Immigration, Innumeracy, And The Case For Impeaching Judges

[Peter Brimelow writes: I spoke on "Problems Of Immigration" to Dr. Michael Hart's Preserving Western Civilization conference in Baltimore on February 7. For an 11 CD set of all the conference speeches, shipping included, send check or money order for $50 to PWC, P.O. Box 4694, Crofton, MD 21114]

First, I want to say a special hello to the spy from the Southern Poverty Law Center who will be here. Last time I spoke in Baltimore [to the H.L. Mencken Club], the SPLC had a report up on their site before we did.

So we ripped it off! It was quite good actually, if you adjust for paranoia.

We just looked at the posted 990s [filings with the Federal government)] by the SPLC ($PLC as we call it). In the last year that we have data for, they took in $40million and spent only $20million. In other words, they're hogging the resources desperately needed by the rest of the Treason Lobby—which is already messed up enough by Bernie Madoff.

So, my message to the spy is: make sure you get paid! Don't let Morris Dees hog it all!

I want to thank Michael Hart  for inviting me here. I was particularly impressed by his really stirring address last night, which is radically different from anything my kids are learning in school, particularly last month—Black History month, Obama's Inauguration, Martin Luther King Day.

I also really strongly recommend to you Michael's book, Understanding Human History. It's a breathtaking book, I mean, it literally took my breath away when I read it. It's a feat of synthesis and compression which I admired enormously as a professional editor. It's a measure of the hole that we're in that it had to be published by a relatively obscure press—you'll forgive me, Louis [Andrews, head of Washington Summit Publishers].

On the other hand, one of the great morals of this story is—technology changes everything. We can now make books more easily. We can publish them more easily, we can find our audiences through the internet, as [conference speaker] Henry [Harpending. Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah] is doing with his book [The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution]. So everything is not lost.

Speaking of which, at VDARE.COM, we've published our first book, Steve Sailer's America's Half Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance". It's a critique, really, of Obama's autobiographies, the kind of analysis you're not going to read in the Main Stream Media or the mainstream publishing industry. So we have a table out there which is manned by my wife, Lydia, and you can buy it and she will give you a smile.

And as to the individual who ripped us off and stole the book this morning: We know who you are! [Laughter] And we're waiting for you to pay us! Lydia's taller than you are! [Laughter]

Or maybe he's the $PLC spy—in which case you should go pay anyway, because Morris Dees can afford it! [PB note: The culprit didn't pay. Obviously, he was the $PLC spy.]

My topic today is "Problems Of Immigration"—other, of course, than that they speak with odd accents and nobody can understand them, particularly when they get excited!

Well, I don't really need to tell this audience the problems of immigration: you're highly educated in the area. We have a great expert on the subject here, Larry Auster, who blogs us all under the table, all hours of the day and night, on the subject.

If you in the immigration debate, you're always confronted with the phrase: "We are a nation of immigrants." Of course, it's all nonsense. All nations are nations of immigrants. There is no known case where people grew out of the ground. The difference between the US and other nations is the speed with which it was put together. The process which in England took a millennium was achieved here in less than a century. And the problem is—and this is the problem with immigration— that it can be un-put together again very quickly.

In the end, what we face as a result particularly of mass non-traditional immigration is that it destroys and dissolves the national community.

You're all familiar, I'm sure, with American immigration history. It's not continuous. For most of American history, America grew through natural increase. There have been many pauses in the flow of immigrants. There was a great pause in the middle of this century, which was ended by the 1965 immigration act and by the simultaneous decision on the part of American governments to stop enforcing the law on the southern border, to allow another wave of illegal immigration to occur, as had occurred in the 1950s. (It was stopped and reversed by the Eisenhower administration.)

Now, this is a problem which we see throughout the Western world—an unprecedentedly huge influx of non-traditional immigration. The result of this is that every major Western nation will be a minority in its homeland the foreseeable future. It takes less time in some places and more time in others, but the calculations can easily be made.

