Publishers Weekly
- Publisher's Weekly
An "immigration mystique" purveyed since the pre-WWI era by politicians of both parties promotes high-sounding but flawed justifications for large-scale immigration to our shores, declares Williamson, senior editor of Chronicle (and formerly National Review's literary and senior editor). This mystique, he says, wrongly equates a generous immigration policy with displays of national moral worth and fosters an unrealistic dream of multicultural globalism based on the mistaken assumption that the U.S. has a special obligation to peoples of color in former European colonies of Asia and Africa. The conservative core of Williamson's argument is familiar: non-European and Third World immigrants bring with them "opposing values" from "proletarian and peasant cultures" that jeopardize the nation's dominant WASP culture, prevent us from consolidating a national identity and thus threaten "to condemn the United States to endless cultural adolescence." He further contends that mass, unskilled immigration displaces U.S. citizens from jobs, saps productivity and impedes technological advances. His polemic takes on liberals as well as conservatives who favor open borders. (July)
Library Journal
According to Williamson, a former editor of the National Review and the current editor of Chronicle: A Magazine of American Culture, there are two sides to the immigration issue: the restrictionist view (which he favors) and what he calls the "immigrationist" view (which he blames for dividing our country and diluting its heritage). Less jingoistic and more intellectualized than Peter Brimelow's Alien Nation (LJ 4/15/95), the present work attempts to show that our national identity, natural environment, and social unity have been irreparably damaged by liberalized immigration laws. Tracing U.S. history from Colonial times to the present, Williamson contends that contrary to popular opinion, some form of immigration restrictionism has almost always been accepted as a political necessity in the United States because of the need to maintain cultural unity and to control population growth. Argued in an inflated yet refined prose style similar to that of columnist George F. Will and liberally sprinkled with quotes from literature, history, politics, and philosophy, this opinionated analysis will bolster the critics of current U.S. immigration policy.Jack Forman, Mesa Coll. Lib., San Diego, Cal.
Booknews
Williamson, former editor for "National Review", looks at immigration from a moral standpoint rather than in economic terms, exploring the effects of immigration to the US on national identity, social and political order, and the environment, as well as the effects on immigrants themselves and their countries of origin. He challenges the contemporary religious defense of a generous immigration policy, and traces the growth of the propagandistic immigration mystique from colonial times to the present. No index. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
Gilbert Taylor
Despite the passion expended on the immigration issue, Williamson believes the debaters suffer from superficiality of thought: the sides think immigration's desirability or lack thereof depends on the economic impact of the newcomers. The author, editor of the conservative "Chronicles" magazine, seeks to inject a nationalist dimension and writes mostly approvingly of what earlier critics expressed about the waves of immigration they lived through, notably in the 1840s and 1900s. Unlike those earlier influxes, the current 30-year-long torrent of foreigners enters a zeitgeist of multiculturalism, which asserts a moral imperative extolling immigration as a means to create the "First Universal Nation", the title of immigration enthusiast Ben Wattenburg's 1991 book. The problem, Williamson insists, is that the founders "never intended to fabricate an ideologically-charged universalist dynamo," such as the one set in motion by the 1965 Immigration Act. Implicitly, Williamson champions the America-first, nativist viewpoint, heartening or infuriating depending on the proclivities of the reader, who is likely to have also sampled the anti-immigration blast "Alien Nation" by Peter Brimelow .
