Gideon,

I don't think I shall get anywhere arguing scriptural interpretation with you. Are Jews at large driven by the calculating ethnocentrism described by Kevin MacDonald? Or by the universalist humanism you profess? Something of both, would be my best guess, the mix being different under different circumstances and at different degrees of religious intensity. My strong impression of the Haredim, for instance, is that they don't give a fig about Gentiles and would not subscribe to your moral universalism. On the other hand, a lot of secular Jews I know are idealists like yourself, whose idealism embraces Gentiles too.

In any case, I gather you don't agree with my suggestion that for Jews, the issue we are discussing—where should Jews stand on immigration?—really comes down to: Good For The Jews? or: Good For America? You seem to think our organizing principle should be: Good For Everybody In The Whole World!

That is so preposterous I can't even summon up any admiration for the high idealism that must underlie such a position. I actually prefer the ethnocentrism Kevin MacDonald imputes to your people. At least it is recognizably human. Perhaps you are familiar with Pascal's wise observation that while man is neither angel nor beast, he who would act the angel acts the beast.

While I am with you in wishing to see "a considered, rational approach to the immigration problem," it was not "a small group of pontificators" who derailed the recent Senate bill by "lathering up their base." Do you really regard ordinary Americans with such contempt? Do you really think that they can be "lathered up" to oppose something that a small group wants them to oppose?

The recent Senate bill was derailed by great masses of ordinary citizens overwhelming their representatives with mail, email, phone calls and faxes because they were outraged at the shoddy dishonesty of the bill's contents, and were inclined to believe that the 1986 experience, when the government promised us strict enforcement in return for amnesty, then delivered the amnesty but not the enforcement, would be repeated. This was not an army of brainless automata "lathered up" into action by some small, sinister clique of manipulators. It was popular democracy at work, and a proud moment for freedom and the rule of law in these United States.

Nor is it true that "a majority of Americans actually want comprehensive immigration reform that includes a realistic path to citizenship for those already here." It took me less than two minutes on Google to locate a poll, by a respectable market-reasearch firm, showing 68 percent of respondents favoring deportation as an answer to illegal immigration.

I don't myself believe that "America needs more people to keep our economy running smoothly." That the Chairman of the Federal Reserve says this is so, does not make it so. Even a Fed Chairman can be mistaken. There was very nearly no immigration at all into the U.S.A. from 1945 to 1965, yet the economy boomed as never before. How did that happen? A national economy is a very flexible and ingenious thing, certainly able to cope with shortages, of labor or anything else, by means other than immigration. It might raise wages, or automate, or outsource. Indeed, many economists tell us that automation, and technological advance in general, is retarded by a large supply of cheap manual labor. I am not an economist, but this seems plausible to me.

"The role of immigrants in our economy is ... a well-established plus." Is it? Does that include both legal and illegal immigrants? Both high- and low-skilled immigrants? Is your "well-established plus" net of the costs of educating immigrants' children, supplying health care to immigrants who cannot afford it, incarcerating immigrants who commit crimes, and defending ourselves against immigrants like the nineteen who committed the 9/11 atrocities? In any case, even if this were true in some general sense, it would not get us very far with the questions I thought we had agreed were central: How many immigrants? With what skills and education levels? From where?

The various names and studies you cite as claiming to have proved that immigration increases our prosperity can easily be countered by others who claim the opposite thing. I named George Borjas and Robert Rector in my previous post. But again, even if I were to concede this point, which I do not, some issues would be left dangling. For all I, or you, know, the American people at large might be willing to sacrifice that claimed 0.1 percentage point in GDP growth if they could be relieved of the social, cultural, political, and fiscal problems arising from mass immigration. I personally would certainly be so willing. Man does not live by bread alone... Speaking of which, what happened to your ringing declaration, five paragraphs earlier, that: "The Torah is a unique attempt to create a nation governed not by pursuit of power or the accumulation of wealth but by recognition of the worth of each person as the image of God"? If the accumulation of wealth is not, according to the Torah (which "We Jews take ... very seriously") a governing principle, why are you bringing it forward to justify your views on immigration?

I think you are quite right to say we "can't predict who's going to make the greatest contributions." I certainly wouldn't depend for accurate predictions on those functionaries in the immigration bureaucracy who, in practice, end up as the decision-makers.

