Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster Kindle Edition

Great book. Easy to read, very inspiring / powerful, and very important points!

I am not finished reading this book yet but believe it is going to live up to its advertisement.

Great book, a must read for people considering the immigration bill. Sad that our government has done nothing to address immigration.

a well written rebuke of foolish pro immigration maxims. for example, the often quoted maxim that immigration is necessary for economic growth is refuted by reference to Japan's economic growth. Japan is growing faster than the U.S. and has no immigration, but the U.S. has nit wit somali's raping little girls.

Great info

Peter Brimelow brings a rapier like wit and razor sharp mind to bear on the desires of the left and big business regarding immigration.

(Brimelow has been the editor of many publications, including Forbes, the Financial Post, and National Review. Brimelow was born in 1947 in Warrington, Lancashire, England. He studied at the University of Sussex (BA, 1970) and received an MBA from Stanford University in 1972. Brimelow subsequently emigrated to Canada. After a brief stint as a securities analyst, he settled down in Toronto and became a business writer and editor at the Financial Post and MacLean's magazine. From 1978 to 1980, he was an aide to senator Orrin Hatch in Washington D.C. In 1980 he moved to New York, working mainly for Barron's and Fortune. Brimelow was senior editor of Forbes Magazine from 1986 to 2002.)

Immigration is fine in small doses...but we have imported nearly 20 million folks since Ted Kennedy and others promised in 1965: 1965:

"The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs."

1986: "This amnesty will give citizenship to only 1.1 to 1.3 million illegal aliens. We will secure the borders henceforth. We will never again bring forward another amnesty bill like this."

2007: "Now it is time for action. 2007 is the year we must fix our broken system.

We have only a little time left to save our country. If a country is defined by its people we cannot allow politicians to import voters they would prefer.

I especially recommend the paperback edition where he responds with scathing wit to his critics. Myself I think he blames the 1965 Immigration Act too much. Isn't it jet transport and ease of communication that have shrunk the world and made it easier for people to switch countries? Recently my Canadian born daughter visited me from Arizona en route for a short visit to Egypt to see her American husband there working for a Swiss company. When my grandmother's much loved brother emigrated from Scotland to New Zealand at 16 years of age they never saw each other again.

I find it interesting that those reviling the book pretty much say "he's a racist bigot" and think that is a response to the ideas raised. I find little or no analysis of what Mr. Brimelow actually says in those rants. Just one example is a series of commments along the lines of "America is a nation of immigrants and has done just fine -- anyone opposed to further immigration is a (fill in the blank) [racist, hypocrite, etc.]"

Brimelow actually goes to great lengths to discuss this issue;
1. ALL nations are nations of immigrants, it's just that their immigration was quite gradual. Even the US (until recently) had a more gradual immigration pattern with periods of time between waves for assimilation.
2. There is currently no "resting period" for the new immigrants to assimilate.
3. There is now an active movement OPPOSED to assimilation (the cultural diversity folks).
4. This lack of assimilation is encouraged by the movement for bilingual education.
(He gives a sadly amusing story of the child of an acquaintance being pushed into classes taught in Spanish (New York City school system) because his first name was "Pablo." This despite the fact that neither he nor his parents spoke Spanish. This little factlet (his not being a Spanish speaker) was something that had not occured to those who in their zeal for multiculturalism were practicing an interesting form of racism.)
5. He then discusses the problems that arise from a failure to assimilate and the political and economic fallout of such.

This idea is further explored in Brimelow's discussion of the difference between "state," "nation," "polity," and other similar terms.

Brimelow discusses many areas of concern: social, political, economic, and cultural -- and many issues within each. For the most part I found his reasoning thoughtful and well-considered. I found particularly noteworthy his discussion of some of the commonly touted (and extremely positive) statistics on immigrant's economic contributions to the U.S. and how those measures are grievously skewed by the way the data is gathered and defined. He gives a detailed cost/benefit analysis of current immigration patterns and comes to very different conclusions.

While I did not agree with all this book says, I found much of it food for thought. Those disagreeing need to do more than name calling. Perhaps actually reading the book would be a good place to start.