Irwin Stelzer Sees The Light— A Decade Late
06/12/2009
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Hat tip, The Irish Savant, for drawing my attention to a recent column by Irwin Stelzer:

Irwin Steltzer is a self-confessed neoconservative, you know, those people who cornered the invade-the-world, invite-the-world market. Basically the neocons want us over there and them over here. Seltzer is also a key figure in organisations such as the Hudson Institute and the American Enterprise Institute
Irwin is also what the Nazis used to call a 'rootless cosmopolitan'. So the following from his piece in yesterday's Irish Independent comes as something of a shock.

"There are places in the UK, France, America and other countries where the existing inhabitants feel they have become strangers in a strange land. The dress is foreign and often scary, the native tongue is unheard of on the streets, the odours from the cooking of strange foods are off-putting, children are held back in school by immigrants who do not speak the nation's language, and the religions practiced vary from the merely exotic to the positively threatening.

Perhaps worst of all, this is of little concern to the ruling elites, who rarely live in the affected neighbourhoods, or venture into them. They are free to favour multiculturalism without enduring its consequences, and to ignore the fact that new immigrants, unlike previous waves, have no desire to integrate into a culture they often find abhorrent."

Couldn't have put it better myself, Irwin me old mate. Just a pity that you didn't start saying it years ago when you had such massive influence among our rulers.

Stelzer's piece does not seem to be online at the Irish Independent, but the U.K's Daily Telegraph has it, with the quite inaccurate headline Immigration is not an insolvable problem Telegraph.co.uk 09 June 2009

The Irish Savant is absolutely right that the column is something as a shock. Stelzer puts cultural concerns absolutely dead center in his analysis:

...the international movement of labour...creates three problems for the receiving nations. The first, and newest, is that among the immigrants are terrorists...The second is that native workers see the newcomers as competitors for jobs... The third is that the native population senses that its culture is under siege...It is the culture issue that is so intractable....The hardest part is to persuade the policy-making elites that insistence on assimilation, rather than continuation of the multicultural policies which make them feel so saintly and modern, will alleviate some of the opposition to immigration and cut into the mounting popularity of racist parties.

This is rich in irony for old VDARE.com hands. As Peter Brimelow remarked ten years ago:

I like Irwin Stelzer personally and he was warmly supportive when I first discussed immigration reform with him, in the early 90s. His violent reaction to Alien Nation was a shocking 180 degree turn. But his subsequent writings on the subject showed distinct signs of intelligence, and with the Commentary review discussed here ["Unwelcome Mat? Heaven's Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy by George J. Borjas." Review by Irwin M. Stelzer], he completed 360 degrees. Alas, he didn't like me pointing this out and seems to be rotating again, or at least palpitating wildly. The reasons for this probably require another book, but seem to include intense ethnic prejudice against WASPS. Tsk tsk.

My own view of Stelzer: Luke 13 verse 7.

(Not yet a Hate Crime!)

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