Patriotic immigration reformers remain dumbfounded over Mitt Romney’s refusal to condemn President Obama’s Executive Amnesty, especially after all of his tough enforcement talk during the primaries. But this betrayal of the GOP base should have surprised no one; the Romneys have been doing it for decades.

Peter Brimelow has written that most individuals are incapable of engaging new ideas after the age of 21. In a similar manner, the individual members of America’s political families seem largely incapable of engaging any ideas that are distinct from those of the larger clan.

Think about it: How different is the post-American worldview of George W. or Jeb Bush from that of their internationalist father? Is Senator Jay Rockefeller (NumbersUSA D+) very different from his globalist uncles Nelson and David? Can you imagine any member of the Kennedy clan calling for an immigration moratorium? 

You see my point.

The Romney Family’s worldview has been largely shaped by their political patriarch, the late Governor George Romney of Michigan—a man to whom they remain passionately attached, and whose legacy they are quick to defend.

During a recent episode of Mad Men, a fictional aide to New York City Mayor John Lindsay remarks: “Well, tell Jim [that Lindsay’s] not going to Michigan because Romney’s a clown and I don’t want him standing next to him.”

Mitt son Tagg Romney quickly defended his grandfather on Twitter: “George Romney was as good a man I’ve ever known. Inspirational leader, worked for civil rights, promoted freedom. We need more like him.”

(My emphasis). This is an opinion Tagg’s father clearly shares.

“I am a small shadow of the real deal,” Mitt Romney said of his late father. “I grew up idolizing him. I thought everything he said was

Mexico is in the midst of a presidential election. Since Mexico has its elections every six years, and the U.S. every four years, that means that every 12 years both countries have elections the same year.

As I am currently visiting Mexico, you could say I’m right in the middle of it, but of course, as an American citizen I don’t vote, campaign or meddle in the election, though I do find it very interesting and entertaining.

The election is scheduled for Sunday, July 1. The winner is scheduled to take office in early December.

I’ve been writing quite a bit about the Mexican election for other websites. My Mexidata.info archive has recent articles on the election (click here). For a more general explanation, you can read my article Elections in Mexico and the US: Comparisons and Contrasts.

Here at VDARE.COM, our main emphasis is the National Question. What can we learn from the Mexican election that affects our immigration policies?

There are three principal parties in Mexico:

• The Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI).

The PRI ran Mexico from 1929 to 2000, when it was defeated by Vicente Fox, of the

• Partido Acción Nacional (PAN). Fox was president 2000-2006. He was succeeded by another PAN president Felipe Calderon (2006 to this year, when his term expires).
• The Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD)--populist leftist.

In addition there are smaller parties which may or may not make alliances with larger parties.

In this election there are actually four candidates, listed here by their positions in the polls:

1. Enrique Pena Nieto (photo here) is the candidate of the PRI and the smaller Green Party.
2. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador , known by the initials AMLO (photo here) is the candidate of 3 parties: the PRD, the PT (Labor Party) and Movimiento Ciudadano. AMLO was the PRD candidate in 2006, who was edged out by less than 1% of the vote by Felipe Calderon. AMLO refused to accept defeat and organized massive protests in Mexico City which lasted for months. Now
3. Josefina Vazquez Mota(photo here) , known publicly as “Josefina”, is candidate of the PAN.
4. Gabriel Quadri de la Torre (photo here) is the candidate for the micro-party known as Nueva Alianza, or PANAL.

Vicente Fox had many fans in the Republican Party who identified the PAN with the GOP. They assured us that we had to give Fox what he wanted on immigration because he was “conservative”

[See also Time To Rethink Immigration (II): Freeing America From The Immigration Gulag, By Peter Brimelow, June 5, 2006]

James Fulford writes:

Today, Mitt Romney has come out with a disastrous immigration statement that  panders to Hispanics, but not as much as Obama did, promises to replace Obama's unconstitutional, illegal, even impeachable,  Obamnesty, with something that is just that much less unconstitutional, illegal, and impeachable—but not enough to win the election, let alone save America.  Oh, and he wants to increase skilled immigration, further immiserating the American Middle Class.

France’s Bourbon monarchs were said, when they were restored after Waterloo, to have "learned nothing and forgotten nothing." Mitt Romney is the modern Bourbon candidate, but there is not going to be a Republican Restoration if he continues on this path.

