In this episode, we talk about Donald Trump's immigration policies and his impact on the 2016 presidential race. We discuss the differences between Trump and other conservative presidential candidates on immigration and how they differ from each other on the immigration issue.
00:00:00.000Let's put it this way. If you look at Trump's statements on paper and you put aside some of the rhetoric about, you know, they're sending violent criminals and rapists, when you actually look at what he's saying, it isn't that fundamentally different from a lot of the Republicans.
00:00:21.240He seems to endorse legal immigration. The problem is the illegals, and it's a problem of crime. It's not really a problem of demographics or race and culture and things like that.
00:00:34.180But Trump says these things, says these in a way mundane things with such gusto and such visceral energy and toughness that that's why he's gotten under the skin of his critics.
00:00:52.160And that's why he's kind of inspired people like me, is because he gives us the impression that he gets it, maybe on a visceral level and maybe not on an intellectual or policy level.
00:01:02.780But he just seems to have it in his gut. He knows that something really bad is happening.
00:01:09.060And the only way to articulate that now, at least in the mainstream, is by talking about, you know, some crazy gang member who kills someone.
00:01:19.820But that it's ultimately really about the future. And that's why he's exciting.
00:01:26.400It's kind of like Trump is interesting on a subliminal way. But actually, if you listen to what he says, it's not too different from Scott Walker or whatever.
00:01:37.780It's different than Jeb Bush, certainly, but it's not too different from those who have at least made gestures towards immigration reform.
00:01:47.320I think that you're right. You're right. What Trump has actually said is very moderate.
00:01:54.160He simply doesn't like legal immigration. He hasn't said anything about legal immigration at all this time around in the past.
00:02:02.220He has. And he has said, for example, that he doesn't like he thinks that they ought to be ought to bring in Christians from Syria rather than Muslims, which is what which is that some of these things don't get picked up for reasons which are worth speckling about.
00:02:16.940He has in the past said, for example, that he's he thinks it's too hard to come here from Europe.
00:02:22.200He said that a couple of years ago, but he's not saying it now.
00:02:26.240Now, I don't personally agree that what he's saying is is what he has said is particularly fierce rhetoric.
00:02:32.980He simply says that the Mexicans are a disproportionate crime committed by Mexicans.
00:02:39.440Right. And he's right. I mean, we don't have good numbers on this because the government, as the federal government and everybody else, every other aspect of the government doesn't want to know and the media doesn't want to report it.
00:02:50.540But all the evidence that we have points towards, you know, excessive crime by disproportionate crime by Mexicans and some very bloody and unpleasant crimes as well.
00:03:00.600That, of course, is completely suppressed in the mainstream media and then the little discourse.
00:03:04.680So to that extent, he's bombed through it. But he isn't saying anything particularly savage.
00:03:08.340He said in his in his introduction and is when he declared, he said, some, I suppose, are good people.
00:03:14.900You know, that's put it for the reason. I don't see what he said.
00:03:19.620You're being too. That's what I guess I'll go back to what I said before.
00:03:25.020You're being too literal. You're looking at the words and not hearing his body language and tone.
00:03:31.180You know, like when he said, and I'm sure some are good people.
00:03:36.420But he didn't say that. He did put that marker down. He just doesn't get any credit for it.
00:03:41.640I mean, I think you're right. I think with Trump, there's a subjective aspect, an objective aspect.
00:03:47.420Subjectively, he's not he's not all that radical in immigration.
00:03:51.560In fact, he's less radical than Santorum and Scott Walker are, both of whom have discussed reducing legal immigration, which he hasn't addressed at all.
00:04:00.140But objective, of course, the fact he better fight on the issue is all that really counts.
00:04:06.040Right. Scott Walker is just very, very boring. He's almost like a parody of a boring Nordic from Minnesota or Wisconsin.
00:04:16.100I mean, sorry to insult my fellow white people, but he's just you just look at him.
00:04:21.600I can't imagine someone like that would be a national leader.
00:04:25.480Well, on the other hand, Richard, what he did in Wisconsin, winning three elections there and defeating a recall and so on and taking on the teachers union, that takes a certain amount of guts.
00:05:39.160But let's let's go back to what something you mentioned, actually, just before I turned on the recorder.
00:05:44.460And that is that you actually read the the transcript of the debate and that you you said that Walker seemed to be indicating that he wanted to reduce legal immigration, but that he never articulated it clearly.
00:06:05.180He said it's in code, interesting that that we could pull it up.
00:06:10.140He said that he wanted to design an immigration policy which put American workers first.
00:06:17.960And, you know, the simple idea that immigration is going to do with the living standards of American workers is radical and the entire political establishment doesn't want to think about it.
00:06:30.120You know, and Bernie Sanders has done the same thing.
00:06:33.920There is a late market impact of immigration and Walker's aware of it.
