The British National Party, arguably the clearest symptom of British patriotic resistence to immigration, has just won its first seat in the London Asembly. Foolishly, all the so-called mainstream parties’ candidates walked off the stage when Richard Barnbrook began his victory addresss. (BNP’s Richard Barnbrook calls for flying of Union Jack and a ban on burkas, by Martin Fletcher, Times Online, May 5 2008.) So much for the voice of the people.

We have written about the BNP in the past primarily in the context of the attempt, extraordinary in a democratic society, to imprison its leader, Nick Griffin, for political comments (critical of Islam!) made in private - and the U.S. MSM blackout on the subject.

This and other themes familiar to VDARE.COM readers have just been echoed in an intelligent piece on the BNP’s success by a self-described gay “social democrat”, Johann Hari.

BNP votes are a cry of white working-class anguish, by Johann Hari, The Independent, May 5 2008.

The trial of Nick Griffin for hate-speech wasn’t just immoral – he has a right to free speech, no matter how foul – but also dumb politics. The way to discredit the BNP is for people to hear what they say. No more no platforms: take them on….

But we also need to address the worries of BNP voters. Most are anxious about immigration not because they don’t want different-looking people walking the streets, but because they feel it damages them in several specific ways…

Hari instances the shortage of public housing, and goes on:

How about wages? It’s true that immigrants boost the economy overall, and pay back £6bn more than they take from the Exchequer. But it’s also true that British people don’t benefit equally from it. It’s simply a fact that if you significantly increase the supply of cheap labour, the hourly rate for it comes down: that’s why wages for builders and waitresses and cleaners have barely budged for 10 years now. For people on the lowest wages, immigration does depress their wages, and it is wrong to deny this, or wave it away as unimportant.

But instead of offering these solutions, we have turned the white working class into a national punch-line. We dismiss them as “chavs”, “pikeys” and racists, and jeer at their clothes and voices and names. So we don’t really have the right to act surprised when they vote in a way designed to tell the entire democratic system – as the woman [previously quoted] standing in her damp flat, carrying bags of economy-brand food from Iceland, told me – to “f— off”.

[Quote bowdlerized because of puritanical US webfilters].

Needless to say, there is no chance that the left will actually listen, because of what its motives actually are. But Hari deserves to be congratulated.

Recently, Condoleezza Rice revealed a foolish failure to understand what the Battle of Kosovo means in Balkan politics:

“I mean after all, we’re talking about something from 1389. 1389! It’s time to move forward. And Serbia needs to move forward. Kosovo needs to move forward.”

“The War Nerd” (Gary Brecher) was suitably scathing about this ignorance in a woman who is, after all, U.S. Secretary of State.

Well, how about 843?

News is finally making it into the MSM that Silvio Berlusconi’s victory in the Italian elections was partly due to a patriotic reaction against immigration, especially in the north, where the quasi-secessionist Lega Nord made significant gains. Paul Belien has posted an excellent article on Takimag, noting not just the MSM’s reluctance to acknowledge the immigration issue’s power, but also that the intense spirit of local autonomy closely allied with patriotic immigration politics from Belgium to Rome is part of a political tradition tracing back to the Middle Frankish Kingdom, created when Charlemagne’s empire was partitioned by the Treaty of Verdun in 843.

Curiously, nearly twenty years ago, on the one occasion when I met my namesake, the then-retired British diplomat Lord Brimelow–no relation, I hasten to point out to those who remember his role in forcibly repatriating Cossacks and Yugoslavs to certain death after World War II–he was reading a book open at a map of the Treaty of Verdun’s results. He commented that it revealed fault lines still working in European politics.

What this means is that the effects of America’s post-1965 immigration disaster could well be felt for a thousand years. Immigration enthusiasts are historically illiterate - where they are not actually evil.

Tonight, whenever James Fulford gets around to it, we’re going to add the Newark Star-Ledger’s Paul Mulshine’s blog to the VDARE.COM blogroll, and his nationally-syndicated columns (often on New Jersey subjects - all politics is local!) to the VDARE.COM links page.

