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Peter Brimelow’s article “Time to Rethink Immigration?” appeared in the June 22, 1992, issue of NR, and its effects are still with us. This month Random House publishes Mr. Brimelow’s book, Alien Nation, which grew out of that article. Before June 1992, immigration was a marginal issue. By 1993 it was among the most hotly debated questions of public policy; and by March 1995, with the emergence of Governor Wilson as a presidential candidate, it had become almost the entire basis of a campaign for national office. While readers of NR will know why we welcome the heightened awareness of the issue, they will also know that our view is not shared by all conservatives. For that reason, we offer four reviews of Alien Nation, representing a range of opinion on this critical question.

—DK AFTER a decade and a half of confinement to fairly obscure pamphlets and technical monographs, the case against massive immigration has at last found a champion whose book, in the wake of the landslide passage of California’s Proposition 187 last year, is likely to inform and shape the national discussion of immigration for years to come. As both a consumer and a producer of such obscure literature myself, I have to acknowledge that the author, a respected financial journalist at Forbes and a senior editor of this magazine, as well as a sort of perennial immigrant—from Great Britain to Canada to the United States—has mined those pamphlets and monographs well.

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Samuel Francis

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Peter Brimelow’s article “Time to Rethink Immigration?” appeared in the June 22, 1992, issue of NR, and its effects are still with us. This month Random House publishes Mr. Brimelow’s book, Alien Nation, which grew out of that article. Before June 1992, immigration was a marginal issue. By 1993 it was among the most hotly debated questions of public policy; and by March 1995, with the emergence of Governor Wilson as a presidential candidate, it had become almost the entire basis of a campaign for national office. While readers of NR will know why we welcome the heightened awareness of the issue, they will also know that our view is not shared by all conservatives. For that reason, we offer four reviews of Alien Nation, representing a range of opinion on this critical question.

—DK AFTER a decade and a half of confinement to fairly obscure pamphlets and technical monographs, the case against massive immigration has at last found a champion whose book, in the wake of the landslide passage of California’s Proposition 187 last year, is likely to inform and shape the national discussion of immigration for years to come. As both a consumer and a producer of such obscure literature myself, I have to acknowledge that the author, a respected financial journalist at Forbes and a senior editor of this magazine, as well as a sort of perennial immigrant—from Great Britain to Canada to the United States—has mined those pamphlets and monographs well.