But what follows from this truth? In a situation where you can't accurately predict, you have no choice but to "go with the percentages." In this case that means preferring some groups over others. Groups who have thrown up great numbers of entrepreneurs, generated plenty of jobs and helped increase our national prosperity, or who have enriched our cultural and intellectual lives—groups like, oh, say, the Ashkenazi Jews—should be given preference over groups whose members are more inclined to vegetate in low-skill employment or welfare dependency.

Don't you agree? Or, if you don't agree, what would be your prescription for increasing the probability that our selection of immigrants (remember, we have already agreed that selection is unavoidable) will be optimal for our nation? What, actually would be your criteria for selection, Gideon?

You say, correctly, that I want more diversity in our immigration. You then say: "this point makes no sense." You then go on to argue that your program "would promote diversity and fairness." Why do you want to promote something that makes no sense? I am afraid I did not follow the logic of this paragraph. I also object to your assertion that "people migrate to neighboring places." No, they don't. I didn't; neither (I am pretty sure) did your ancestors. People migrate to places that (a) offer them a better life than the one they currently have, and (b) permit them to come in and settle. Migration flows are not governed by irresistible laws of nature. They can be—and, among sensible nations, always have been—controlled by borders, visa procedures, and laws.

I am sorry to have "astounded" you with my caution towards persons claiming to be fleeing persecution. However, a generous attitude to such persons will result in massive fraud. As an illustration, I point you to Britain, where the phrase "asylum seeker" is now a synonym for "illegal immigrant." I can guarantee that an open-hearted program such as you favor will provide, for every genuine refugee from real persecution, at least ten, and more likely a hundred, persons who are taking advantage of your generosity. Many of them will be, almost by definition, people of criminal or amoral character.

I do not want these people. I don't think I am a callous person—I am pretty sure than no-one who knows me would describe me so—but I am not generous towards strangers with things I own that are precious to me, that I have struggled and sweated to acquire. If the stranger has a hard-luck story I may do him the courtesy of listening to it; but the world, you know, is full of hard-luck stories.

Of course we can deport 12 million people if we want to. (And according to at least some polls—see above—we do want to.) Our nation has, by acts of collective will, done far more difficult things than that. If sensible policies were implemented, great numbers of illegal immigrants would anyway self-deport.

I am not clear why Auschwitz came to your mind. We are speaking of deporting people back to their home countries. Are you supposing that those home countries would gas the returning deportees and incinerate their corpses? Why on earth would you suppose that? My own opinion of the government of (for example) Mexico is pretty low, but not that low. As to families of mixed status being "ripped apart," again I'm afraid I don't quite follow. Are you suggesting that, in a case where one family member is legally resident and another is not, we should deport the illegal resident while forcibly preventing the legally-resident member from accompanying them? That is certainly not something I would favor, and I don't see how it could lawfully be done. Our government has no power to prevent persons from leaving our territory, unless they are guilty of some crime.

I am flattered and pleased by your kind remarks about my accomplishments since coming to the U.S.A. They seem to me, honestly, to be very slight. Again, though, this is individualist stuff. Any given person might make great contributions after settling in the U.S.A. Unfortunately, as I said before, this is not a thing that we—certainly not our overworked and ill-paid immigration officials—can predict on an individual basis. We can only "go with the percentages."

I have ended up as a writer of (I hope) modestly useful books and (I hope) mildly entertaining commentary. I might, for all anyone knew when I first entered the U.S.A., have ended up as an axe murderer doing 25-to-life in some state correctional facility. Who can tell? As I said in a previous post, the individualistic approach, though highly congenial to the national temperament, and appealing to the universal human interest in the life particulars of other human beings, does not get us very far with policy-making, which must primarily be based on statistics, modified slightly, and very cautiously, around the edges to take account of some few particular and exceptional cases.

You conclude with further expressions of regret that this year's Senate immigration bill was "shot down" by a "vocal minority." This account of the bill's fate is not true, though. See here and any number of other places. The U.S. public at large was hotly opposed to that bill, the more so the more they learned about it. The principal reason for such widespread opposition was that the bill promised amnesty in return for enforcement; and the American public has been given that promise before, and remembers that it was flagrantly broken. Fool us once, shame on you; fool us twice, shame on us.

