The Wall Street Journal has reached a new low in its advocacy for open borders. It published an article yesterday by one of its editorial writers (it’s not at the Journal’s free site, but has been posted here) slamming NR and my Center for Immigration Studies as being part of a cabal of baby-killing, white-supremacist Chi-com lovers. NR can adequately defend itself from the Journal’s claim that it becomes “unhinged” on immigration, but the article’s lies about CIS were more serious. The author, one Jason Riley, claimed CIS is a “big fan” of China’s one-child policy, that we support RU-486 and cutting U.S.population by half, and implied that we were protectionists and had taken money from a eugencist outfit called the Pioneer Fund.
Needless to say, this is undiluted nonsense, so I called the author of the piece to find out what the heck he was talking about. He said he based his claim not on anything CIS had actually said or published but on the fact that we had “published authors who hold those views.” Presumably he’s talking about people who’ve written for us on the demographic consequences of immigration (all our material is on line here), some of whom probably are pro-abortion — but as an immigration think tank, we don’t ask what people think about other issues. Of course, we’ve also published articles by supporters of high immigration, such as Steve Moore, because sparking debate is what a think tank is supposed to do, even though we make no secret of our preference for lower immigration levels and better enforcement.
I know politics is hardball, but this kind of thing is beneath the Journal. In fact, it suggests that the libertarians have grown desperate in the face of conservative resistance to their post-American approach to immigration.