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I really should stop taking The Economist. It’s expensive ($138 for a one-year subscription); the weaknesses noted by Andrew Sullivan in his hit piece on the magazine 13 years ago (“has shown a remarkable capacity over the past couple of years to be demonstrably wrong,” etc., etc.) [Not so groovy The Guardian, June 14, 1999, TNR version here] are still very much in evidence; the job ads run about ten to one government and globalist do-gooders versus private firms; and the artwork is bizarre and cryptic.

And then there’s the Open-Borders cheerleading, of which Economist readers are getting a megadose in the current (June 30th) issue.

The center of this issue is given over to one of the magazine’s Special Reports, [PDF] in this case a 16-pager on London, entitled On a high, timed to appear between Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee in early June and the opening of the Summer Olympics in late July. (The Economist rarely admits that it is written by humans, no doubt to preserve its aura of Olympian omniscience, but there’s a discreet reference to this Report’s author: Emma Duncan [Email her].)

The Special Report has a 2½-page introduction, then comes the first topical heading: “Immigrants . . . Growth has brought foreigners, and foreigners have brought growth.”

There follows a parade of Open-Borders clichés longer than the Lord Mayor’s Procession. “London was invented by foreigners,” The Economist tells us, referring to the Romans. Regrettably, Queen Boudicca, “an early opponent of immigration,” burned down the Roman’s first settlement. [Immigrants in London: Hello, World]

What the good queen was actually opposing was invasion and occupation. I wish I could be sure The Economist knows this and is just being whimsical.

And on, and on.

All this [i.e. recent mass immigration] has changed London utterly. It has created a new elite: foreigners, or recently naturalized Britons, dominate the best neighborhoods and the best schools . . .

Fourth of July irony: A university named after James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution” (who also thought blacks should have been freed and expelled from the United States) hires a president, Jonathan Alger, who thinks the Constitution permits excluding your white son from a college in favor of less qualified minorities to achieve “diversity.” His term began July 1.

And another irony: The board of visitors that hired Alger, formerly senior vice president and general counsel at Rutgers University, is peppered with Republicans—such as Susan Allen, wife of the former senator from and governor of Virginia, George Allen. “Mr. Macaca” is now running against leftist Democrat Tim Kaine to replace Sen. Jim Webb.

Reportedly the board voted unanimously for Alger. Maybe Mrs. Allen thought she could expiate her husband’s sin. But probably the school’s visitors were just clueless.

Not that they shouldn’t have expected a man of the Left. The recruiting company that found Alger is a “women-owned executive search firm with a

A chat with Thomas Sowell (1998)

Happy Birthday Thomas Sowell!

Peter Brimelow writes: Happy Birthday Thomas Sowell! The famous black conservative economist was born June 30 1930.

We just found this 1998 FORBES Magazine interview I did with Sowell, over a decade after my first one, which had resulted in his being hired a columnist by the great, long-time Editor, James. W.  Michaels. (Despite my best efforts, this very successful arrangement came undone after Michaels was deposed and his successor foolishly tried to subject Sowell to conventionally crude magazine editing). 

Sowell was widely assumed to support the post-Cold War conservative immigration enthusiast consensus, but in fact his doubts were obvious as early as his 1995 review of my book Alien Nation. You can see them also in our interview below, in which I pushed him pretty hard. In retrospect, that such an interview could appear in a Main Stream Media outlet is evidence of the brief and curious Political Correctness interglacial that John Derbyshire has noted in the 1990s.

I have always hoped that Thomas Sowell would get more involved on the Patriot side of the immigration debate that he has. But he did just say this, about Obama’s Administrative Amnesty:

Only after the border is controlled can any immigration policy matter be seriously considered, and options weighed through the normal constitutional process of congressional hearings, debate and legislation, rather than by presidential shortcuts.

Not only is border control fundamental, what is also fundamental is the principle that immigration policy does not exist to accommodate foreigners but to protect Americans — and the American culture that has made this the world’s richest, freest and most powerful nation for more than a century.[The Immigration Ploy, June 19, 2012]

My emphasis

That sure beats Mitt Romney.

Originally published in Forbes Magazine, July 6, 1998

Peter Brimelow's 1998 intro:Unshrugging Atlas of the American race debate, longtime fellow of Stanford University's Hoover Institution, economist, FORBES columnist, survivor of Harlem public schools and the U.S. Marine Corps, gifted amateur photographer and much-feared world-class grouch, Thomas Sowell, 68, has just published his 25th book—Conquests and Cultures: An International History (Basic Books).

It's a stunner. "We all stand on his shoulders," says the Manhattan Institute's Abigail Thernstrom, whose book America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (coauthored with husband Stephan) caused a major controversy last fall.

Sowell's newest work is the last of a trilogy (Race And Culture 1994; Migrations And Cultures, 1996) in which he gives his answer to one of the most troubling, and taboo, questions of modern times: why the achievements of different human groups vary so dramatically.

Sowell argues, bluntly and in great detail, that some human cultures-the mental "working machinery of everyday life"-are just plain more effective than others. Not "better" or "worse"; just plain work better in the modern world.