I, at any rate, am not ashamed of what happened to that wretched, deplorable, and dishonest bill. To the contrary: I should be proud and glad to think that I contributed in some small way to the slaying of that dreadful monstrosity, that gross and impertinent fraud on the citizens and lawful residents—Jew and Gentile alike—of the United States.

Next: Jewish immigration activists looked out for Jewish interests. So what?

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From: John Derbyshire
To: Gideon Aronoff
Subject: Pardon my goyish skepticism, but...

Gideon,

Every statement of immigration restrictionism should begin with the observation that British restrictionist Enoch Powell took pains to include in all his speeches on the topic: Numbers are of the essence. This seems to be especially difficult for us Americans, with our individualist ethos, to grasp. The settlement of one (or ten, or a hundred) people from Algeria, Bangladesh, or Chile is of no consequence to America's future. The settlement of ten million is of mighty consequence. An individualist approach to immigration issues, while occasionally illuminating, does not scale up well.

After many exchanges of this kind, to-ing and fro-ing with advocates of lax immigration policies, I have come to the conclusion thaA Patriot. And Numerate, Too.: Enoch Powell understood that, with immigration, "numbers are of the essence."t the real gulf in immigration talk is not between conservative and liberal, cruel and kind, nativist and xenophile, or practical and sentimental. It is between those who are keen to discuss numbers and those who, for whatever reason, are unwilling to do so.

Your response (which, if you don't mind my saying so, is not really a response, more a mission statement) to my first post illustrates this truth in several places. Your second paragraph, for example, has this:

Today, we are witnessing a striking parallel to our own Jewish American history, as Latin Americans, Asians and others clamber to get into America like we did...

I'm afraid I don't see the parallel at all.

If, as I insist, numbers are of the essence, then we should scrutinize the numbers in the two cases. In 1900 there were about 11.2 million Jews in the world. About 9.0 million were in Europe; about 5.2 million in the Russian Empire (which at that point included Poland). The population of the U.S.A. in 1900 was 76.2 million. The worldwide pool of Jews from which the "great wave" came therefore represented about fifteen percent of the receiving population. The actual pool so far as the main sending countries were concerned was a tad more than half that— let us be generous and say ten percent. (And let us note that both figures are slightly inflated by the fact of substantial Jewish immigration 1881-1900.)

Now to your "parallel." Leaving aside "others" (I am determined to be generous to your argument!) your Latin American and Asian total—depending on precise definitions, and again I am trying to be generous to you, taking only the 1999 figures—is about 5,780 million. Dividing by the current population of the U.S.A. (estimated at 301.1 million) I get a sending-pool to receiving-population ratio of 1,920 percent.

Fifteen percent... ten percent... 1,920 percent... Forgive me, Gideon, but I don't quite see your "parallel"—though I'll admit that the numbers are indeed "striking."

Just so with all your other assertions, when I try to reduce them to numbers. You say, for example, that: "American immigrants founded or co-founded some of the world's most prominent tech companies, among them Intel, Sun Microsystems, eBay, Yahoo! and Google."

Well, let's see. Wikipedia lists a total of eleven people as founders of those five companies. Of the eleven, five are foreign-born: one each from Germany, India, France, Taiwan, and Russia. If you want to slice the cake a bit thinner, you can note that the French-born entrepreneur (Pierre Omidyar) is of Iranian parentage, while the Russian one (sergey Brin) is Jewish.

A cautious conclusion one might draw is that our immigration policy ought preferentially to admit more Germans, Indians, French-Iranians, Taiwanese, and Russian Jews. Further thought suggests that if (as is apparently the case), you, Gideon, want U.S. immigration policy to have, as one of its aims, the growth of imaginative entrepreneurship in our country, we ought to carry out a close numerical analysis of entrepreneurship by country of origin, education level, religious affiliation, and so on. Depending on what that tells us, we could then adjust our immigration policy to favor the most entrepreneurial groups.

