ambient culture to make—concerted efforts to assimilate. Important pockets of these new immigrants are not assimilating, not learning English, not becoming or thinking of themselves primarily as Americans. The effect of these developments on American identity is disastrous and potentially irreversible.

Only a reading of the whole article, which is 3,100 words long, will reveal if Kimball, the long-time managing editor and now editor of the neoconservative culture journal The New Criterion, lets on that the neoconservative movement itself has been loudly championing this “dangerous” tide of immigration for the past several decades and doing its best to silence any opposition to it, while Kimball’s own magazine has, at best, had nothing to say on the issue. The first time to my knowledge that The New Criterion said anything critical about immigration was in a Sepember 2006 article by Roger Scruton, and that piece concerned immigration in Europe, not America. The odds that Kimball will mention the leading role played by his own neoconservative movement in advancing the policy he now calls a threat to our national existence are close to zero. But the article has already pleasantly surprised me once, maybe it will do so twice.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 18, 2007 02:45 PM | Send