The funny thing about all of these Western nations, France and Britain and so on, is that they all have the same sort of mythology. They all believe that they are nations of immigrants. I've had people seriously argue to me that the English are mongrels because they are Vikings and Saxons and so on, so they must obviously be all immigrants and very different. But of course they are actually very close genetically.

And they all believe that they are "proposition nations" and therefore don't have to worry about the underlying ethnic strata. The Americans are told that they have this constitution that they have to subscribe to. The French believe that they're civilized, which may surprise you, but that's what they think (laughter), and that their duty is to civilize the rest of the world and to civilize their immigrants.

The next big date that we at VDARE.COM look forward to in this debate is 2011. That's when we calculate, Ed Rubenstein calculates, that the majority of births in the country will be to minorities. Which in turn means, of course, that in thirty years' time the majority of the population will be minorities. You'll hear a lot about that when it happens. And it will happen very soon.

Now Michael told me that he didn't want to talk about the economics of immigration, even though I am a financial journalist. So I won't talk about it—except to say that the central point in the economics of immigration is that there's no benefit to the native-born. This great influx that has been coming in now for maybe forty years is not benefiting the native born. It is not making them wealthier. It does increase GDP, but that's virtually all captured by the immigrants themselves in their incomes.

And this is a consistent finding in all First World countries where we see major influxes of immigrants. In my book Alien Nation, which was written in 1995, I reviewed the evidence in whole series of countries and found exactly the same thing: there's no substantial benefit to the native-born.

And this means that we're looking at something really odd. I mean, why are these countries doing this to themselves if they are not benefitting their native-born—their own people?

There's a vulgar Marxist explanation that has a certain amount of power. Although the native-born are not benefitting from immigration, there is a tremendous redistribution of wealth within the native community as a result of immigration. Within the US, it's calculated that something like 2-3% of GDP is transferred from labor to capital. That's obviously something that benefits the business class. This is a class debate. Immigration benefits the upper class and disadvantages the lower class.

 Also, and this is a more subtle point, this is really extraordinary new social development in the Western World, which is the rise of the New Class: which is the people who make their living by pushing other people around with the government. To them, these immigrants represent clients.

This whole thing was pretty well summed up in the Great War over Proposition 187 in California in 1994. Californians overwhelmingly passed an initiative to cut off illegal immigrants from benefits—to get their snouts out of the tax trough. But one of the main funders of the opposition was the corporation that owns Univision the Spanish language television network.  And the teacher's union and the civil service union. They're the ones that put the money up to keep illegal immigrants coming in.

However, I never liked Marxist explanations for things in the 1960s, and I don't like them now. There's something deeper going on.

When I was in Forbes—I was there for sixteen years—I used regularly to do articles which involved charts and graphics. If we were writing about differences in income distribution and stuff like that, then obviously we'd break it out by race because there are such tremendous systematic differences between Americans on the basis of race.

Well, the Art Department, who were of course mostly lumpen liberals like everyone is in the media world, the kind of people that you find living in Greenwich Village where Forbes offices were located, they would never allow us to have a bar chart with blacks black, Asians yellow, and whites, you know, white! They insisted that blacks had to be green! And Asians had to be blue! And all kinds of other colors.

Of course, this made the graphics incredibly difficult to read, because you have to be constantly looking back and forth from the chart to the color key to figure out what you were looking at. But the Art Department just knew that it was not possible to have a simple bar chart which was intuitively obvious.  It wasn't because they were getting directives from management. It was something they really believed.

Now this is something which, as I say, is really strange. The only explanation that I can offer in a nutshell is what I call in Alien Nation, "Hitler's Revenge". I think the effects of fighting the Second World War, on the Anglosphere culture, turned the elites so strongly against racism and xenophobia and that kind of thing, that they kind of went overboard the other way. They became incapable of dealing with any questions dealing with race, ethnicity or nationality.

