Alien Nation: Common Sense about America's Immigration Disaster

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. (Apr.)