By a pleasing coincidence, Peter Brimelow’s “Time To Rethink Immigration” cover story in National Review was dated twenty years ago this Friday. We present it here in an anniversary, re-hyperlinked form.

 John O'Sullivan devoted most of the June 22nd, 1992 National Review to this piece (14, 000 words). The cover featured a picture of the Statue Of Liberty with her hand up like a traffic cop and the words "Tired? Poor? Huddled? Tempest-Tossed? Try Australia.'' That wasn't popular with immigration enthusiasts.

I particularly liked phrase “Symptomatic of the American Anti-Idea is the emergence of a strange anti-nation inside the U.S.—the so-called Hispanics” .

That wasn't popular with "so-called Hispanics”—which in this context means almost exclusively Mexican-Americans, but in other contexts might mean anything.  (Brimelow's point.)

Mitt Romney take note—this article was published during the 1992 Presidential election season, in which the incumbent, Bush the First, was contesting with Clinton. Bush the First ignored immigration and the National Question and lost. Four years later, Dole also ignored it and lost. George II did just about get himself elected because of eight years of cumulative Clinton backlash, but also ignored the National Question and led the GOP to epochal defeat. Now Bush advisors are telling Romney to do the same.

Note: An earlier version of this article, broken into two parts, is still on the site. We’re keeping it because so many of our other articles link to it.

Time To Rethink Immigration

 First published in National Review, June 22, 1992

DANTE would have been delighted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service waiting rooms. They would have provided him with a tenth Circle of Hell. There is something distinctly infernal about the spectacle of so many lost souls waiting around so hopelessly, mutually incomprehensible in virtually every language under the sun, each clutching a number from one of those ticket-issuing machines which may or may not be honored by the INS clerks before the end of the Civil Service working day.

The danger of damnation is perhaps low—although a Scottish friend of mine once found himself flung into the deportation holding tank because the INS misunderstood its own rules. And toward the end of my own ten-year trek through the system, I whiled away a lot of time watching confrontations between suspicious INSers and agitated Iranians, apparently hauled in because the Iran hostage crisis had inspired the Carter Administration to ask how many of them were enrolled in U.S. universities. (The INS was unable to provide an answer during the 444 days of the hostage crisis-or, as it turned out, at all.)

Nevertheless, you can still get a pretty good blast of brimstone if you dare

When liberals discover that I have unorthodox views on race, they poke around for other unorthodox views. They think that if I am beyond the pale on enough fashionable subjects, it means I am a crackpot, and they can ignore the uncomfortable things I say about race.

The first poke usually goes like this:  “And what do you think about gays?” My reply: “I sure wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one.”

This question of whom I want my children to marry—or even more provocatively: whom I want your children to marry—was raised by John Derbyshire in

Well into the 2000s, the news and entertainment media told us incessantly that serial killers were overwhelmingly white, male, 20-45 years old. Blacks still repeat this canard. The father of that false profile: Robert Ressler of the FBI’s behavioral science unit. But Justin Cottrell’s new book, Rise of the Black Serial Killer, demonstrates that serial killers today are overwhelmingly black men, and that Ressler lied in court when he stated: “There are very few non-white serial killers.”

Cottrell argues that Ressler was afraid of being called a racist. I think Ressler had an appetite for the limelight and simply told the leftwing MSM what they wanted to hear. The MSM reciprocated by making Ressler a star. (Conversely, only VDARE.com notices Immigrant Mass Murder Syndrome—at least 37 cases and 337 victims over 20 years).

During the 2002 Beltway Killings by the Nation of Islam’s John Muhammad and his young protégé, Lee Boyd Malvo (an immigrant), people were avoidably murdered because Montgomery County’s black police Chief Charles Moose promoted the baseless profile of a “white male” driving “a white box truck” that permitted the real killers to pass through police checkpoints undisturbed—even after one killer had spoken to Moose on the phone, and Moose knew he was black.

With time, the FBI became such an incompetent Politically Correct bureaucracy that even in cases where the killer was a heterosexual white male, it was more interested in catching someone else who fit the profile, above all if they were vaguely pro-authority or rightwing.

