The piece in question, in which Buchanan blames the Virginia Tech shootings on the Korean hordes who have entered the country in the past few decades, is a good example of why it’s so lonely over here on the moderate-restrictionist side of the immigration debate – because all the other restrictionists seem determined to take every chance they get to act like, well, the liberal caricature of an immigration opponent. ~Ross Douthat

Three points.  First, it’s lonely on the moderate restrictionist side because most people who start out as moderate restrictionists very quickly find themselves under assault from open borders fanatics who think that anyone to their right on immigration is a racist and aren’t afraid to say as much–therefore the moderate restrictionists sooner or later either cave into this blackmail or they eventually come into the Brimelovian camp to one degree or another.  Second, Mr. Buchanan’s target of choice in this case was perhaps not as well chosen as it probably should have been (since, as Steve Sailer of TAC and VDare, Koreans are a group with a very low rate of committing murder, which makes Cho Seung-Hui an even more freakish aberration from the norm than he would already have been).  The use of spectacular and extraordinary cases to vindicate general principles is usually a bad idea.  Pro-lifers who wanted to make or break the right to life on the Terri Schiavo case have learned, I hope, that they tended to make a mockery of what is generally a powerful, sacred truth.  Restrictionists can likewise take to excess the entirely legitimate public policy position that mass immigration increases crime generally and violent crime in particular, but this should be understood as an abuse of a legitimate argument, not as some sort of transparently absurd tub-thumping (such as, it seems to me, Ross and Reihan seem to making Mr. Buchanan’s article out to be).  Third, the very nature of the immigration “debate” in this country is such that if restrictionists cannot make the issue into a dire one of national security and public order it is virtually impossible to persuade large numbers of people to reject the dreadful nonsense they are routinely fed about this being a “nation of immigrants,” that importing cheap labour is good for the economy and the structure of our society and the idea that the failure to integrate millions of culturally alien people into our society is a recipe for success and happiness for all concerned.  Moderate restrictionist approaches, because they tend towards the incrementalist, the procedural and the technical, have something to recommend them (they tend to be better grounds for forging broad-based legislative compromises, for instance), but they leave the rhetorical field wide open to the abuses of open borders zealots who are allowed to contest the field almost unopposed because all “reasonable” people have agreed that more rigorous restrictionist views are not really admissible.  This sets up all restrictionists, moderate and rigorous, for ultimate defeat. 

In other words, unless restrictionists of any kind (moderate or rigorist) cast the isssue as one of letting into the country foreigners who threaten you (and also make it sound much more frightening than it really is) nobody much cares, because most people aren’t thinking about long-term demographic, cultural or socioeconomic consequences of cheap labour today.  There are rooves to be repaired and gardens to be tended, so don’t tell them about the damage being done to the wages of native-born labour or the creation of an exploited underclass.  (Hundreds of small towns take similarly short-sighted approaches to “development,” selling their birthright for a Super Wal-Mart, but that is another story.)  The main way to get the attention of the mass democratic public is, unfortunately, to shock them with the threat of immediate danger.  I suppose this is why so many Republicans engage in hyperbolic rhetoric when talking about the threat from jihadis–if the danger is not overhyped and magnified beyond all reason, virtually no one will take it seriously.  This is probably why liberal activists are constantly in ‘crisis’ mode, because they learned a long time ago that people in this country don’t even blink unless someone mentions that there is a ‘crisis’ in such-and-such an area.  This is also probably why some environmentalists tend to verge on the hysterical, since their policy recommendations would otherwise be so completely unpopular that they have to overcompensate by making their issue seem like one of life or death for the entire planet. 

If restrictionists do cast the issue in this more alarmist way (i.e., in the only way that will make the issue politically meaningful to most people), they are declared hopelessly marginal and extreme–usually by moderate restrictionists who want to make it clear that they favour limitations on immigration, but they are not like those wacky VDare people.  When casting the issue this way is also much more accurate (viz. Resendez Ramirez and, indeed, the prison population of the border states), moderate restrictionists will still tend to shy away from it because it smacks of, well, taking the issue of restricting immigration a little too seriously.  Many moderate restrictionists seem to take the view that, yes, on balance there should be some control over the borders and reform of the immigration system with an eye towards limiting levels of immigrants into the country, but when it comes right down to it they do not believe it to be either terribly urgent or crucial.  It is one policy issue in a raft of others and you can ultimately take it or leave it. 

More rigorous restrictionists obviously take it much more seriously, which sometimes leads them to make excessive statements about the wrong cases, even though such statements might be only too appropriate in other cases.  The episode of the Hmong hunter who went on a shooting spree in Minnesota, while technically an isolated incident, did highlight the problems the Hmong have assimilating into American society after coming from Laos (something to bear in mind before  we start welcoming in boatloads of Iraqis fleeing the nightmare of their ruined country), and the recent case of Muslim immigrants plotting (crudely and amateurishly) to attack a military base in New Jersey suggests that the kind of argument Mr. Buchanan was making is a valid and necessary one, albeit one that missed its mark in this particular case.