Books, Arts & Manners: The Coelacanth

Fresh Blood: The New American Immigrants, by Sanford J. Ungar (Simon & Schuster, 399 pp., $24)

I DIMLY recall that a dramatic high point of the Kon Tiki expedition, Thor Heyerdahl’s epic raft voyage across the South Pacific in the early 1950s, was the washing aboard of a coelacanth, a primitive fish previously believed to have been extinct for geologic ages and therefore dubbed by the media a “living fossil.” Sanford Ungar’s book offers a similar thrill. With almost charming innocence it flops into this moderately advanced stage of the immigration debate blissfully unaware both of the new critique of immigration’s malfunctioning developed by younger academics like George Borjas, and of the increasingly desperate defenses extemporized by immigration enthusiasts. Fresh Blood is a throwback to the days when dinosaurs and immigration enthusiasts ruled the world, and a useful reminder of their essential crudity.

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Peter Brimelow

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Fresh Blood: The New American Immigrants, by Sanford J. Ungar (Simon & Schuster, 399 pp., $24)

I DIMLY recall that a dramatic high point of the Kon Tiki expedition, Thor Heyerdahl’s epic raft voyage across the South Pacific in the early 1950s, was the washing aboard of a coelacanth, a primitive fish previously believed to have been extinct for geologic ages and therefore dubbed by the media a “living fossil.” Sanford Ungar’s book offers a similar thrill. With almost charming innocence it flops into this moderately advanced stage of the immigration debate blissfully unaware both of the new critique of immigration’s malfunctioning developed by younger academics like George Borjas, and of the increasingly desperate defenses extemporized by immigration enthusiasts. Fresh Blood is a throwback to the days when dinosaurs and immigration enthusiasts ruled the world, and a useful reminder of their essential crudity.