I recently watched the documentary film The US vs. John Lennon. A lot of the film focuses on the famous immigration case in which the Nixon administration tried unsuccessfully to deport Lennon.

Now, the major impulse in that direction came from Strom Thurmond-who had a barely average record in the area of immigration despite hailing from a region with a lot of support for immigration restriction.

Now, I will admit a soft spot for Lennon’s music. I own all his and most of Yoko’s albums. After his death, I volunteered in the construction of the Peace Museum Yoko supported in Chicago. The bigger issue here is consistency of immigration policy. Selective deportation of political enemies is the type of thing that makes immigration restriction look bad–and frankly, Strom Thurmond did nothing to deserve that kind of favor from those supporting immigration restriction.

If we have a reasonable immigration policy–even one that places a reasonable value on citizenship, we will get immigrants with a range of political ideas. Frankly, I think Thurmond did far more to endanger the US with his support of H-1b expansion than anything Lennon did.

Michael Barone had an article in the WSJ the other day about the demographic shift away from “hip cities” like San Francisco and Chicago to places like Idaho. (Steve Sailer blogged about it here.) Barone wrote

In 1950, when I was in kindergarten in Detroit, the city had a population of (rounded off) 1,850,000. Today the latest census estimate for Detroit is 886,000, less than half as many. In 1950, the population of the U.S. was 150 million. Today the latest census estimate for the nation is 301 million, more than twice as many. People in America move around. But not just randomly.

It has become a commonplace to say that population has been flowing from the Snow Belt to the Sun Belt, from an industrially ailing East and Midwest to an economically vibrant West and South.[The Realignment of America | The native-born are leaving “hip” cities for the heartland. By Michael Barone, May 8, 2007]

Barone has an amusing Red State/Blue State graphic, but this topic was covered in Alien Nation in 1995, before Red States and Blue States were invented, so the reference, instead was to “White Flight.” Peter Brimelow wrote, (in 1995)

And Americans are flinching—they are polarizing geographically. “We are now seeing white flight from whole states and regions,” says William H. Frey, a demographer and research scientist at the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Center. He calls it “the flight from diversity.” The most dramatic case: California—which is being abandoned by lower-income whites in particular, exactly the group that would appear to be most vulnerable to competition from unskilled immigrants. Much of this white flight is flocking to the intermountain West, which seems likely to emerge as part of America’s white heartland.Alien Nation,Chapter 3, P. 69 of the paperback edition

See also the chart on pp 70-71, which I may reproduce later.

Later in the in the same chapter, Peter Brimelow wrote

The demographer and economist B. Meredith Burke reports asking an official in the State Department’s Bureau of Refugee Affairs what size of population he considered too much for California.

“Oh, 100 million or so,” he replied airily. “Look,” he instructed me, “eventually it will get unpleasant enough so that everyone will move out and the situation will resolve itself. That’s the free market solution.”[Counterpoint: An environmental impact statement for immigration Wall Street Journal, April 1, 1993]

Maybe this is a free market solution. But it’s not a free market problem—any more than it would be if the government decided to stop enforcing the law … or allow an invasion.[Alien Nation, P. 72]

Because of a lockdown at Boulder High School, Joe Guzzardi’s appearance on the Denver-based Peter Boyles Show will be rescheduled for Friday or Monday. We will give you the new date when it is confirmed.

Joe Guzzardi will be a guest on the Peter Boyles Show, Thursday, May 10th at 10:00 EDT. Listen here.

Among other topics, Joe will be discussing his recent column “They Just Don’t Want to Assimilate.”

UPDATE: I’ve moved this post up since the time is in 45 minutes.