Jonah: A few weeks ago a paleo acquaintance told me that NR was “silent” on
the immigration issue, had “totally given up on it,” had “completely
surrendered to the open-borders lobbies,” and so on. I spent a happy half
hour in the basement going through recent back numbers of NR–I am one of
those people who saves my magazines–ticking off immigration-related
articles, which we have been running on average every other issue for at
least two years past (that’s as far back as I went). Some of them–by, for
instance, John O’Sullivan and John J. Miller–were as critical as anything
on the paleo websites. Others–by me, and Ramesh–were more ruminative. NR
does, in other words, publish a good range of articles and editorials on
this topic, with a center of gravity well on the restrictionist side of the
median. I sometimes wonder if NR’s critics ever actually read the
magazine–or, so far as this particular topic is concerned, understand that
it is, after all, only one of a score of topics of national importance that
a magazine like NR has to cover.