Assimilating to the GOP PDF

The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal, Mark Krikorian, Sentinel, 304 pages

By Scott McConnell

No contemporary American political movement has had more difficulty finding an effective tone than the immigration-reform lobby. Its aim of slowing down the rate of immigration has long been supported by popular opinion, but it has never found majority elite support in either party. The eloquent arguments pushed by National Review in the early 1990s, particularly Peter Brimelow’s powerful brief for the American nation as a product of shared culture and ethnicity, were for the most part rejected or shunned by the conservative establishment, which on this issue did not even pretend to follow the impulses of its populist base.

Yet for those convinced that the United States needed a better immigration policy, Republican establishment rejection did not end the matter. A dozen years ago, when I first saw Mark Krikorian—then the new director of the Center for Immigration Studies—I thought he was the best possible voice for making the immigration-restriction argument persuasive to Americans. Young, wonkish, sufficiently ethnic in background and sensibility to be empathetic to the immigrant experience, highly intelligent with a firm grasp of all the policy detail deployed by both sides in the debate, Krikorian had an uncanny ability to normalize the issue, to dampen its emotive aspects and defuse the smear words (nativist, racist, etc.) that proponents of high immigration habitually threw at their opponents. The growth in influence of the Center for Immigration Studies under his leadership confirms this judgment. Especially striking is the headway Krikorian has made in courting influential Republicans: this book is blurbed by both David Frum and Bill Bennett. But history works in curious ways, and the embrace of immigration reform by the conservative establishment presents some difficulties of its own.

Krikorian’s excellent New Case Against Immigration is a lucid elaboration of arguments made by CIS during the past decade. What will strike many as new is his insistence that the trouble is not that immigrants aren’t as smart, industrious, or able to assimilate as the storied Ellis Islanders but that America has so changed as to put mass immigration in an entirely different context. Krikorian explicitly rejects the notion that the predominantly Mexican ethnicity of the new immigration is an issue, pointing out that America has always had an elastic definition of “whiteâ€