Such studies have in fact been done. Here is one (though a bit out of date, I'm afraid—a more current one might throw the argument in your favor...) from the Center for Immigration Studies. Sample quotes:

...The difference between Middle Eastern immigrants who have a self-employment rate of 28.2 percent, the highest of any region, and the self-employment rate of 4.8 for Central Americans, the lowest of any region, is extremely large. By region of origin, immigrants from Europe, the Middle East, and Canada ... have self-employment rates that are four or more percentage points higher than those of natives. In contrast, immigrants from Mexico ... and Central America have self-employment rates that are more than four percentage points lower.

Koreans, Cubans, Canadians, and immigrants from the United Kingdom have the highest self-employment rates, while immigrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the Philippines have the lowest rates of self-employment. There is also significant variation within regions. For example, Cuban immigrants are much more entrepreneurial than Haitian or Dominican immigrants, even though they are all from the Caribbean.

Age and education ... do not account for all of the differences between immigrant groups. For example, 27.5 percent of college-educated Middle Eastern immigrants between the ages of 35-44 are self-employed. In contrast, college-educated Mexican immigrants in the same age group have a self-employment rate of only 10.5 percent. Thus, much of the difference between the two groups remains even after controlling for these two factors.

It is clear that current immigration policy does not produce a flow of immigrants that fundamentally alters the overall level of entrepreneurship in the United States.

Under a perfectly open immigration policy, several hundred millions, perhaps two or three billions, of people would come to settle in the U.S.A. This prospect is absolutely unacceptable to the American people. (Trust me on this one, Gideon.) It follows inescapably that U.S. immigration policy must perforce be selective. We must—we must—say to this one: "Yes, you may come and settle in our country." We must say to that one: "No, you may not come to settle in our country." We—we, the people, the citizens of America, not the Wall Street Journal editorial board, nor Gideon Aronoff, nor John Derbyshire—we Americans must decide, by consensus, how many immigrants we want, from where, with what skills and education.

If we shirk this decision, as in fact we have, we shall just get great numbers of people from nearby poor countries, with a weighting towards those willing to break American laws. Hence our huge population of Mexicans and Central Americans, unknown numbers of them present here in defiance of our laws. The 2000 census showed—see Table 2 here—Mexico running away with the percentage of our foreign-born population, at 29.5 percent. Number two, China (including Taiwan and Hong Kong) was far behind at 4.9 percent. France and Russia do not even appear in the top ten. El Salvador sends us more people than Germany. Perhaps, Gideon, you can point me to a high-tech company founded by a Salvadoran immigrant?

Since, as I have noted above, U.S. immigration policy cannot help but be selective, we really ought to give some thought to the selection criteria. Why such colossal favoritism towards Mexicans, for example? Mexico is not even a particularly poor country. Of the 179 nations listed here by per capita annual GDP, Mexico ranks No. 54 with $8,066. El Salvador is No. 98 with $2,619. Good grief: 47 countries—count 'em, 47!—have per capita GDP less than one-tenth of Mexico's. What about the struggling people of Cambodia ($503), Madagascar ($299) and Burundi ($119)? Around five billion people worldwide are poorer than the average Mexican. Are you not outraged, Gideon, that these unfortunates have such vanishingly small representation among our foreign-born population? Where's that famous Jewish compassion?

Having exceeded my word count, I can offer only sketchy responses to your other points—though if you would like me to expand on anything, please say so, and I shall.

To your invocations of the Torah and Talmud, I am afraid I must respond with goyish skepticism. The one thing that is plain to even the most casual inquirer into Judaism is that it is an exclusivist religion. What, otherwise, does the phrase "chosen people" mean? Many commentators fluent in the relevant languages and studies (this commentator, for example) tell us that "stranger" in these texts means "Jewish stranger." Some of these commentators tell us that the extension to Gentiles is a result of the Enlightenment liberalization of classical Judaism; some, that it is a well-intentioned but ignorant misapplication of the texts; some, that it is part of the conscious deception Jews engage in when presenting themselves to Gentiles. I am not competent to judge which, if any, of these commentators is correct. I must tell you, though, that if you want to confront the Kevin MacDonalds of the world, you had better be ready with responses to points of this kind. "The Torah says..." will pass with a general audience. With a skeptical—not even necessarily antisemitic—audience, you will have to do better.