00:06:37.460And by the way, he did say on Hannity, apparently, after after the debate, he expanded on that and explained he wants to reduce legal immigration, which is what which is what he said before.
00:06:48.520What do you think the prospects of something like that happening?
00:06:52.020I mean, let's let's say a Republican wins in 2016, which is certainly possible, despite all of the demographic changes which you have chronicled.
00:07:07.480Let's say that I'm wrong and that Scott Walker is his boringness or maybe it's actually his boringness is his greatest strength and he he becomes president.
00:07:18.340What do you think the possibilities of actually reducing legal immigration for the first time since I get when was the last time we we seriously reduced immigration was in 1924.
00:07:53.040In the early, you know, nobody expected, nobody, nobody expected Ronald Reagan to win the presidency as early as January of, as in late, well into 1979, well into early 1980.
00:08:04.940The conventionalism was it couldn't possibly run.
00:08:10.940And what will happen, of course, and the reason why the no goodniks are so hysterical about it is once one step is taken, it will become obvious that other steps can be taken.
00:08:20.200Partly because it will assemble a constituency.
00:08:23.200I mean, the problem that the Republicans have is they're not winning the white working class vote above all in the northern tier of states.
00:08:30.100You know, New England, greater New England from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon.
00:08:39.380I've been trying to explain it to them for 20 years.
00:08:41.720But once they see it, I think they will start to take additional steps.
00:08:44.520And that's why any discussion of immigration reduction at all is met with such hysteria in the mainstream media because they know that perfectly well.
00:08:55.020What should we talk about here, Peter?
00:08:57.220I do want to talk about the 20th anniversary of alienation.
00:09:01.760But I feel like we've only kind of touched on some of the more timely things.
00:09:08.540I think it's completely correct that what he represents is style.
00:09:12.320I mean, for example, at the time of, I know you're not interested in this issue, but at the time of Mike Pence's capitulation on the religious freedom issue in Indiana,
00:09:23.920I wrote a piece in which he said that these Republicans don't have the faintest idea of how plural culture works.
00:09:31.620And all he had to do, among other things, was to say there's certain key words which have entered the political discourse,
00:09:37.880even though the left doesn't like political correctness, and he should have said he was opposed to the political correctness.
00:09:43.540Now, that's exactly what Trump did say when he was challenged on this stupid war on women point.
00:09:47.740He said he didn't have time for political correctness, and it was greeted with applause.
00:09:52.160And similarly, he said, what else did he say?
00:09:53.740He didn't have time for something else.
00:11:54.680I think there's also an issue of what Kevin MacDonald calls implicit community, you know.
00:12:00.240I mean, the Republicans are an implicit white community.
00:12:03.640Without doing anything at all about it, they just are.
00:12:06.560And similarly, the Republicans, you know, in the South have succeeded in getting very high shares of the white vote, as high as nearly 90 percent in Mississippi, without doing anything to deserve it at all.
00:12:18.260In fact, the first possible opportunity, they'd piss all over their white base with this backing off down the Confederate flag question.
00:13:16.860I also think that, you know, he has people around him because they're batting on to these various campaign consultants whose job it is to prepare them for debates.
00:13:25.340And it's obvious that they hadn't thought about this question of legal immigration either.
00:13:28.760They just hadn't given him any answer at all.
00:13:30.480He didn't have a good answer or a bad answer.
00:13:49.700Well, I think also there's a kind of – and I don't want to seem ageist or something.
00:13:54.500But there's a kind of generational factor to it all.
00:13:57.940And I can definitely see in someone like Kasich or someone who's this almost kind of good old boy, backroom dealer, local politician, writ large, you know, in his mentality and talk.
00:14:11.840He would say things like the minority community.
00:14:15.320And I actually – I read somewhere that he actually used the word – there are a lot of ethnics here.
00:14:18.960Like, it's people who have a very – they come from a very different background.
00:14:24.340They have a different vision of what we're going through.
00:14:26.920And their vision is that America is, you know, 90% white and there's a kind of minority community of blacks.
00:14:35.060And we have these illegals that are a big problem.
00:16:55.040I said specifically in Alien Nation that this was the reason why the immigration debate hadn't really gelled in 1995.
00:17:03.180It was because the thing on the act and the subsequent illegal immigration influx only began in the late 60s.
00:17:10.040So most of the people who were then around in 1990 had basically grown up at a point where it wasn't, it simply wasn't an issue.
00:17:17.020Now, I have to say, though, that we've gotten absolutely nowhere in 20 years.
00:17:20.820And there is another fact at work here, which is the increasing intensity of political correctness.
00:17:26.100And, as you know, John Derbyshire, who, like me, is a fellow geezer, is extremely depressed about, you know, the younger generation because he thinks they really are brainwashed.
