Immigration & Racism Revisited

David Frum of National Review has written about his "conversion" on immigration. He used to favor a more liberal policy, but now he's become a restrictionist. Though I don't find the reasons for his change of heart compelling -- I think that rationalizing and liberalizing our immigration system go hand in hand -- I am heartened by his honest treatment of the many yahoos to be found in the anti-immigration fever swamps:

In the late 1980s, a group of self-described "paleoconservatives" had congealed around the magazine Chronicles. For them, the great issue was not incomes, but race. They mixed their ferocious hostility to immigration with savage denunciations of the civil-rights movement of the 1960s--and, for that matter, the Union cause in the 1860s.

The just-hatched Internet then started to sprout websites devoted entirely to the immigration issue. All too often, the immigration reformers decided to perceive no-enemies-to-the-racialist-right. They might be exclusionist at the borders of the nation; at their own port of entry, however, they lifted their lamp to welcome people who wanted to argue the intellectual inferiority of African Americans, or compared federal law-enforcement agents to the Gestapo, or insisted the Jews had brought the Holocaust upon themselves, or despised America's Spanish-speaking neighbors as inferiors and enemies, or dined with David Duke. Has ever a cause been worse served by its alleged advocates?

You'll recall that I wrote what was, I thought, a fair post on this subject a couple weeks ago, noting that the racists are to the restrictionist cause what the reconquista types are to pro-immigration groups -- a pox and a liability. But this observation generated some angry e-mail, in which readers complained that I was calling all restrictionists racists, which I explicitly did not.

It's nice to see a restrictionist admit the obvious: The movement needs to purge its own ranks -- for its own good and that of the country.