Recently, VDARE.com published my “Hate Crimes”: Washington’s War Against White Working Class Dissent, about unknown working class whites persecuted for having

"It's surprising what you can find on the internet," we used to say when the thing was new. Nowadays I am more often surprised by what I can't find on the internet. I posted an example here on VDARE.com a few days ago: a curious little flight of imagination by Winston Churchill.

Now here's another item whose complete absence from the internet until yesterday is even more puzzling.

I was noodling the idea of a piece on "the hostility many blacks feel toward whites," to quote from my infamous April 5 article in Taki's Magazine.

The phenomenon, though not of course universal among American blacks, is very noticeable to immigrants who come here when adults (as I did). It used to be a common topic of conversation among expatriates; though since I don't hang out much with expatriates any more, I cannot say whether this is still the case. Back in the 1970s, I once had a conversation about it with a black West Indian work colleague, whose perceptions agreed with mine. I have passed some occasional comments on the subject in my columns.

For such an inflammable topic, though, I thought I needed some backup. It could not possibly be the case that such an obvious feature (it seemed to me) of our social life had gone unremarked in the public prints and pixels. Surely some respectable journalist, writing in a respectable outlet, had commented on widespread black hostility to whites?

Dredging through my memory, I came up with a vague recollection of Amity Shlaes' article "Black Mischief," which had appeared in the London Spectator back in the mid-1990s. Ms. Shlaes, a Wall Street Journal features editor at the time (she is now a syndicated columnist for Bloomberg), had written frankly about the routine anti-white hostility New Yorkers faced from blacks.

She had, of course, gotten into trouble for the piece. There had been quite a stir about it all at the time — enough, at any rate, for me to have remembered it. The article must surely, I thought, have been posted to the internet at some point in the following 15 or 20 years.

I went a-googling, encouraged by Ms. Shlaes' very distinctive name. The obvious search arguments, that last name together with "black mischief" in quotes, did yield this; but it's not Ms. Shlaes' column, it's only someone writing about the column. It's also a "teaser," with some registration business to go through if you want to read the whole thing. No thanks.

For the rest, all I was getting was dry leads, mostly lists of books containing both Ms. Shlaes' contrarian 2008 history of the Great Depression and Evelyn Waugh's wonderfully non-PC 1932 Africa novel.

Adding "-waugh" to the search argument thinned things out considerably, to just eleven results in fact. None of them was the Spectator article.

I thought this was puzzling. Had I imagined the thing? No: Dominic Lawson, then editor of the Spectator, had written about "Black Mischief" and its consequences for Ms. Shlaes’ career shortly afterwards in a piece mocking American political correctness.[Taboo or not Taboo, November 19, 1994]I had that piece in my archives, for unrelated reasons. (It is very melancholy to re-read it now, when the Brits have fallen deeper into the darkness even than ourselves.)

Here is Lawson, on the reaction of Ms. Shlaes' colleagues when "Black Mischief" became known to them:

Over the next few days, Amity found herself being treated like Peter Sellers's strike-breaker in I'm All Right, Jack. A number of her

American Christians risk a pile of propaganda from the pulpit this Sunday. President Obama’s clearly impeachable extension of his administrative amnesty, to illegals who would have been covered by the DREAM Act amnesty that Congress has repeatedly refused to pass, has the support, not merely of much (if not all) of the political class, but also of Big Religion. Here is Peter Brimelow on his Episcopalian Church. Here’s a scathing indictment of the Catholic Bishops’ hypocritical just-issued statement of support for Obama.

As an evangelical Christian myself, I’m particularly interested in the evangelical family organization Focus on the Family. According to the group’s own website,

Focus on the Family is a global Christian ministry dedicated to helping families thrive. We provide help and resources for couples to build healthy marriages that reflect God’s design, and for parents to raise their children according to morals and values grounded in biblical principles. [About Focus on the Family] 

But Focus on the Family has just betrayed its contributors, betrayed families and betrayed its own principles by, for the first time, supporting amnesty.

As reported in my blog entry, Focus on the Family Boards the Amnesty Bandwagon, the group’s current leader, Jim Daly, joined a group of 100 similarly deluded evangelicals in signing a document, "Evangelical Statement of Principles for Immigration Reform" calling for  "a bipartisan solution

With my daughter, Karia Sybil Nancy Brimelow,  born 10:51 pm June 13, 8lb 8oz: