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.

Sixty years on, the attitude of Londoners towards Americans is radically different [bold mine-DL].  After September 11, 2001, the U.S. Embassy building in Grosvenor Square was supplied with large concrete barriers and bollards to ward off a car or truck bomb. Armed policemen patrol day and night and unsuccessful efforts were made to turn some streets into no-entry zones. ~Carol Gould

The first time I read this, I thought, “That makes no sense, I must have missed something.  How does that show anything about the attitude of Londoners?”  Then I read it again and I realised that the Standard had outdone itself when it comes to fits of crazy anti-European rhetoric.  Even Clive Davis finds it a bit odd.

The problem here, of course, is that all U.S. embassies around the world experienced massive increases in security in the wake of the largest terrorist attack in American history.  Why might that have happened?  Could it be that the government was not so much concerned about unruly yobbish mobs blowing up the front gate as they were concerned to avoid repeats of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam?  No, it’s obviously the evil-minded Londoners who wanted to ram bomb-laden trucks into the side of the building.  (Of course, there were and still are potential terrorists in Britain, but they are not exactly, shall we say, West Enders.  Ms. Gould could talk about the Britons who actually do hate America, but that could get dicey and involve all sorts of deviations from the party line.) 

The next bit of the article is not much better, blaming neighbours of the embassy for being concerned that their neighbourhood might enjoy the sort of explosive attentions the IRA paid to the financial center of London in 1993.  These people have probably overreacted and embarrassed themselves, but it is not difficult to understand why the residents of Mayfair don’t want a prime potential terrorist target literally in their frontyard.  It is, after all, their country and their neighbourhood.  If The Weekly Standard doesn’t like it, they can go cry to their best friend Tony, for whom probably large proportions of the Mayfair protesters voted in the last general.  Frankly, it’s easy to belittle people in central London from the bowels of the AEI building, and if there are British citizens who have hardly distinguished themselves with stoicism and hardy endurance there isn’t much tolerance at the Standard and similar vehicles for anything resembling independence of thought by Europeans.

Take the next item: complaining about opposition to an American trying to buy Arsenal.  First of all, any sensible person knows that you don’t want to buy Arsenal, for goodness’ sakes–you would want to buy a respectable team.  (I will be now be deluged with death threats.)  If the people who own Arsenal don’t want to sell a controlling stake to an American, that seems to me to be a legitimate business decision.  Having endured the delights of foreign oligarchs from Russia buying up football teams, it might be that football owners and fans have had quite enough of making their national sport into a field for foreign venture capitalism.  If Canadians or Brits tried to buy an NFL franchise or, an even more serious threat to national pride, a NASCAR team, the American sports media would raise holy hell over it and every conservative would throw a fit about how “those people” don’t know anything about our football.  This has the virtue of being true.  As for the whining about too many stairs and no A/C in the Tube–suck it up!

The last time I was in Britain, which was admittedly eight years ago now, I was shocked at how accommodating and Americanised people had become.  People in London were short-tempered and rude, as almost all big city people are, but most Britons were decent, pleasant people who gave us no grief.  Yes, this was pre-9/11, pre-Bush, pre-Iraq, but what stunned me was that the once unforgiveable crime of putting ice in tea had become a commonplace thing.  In spite of what they must have regarded as an evil importation of bad taste, the British have accepted iced tea and now do not stare at you uncomprehendingly when you request it.  I don’t know whether it is actually progress–some might take it as proof that Britain really has gone down the drain–but it seems bizarre to regard the British today as being more anti-American than many of them were at the height of the CND days.  The main examples Ms. Gould uses are examples where Britons are reacting against symbols of American wealth and power, which always put people on edge in every corner of the world when they are wielded by foreigners in your own country.  It may not be terribly edifying, but there is nothing strange about it, nor is it necessarily representative of seem broader shift in British attitudes.  They are not turning against Americans or America as such, and therein lies all the difference in the world.

Tomorrow I will be at the major medievalist conference of the year at Western Michigan University.  I will be talking about…monotheletism, of course, and monothelete ideas of deification.  I think they had some, which may come as a surprise to some people who don’t think of the monotheletes as having many ideas at all.

