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Immigration and Bad Social Policies Don't Mix; A White Ethnic Core

Immigration and Bad Social Policies Don't Mix; A White Ethnic Core
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June 27, 1995, Section A, Page 16Buy Reprints
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To the Editor:

Ira Glasser, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, in a personal attack on me (letter, June 16) seconded by A. M. Rosenthal (column, June 20), purports to prove his charge of racism through selected quotations from my book "Alien Nation: Common Sense about America's Immigration Disaster."

Cardinal Richelieu claimed that he could find something to hang the most honest man in six lines written by him.

But despite the best efforts of Mr. Glasser, the 16 quotations he has carefully winnowed and arranged have this unfortunate characteristic:

They are all entirely true.

For example, it is a fact that the American nation has always had a specific, white, ethnic core.

It is a fact that the 1965 immigration law dramatically skewed immigration toward the third world.

It is a fact that public policy is now making the United States a multiracial society.

It is a fact that there is no precedent for a sovereign country undergoing such a rapid and radical transformation of its ethnic character.

And it is a fact that race is destiny in American politics, in the entirely empirical sense that here, unlike Europe, political allegiances are generally determined by ethnicity, not class.

Mr. Glasser and Mr. Rosenthal make no attempt to deny these facts. They simply decree that any mention of them is anathema.

This is an extraordinary attitude to truth, which must be rejected by anyone concerned with honest public debate.

It is also a fact that my little son, Alexander, has blue eyes and blond hair.

I mention this only once ina book of 275 pages, but both Mr. Glasser and Mr. Rosenthal are sufficiently outraged to highlight it in, respectively, a letter of 425 words and a column that is shorter than it seems.

The passion he has innocently provoked is an example of the blind hysteria that for 30 years has made impossible the rational discussion of America's out-of-control immigration policy. PETER BRIMELOW New York, June 21, 1995 The writer is a senior editor at Forbes magazine.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 16 of the National edition with the headline: Immigration and Bad Social Policies Don't Mix; A White Ethnic Core. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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