The rest of your questions:

"How generous should we be to people who are fleeing persecution?" Not very, would be my answer. (1) It is in the nature of persecuting regimes that actual evidence of persecution is hard to come by, so there will be many bogus refugees. (2) The U.S. government should place the interests of U.S. citizens before all other considerations. Some people are persecuted for excellent reasons. The fanatical (and fanatically antisemitic) Muslim Brotherhood is savagely persecuted in Egypt and other Arab countries. Will you be generous to them? (3) Where persecution is the norm in a country, that country needs major reform. The only people who can carry out such reform are the people of that country. As Dr. Johnson observed, sometimes martyrdom is the only test of truth.

"If we practically can’t deport 12 million people..." Your premise is false. Not only can it be done, it has been costed. The National Policy Institute will email you Ed Rubinstein's report, whose conclusion is that: "No matter how high the costs of deporting illegal aliens may seem, the costs of not deporting them are larger still." (Ed actually computed the cost at "between $41 billion and $46 billion annually over five years." That's about the cost of 92 Space Shuttle launches a year.) The Eisenhower administration deported, or caused to self-deport, several hundred thousand illegal aliens in a few months, and it didn't even make newspaper headlines.

"What policies best serve to promote the integration of newcomers?" Well, some diversity would help. One of the most troubling aspects of our immigrant numbers in recent years has been the decline in diversity.

"Since we can't accept everyone in the world, what are the criteria for a controlled, liberal immigration system?" Aha! Why don't we ask the American people? But I am very glad to know that we are in at least general agreement on this central point: Numbers are of the Essence.

NEXT: The Torah, the Talmud, and the Undocumented Worker

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John Derbyshire is a columnist for the National Review, a critic of mass immigration into the US, and has publicly described himself as Jewcy's "shabbos goy." Gideon Aronoff is the head of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the zeyde of all Jewish-American immigration orgs. In this installment of Jewcy's Big Question series, they square off on the question, "Where should Jews stand on immigration?"

From: John Derbyshire
To: Gideon Aronoff
Subject: An astonishing pattern

Gideon,

I hate to act the Philadelphia lawyer here, but my attention got snagged right away on that word "should."* Where should Jews stand on immigration?

"Should" implies either some desired goal (If you want to ace that interview you should get your hair cut) or moral obligation (You should be patient with veMake it Stop: Does fear of antisemitism explain Jewish attachment to liberal immigration policy?ry old people). Which "should" are we looking at here? I shall try to tackle both.

Goal-wise, the starting point for discussion is our old pal Kevin MacDonald—to be exact, Chapter 7 of his book The Culture of Critique. The chapter heading is "Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy." Kevin gives a very full account (the chapter, with its notes, is 59 pages long in my 1998 hardback edition) of Jewish efforts, from the late 19th century on, to shape U.S. immigration policy in what American Jews perceived to be their group interests. In a nutshell:

• Fear of antisemitism was the main force driving Jewish activism on immigration issues.
• Jewish activists perceived a strong group interest for Jews in making U.S. society as ethnically heterogeneous as possible. To be the lone identifiable ethnic minority in an otherwise homogeneous society would, they believed, be to invite antisemitism.
• Destroying the WASP hegemony—or, later, the white-European-Christian hegemony—was a key goal. MacDonald: "[T]he historical record supports the proposition that making the United States into a multicultural society has been a major Jewish goal beginning in the nineteenth century." [p. 260]
• There was a contradiction (MacDonald says an insincerity) at the heart of this program, in that while the propaganda for more immigration stressed the harmonious blending of many ethnicities into a "proposition nation," many of the propagandists—MacDonald cites Israel Zangwill as an example—were themselves ardently ethnocentric, opposed to (for instance) Jew-Gentile intermarriage.
• "[T]he rejection of national interest as an element of U.S. immigration policy" was "a hallmark of the Jewish approach to immigration," says MacDonald [p. 288] Again: "Reflecting the long Jewish opposition to the idea that immigration policy should be in the national interest, the economic welfare of American citizens was viewed as irrelevant..." [p. 292]

Thus MacDonald. Is he right? Certainly the extraordinarily tenacious attachment of American Jews to liberal immigration policies calls for some explanation, and social commentators aren't exactly vying with each other to provide one. Faute de mieux, I think MacDonald's explanation is a pretty good one. I would qualify it with two points:

• Practically all of that chapter deals with the period 1881-1965. The subsequent 42 years have seen much dilution—assimilation, in fact!—of Jewish identity in the U.S. As Yuri Slezkine notes in his book The Jewish Century: "In 1940, the rate of outmarriage for American Jews was about 3 percent; by 1990, it had exceeded 50 percent."
• In MacDonald's view, there is never anything of idealism or selfless charity in anything Jews do. All is Machiavellian group self-interest. He convinces me that group self-interest is indeed in play, but there is more to human beings than that. The Jews one actually knows seem to be moved at least in part by genuine idealism.

