Indianapolis Star (Opinion by Ruben Navarrette): Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a fresh and increasingly important voice in the national political debate. His twice-weekly column offers new thinking on many of the major issues of the day, especially on thorny questions involving ethnicity and national origin. His column is syndicated worldwide by The Washington Post Writers Group.
You'll often hear that the immigration debate suffers from a lack of political will. But what it really needs is honesty and clarity.
And so, thank goodness for people like Peter Brimelow. His beliefs are vile, dangerous and antithetical to the greatest traditions of this country. But what is extremely helpful is that he's honest and clear about what he believes.
Brimelow is convinced that -- as he recently told a reporter for CBS News -- "diversity is weakening American identity."
He is not alone. A few years ago, commentator Patrick Buchanan published a book where he argued that the United States was better off when most of the immigrants to its shores came from Europe and not Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Question: What do immigrants from those parts of the world have in common? Answer: They're not white.
Brimelow shares his beliefs on the website he founded -- VDARE.com. The site is named in honor of Virginia Dare, the first child born to English settlers in America before all that dreadful race mixing and diluting of bloodlines occurred. He writes books like his best-seller "Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster." And he also gives speeches and appears on panels like the one in which he participated recently at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) titled: "The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the Pursuit of Diversity Is Weakening the American Identity."
We have words to describe people like this and most of them end in "-ist."
Most Americans are not as honest or as clear as Brimelow. They waste a lot of time and effort trying to keep up appearances and pretending to be more progressive and open-minded about immigration than they really are. They'll deny until their last breath that they have anything against immigrants who come to the United States legally from countries like China, Pakistan, India or Brazil. Why, this is a country of immigrants, they'll say. It's only illegal immigration they have a problem with, they'll insist.
That's not true. The three dirty little secrets about the immigration debate are that how Americans feel about immigrants has a lot to do with what country people are coming from, that racism and xenophobia are part of the equation and always have been, and that legal immigrants are as much of a target as their illegal brethren.
Powerful groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) or the Center for Immigration Studies advocate for limits on legal immigration, and they influence Congress. My congressman, Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-Calif., was once a lobbyist for FAIR. Little wonder that lawmakers occasionally call for a moratorium on legal immigration or that, in the 1996 welfare reform law, one group stripped of benefits was legal immigrants.
Still, Americans cling to the fantastical claim that they love and appreciate immigrants -- as long as those immigrants come legally. I blame the indoctrination that many of us went through in public schools. We were taught that the United States is a nation of immigrants, that we draw strength from our diversity, that we should cherish our cultural differences, and that people from all over the world come here for second chances and wind up building a first-rate nation.
As someone who grew up in Great Britain and came to the United States in the mid-1970s, Brimelow missed those lessons. An immigrant who is critical of immigration, he is described as a "white nationalist" by the Southern Poverty Law Center. According to the SPLC, the website that Brimelow founded and edits is a hate site.
I would imagine that the people who invite someone like Brimelow to address their group know exactly what to expect, and his remarks to CPAC did not disappoint.
According to CBS News' "Political Hotsheet," Brimelow said during the panel that immigration -- both legal and illegal -- was, along with multiculturalism, damaging America by creating a "Spanish-speaking underclass parallel to the African-American underclass." He described Hispanic immigrants as "completely dysfunctional" and declared the state of California as "rapidly turning into a Hispanic slum" that is "totally overrun by barrios of illegal immigrants."
Anyone else feel like they need a shower?
Let me honest and clear. My Mexican-American family has been in the United States for five generations. By comparison, Peter Brimelow has been here for five minutes. No wonder he doesn't understand the first thing about America and the values that make it great.
You'll often hear that the immigration debate suffers from a lack of political will. But what it really needs is honesty and clarity.
And so, thank goodness for people like Peter Brimelow. His beliefs are vile, dangerous and antithetical to the greatest traditions of this country. But what is extremely helpful is that he's honest and clear about what he believes.
Brimelow is convinced that -- as he recently told a reporter for CBS News -- "diversity is weakening American identity."
He is not alone. A few years ago, commentator Patrick Buchanan published a book where he argued that the United States was better off when most of the immigrants to its shores came from Europe and not Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Question: What do immigrants from those parts of the world have in common? Answer: They're not white.
Brimelow shares his beliefs on the website he founded -- VDARE.com. The site is named in honor of Virginia Dare, the first child born to English settlers in America before all that dreadful race mixing and diluting of bloodlines occurred. He writes books like his best-seller "Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster." And he also gives speeches and appears on panels like the one in which he participated recently at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) titled: "The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the Pursuit of Diversity Is Weakening the American Identity."
We have words to describe people like this and most of them end in "-ist."
Most Americans are not as honest or as clear as Brimelow. They waste a lot of time and effort trying to keep up appearances and pretending to be more progressive and open-minded about immigration than they really are. They'll deny until their last breath that they have anything against immigrants who come to the United States legally from countries like China, Pakistan, India or Brazil. Why, this is a country of immigrants, they'll say. It's only illegal immigration they have a problem with, they'll insist.
That's not true. The three dirty little secrets about the immigration debate are that how Americans feel about immigrants has a lot to do with what country people are coming from, that racism and xenophobia are part of the equation and always have been, and that legal immigrants are as much of a target as their illegal brethren.
Powerful groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) or the Center for Immigration Studies advocate for limits on legal immigration, and they influence Congress. My congressman, Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-Calif., was once a lobbyist for FAIR. Little wonder that lawmakers occasionally call for a moratorium on legal immigration or that, in the 1996 welfare reform law, one group stripped of benefits was legal immigrants.
Still, Americans cling to the fantastical claim that they love and appreciate immigrants -- as long as those immigrants come legally. I blame the indoctrination that many of us went through in public schools. We were taught that the United States is a nation of immigrants, that we draw strength from our diversity, that we should cherish our cultural differences, and that people from all over the world come here for second chances and wind up building a first-rate nation.
As someone who grew up in Great Britain and came to the United States in the mid-1970s, Brimelow missed those lessons. An immigrant who is critical of immigration, he is described as a "white nationalist" by the Southern Poverty Law Center. According to the SPLC, the website that Brimelow founded and edits is a hate site.
I would imagine that the people who invite someone like Brimelow to address their group know exactly what to expect, and his remarks to CPAC did not disappoint.
According to CBS News' "Political Hotsheet," Brimelow said during the panel that immigration -- both legal and illegal -- was, along with multiculturalism, damaging America by creating a "Spanish-speaking underclass parallel to the African-American underclass." He described Hispanic immigrants as "completely dysfunctional" and declared the state of California as "rapidly turning into a Hispanic slum" that is "totally overrun by barrios of illegal immigrants."
Anyone else feel like they need a shower?
Let me honest and clear. My Mexican-American family has been in the United States for five generations. By comparison, Peter Brimelow has been here for five minutes. No wonder he doesn't understand the first thing about America and the values that make it great.
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