He argues that cultures are pervasive, persistent and paradoxical in their transmission. (Conquerors can benefit the conquered-in the long run). Cultures do change. But it takes time.

How should society deal with cultures that do not adapt well to modernity? "Certainly the worst way," says Sowell, "would be trying to artificially preserve such cultures through such notions as 'multiculturalism' and 'cultural relativism.'"

Sowell bypasses both "bias" and genetic inferiority as explanations for the inferior economic accomplishments of some groups. But his cultural explanation for group differences is hardly more popular than the genetic explanation associated with Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's much-reviled The Bell Curve. Liberals prefer to explain uneven distribution of income and of accomplishment as due to "racism" or "prejudice."

Asked recently why liberals reject or ignore his arguments, Sowell replied: "Because it deprives them of their favorite villain." It casts "doubt on the efficacy of external [government] intervention. And external intervention is what the [political] left is all about."

But being out of tune with his fellow intellectuals and academicians doesn't much bother Sowell. He's used to it.

Last year he published Late-Talking Children (Harper-Collins). It summarized his conclusions on the subject, partly derived from observations of his own son, John, now a computer programmer. Sowell's Web site (www.tsowell.com) features a group organized by Vanderbilt University speech pathologist Stephen M. Camarata and an endorsement by MIT cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. But, Sowell notes, "rank-and-file speech therapists have absolutely gone ballistic."

The thought makes Sowell laugh happily. FORBES recently spoke with him at length.

Sowell: With all three of the books in this series, the crucial question is human capital. The people who have it prosper. And those who don't, don't. And in different periods of history, over many centuries, different people have it.

FORBES: But in Conquests and Cultures, there's a note of geographic determinism. You say the Industrial Revolution happened in Britain partly because Britain's iron ore and coal were located close to one another and close to the sea. Whereas in Germany, land transportation costs were prohibitive—and the seaports froze.

I also did that in Race and Culture. One of the reasons I got angry when people wrote letters to FORBES claiming I'd gotten this from Jared Diamond [Guns, Germs, and Steel1997] was that I'd published Race and Culture three years earlier!

What started me off with geography were two facts. One is that Africa is more than twice the size of Europe but has a shorter coastline. That blew me away. And the second was that before the transcontinental railroad you could reach San Francisco faster and cheaper from China

Put not your trust in princes. Or judges.  VDARE.com did not take a position on Obamacare (except to note that is yet another subsidy to immigration, both legal and illegal). We don’t even care to debate the legal intricacies of the June 28 Supreme Court decision upholding Obamacare.  But we do think this development exposes the weakness of the strategy, much beloved by some of our allies, of using litigation to effect political change.

The plain fact is that the courts can’t be relied upon—to reach any particular conclusion. This is of course not news to practicing lawyers, whose utter cynicism about judges and their foibles was deeply disquieting to me when I first started to write about juridicial questions as a staffer for Senator Orrin Hatch, then as now a Judiciary Committee member, more than thirty years ago.

But, for example, I didn’t then know about the astonishingly unethical collusion of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter with Department of Justice lawyer Philip Elman to produce the epochal 1954 Brown vs. Board desegregation decision, which as Paul Craig Roberts has said, “effectively ended constitutional law by teaching a generation of judges that the Constitution has no meaning apart from the judiciary's subjective feelings about social policy.”

Perhaps we will eventually find out what occult force produced Chief Justice John Roberts' unexpected, and apparently last-minute, shift. But it’s worth noting that observers widely assume that he simply buckled under public i.e. non-jurisprudential pressure. (See Did Roberts Give In To Obama’s Bullying, by Joel B. Pollak, The Daily Blaze, June 28, 2010) The obvious parallel: the famous “switch in time that saved nine”—the Supreme Court’s capitulation to the New Deal.

This is further proof of VDARE.com’s long-standing contention that only grass-roots pressure, and not inside-the-Beltway machinations, will bring about patriotic immigration reform.

In the case of Obamacare, some of this public pressure

Some supporters and opponents of SB 1070 have claimed the Supreme Court’s ruling was a victory. And some supporters and opponents have also claimed it was a defeat. This is to be expected, as the ruling was mixed. (There’s speculation that Justices Roberts and Kennedy went relatively weak on this to give them cover—because they intend to overturn Obamacare on Thursday!)

My view: to adapt Ben Franklin, immigration patriots have a victory—if they can make it one.

The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the most controversial aspect of the legislation: Section 2(B), which requires police to look up the immigration status of suspected illegal aliens whom they encounter in the course of law enforcement. (However, it did not preclude future litigation on the application of the law, specifically on racial profiling. While this is unfortunate, it was not unexpected.)

Additionally, the Supreme Court overturned

• Section 3, which criminalizes at the state level the federal crime of unlawful presence.
• Section 5(C), which creates criminal penalties illegal aliens for illegal aliens who solicit or perform jobs. (But last year the court upheld state laws criminalizing the employment of illegals).
• Section 6, which authorizes local police to make warrantless arrests of those they believe have committed deportable offenses.

Observant readers will note that there were only two sections and two subsections that the Court actually ruled on. But there are nine Sections of SB 1070 (technically twelve, but three are rhetorical or