This is the second issue of The Social Contract to be devoted entirely to material originally posted in the webzine VDARE.COM, the first being TSC’s Winter 2006–2007 issue. I am once again most grateful to TSC’s publisher, Dr. John Tanton, and to its editors for giving, in Shakespeare’s words, “to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name.”
Peter Brimelow
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Of course, I don’t at all think the Internet is an “airy nothing,” although I do recognize that many people still find tree-based journalism comforting and somehow more real. I think, in fact, that the Internet is the most important development since the invention of writing, and that it will have equally profound effects on human society. Two quick examples: I regret that in this volume we cannot reproduce our “hyperlinks”—in effect footnotes, which if you click on them take you to supporting articles both on VDARE.COM and elsewhere. These exponentially enhance an argument’s credibility—and also our traffic, as we can tell from our internal tracking data. I also note that several VDARE.COM writers represented in this collection originally made themselves known to me by e-mail, thereafter rapidly coalescing to form the VDARE.COM e-community. (One of the Internet’s revelations, to a gnarled professional journalist like myself, is just how much writing talent there is out there among educated Americans who have not gone through the political filtering that occurs in the Mainstream Media.)
And it couldn’t happen a moment too soon. It is now absolutely clear that common sense in the immigration debate is not going to triumph through the conventional process of debate in the established Mainstream Media, academe, or politics. Indeed, there is still essentially no debate at all on immigration and related topics—as Steve Sailer’s account, republished here, of the lynching of the eminent scientist James D. Watson makes clear. Political correctness is no mere figure of speech, but an active totalitarian force. Further frightening evidence, also republished here, is Athena Kerry’s reflections on her experiences as a student in a Jesuit university.
For me, the saddest lines in this collection are at the end of my own long interview with Harvard Professor George Borjas. Despite his own great intellectual triumph in establishing that the economic utility of immigration is much exaggerated, and that in fact there is no economic rationale for the current mass influx, Borjas tells me that he discourages his graduate students from studying immigration: “I don’t think it would do them much good.”
Earlier, explaining why no work is done on the question of what, in theory, is the optimum number of immigrants, he laughs and says: “There’s an academic’s career to think of. You have to worry about getting tenure…”
George Borjas is remarkably cheerful about all this. But he began his career in Communist Cuba. For those of us who thought we lived in a free society, experience of the immigration debate is bitter.
Nevertheless, there are reasons for cheer. I argue elsewhere in this collection that the business community may not prove the immovable obstacle to immigration reform that it appears to be. And Steve Sailer recounts the greatest triumph for patriotic immigration reformers to date: stopping the 2007 Bush Amnesty bill. The truth, and the Internet, shall set us free. ■