Legal Immigration Is Bad: We Can Stop It
In 2007, neoconservative John Podhoretz, now the editor of Commentary magazine, and a man who supports mass immigration, even if it’s illegal immigration, threw something of fit in the pages of National Review magazine when Mark Krikorian, head of the Center For Immigration Studies wrote that “Immigration Is Incompatible With a Modern Society” (which it is, and Krikorian has written a whole book on it).
Podhoretz’s post, in National Review’s collegial group blog The Corner, is still up, although it’s the last one he posted because he’s not a man who does “collegial” very well.
“Immigration Is Incompatible With a Modern Society”
So sayeth Mark Krikorian. Thank you, Mark. You have written honest words. And this is where I came in. Nearly four years ago, speaking out in modest support for the original Bush proposal on immigration, I was hammered by John Derbyshire and others for not understanding the profound difference between LEGAL IMMIGRATION (good) and ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION (bad). Now it seems we are to view immigration — all immigration — as incompatible with a modern society. So why didn’t you immigration restrictionists just say so in the first place, instead of hiding behind the word “illegal”? Why didn’t you then acknowledge your problem wasn’t with law-breaking at all but rather with the fact that any people are coming in? Could it be that you knew then it was an extremist view that only had support on the fringe, but that there would be real strength behind using the illegality of illegal immigration to rally people to your cause? And that now, with real movement in your direction ideologically, you now feel freer to advocate openly what you have always hinted at but have never quite said so blatantly?
October 18, 2007
This is not only offensive, it’s stupid. Krikorian pointed out that he’d been talking about legal immigration for years, Podhoretz just hadn’t been listening. (He’s not a good listener.)
But it’s also self-refuting. Every country, has after all, the right to control its own immigration and decide what immigrants it wants.
Peter Brimelow didn’t write Illegal Alien Nation, he wrote Alien Nation, Krikorian isn’t head of the Center For Illegal Immigration Studies, but the Center For Immigration Studies. Legal immigration is the part of immigration that can be easily controlled. But Podhoretz, who is technically a prominent public intellectual, had never heard that many normal people wanted a reduction in legal immigration.
There are generally two kinds of immigration:
A: Immigration of poor people from poor countries, who if they get jobs at all (refugees often don’t) do unskilled labor and displace native minorities. They’re a net loss for America—they consume more than they produce.
B: Skilled and entrepreneurial immigrants, sometimes from the same poor countries, but the upper classes thereof, who, as I’ve said, displace a better class of people.
Hanania’s Plea For “High-Skilled” Immigration Would Simply Displace A Better Class Of Americans
Richard Hanania, who Wikipedia describes as an “American political science researcher and right-wing online personality” has written a Substack apologia for the importation of high-skilled, high IQ, “ambitious” immigrants that he likes to refer to as “Elite Human Capital:”
These people pay more in taxes than they consume in government subsidies, so they’re not a net financial loss for America—but they do displace Americans who might be filling their roles in America.
Some of the worst immigrant-sending countries send their people to America legally.
Haitian, Hmong, Somali (and other Africans), and Muslim immigrants (who have increased greatly since 9/11) are mostly legal immigrants and/or refugees.
Haitian Immigration Would Be Bad, Actually, Even If They Were Vegans
If you read Peter Brimelow’s Alien Nation, you’ll find that Haitian immigration was a problem even in the 90s, when then-President Bill Clinton was “forced to order the interception of boats carrying would-be illegal immigrants from Haiti on the high seas” because of America’s “inability to expel asylum seekers” [
This is a picture of the two Muslims who did a mass shooting, killing 14 people, at a Christmas party in San Bernardino in 2015.
The man pictured, Syed Rizwan Farook, was born in America—the woman, Tashfeen Malik, was a legal immigrant.
Illegal immigrants take American workers’ jobs, but so do H-1B immigrants. Do you think an American tech worker being forced to train his replacement feels better because said replacement is legal.
Pink Slips at Disney. But First, Training Foreign Replacements, By Julia Preston, NYT, June 3, 2015.
Many immigrant criminals (rapists, murderers, robbers and gang members) are also from legal immigrant cohorts, not only Somali and Hmong refugees, but legal Hispanic immigrants.
The Pew Research Center estimated “that in 2023, the vast majority of U.S. Latino adults (82%) had full legal status as U.S.-born citizens (54%), immigrants with naturalized citizenship (15%) or lawful immigrants without citizenship (13%).” Only 18% were illegals. And many immigrant gangsters are either legal or second-generation immigrants.
When he was running for President in 2015, Donald Trump posted an immigration plan that included restrictions and reforms of the legal immigration system. [PDF]
Here’s a sample:
Decades of disastrous trade deals and immigration policies have destroyed our middle class. Today, nearly 40% of black teenagers are unemployed. Nearly 30% of Hispanic teenagers are unemployed. For black Americans without high school diplomas, the bottom has fallen out: more than 70% were employed in 1960, compared to less than 40% in 2000. Across the economy, the percentage of adults in the labor force has collapsed to a level not experienced in generations. As CBS news wrote in a piece entitled “America’s incredible shrinking middle class”: “If the middle-class is the economic backbone of America, then the country is developing osteoporosis.”
The influx of foreign workers holds down salaries, keeps unemployment high, and makes it difficult for poor and working class Americans – including immigrants themselves and their children – to earn a middle class wage. Nearly half of all immigrants and their US-born children currently live in or near poverty, including more than 60 percent of Hispanic immigrants. Every year, we voluntarily admit another 2 million new immigrants, guest workers, refugees, and dependents, growing our existing all-time historic record population of 42 million immigrants. We need to control the admission of new low-earning workers in order to: help wages grow, get teenagers back to work, aid minorities’ rise into the middle class, help schools and communities falling behind, and to ensure our immigrant members of the national family become part of the American dream.
Additionally, we need to stop giving legal immigrant visas to people bent on causing us harm. From the 9/11 hijackers, to the Boston Bombers, and many others, our immigration system is being used to attack us. The President of the immigration caseworkers union declared in a statement on ISIS: “We’ve become the visa clearinghouse for the world.”
At the time that plan was announced—it wasn’t carried through in the first term due to external and internal sabotage to the Administration—Noah Rothman posted an article in Commentary Magazine (edited by John Podhoretz, above) titled “Trump’s War on Legal Immigration a Tipping Point for the GOP”. [August 16, 2015]
At the time I said that was true—but not the way he thinks.
20 years ago I spoke to an immigration restrictionist named Bob Park, a former Border Patrolman, who as young man had taken part in Operation Wetback in 1954.
Hispanic Mass Immigration and Remigration
At White Papers, our core premise is that Western nations deserve to protect their sovereignty, their political institutions, and their founding demography, and to build a future free from interference by alien cultures or hostile elites. The reality is that the nations of the West are at risk. The peoples native to Europe and…
He pointed out that to do mass deportations, Eisenhower hadn’t needed to pass any new laws. Trump’s ICE deportations also don’t require new laws—illegal immigration is already illegal.
Reducing LEGAL immigration may require new laws, including a possible immigration moratorium. The PAUSE Act is the most important piece of legislation currently in Congress to this end. To cut down further, we at White Papers proposed the Immigration Quota Act of 2026. (And to reverse immigration, we proposed the Remigration Act of 2025). However, the current Administration can make a start by just not issuing visas, and see how that works.
James Fulford has been writing about the national question for over 20 years, mostly for VDARE.com, more recently for White Papers. Subscribe to his personal Substack here.
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