Should have done this a long time ago. Paul is one of the few MSM voices critical of immigration policy. (Hope this doesn’t get him into trouble).

Here’s his evisceration of RINO U.S. Attorney Chris Christie’s attack on Morristown Mayor Don Cresitello, a Democrat, for daring to criticize opponents of his plan to claim local law enforcement powers against illegal aliens.

Chrisitello is running in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, which will hearten the long-suffering VDARE.COM Democratic caucus.

Many thanks to the readers who have been sending me Mulshine’s work. And to all VDARE.COM readers: please let us know whenever you see any signs of intelligent life in the MSM, national or local. We aim to make VDARE.COM a clearing house for all immigration patriots, regardless of race, creed, or politics.

Solidarity forever!

BROOKLYN - After decades in obscurity, bedbugs have returned to the United States to take up residence in a place where they can live long-term, rent-free and have all the food they need — in mattresses all over the country.

Bed bugs can live in your new mattress, by Victoria Corderi, NBC News, April 22, 2008.

What word is missing in this report?

(Thanks, LB).

Technically true! Completely unreported by the MSM as far as I can see, Pastor Chuck Baldwin has won the Constititution Party’s presidential nomination, unexpectedly defeating Alan Keyes. Here’s his acceptance speech. This is a problem for VDARE.COM because I suppose, as a non-partisan foundation, we’ll have to stop posting his self-syndicated columns, which we picked up in the middle of last year, until after the election. But at least voters in the 20-odd states where the Constitution Party is on the ballot will have an immigration patriot to vote for.

I’ve been trying all day to blog on Jason Riley’s “Immigrant Scapegoats“ [Wall Street Journal Edit Page, April 24, 2008] and now the amazing Michelle Malkin’s co-blogger See-Dubya has beaten me to it.

Riley, who is apparently about to publish a rah-rah immigration book, is not even above the silly smear that critics of immigration policy are “anti-immigrant”, even though e.g. George Borjas and I are immigrants. Of course, supporters of the nation-breaking post-1965 immigration onslaught are really guilty of treason, so I guess we might as well respond by describing Riley as “anti-American”.

I was amazed (well, not really, nothing surprises me with immigration enthusiasts) to see Riley commit this elementary economic error:

The common assumption is that a job filled by an immigrant is one less job for a native.
But this reasoning is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how our labor markets operate. The U.S. job market is not a zero-sum game. The number of jobs is not static. It’s fluid, which is how we want it to be. In 2006, 55 million U.S. workers either quit their jobs or were fired. Yet 57 million people were hired over the same period. In a typical year, a third of our workforce turns over.

Immigrants help keep our labor markets flexible. And flexible labor markets – the kind that minimize the costs to a business of hiring and firing employees – enable workers and employers alike to find the employment situation that suits them best. Flexible labor markets make it easier for an employee who doesn’t like his job to find another position somewhere else. And flexible labor markets make it more likely that an employer will expand his workforce or take a chance on a less experienced job-seeker.

A better fit between employers and employees increases productivity and makes markets more responsive to consumer demand. In the end, employers, workers and consumers are all better off.

Even if this were true–and it omits the cross-subsidies that Milton Friedman acknowledged made mass immigration impossible in a welfare state - it ignores the critical point that, while Americans in aggregate may be “better off”, the individual Americans directly competing with immigrants may very well be worse off. Immigration causes a redistribution of income within the native-born community, basically from labor to capital. And it’s not small.

The really amazing (but see above) thing about this is that the point was made, not just by me in Alien Nation thirteen years ago, but by the Wall Street Journal Edit Page’s late favorite immigration enthusiast economist Julian Simon (he was actually a marketing specialist but he was willing to fake it) in his Economic Consequences Of Immigration back in 1990.

In other words, this riposte has been around for eighteen years, but Riley (or, let’s hope, his editors on the Edit Page) still haven’t heard of it.

American mmigration enthusiasm is a complex thing, very often motivated by unspoken ethnic insecurities. But one major factor, alas, is sheer stupidity.