It remains the case that the generality of American Jews, certainly among the commentariat, are very hostile to immigration restriction. They believe that wellnigh unrestricted immigration from absolutely everywhere is ... is what? Good For The Jews? That would be MacDonald's interpretation. My own impression, talking to these people, is that they actually believe it is good for the U.S.A. Indeed, given that most of present-day immigration is of either (a) Muslims, who are antisemitic almost to a man, or (b) Latin Americans, which is to say, people from countries where antisemitism is more common, and more frank, than it ever was in the U.S.A. (where do they think all the old Nazis retired to?)—given that, the persistence of extravagant pro-immigration sentiment among American Jews today is rather astonishing. Perhaps the only explanation can be that Jews have so thoroughly internalized the Good For America justification that it overrides the understanding—which they must surely possess—that it is Bad For The Jews.

And it should be said, of course, that there are now numerous exceptions to all the above—many American Jews, including some prominent and activist ones, who are off the old reservation on immigration issues—Stephen Steinlight, for example.

So: If the "shoulAmerican Mosaic: Will the country be improved by floods of new immigrants?d" in our title implies a goal, and the question mark invites us to offer suggestions for attaining that goal, we need to know what the goal is. MacDonald would say that the goal is Jewish group self-interest, best attained by making Jews just one minority in a nation of minorities, a multiculturalist bouillabaisse, arrived at via unrestricted mass immigration from everywhere. I myself would be more charitable. For many Jews, I believe, the goal is a better U.S.A. Some, apparently really believing the catch-phrases about "diversity," "vibrancy," "nation of immigrants," and so on, truly think that the country will be improved by floods of immigrants from everywhere. Others, like Dr. Steinlight (I wonder what motives MacDonald would ascribe to him?) disagree.

So much for a goal-directed "should." What about a moral-obligation "should"? All matters of interest, Jewish-group or other, aside, what is the right stand to take, the good and moral stand?

As a conservative, I would say that the right stand, for Jews or any other Americans, is the one that conserves. That is to say, it is the one that best keeps intact our national values, our national coherence, and our national interests.

It is simply not true that our national values have always included openness to immigration from everywhere. Until the 1965 Act—which is to say, for 82 percent of our nation's history—they never did so. (And even that Act included quotas on immigration from Latin America.)

How it improves our national coherence to import an entire new racial minority, doubling our opportunities for racial discord, is mysterious to me. (And if you don't think Hispanics are a race, you had better go argue with them about it. Their main lobbying organization is called National Council of The Race).

Our national interests, like those of any other nation, center on peace, prosperity, and domestic tranquillity. On the last of those three, I have made my opinion plain. I think that "diversity" is a bust, and that we should solve the race problem we have—have always had—before introducing another one. On peace there is little to say. A nation as powerful and remote as the U.S.A. has not much to fear in the way of existential threats. Since the entire Muslim world is currently hostile to us, and inclined to express its hostility in acts of civil terror, I do think it is foolish of us to permit Muslims to settle in our country, and I think I would think this more intensely if I were Jewish. The prosperity issue is one where we can have real debate. Does unrestricted mass immigration from everywhere make us richer? I myself am persuaded by the arguments of, for example, George Borjas and Robert Rector that it does not, but I acknowledge that there are some cogent arguments on the other side.

In summary: If "should" implies means to an end, it depends on the end: Good For The Jews, or Good For America? If "should" calls on a moral obligation, then as a conservative, I would say that the obligation is to conserve those qualities that made us a good, strong, just, and prosperous nation, and not to endanger those qualities by embarking on dramatic demographic adventures.

* This post has been modified since publication.

