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Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster Paperback – May 30, 1996
| Peter Brimelow (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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- Print length384 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper Perennial
- Publication dateMay 30, 1996
- Dimensions5.31 x 0.86 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100060976918
- ISBN-13978-0060976910
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Important...Many of the facts in this book will be surprising even to well-informed readers." -- --Nathan Glazer, Harvard University
"One of the most widely discussed books of the year." -- --Jerry Adler,Newsweek
About the Author
Peter Brimelow, who has two children in public school, is the editor of VDARE.COM, a senior fellow with the Pacific Research Institute, and a columnist for CBS MarketWatch. A financial journalist, he has written extensively about the NEA and the economics of education in Forbes and Fortune. The author of Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster, he has contributed to the Wall Street Journal the New York Times, and the Washington Post.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Part One
The View From the Tenth Circle
These population dynamics will result in the "browning" of America, the Hispanization of America. It is already happening and it is inescapable.
-- HENRY CISNEROS,
former mayor of San Antonio, Texas; Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Clinton administration
My grandparents came from Lebanon. I don't identify with the Pilgrims on a personal level.
-- DONNA SHALALA,
Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Clinton administration
We are transforming ourselves . . .
-- DORIS MEISSNER,
Commissioner, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in
the Clinton administration (who approves)
Dante, the great poet of medieval Italy, would have been delighted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service's waiting rooms. They would have provided him with a tenth Circle of Hell to add to the nine degrees of damnation he described in his most famous work, the Inferno.
There is something distinctly infernal about the INS spectacle. So many lost souls wait around so hopelessly, mutually incomprehensible in virtually every language under the sun, each clutching a number from one of those ticket-vending machines which may or may not be honored by the harassed INS clerks before the end of the civil service working day.
The danger of damnation is low--sort of. A Scottish friend of mine did once find himself flung into the deportation holding tank because the INS misunderstood its own rules. And toward the end of my own ten-year trek through the system, I whiled away a lot of time watching confrontations between suspicious INSers and agitated Iranians, apparently hauled in because the Iran hostage crisis had inspired the Carter administration to ask just exactly how many of them there were enrolled as students in U.S. universities anyway.
(The INS was unable to provide an answer during the hostage crisis's 444 days. Or, as it turned out, at all.1)
You can still get a pretty good blast of brimstone, however. Try suggesting that it might be another of those misunderstandings when, having finally reached the head of the line, you are ordered by the clerk to go away and come back another day with a previously unmentioned Form XYZ.
Your fellow huddled masses accept this treatment with a horrible passivity. Perhaps it is imbued in them by aeons of arbitrary government in their native lands. Only rarely is there a flurry of protest. At its center, almost invariably, is an indignant American spouse.
The Great American Immigration Paradox
We are looking here at something crucially significant: the Great American Immigration Paradox. Just as New York City's government can't stop muggers but does a great job ticketing young women on Park Avenue for failing to scoop up after their lapdogs, U.S. immigration policy in effect enforces the law only against those who obey it.
Annual legal immigration of about I million--counting the 100,000 refugees and the 100,000 applying for political asylum--is overwhelmed by an estimated 2 to 3 million illegal entries into the country in every recent year.
Many of these illegal entrants go back home, of course. In fact, some commute across the border every day, But, year by year, the number of illegal immigrants who settle permanently in the United States grows. Here's how to think about it: if you balance the gross illegal immigration against gross departures of illegals, you find the net increase in the illegal immigrant population. A cautious INS estimate: this net illegal immigration has been running at about 300,000 to 500,000 annually.2 No one, however, really knows.
The INS bureaucracy still grinds through its rituals. But the reality remains as President Ronald Reagan described it in 1983: "This country has lost control of its borders."
"And," Reagan added, "no country can sustain that kind of position."3
Indeed, the loss of control is even more complete than Reagan suggested. Much of the current legal immigration can't be kept out either. The majority of those lost souls in the INS waiting room will find salvation, in the form of U.S. residence, in the end.
This is because most legal immigrants--usually between a half and two thirds--are accepted more or less automatically under the various family-reunification provisions of current U.S. law.
Then there are refugees, who apply for admission while they are still abroad, and political asylum seekers, who apply once in the United States. And, similarly, the weird workings of the American legal system have made it virtually impossible to expel asylum seekers once they land on U.S. soil.
