The UnREASONableness Of REASON's Nick Gillespie
01/26/2016
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Reason Magazines's editor-in-chief Nick Gillespie has a post mocking National Review (not that there's anything wrong with that), trying to make the point that NR is traditionally anti-immigrant, ignoring the famous purge of John O'Sullivan  and Peter Brimelow—see John O'Sullivan's Getting Immigration Right, American Conservative, July 30, 2007.

Gillespie writes

According to National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru, "a hard line" on immigration is not simply one issue among many but is now a "defining" issue for contemporary conservatism. At least going back to the 1990s, the magazine, despite being edited by an immigrant (the Brit John O'Sullivan) inveighed against immigration in article after article. Many of these were penned by another immigrant, Peter Brimelow, who would go on to start the odious racialist site VDare.com (I had trouble finding Brimelow's articles at National Review's site, but to get a sense of the arguments he published for the mag, read this Reason review of his book Alien Nation). [Emphasis added] 

Pity National Review & Conservatives, For Donald Trump Has "Stolen" Their IssuesWhen he's anti-immigrant, pushing a bellicose foreign policy, and insisting on American "greatness," Trump sure *sounds* conservative.

Nick Gillespie, Reason.com, January 25, 2016

While calling us the "the odious racialist site VDare.com" Gillespie [Email him] fails to link to us—or provide any proof for the epithets. Of course, the reason he had "trouble finding Brimelow's articles at National Review's site" is because they aren't there. They're here—see Peter Brimelow’s “Time To Rethink Immigration”—The Twenty Year Anniversary Edition, originally published in NR on June 22, 1992.

The Reason review Gillespie refers you to is Wretched Refuse, by John J. Miller,  June 1995. John J. Miller would go on to take his crazy immigration enthusiast schtick on to a career at ...National Review.  See Miller Watch (1): “Borderline…”, and Miller Watch (And Wait!) II: The Mop, The Faucet, And The Lunatic.

Referring to that Reason review, Peter Brimelow wrote:

Evading Alien Nation's thesis about the workings of the 1965 Immigration Act is unusually important for libertarian imigration enthusiasts—for example, it was also repressed by Alan Bock in the Orange County Register, Stephan Chapman in the Chicago Tribune and, needless to say, by John J. Miller in Reason magazine. Otherwise they would be forced to admit that this specific immigrant inflow is the result, not of a free market, but—aargh!—government intervention. Essentially, they are in the same position as the boosters of dams and supersonic airliners who conned an earlier generation of libertarians into thinking that these projects were the product of market processes rather than federal subsidies and log- rolling. But at least the dam-boosters were after a dishonest buck. What is the libertarian immigration enthusiasts' agenda?
I don't know—probably rampant sentimentalism. Anyhow, there's nothing surprising about this—Reason (motto: "Free Minds and Free Markets") has always been completely unreasonable on the subject of immigration.

See

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