Emotion At Reason

We regularly have                          to boot the writers at the Establishment Libertarian                          magazine Reason for being, well, unreasonable about immigration policy. We now seem to have graduated                          to Editor-in-Chief                         Nick Gillespie himself [e-mail himself].

Gillespie was                          recently                         touting yet another federal government scheme to                          subsidize immigrants, in this case illegals, at taxpayer                          expense—something which,                         absurdly, he claims libertarians ought to support.                          This is the so-called D.R.E.A.M. Act, a combination                          stealth amnesty and discounted tuition program.

D.R.E.A.M. has the                          support of all the usual nogoodniks and, Gillespie                          wrote, is

"…seen as enough of a                          threat to gin up an attack from the unabashed Heather                          Locklear fans over at the anti-immigrant site VDARE.com.                          (Peter Brimelow, the proprietor of the site named for                          the 'first' European born in Britain's American                          colonies,                         has written: 'If, through some miracle of genetic                          recombination, Virginia Dare is reborn in Ms. Locklear's                          beautiful face, [Dare's grandfather                          and colonial governor of Roanoke] John White might                          well have recognized her.") Juan Mann's piece on the                          legislation was cleverly titled 'Illegal                          Alien's D.R.E.A.M.—Patriot's Nightmare.'"

[Links in the original].

The quote, of course, is from our "Why                          VDARE.COM/ The White Doe?" essay, which we posted                          nearly four years ago. (Yes, I KNOW we have to update                          it.) The actress Heather Locklear is supposedly part-Lumbee                          Indian, the North Carolina tribe sometimes thought to be                          descended from the survivors of the Lost Colony.

I                          spend a lot of time thinking about the psychology of                          immigration enthusiasts. Gillespie here provides a case                          study.

Note the quotes around "first" in discussing                          Virginia Dare. Why? Simple. Gillespie can't read.

We actually referred to Virginia Dare as the "first                         English child to be born in the New World," and in fact she's usually                         referred to as the "first white child of English                          parents" born in                         America.

Perhaps Gillespie is hinting that the first "European" child should be                         Snorri Thorfinnson, born in "Vinland" somewhere around 1020. Or (more likely) Gillespie may be                          thinking of some Spanish colonial child, sired by                         Pizarro or                         Cabeza de Vaca.

But we said "English" for a reason: one of                          VDARE.COM's themes that the U.S. is not a "proposition nation" but an                         organic growth from a British root.

I                          presume Gillespie is distressed by Virginia Dare                          because, like libertarians other than our                          paleolibertarian friends over at                         LewRockwell.com, he is allergic to the notion that                          liberty is culturally specific.

But what's he got against Heather Locklear?

You can tell he thinks he's scoring some kind of point.

I suspect that,                          like the rest of what                         Steve Sailer has called the "Righteous Right," Gillespie is infected with                          the common liberal hysteria about race and "racism." So intense is this emotion (and so careless is his                          reading) that he flips out when he sees the word "genetic," although it's entirely unexceptionable.

Proof of this                          emerges in Gillespie's penultimate paragraph:

"One of the great                          shames of this country is that its immigration policies                          have often been at best arbitrary and more often                          explicitly racist, designed to keep out unfavored                          groups. That legacy is one of the reasons it is hard to                          get too bent out of shape over illegals: Among those of                          us who lay claim to, say, Italian heritage, who wouldn't                          have wanted our parents or grandparents to enter the                          country after such people were effectively barred from                          entering the country in the mid-1920s?"

At VDARE.COM, of course, we think that the                         cut-off of                          1921 and 1924, which ended the previous Great Wave of immigration,                          was not "racist" but nationalist legislation—aimed at                          preserving the American nation by stabilizing its                          shifting ethnic balance.

But Gillespie isn't even trying to make a rational                          argument about that. Instead, he is explicitly trying to                          stir up a desire for revenge—against who?—among those                          who may have been "effectively barred" back then.                          (Not absolutely barred, because immigrants were allowed                          in proportion to each group's presence in the American                          population.)

In fact, it is a matter of historical record that, with                          the exception of the Jewish organizations, immigrants                          were generally quite calm about the cut-off.

"I never heard                          anything about it at all," says our                         Joe Guzzardi, whose grandfather came from Sicily.

"Reason"?                          Let's change the rag's name to Emotion.

Peter                          Brimelow is Editor of   VDARE.COM and author of the much-denounced   Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration                          Disaster (1995).