We briefly kicked the immigration issue around at the Houston panel discussion. I recycled my confession, made in the pages of NR 3 yrs ago, that I was an illegal immigrant here myself back in my feckless youth. I noted again what I’d noted in that piece: my conclusion that it is awfully hard to get native Americans to think about immigration. It’s a quirk of the national character: we just don’t want to take the subject seriously. It goes against the grain somehow. As supporting evidence, I adduced the fact that if you sit down to read up on U.S. immigration policy, you find you are reading books by people who are themselves immigrants (George Borjas, Peter Brimelow), or whose parents were (Michelle Malkin).

In free discussion with attendees afterwards, the following points came up.

1. Isn’t it the same anywhere? Native citizens don’t think about immigration because it doesn’t directly affect them. Immigrants think about it a lot, because they have to **do** it.

2. Whatever you think of U.S. immigration problems, the Europeans have made a far bigger mess of the issue and face far bigger problems. (Jonah made this point from the platform.)

To answer both points together: Europe’s problems are indeed dire, but they arise from ***legal*** immigration. European immigration policies were terribly wrong-headed, but illegal immigration was never a major part of them. I can’t speak to other European countries, but I have a friend who was an illegal immigrant (a visa-overstayer from China) in England 1985-6. He nearly starved. It is more difficult, by an order of magnitude, to survive as an illegal immigrant in England than in the U.S. I believe the U.S. is the only advanced nation with a really serious problem of **illegal** immigration. Why did European countries have such stupid legal-immigration policies? See below.

And, no, it is not the same elsewhere. Immigration restriction has been a hot issue in England (at least) for most of my life. Enoch Powell’s 1968 speech on the topic was a seismic event in British politics. (And again, he was talking about **legal** immigrants.) It generated a big populist movement against liberal immigration policies. That movement was by no means restricted to nutty-fascist groups — the sober, conservative, and intellectual magazine Salisbury Review was working the issue in the 1980s, under then-editor Roger Scruton. So were the op-ed pages of the Daily Telegraph. This populist movement was entirely native-British. There was no British equivalent to the Borjases, Brimelows, and Malkins, just as there was no American Enoch Powell. Unfortunately the European nations, including Britain, are much less hospitable to populist movements than the U.S.A. (Solid majorities of British people went on favoring capital punishment long, long after the government had abolished it.) There were some minor victories for immigration-restrictionists, but the elites, one-world lefty intellectuals, and cheap-labor industrialists mostly had their way, with the horrible results we now see.