Email Jason Riley

Steve Sailer is bored by the Democratic primary, but on the Republican side I think Paul’s result is impressive - irritating that MSNBC apparently didn’t bother to run an exit poll.

Mike Huckabee, who has actually dropped out, got 11% too. This continuing Republican revulsion has to be bad news for McCain.

McCain and both Democratic contenders have reportedly passed the word in Washington that they don’t want any immigration legislation coming up before November i.e. they all want the issue suppressed. Inexplicable that Paul has not yet signed on to the effort to get the SAVE Act to the House floor. His real committment to national sovereignty is the obvious counter to McCain’s questionable military/ patriotic appeal - or what Lew Rockwell has decried, unfortunately I believe, as “red state fascism”.

About a year ago, I reported after a daring visit to Empire Central the then-dramatic news that the McCain/ Bush/ Kennedy Amnesty/ Immigration surge bill was in trouble—to the surprise of Beltway Treason Lobbyists and Beltway Immigration Reform Patriots alike. (That this kind of Stockholm syndrome affects even good people inside the Beltway is why it’s worth risking ambassadors from America to D.C. from time to time.

Last week, I found nothing quite so heartening, but there were a few encouraging straws in the wind:

• Intense discontent among patriotic immigration reformers and Republicans generally with McCain’s gerrymandered primary victory and his (Steve Sailer-predicted) Establishment me-tooism (click here for a devastating Tom Sowell critique of McCain’s Martin Luther King groveling). It’s not yet reached Dole-1996 proportions, but it still might.
• Surprisingly widespread resigned acceptance among Beltway Republicans that McCain’s much-touted POW record will boomerang, just like John Kerry’s Swift Boat service, because of allegations, widespread on the internet, that he eventually collaborated with his captors. I don’t know what the truth is. But I do know that, nearly twenty years ago, William Stevenson, author of the huge spy best-seller A Man Called Intrepid, and his co-author and wife Monika Jensen, were privately expressing puzzlement at finding in their research for their Kiss the Boys Goodbye: The Shocking Story of Abandoned U.S. Prisoners of War in Vietnam, that McCain had emerged as an opponent of efforts to solve the MIA conundrum.
• But neither Clinton nor Obama can easily raise this—which is why the idea of nominating an unimpeachable war hero, Jim Webb (D-VA) is visibly gaining ground.

California Political News and Views just sent out this huge sob story from the notorious Los Angeles Times (Divided by death and the Mexican border: Illegal immigrant families are torn apart when someone dies. Survivors are afraid to follow a loved one home for burial, by Anna Gorman, April 2, 2008) with a typically incisive comment.

Reading the story, this jumped out at me:

The Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles pays for an immigrant’s final journey home if the family is unable to do so. In the last four years, the consulate has shipped more than 1,000 bodies to Mexico for burial.

They do? Given that burial at home is apparently important to Mexicans, this means the Mexican government is providing a subsidy to illegal immigration. If it were not available, on the margin some illegals would not come.

The Bush Administration should tell Mexico to stop this subsidy immediately.

Does anyone know if Mexico subsidizes live Mexicans who want to go home?

If not, Bush should suggest that instead.

In fact, he should demand it.

The London Daily Telegraph reports this morning that a parliamentary inquiry is about to report that the record immigration levels inflicted on Britain under Tony Blair have brought “close to zero” economic benefits to the native-born. (Migration has brought “zero” economic benefit, by Phillip Johnston and Robert Winnet, March 29, 2008).

This, of course, is entirely consistent with the consensus among U.S. labor economists - immigration brings no net aggregate gain to the native-born - that I noted in Alien Nation almost exactly thirteen years ago. (P. 163-164 noted similar results from Canada and Australia).

Three years earlier, in the National Review cover story that grew into Alien Nation, I quoted George Borjas making the same point: (“The economic arguments for immigration simply aren’t decisive. You have to make a political case…”)

Why has this simple point still not penetrated public consciousness? Because that would required campaigning journalism - endless anecdotes embroidering same moral. Needless to say, I blame Bill Buckley.