Like the famous bird of RAF origin that flies around in ever diminishing circles until it finally vanishes in a way which I won't go into, they got over on the other side and as a result are leading their nation-states to destruction.

You've all heard of "hate speech", and you're going to hear a lot more about it. I think one of the first things that the Obama administration will do,—and it will not be amnesty, I don't think they're going to go for that—is to try to push through legislation designed to curtail hate speech and hate crimes, which are really political speech and political crimes. Teddy Kennedy tried to get it through the last congress. Maybe it'll be his memorial.

Of course the problem that we've got here is not hate speech in this country, but what we might describe as "hate facts"—facts that are true, but which nobody dares to mention  (applause).  Well, there are also "hate numbers", and I shall mention into a few here.

I should say here as an aside that we have a very quantitative audience here—you're accustomed to talking about and thinking about numbers. But you have no idea how innumerate the population as a whole is. Unless, of course, you contemplate Republican political strategists and their idea of how to win elections!

So that is why I'm going to go through what may seem obvious in some detail. The numbers of the immigration influx right now are really compelling.  The racial balance is shifting rapidly and it's steadily weakening the Republican Party, which is the party of the majority of Americans—that is to say, the American majority.  Ninety percent of the Republican voters are white. In the long run, it is obvious that only an immigration cutoff is going to save the Republican Party, and with it America.

But in the short and medium term, the Republicans can quite easily recoup their position by making a more effective appeal to their base—which is white America. And actually immigration reform is a good way to do that.

It's a pretty good way of appealing to minorities too, as a matter of fact. It seems to have been totally lost in the shuffle, but in 2004, Prop 200 in Arizona, another anti-illegal immigration initiative that carried overwhelmingly despite the opposition of the entire political elite in Arizona including John McCain, got 47% of the Hispanic vote, running well ahead of George Bush.

So I don't think that immigration reform is all that unpopular with the minorities, and even with immigrants, partly because they're the ones that bear the brunt of mass immigration—they're the ones that pay the price at the workplace in terms of jobs and salaries.

In 1997 Ed Rubenstein and I wrote a cover story in National Review called Electing a New People.  We got the title from Bertolt Brecht's famous poem. You know the East Germans rose against the Communist government in 1953, and Brecht wrote this poem in which he said the government should dissolve the people and elect a new one. That's essentially what American public policy is doing right now.

There are three critical points here:

• There's the static point: in America, race is destiny—politically. If you say this, you always get misquoted as saying race is destiny, but what I'm saying is race is destiny politically. The races vote systematically differently and these differences are very slow to change.

• There's a dynamic point: that is, the overall share of the overall vote sways back and to depending on the circumstances, and the proportion that the parties get of each race's votes sways back and to as well. But it always sways back and to in tandem. The differences remain roughly the same.

• And there is, of course, the immigration point: immigration is rapidly shifting the racial balance towards America's minorities. So it's every election cycle, it's getting more difficult for the GOP to win, by about a percentage point.

Subsequently, Steve Sailer, the author of our new book, has been making a corollary point at VDARE.COM:  the most practical solution to the Republican dilemma is not outreach but inreach—in other words, to expand their grip on the white base. We call this the "Sailer Strategy". And it's actually how the Republicans won in 2002 and 2004. They increased their share of the white vote, and they increased white turnout. But they did it on the issue of the war. White Americans are patriots and they were persuaded that the war was a patriotic thing to support, so they came out and voted for it.

We saw a similar thing in the last election with the selection of Sarah Palin as the nomination as running mate for McCain. It was kind of a cultural cue that McCain was sending out, and it worked. It did mobilize the white base—for a while, until the economy fell off a cliff.

Anyway, these are the numbers. CNN has the best exit polls that are out now, although they are all always subject to revision. It's well worth looking at, seven pages worth of masses of details.

In 2008, whites cast 74% of the presidential ballot, blacks allegedly about 13%, a very high turnout for blacks, Latinos maybe 9% and others 5%.

