Immigrants and Immigration - Roy Beck's The Case Against Immigration

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Roy Beck's The Case Against Immigration

One of the more remarkable aspects of the continuing debate over

American immigration policy is that the nation's liberal elites seem,

ever so gradually, to be finally catching up with the people. For years

opinion polls have shown that a large majority of the American people,

of all political persuasions and all ethnic backgrounds, want less

immigration. Yet year after year immigrants continue to flood across

our borders as "opinion molders," elected officials, business

executives, and professional eggheads insist that mass immigration is

really beneficial and its dangers are much exaggerated by "nativists"

and "racists."

Only in the last couple of years have a few books been published

that dissent from that view, and the appearance of these books,

published by major New York houses, suggests that the elites are

finally beginning to grasp what uncontrolled immigration means for the

people and the country they rule. What began as a popular protest

against elite policies and preferences has now started influencing the

elites themselves, even if the elites still like to imagine that they

thought of it first.

Roy Beck's *The Case Against Immigration* is the most recent

example of a book published by a major publisher that challenges the

conventional wisdom about immigration (Peter Brimelow's *Alien Nation,*

published last year, was the first), and although Beck has been

actively engaged in the movement to restrict immigration for some

years, he has done so as a card-carrying liberal. A former newspaperman

in Washington, DC who has been deeply involved in the social activism

of the Methodist Church, Beck has seen firsthand what immigration means

for ordinary Americans, not only underclass blacks but also middle and

working class whites. His book is an exhaustive documentation of the

evil consequences that immigration is causing for these groups as well

as for the nation as a whole.

Beck's liberalism, however, is by no means of the polemical or

partisan variety, and the impression that his book gives is that he is

a man deeply and genuinely concerned about the injustices endured by

the real victims of immigration. He avoids most of the cultural

arguments against immigration that conservatives tend to use, his main

concern focusing instead on the economic effects of immigration on

workers and on the social consequences for those Americans whose jobs

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