00:17:34.820Now, of course, he's looking at the National Review, the people who knew the National Review, but he really thinks they are brainwashed in that they do believe this stuff and they're incapable of responding to things like that, as you say, are right in their face.
00:17:46.960I actually have a lot of hope for millennials because they're experiencing it firsthand.
00:17:52.060But what I would say, they're not going to become conservatives.
00:17:54.900I mean, I think the whole conservative paradigm is just totally over.
00:17:58.220It's just, it is utterly bankrupt, and I think it, most pressingly due to George W. Bush and his years, but it just doesn't have any resonance anymore.
00:18:10.100I think for younger people, the idea of hyper-patriotism and hyper-religiosity and, you know, all this kind of stuff just strikes them as a joke.
00:18:20.980I mean, I don't think there's any future to conservatism.
00:18:23.600However, is there a future to, you know, identitarianism or just simply a kind of white identity within this, you know, new multi-culti world?
00:18:34.720And I think the answer to that is yes.
00:18:40.280And, you know, in a way, conservatism has to die so that something more vital will rise in its place.
00:18:47.780I mean, it's just, I don't know, that's the kind of way I see it.
00:18:50.000But I don't, I have a lot of hope for millennials.
00:18:52.140I don't think they buy into the illusions of their parents and grandparents about, you know, the American dream.
00:18:59.920And we can just, you know, say these magic words like the Constitution and democracy and it's all going to be okay.
00:19:06.160I don't think they believe in any of that hokum.
00:19:09.380And so I actually have a lot of faith in them.
00:19:12.400I think they're going to be different.
00:19:15.320I'm married to millennials, so I'm inclined to agree.
00:19:17.700Yeah, I'm going to keep my daughter away from you, Peter.
00:19:26.120Anyway, yeah, well, let's talk a little bit about alienation because I can actually remember purchasing a used copy of your book in a used bookstore in Charlottesville, Virginia.
00:19:40.480And, you know, like 2001 or 2002, I can't remember.
00:19:45.560But it's actually the 20th anniversary of alienation.
00:19:49.600So let's just talk a little bit about, let's talk about a couple of issues.
00:19:53.440And I'll just set them out and then I'll let you go.
00:19:56.740But first off, what was it like getting that book published 20 years ago in 1995?
00:20:04.200And also, what has been the trajectory of the immigration reform movement?
00:20:12.400Because you've kind of given a hint of that, of we've accomplished nothing.
00:20:17.180But what was it like in the 80s and 90s?
00:20:20.840And then, you know, what do you see, which direction you see the arrow pointing and so on and so forth?
00:20:27.060And then maybe we can talk a little bit about, you know, the future of immigration reform and going beyond immigration and all that kind of stuff.
00:20:35.040What was it like getting that book published in 1995?
00:20:39.920Well, you know, Richard, Derbyshire and I have this concept of an interglacial.
00:20:44.100If you look at the way in which the mainstream publishing business operated, there was a moment and a window, really, in the 1990s when it was possible to get all kinds of books published, notably for the bell curve and so on.
00:20:57.520It was something to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
00:21:00.320It did really disorient the left a great deal.
00:21:02.960For a brief while, you were able to get this stuff published.
00:21:07.300I wrote this book in this big cover story in National Review in 92, and a famous agent called Andrew Wiley contacted me and urged me to do this book about it, and he was able to get mainstream publishers interested.
00:21:28.840Now, I have to say that when I tried to revise Alien Nation ten years later or do a later version, his response was to sever our professional relationship because the blowback from publishing Alien Nation was so fierce that he obviously didn't want to represent anymore.
00:21:53.520I mean, I noticed when I first saw it, or maybe when I looked at it a little bit later, that David Frum blurbed it.
00:22:00.900And I probably saw that at a time when I hated – David Frum was a speechwriter for George W. Bush, and I probably hated him more than any other intellectual.
00:22:20.360It was almost – even the neocons, you could say people like you and I are very far away from, you know, ideologically, but even they were picking up on these things.
00:22:33.300And actually, a lot of neocons have been fairly good on this question.
00:22:37.560So there really was a kind of moment of that, you know, mid-late 90s when there was a chance of this becoming a major, you know, intellectual movement.
00:22:51.560You know, there is – there is a famous thing about people who have more illnesses that they go through of several different phases, denial, anger, bargaining, denial, and acceptance.
00:23:02.320That was true for this – for the immigration issue.
00:23:05.420I mean, the first response is denial that anything was happening.
00:23:08.240And then there was anger, and we got a lot of anger.
00:23:10.420But we did get breakthrough as far as the bargaining stage.
00:23:14.880And you would say – people would say things like, everybody knows there's something wrong with the immigration system, and, of course, we should be reoriented towards skills and all this stuff.
00:23:25.920And if you look at the early reviews, that was quite a common reaction.
00:23:29.600But what happened after that was a ferocious counterattack.