NEXT: Let's Roast Some Old Chestnuts

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From: John Derbyshire
To: Joey Kurtzman
Subject: I wish a Jew had written these books

You bet. Though since I broke the bank previously, and am thereby presumably the cause of our moderator bringing down the guillotine, I’ll keep it short.

On empathy for immigrants: yours is not a sufficient explanation. Why haven’t the Irish, or the Italians, been as prominent in fighting immigration restriction as the Jews? MacDonald argues (with bags of documentation) that opposition to the early-20th-century restrictionist movement, which eventually led to the 1924 Immigration Act and quota, was almost entirely Jewish. You might argue that Jews are better at organizing and agitating in causes like this, but then you are just walking into MacDonald’s trap.

You also owe me an explanation of why current immigration-restrictionists are not Daughters of the American Revolution, or hillbilly descendants of 18th-century Scotch-Irish settlers, but people like Mark Krikorian (third-generation Armenian American), Peter Brimelow (immigrant from Britain), Michelle Malkin (daughter of immigrants from Philippines), and so on.

On MacDonald’s picking on the Jews: Well, his excuse is that the Jews provide an exceptionally data-rich set for the kind of study he wanted to undertake. That ought to be convincing. If I decided to embark on an inquiry into human groups’ ability to execute “group evolutionary strategies” across centuries, the Jews would be ideal. Of course, we are not convinced, for the reasons I have mentioned: MacDonald’s disinclination to say anything at all nice about the Jews, as well as his rather (it seems to me) unscholarly language in speaking about “manipulation” of Gentile culture by Jewish intellectuals, and so on.

I find myself wishing very much that someone Jewish had done the kind of study MacDonald did. I agree with you that it was worth doing; I agree that the results are often interesting and often true; I just wish it hadn’t been this guy who wrote Culture of Critique.

On the deracination of young Jews: Slezkine, in his book The Jewish Century (which I wish we had more space to discuss) gives his opinion that following the last influx of Jews (i.e. from the USSR in the years around 1980), the Jews of the U.S.A. are settling down as just another American ethnicity, with an increasingly feeble group identification and high rates of exogamy. (He gives the rate of out-marriage as 3 percent in 1940, 50 percent in 1990.)

Slezkine also makes much of the fact that we goyim are all becoming Jews: “learning how to cultivate people and symbols, not fields or herds… pursuing wealth for the sake of learning, learning for the sake of wealth, and both wealth and learning for their own sake…replacing inherited privilege with acquired prestige, and dismantling social estates for the benefits of individuals, nuclear families, and book-reading tribes (nations).” He quotes Levenson: “A Jewish style of life may be more endangered when everyone eats bagels than when Jews eat hot cross buns.”

All this sounds right to me; so while MacDonald has, I believe, uncovered some interesting truths about twentieth century American culture, I am not sure he has anything to tell us about the future.

Did MacDonald demonstrate that the group evolutionary strategy of the Jews had negative consequences for American intellectual culture? In Culture of Critique I believe he did. One of the most corrosive influences on 20th-century American life has been the collapse of group confidence among white Gentiles.

“These [Jewish-inspired and -led] movements have called into question the fundamental moral, political, and economic foundations of Western society,” says MacDonald in Critique. I think that’s putting it a bit too strongly; but yes, the Frankfurt School, the New York Intellectuals, the Boasian anthropologists, did manage to convince white-Gentile America that there was something deeply wrong with it. That is not to mention the number of lives that must have been wrecked by Freudian superstition, and the unpleasant future consequences that will flow (I believe) from decades of well-nigh unrestrained Third World immigration.

I do think we’d have been better off without all that. You have to put something in the other side of the balance, though: the wonderful vitality of American popular culture, which had a huge Jewish component, the war-winning, disease-curing, and life-improving developments in the theoretical sciences that had so many Jews among their originators. History is all swings and roundabouts. Net-net, would the U.S.A. have been worse off, or better off, without the Great Wave Jewish immigrants? It seems indisputable to me that we would have been worse off. MacDonald would disagree.

Finally, I endorse your call to Jews, and anyone else with an inquiring mind, to give MacDonald a try. I don’t think he is going to go down in history as one of the giants of social science, but he does have some interesting things to say, and he doesn’t give a fig about PC—always refreshing, in this rather stifled day and age. Still, I wish these books had been written by someone else.

JD

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