Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [45]
So when Chavez wrote in her column that “some people just don’t like Mexicans—or anyone else from south of the border,” she wasn’t identifying a new phenomenon in American policy debates. She could point to well over 250 years of New World nativism to buttress her argument. Put another way, if race and ethnicity weren’t factors in the most recent immigration fight, it might well be the first time in U.S. history that that was the case. Chavez’s column continued, “They think Latinos are freeloaders and welfare cheats who are too lazy to learn English. They think Latinos have too many babies, and that Latino kids will dumb down our schools. They think Latinos are dirty, diseased, indolent, and more prone to criminal behavior. They think Latinos are just too different from us ever to become real Americans. ” Chavez said that a minority of the American public held these views, but among them were a “fair number of Republican members of Congress, almost all influential conservative talk radio hosts, some cable news anchors—most prominently, Lou Dobbs—and a handful of public policy ‘experts’ at organizations such as the Center for Immigration Studies, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA, in addition to fringe groups like The Minutemen.”
National Review was not among those named by Chavez, though it fit the profile. The magazine and its Web site have thundered against immigration on “cultural” grounds for years via writers such as David Frum, John O’Sullivan, Mark Krikorian, John Derbyshire, Peter Brimelow, and Samuel Francis. Frum, O’Sullivan, Derbyshire, and Brimelow, are themselves beneficiaries of our open border policies but want to construct walls around their adopted homeland and raise the drawbridge. National Review has also run political cartoons that demean Latinos, like the one that appeared in its July 9, 2007, issue. It shows a woman standing next to a man who has just erected a large billboard on the Mexican border that reads SHIRT AND SHOES REQUIRED. The man then turns, hammer in hand, to the woman and says, “This way, maybe we’ll get a better class of illegal alien.”
When the Chavez column appeared, National Review editors had a fit. Contributing editor Mark Levin called the piece “malignant” and “shameful.” He said it was Chavez— not radio personalities like Laura Ingraham, television personalities like Lou Dobbs, and politicians like Tom Tancredo—who had “reduce[d] this debate to the most base level.” Levin said, “This issue isn’t about any particular race or group of people, and any honest observer knows it.” Another contributing editor, John Derbyshire, who proudly calls himself a “racist” and a “homophobe,” defended Dobbs’s nightly rants against Mexican immigrants. The CNN anchor is married to a woman “of Mexican ancestry,” noted Derbyshire, and ipso facto incapable of anti-Hispanic bias. I’m sure some of Derbyshire’s best friends are black homosexuals.
Senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru went furthest of all, willfully distorting Chavez’s central argument by claiming that she thinks “anyone who disagrees with her about immigration policy is a racist.” And in a display of remarkable self-regard, even for Ponnuru, he called on conservatives everywhere to disassociate themselves from Chavez, melodramatically declaring, “I will never trust her judgment again.”
To its credit the magazine’s Web site invited Chavez to expand on her original column, and she used the opportunity to focus on the commentary of Heather Mac Donald in particular. Mac Donald is a highly respected journalist based at the Manhattan Institute who has written extensively on Hispanic culture and the grave danger it poses, in her view, to the future of America’s Anglo-Protestant social fabric. Over the years, she has written thoughtfully and persuasively on any number of topics, but when she turns her attention to Latino immigration her commentaries