Paying for the Privilege
by Peter Brimelow
I stopped paying attention to Time many years ago. My twin brother and I, already plotting our emigration to the United States, subscribed as college students in England in the 1960’s to get some sense of this world-straddling “indispensable nation”—as Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright later called it, possibly not for our reasons—and also because our English liberal professors assured us it was written by “Cold Warriors.” (We were puzzled to find no sign of this. We were also puzzled by the extraordinary behemoths reported to be common in American college football. As Baby Boomers who clearly remembered the Labour government’s extension of food rationing until well after World War II, we decided it must be the orange juice.)
But now my American anchor-baby teenage son reads Time as a substitute for conversation while scarfing down breakfast before school. (Oddly, he doesn’t like orange juice.) So I got to see this item in the April 20 treezine: “Undocumented And Undeterred: A rough economy and tough enforcement have put unprecedented stress on illegal immigrants. What one Oregon town tells us about why they’re staying.”It was mostly the usual twaddle, insisting that eliminating America’s illegal (“undocumented”) immigrant population is, literally, unthinkable. This only confirms repeated opinion-poll findings, including the April 20 Rasmussen Reports, which indicated that there exists an enormous gulf on this issue between Americans and what Rasmussen calls the “political class.” (Rasmussen reported that 66 percent of Americans think it is “Very Important” that illegal immigration be dealt with—but only 32 percent of the “political class” agreed.)
Some aspects of Thornburgh’s brief for national liquidation caught my attention.