What Republicans stood for in the past was a sober realism about the limits of our power and our good intentions. That spirit is absent today. They act as though slogans are a substitute for strategy. What they claim as steadfast resolve looks more like blind obstinacy. ~Steve Chapman

It may be obvious, but it bears saying.  Today, Republicans are to warfare what Democrats traditionally have been to welfare.  Both insist that we must be willing to “sacrifice” and “pay any price” for the sake of higher ideals, but in both cases the ones insisting on all the sacrifice and paying very rarely have to do either.  Republicans have an attitude towards the lives of Americans that Democratic redistributionists have for the property of Americans: it is always worth it if someone else gives up his, provided that the goals of the policy are being pursued.

The ads he has come up with are not a bad way to convey his “experience,” but a larger problem he may have is what happens when his rivals begin paying attention to him and pointing out all of the failures that occurred on his watch in his various posts.  His tenure as Secretary of Energy is the most damaging and the most well-known, so why exactly does he think it is a good idea to remind people that he was in charge of the department during one of its worst security/espionage scandals?  For that matter, what did he accomplish as U.N. Ambassador?  What did he accomplish in Congress besides the usual pork spending?  He has some minor successes as governor (he banned cockfighting, after all), but even here he doesn’t actually have that much to run on.  Yes, he cut income tax rates, and we New Mexicans appreciate that, but that is literally the only thing he has done that most New Mexicans can recall him doing that does not involve gladhanding with Richard Branson, blowing huge sums on the Spaceport or wasting our money on a worthless train to Raton.  No offense to the good folks of Raton, but who wants to go to Raton?  More to the point, if you want to go, drive there, for goodness’ sake!

And few Democrats questioned whether the al-Qaida-affiliated terrorist group Ansar al-Islam was in Kurdistan. ~Victor Davis Hanson

Perhaps few people questioned this, regardless of their partisan affiliation.  Perhaps more should have challenged the easy association of Ansar al-Islam and Zarqawi with Al Qaeda c. 2002-03, but no matter.  More certainly should have questioned whether their presence in a part of Iraq that Hussein did not control (and which we could have attacked with impunity anyway) was a legitimate justification for invading the rest of Iraq, where Ansar al-Islam clearly was not.

Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe returned to Bogota this week in a state of shock. His three-day visit to Capitol Hill in Washington to win over Democrats in Congress was described by one American supporter as “catastrophic.” Colombian sources said Uribe was stunned by the ferocity of his Democratic opponents, and Vice President Francisco Santos publicly talked about cutting U.S.-Colombian ties. ~Robert Novak

There might have been less blunt ways of beginning to scupper a nasty bit of interventionist foreign policy in Latin America (Plan Colombia), but I’ll take what I can get in this case.  Mr. Novak laments the loss of an “important ally,” but for what end is Bogota an “important ally”?  To pursue the bankrupt, undesirable and, oh yes, unconstitutional drug war in Colombia.  Those who want to see interventionist foreign policy weakened, there could hardy have been a better outcome.

Tony Blair’s leadership of the Labour Party concludes on 10 May.  The people rejoice!

Via The Debatable Land

Rosa Brooks (she of the Obama-is-the-Messiah school) and Will Wilkinson talk about reproduction, yielding this priceless line from Wilkinson (which I am obviously taking out of context):

“You can replace immigrants with robots.”

The more serious point is that Wilkinson is not terribly concerned by the demise of this or that culture.  Okay, so we have established again that many libertarians are not concerned about cultural identity, but we knew that already.  The reason why potential demographic collapse in the West seems worrisome to non-libertarians (a.k.a., 98% of the population) is that the demise of our culture does worry us if for no other reason than that it is ours and that we want to impart it to the more than 2.1 children we are having in our desire to avoid “deplorable solipsism.”

Of course, it’s true that cultures come to an end.  It’s true that cultures change.  However, cultures seek to reproduce themselves, and the way that they do this is through the convictions of those who bear this culture that it is worth preserving and passing on to the next generation (which rather assumes that there will be a next generation to which one can pass the cultural inheritance to).  It seems to me that the habits of perpetuating cultural traditions and teaching them to the next generation on the assumption that your culture actually has some value and is worth keeping for its own sake, quite apart from any happiness it gives you, are so deeply engrained, indeed so normal and widespread throughout every traditional society, that it is difficult to regard with equanimity a rather blase and indifferent reaction to the death of our own culture.

Bill Richardson has campaign commercials (via Yglesias) that don’t make me feel physically ill and which are also fairly funny.  I say this as someone who thinks he would make an appalling disaster of a President and who has voted against him twice in gubernatorial elections.  I stand by my completely mad prediction that he will be the Democratic nominee come next spring.