The New York Times attacked us the other day for reporting this. These are numbers that are not "Fit To Print" because they make it clear that the whites are still by far the largest target. Relatively small shifts in the white vote easily swamp relatively large shifts in the minority vote. The conventional wisdom that the only way to get Republicans to remain in power is to get the minority vote is simply innumerate; it is made by people who simply won't count.

Although you wouldn't know it by watching the coverage on election night, McCain very easily won the white vote in America in 2008. He won about 55% of it, a remarkable achievement really, considering the catastrophe of the Bush presidency.

We took those numbers and projected them back, adjusting for the shifting ethnic balance. What it told us was that that share of the white vote, 55%, would have won McCain the election as recently as 1976. I remember 1976. That was the year, of course, that Carter beat Ford. So McCain actually ran better than Ford did. (Although of course he ran much worse than Reagan. Reagan got over 65% of the white vote in the election).

McCain didn't win the election because public policy has shifted the democratic balance against him. Nevertheless, he stupidly supported that policy.

To give you an idea of what can be done, in Alabama and many other southern states, white are already a much smaller proportion of the population than they are in US as a whole. In Alabama, whites cast 65% of the presidential votes in 2008 as opposed to 74% nationally. But they went for McCain 88% to 10%. He won the state in a landslide. For some reason, white Southerners vote together in a way that American whites don't vote together—yet.

That's of course why we see these constant accusations of racism and so on for discussing these facts at all. Because they put the Democrats in a very difficult position. They cannot afford to allow the white majority to unite.

The 2008 exit polls have a lot of other fascinating details. They reveal these very deep and systematic divisions. So deep that you have to wonder whether the US really is still a nation with a common culture, or whether it has already become sort of a heterogeneous empire. One thing that fascinated me was the discovery that white Protestants still make up 42% of the electorate. 42% of the votes were cast by white Protestants still. And they voted 65% for McCain—overwhelmingly for McCain.

You have to wonder at this situation: white Protestants, of course, essentially invented the United States. As Phillip Roth says in one of his novels, [American Pastoral, p. 311]"Let's face it, they are America." But they've completely lost control of the government.

Obama doesn't have 43% of his appointees white Protestants, in fact I don't think even 4% are white Protestants. So you have to ask yourself what's going on here. How can the founding stock of the country have so completely lost control? They could reasonably regard the Obama administration as kind of an occupation government: a coalition of united minorities that succeeded in uniting the minorities and dividing the majority.

But of course, they don't regard it that way. They're just completely out to lunch on the subject.

At VDARE.COM, it's fascinating to me to note that our strongest writers are invariably Irish and Italian. Now, in the case of the Irish, of course, they just like fighting [laughter and applause]. I say this as someone who has had two Irish wives [laughter]. But the Italians were the major victims of the 1920s cutoff, yet we still have these strong Italian critics of current immigration policy.

White Catholics make up about 19% of the electorate, and a majority of them voted for McCain. It's close, 52% to 47% but it is a majority.

 And then there are the Jews, who are about 2% of the electorate according to CNN. They voted absolutely overwhelmingly for Obama. 83% of them voted for Obama. They voted more for Obama than non-whites on average—non-whites were about 79% Obama. In 1980, when I was working on the Hill, it was quite common for people to say that the arrival of the neoconservatives in the Republican Party heralded a great shift with the Jewish vote to Republicans, which would also be indicated by the fact that they are relatively prosperous. But it's not happened.

In fact, it has gotten vastly worse in the past few years. Why? I don't know, but I do think it's a good question and in some ways the most important question in the immigration debate. And I recommend it to you for further discussion.

In 2007, when we were in the middle of the Amnesty wars, I remember asking a congressional aide on the right side, what we refer to as the "patriotic" side, of immigration reform, what would happen if some version of the Kennedy-Bush Amnesty passed. He reacted with horror. He said: "That will be the end of America. I'd have to emigrate. "

It's an odd thing, if you think about it, it's a remarkable thing, that someone would feel so deeply about this bill, which came so close to being passed, and in his case, passed by a President from his own party. It shows there are enormous tensions in the body politic on this question of immigration.

