The New Republic's review of All-American Nativism, by Daniel Denvir [Tweet him | Email him] ("A searing critique of the big big business nativists dictating our immigration policy—and the moderate Democrats that put them in power") includes attacks on Peter Brimelow, whose seminal 1995 book Alien Nation received a review in the Atlantic, and Roy Beck, who wrote The Ordeal Of Immigration In Wausau, which also appeared in the Atlantic in April 1994.
A theme of Daniel Denvir’s book All-American Nativism is the role that liberal political journals have played in giving cover to deeply reactionary ideas. In the 1990s, The Atlantic published a long and sympathetic review of the book Alien Nation by Peter Brimelow. While he was not yet the far-right webmaster he would become—his site VDARE today tags articles with the label “Immigrant Mass Murder”—Brimelow argued in his book that white Americans have a “legitimate interest in their country’s racial balance” and that the balance should be tilted back to a whiter era. Statements like that made the reviewer uncomfortable, but he ultimately praised the book as “powerful” and “painfully honest.”
Another article published around the same time in the same magazine was a report from former journalist Roy Beck on a small Wisconsin town struggling to resettle Hmong refugees. While soberly reported, the story was darkly framed as “a possible American future” if immigration laws remained the same, where pregnancies in junior high among new arrivals were common and the small town’s new inscrutable foreign neighbors were said to act as a drain on the public treasury.
How Democrats Let the Right Win on Immigration A new book traces the ways liberals have enabled nativism and xenophobia for decades, by Alex Amend, April 28, 2020
The reason we call this a point-and-sputter attack is that author Amend [Tweet him] makes no attempt to show that Hmong immigration wasn't bad for Wausau, that Hmong don't have lots and lots of teenage pregnancies, and that they weren't a drag on the public treasury.
They're also, of course, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, and gang members—and have committed several of the crimes we tag "Immigrant Mass Murder".
As for the "drain on the public treasury", page immigration enthusiast Sanford Ungar, whose 1995 book Fresh Blood: The New American Immigrants, was reviewed in the pre-purge National Review in 1996, where Brimelow wrote
...Mr. Ungar does find Hmong who tell him flatly that they have congregated in Minnesota because of its generous welfare benefits, timing both marriage and divorce to exploit the rules. Several of the successful immigrants he cites are themselves employed by welfare agencies, sometimes specifically to deal with problems caused by their immigrant countrymen. Ungar's admiring account of how home-grown American social activists fought to facilitate the settling of Cambodian refugees in Revere, Massachusetts, is a litany of tax moneys extorted and spent, ending with his editorial complaint that "tax-limiting voter initiatives passed in the 1980s restrict the city council's ability to raise new funds to pay for the necessary programs." The result, Mr. Ungar reports without a qualm, is a filthy slum, racial violence, and warring Asian gangs.
So to recap, everything that Peter Brimelow wrote in Alien Nation and Roy Beck published in the Atlantic is true. Everything we say about Immigrant Mass Murder (and the general awfulness of Hmong immigration) is true.
But Denvir and the New Republic either don't know that, or think it's wrong that we're allowed to say it. They certainly have made no attempt to refute it.