In fact in early 1993 another immigration scandal erupted: it emerged that foreigners were getting off planes at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport at an annualized rate rising rapidly through 15,000, applying for asylum and, because of lack of detention space, being released into the United States on a promise to present themselves at a future hearing, which not more than 5 percent ever did.4 (Not that it matters if they do. An unofficial INS estimate is that eight out of every ten asylum applicants end up staying in the United States quite regardless of whether or not their applications are approved.5)
This inability to expel asylum seekers once they set foot in the United States is why both the Bush and Clinton administrations were forced to order the interception of boats carrying would-be illegal immigrants from Haiti on the high seas. And it's why the Clinton administration had to beg humbly that the Mexican government halt and return home shiploads of smuggled Chinese.
As invariably happens with immigration policy, what was intended (or at least alleged) to be kind turns out to be cruel. We will be returning to this theme later.
Naturally, I take a deep personal interest in these immigration idiosyncrasies. After all, as it turned out I could have avoided my INS decade simply by ignoring the law and staying here after I graduated from Stanford University Graduate School of Business in 1972.
Product details
- Publisher : Harper Perennial; First Paperback Edition (May 30, 1996)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0060976918
- ISBN-13 : 978-0060976910
- Item Weight : 11.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.31 x 0.86 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,189,415 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #43,259 in Politics & Government (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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Everything from modern science and statistics to recent or ancient history shows us that there are vast differences between the races. This is fact as much as the fact that the sun is the center of our solar system or that the Earth is round. This book talks far far too little about this. The worst thing we could do in a democracy or in any organization is to persecute people for the truth. Good decisions cannot be made without considering truth. People need to know that this IS a racial issue. When whites become a minority, the character of this country will change forever. Race mixing will eventually destroy everything that made us great. I am a behavioral neuroscientist, and I have had years of training in brain science and behavior. I have intimate knowledge of brain science and the processes of gathering truth in science. There is no reason we should be ashamed of the truth--especially one as important as this.
White people deserve to live. Somewhere along the way we lost sight of the fact that historically your nation was also your race. When we think of "nationality" we still tend to think of race but we no longer see nation as race. This is wrong. When we speak of "Alien Nation" we need to realize this. Race is unequivocally important--maybe the most important thing there is to consider. It is shameful that this book sneaks around this central issue so much. Our freedom, and our great white race, are evaporating under the dark weight of Political Correctness. We need to get away from the ridiculous notion that to talk of race is to "hate". We need to find who started this rumour--there we will find an enemy of truth and also of our future. In any courtroom, we must consider all evidence carefully in an unprejudiced manner. No more unbalanced books, please. Let's be honest and just say that the white race is superior in many important things. That is simply a fact.
Otherwise it is an excellent book as far as it goes--just introject RACE everywhere where it is obviously left out, and the fact that the white race is unique and amazing and beautiful and deserves to be preserved over any endangered whale or owl. We have real problems here in this country, and also around the world--race is the biggest problem our country is currently facing. It is a life or death situation. Without all the information, we cannot even begin to make a plan for dealing with these realities. This is a half-written book.
Today's Elijah P. Lovejoy is Peter Brimelow. This journalist was a onetime senior editor and reporter for Forbes and the National Review, America's premier conservative, establishment journals. He was fired (or left) these jobs because he has taken up the irrepressible conflict in American Politics.
The conflict: Immigration
Basically, the United States of America is settled territory with its own unique ethnic heritage. America is therefore under threat from Immigration-specifically through the workings of the Immigration Act of 1965, introduced and supported by the late Ted Kennedy.
The 1965 Act-which has been tinkered with-but not fundamentally altered-specifically recruits people from the Third World, especially Mexico to fill jobs and fill up the country. Brimelow argues that the Hispanic wave is a net drain as they are low-skilled workers with very little ability to move-upwards. Indeed, Hispanics are not moving up, if anything children of Hispanics assimilate to a downward, crime prone permanent underclass. Other races might be doing OK, but they unfairly qualify for affirmative action set-asides, special deals, social welfare programs, and often lobby the United States to carryout policies that aid their tribe at the expense of the American People.
Brimelow writes about the consequences of the continued immigration. Basically, it is a more Balkanized, dangerous, and less-free society. Indeed, since this book has been written immigration driven problems have created such a society. Travel is less free since the 9-11, immigrant driven attack, social services costs are so expensive the United States now faces fiscal problems every year, and elections have become a sharp edged contest, heavy with racial overtones.
Keeping immigration alive is the priority of a toxic mix of cheap labor employers (Republicans) and Cultural-Marxist ethnic activists (Democrats).
Despite the extremely powerful pro-immigration forces, since the book America has hardened its boarders, developed a quicker deportation process, and resisted formidable calls for Amnesty (at least as of this writing). However, the issue will not end until the fundamental truth of America is realized: It is a settled territory with its own unique people-immigrants aren't needed and their mere existence is a problem to the American people.
Easy to read, clear in its arguments, this book will stand for all time as the first shot fired of the modern irrepressible conflict.