Well, of course, it would indeed ultimately be the end of America if Amnesty had passed. It would have rapidly accelerated the process of America being swamped. It would be the end of American nation-state, that is to say the political expression of a particular people.

But that people would still exist, and probably exist in a somewhat enraged mood. It would then find new forms of political expression.

In other words, I'm not taking a completely pessimistic view of this situation. But I do think that, as someone said, "As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew."

We don't know what will happen if this immigration influx is not stopped. But we might see for example, a new party. There's been quite a lot of speculation, among surprisingly Establishment pundits like Lyn Nofziger and Peggy Noonan, that the immigration issue will ultimately break the party system, as it did in the 1850s, and that a new party will arise.

What it form it would take—whether it would be an implicit white party or and explicitly white nationalist party—I don't know. But if it did become an explicitly white nationalist party it seems to me that would be a perfectly legitimate response to the immigration-driven ethnic shift and the rise of ethno-centric politics on the part of the minorities.

Maybe we'll see some geographic expression. Maybe we'll see secession movements. Maybe people will group together with states they feel affinities with, and disassociate from states that they don't feel affinity with. If current immigration policy continues, there are several states in the United States that are going to be as different from each other as any country in the world very soon , in terms of race and language and so on.

And the effect of nationalizing this current financial crisis is going to be tremendous tax transfers from the red states to the blue states. At some point, that's going to dawn on them.

Or maybe there is going to be some convulsive effort and the American nation will regain the territory that it was induced for some mysterious reason to surrender after 1965.

I'll paraphrase Winston Churchill here, at a similar moment in peril in Britain; I'm confident that, whereas I think America should have fought on the beaches, it will fight in the hills.

Now there are whole bunch of things that could be done to cut off this immigration problem. I'm not going to go through them right now because I can see Michael twitching. I am going to say, though, I want to end on a brief note:

As some of you may have heard, [fellow speaker University of Texas Law professor] Lino Graglia and I had a conversation this morning about impeaching federal judges. Lino was saying that the Supreme Court has become basically a political tribunal. Which is true!  When I was on the Hill, I worked for an LDS—a Mormon—Senator. I remember talking to one of the staffers who could remember the point at which the LDS decided that they were going to admit blacks to the priesthood, which was a very important question in the LDS church because most adult Mormon men are priests.

Anyway, it was announced and apparently the headline in the student paper at Brigham Young University was "God Speaks To Prophet: Blacks May Now Be Priests".

Now at least that's honest! That's honestly explaining what's going on. Whereas with the Supreme Court, they're pretending it's got something to do with the law. [Laughter]

I was saying earlier on that most people are not numerate. Equally, most people outside this room don't have this idea that the law doesn't exist—that it is complete fiction. They actually believe the law does exist. So it's news to them that the Supreme Court is making it all up as it goes along. And that's one reason why I think the impeachment process is important. It serves a role in public education.

Of course, I'm all in favor of limiting the court's jurisdictions and passing constitutional amendments and so on, as Professor Graglia was advocating. Diversity is strength! Let a hundred flowers bloom! Nevertheless, I think in the end we have to get this issue of impeachment of judges into the public debate.

It's true of course that impeachment on purely philosophical hasn't been successful in 200 years. But on the other hand, there hasn't been nation-breaking immigration in 200 years. We've never seen immigration like this.

One of the richnesses that diversity brings is that immigrants from the Old World will tell you that 200 years in the life of a nation is nothing.

And on that cheerful note I'm going to let Michael stop twitching and I'll shut up. Thank you. [Applause].

Peter Brimelow (email him) is editor of VDARE.COM and author of the much-denounced Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster, (Random House - 1995) and The Worm in the Apple (HarperCollins - 2003)