Alien Nation; Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster

A provocative look at America's out-of-control immigration crisis argues that the United States should close its doors to immigrants, at least temporarily, in order to maintain economic preeminence, social harmony, and national identity. 35,000 first printing. $35,000 ad/promo. Tour.

Forbes senior editor Brimelow's alarmist, slashing anti-immigration manifesto is likely to stir debate. He maintains that the 1965 Immigration Act and its recent amplifications choked off immigration from northern and western Europe while selectively reopening U.S. borders to a huge influx of minorities from Third World countries. Many of these latter entrants are unskilled and require welfare support, and those who do work may adversely affect opportunities for poorer Americans, especially blacks, according to Brimelow. Because of multicultural programs, he charges, the new immigrants are not expected to assimilate, and thus they retain their separateness. Illegal immigration?two to three million entries a year?plus one million legal immigrants annually are causing, by his reckoning, an "ethnic revolution," because Asians, Hispanics, Middle Easterners and others shift America's balance away from the white majority, creating a strife-torn, multiracial society. Brimelow calls for an end to all illegal immigration, a drastic cutback in legal immigration, policies favoring skilled immigrants and elimination of all payments and free public education for illegals and their children.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

E pluribus unum no more? Like most other recent immigrants, former Englishman Brimelow thinks U.S. immigration policy badly needs reforming. Immigration is too high to begin with, he says, but also too many unskilled workers are coming, legally as well as illegally, as are too many persons whose ethnicities differ from the U.S. norm of predominantly European extractions. Brimelow maintains that besides the ill effects present immigration has on law enforcement, social service provision, public health, and the environment, it is undermining the sense of the U.S. as a nation. But we've always been "a nation of immigrants," you say? Brimelow documents that that is true only in that the American people, like the people of every other nation we know of, came from somewhere else. Moreover, throughout American history, immigration has occurred, not continuously, but in several waves that have alternated with long periods of assimilation--this is the pattern that built the nation and that the immigration tsunami touched off by the 1965 Immigration Act and complicated by the political resistance to assimilation known as multiculturalism has broken. The U.S. badly needs to drastically reduce immigration now, absorb the last 30 years' worth of new Americans, and rethink its immigration policies, Brimelow concludes, or it may dissolve into a bunch of smaller countries, in some of which democracy as we enjoy it will not survive. Writing in the magnetically readable, "sledgehammer" (his term) style of his principal employer, Forbes, Brimelow is sure to fuel the debates on U.S. immigration policy in the months ahead. Ray Olson

"Immigration has consequences," Brimelow (a Forbes senior editor and a contributor to the National Review) interjects repeatedly through this scattershot, argumentative tract against current immigration policy and practice. Claiming that the 1965 Immigration Act and later legislation in 1986 and 1990 have worsened a host of economic, political, and social problems in the United States, Brimelow cites supporters and critics alike of American immigration policy and his own interpretation of immigration statistics to disprove commonly held beliefs about immigrants' contributions to America, which he believes have been overemphasized. Brimelow argues that our environment is endangered, our public health threatened, our economy strained, our national unity diluted, and our politics fragmented?all by an immigration policy that is out of control and captive to a ruling "elite," which he associates with the liberal establishment and political correctness. Though Brimelow scores some points in his shrill attack, his highly politicized and provocative language?which often relies on ethnic stereotypes?makes this book a polemic guaranteed to rally the faithful and offend most others.?Jack Forman, Mesa Coll. Lib., San Diego
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.