00:23:32.660It was partly because there was legislation actually in Congress at that time, which was the Smith-Simpson bill, which would have reduced legal immigration.
00:23:40.780And, of course, Proposition 187 passed in California in 1994.
00:23:46.760And it really looked like there was going to be a reduction, a serious reduction in legal immigration at that point.
00:23:54.720It's hard to believe now, but it was commonly thought to be an inevitable thing.
00:24:00.580And it took a great deal of lying and lobbying on the part of the left and the business lobbies and the nail conservatives to stop it.
00:24:08.020Do you think there's a connection between what we could call social mood and immigration where – because remember the late – the early 90s, that was a kind of different time.
00:24:21.440There was a – the stock market had, you know, gone through a major downturn.
00:24:27.980I remember – you know, I can remember back then, and I was, you know, a young guy.
00:24:34.060But there was just a lot of talk of too much debt, of national decline, and so on and so forth.
00:24:40.220I mean, it was kind of ironic because that was coupled with the we just won the Cold War and it's the end of history kind of stuff.
00:24:47.500But there was always a lot of, you know, Japan is going to kill us.
00:24:51.560We're declining as a nation, so on and so forth.
00:25:07.920And that sometimes America can flip over to this, you know, euphoric, grandiose social mood of, you know, say the late 90s when you had the tech bubble.
00:25:18.480And at other points, even the 2000s, where, you know, we're going to change the world.
00:25:22.580We were a global nation, blah, blah, blah.
00:25:24.040Do you think there's a kind of correlation there, a psychic correlation?
00:25:31.140You know, I think the course of the immigration debate in the U.S. is absolutely abnormal.
00:25:35.920I think if it had cleared like an all political issue, there would have been a resolution by, you know, some form of Smith Simpson would have been passed and it would have gotten under control.
00:26:00.380I mean, it's moratorium and the reorientation towards skills and a recognition that the U.S. is an organic nation, that it does have an Anglo core.
00:26:14.160It took a great deal of intense pressure to drive those arguments out of politics.
00:26:22.120As you know, one part of that was we lost control of National Review in 97.
00:26:25.960And I really do think that that was a serious development, because if National Review had been around, had been in the right hands, I think it would have made quite a big difference to the Republican Party.
00:26:35.240So, I mean, it's an extraordinary thing to see a party in the GOP committing suicide here, because the course of the art is suicidal.
00:27:12.520Just to face the point, you know, Derbyshire and I have this contact with an interglacial, but now there's a new ice age.
00:27:18.780I mean, I think the intensity of political correctness is far in excess of, it's abnormal.
00:27:27.700I mean, it's tempting to call it a new McCarthyism, you know, people being forced out of work because they had to rent an act because he gave money to, you know, the wrong cause and all this kind of thing.
00:27:38.280But McCarthyism, first of all, McCarthy was right.
00:29:13.320It's not like Reagan or something, where he actually does have a long list of conservative beliefs on various things.
00:29:18.900Trump is obviously a fairly moderate Republican, apart from his mention of this immigration issue.
00:29:23.080And apart, of course, as you said, from his personality.
00:29:27.120Anyway, the point is they've got to stop this from coming into politics.
00:29:30.080So is it just going to be nastier and nastier?
00:29:32.300Yeah, no, I guess I just see it very differently.
00:29:36.460I think it's a little bit optimistic to call this the true America is against this.
00:29:41.340I think you have to look at something deep in the ideological core of America, and in a way in the kind of moral core of Americans,
00:29:50.980that they can't think of themselves as a people, that they must think of themselves in terms of values or ideology.
00:30:02.300And that that's what they resonate to.
00:30:04.960And that this is kind of the direction the country has been going, actually, for a long time.
00:30:10.140And in a way, the exception are people who go against it.
00:30:13.180And the people who go against it have often been anti-American.
00:30:16.360At least they were very skeptical of its founding ideology.
00:30:20.920It doesn't matter what they formally say.
00:30:25.760If you look at the opinion polls, you'll find that white America and everybody else diverge fundamentally and systematically on a whole range of issues.
00:30:32.720They really have very little in common.
00:30:34.580I mean, the Washington Post unguarded an opinion poll the other day about how many people would actually deport all the illegals in the country.
00:30:42.080And, of course, the answer is very high, but it's overwhelmingly high among whites.
00:30:46.460Whites respond to these issues systematically differently from the minority.
00:30:49.600I think there are more important things than issues, is kind of what I'm saying.
00:30:54.480Issues are like epiphenomenon, but you have to get at something much deeper.
00:30:58.380I mean, you have to answer, like, why is America like this?
00:31:02.140And it's just a deeper question than, like, political tactics.
00:33:28.900And as I said, in Tennessee, for American Renaissance, it actually did surface.
00:33:37.900If you look at the 2010 election, and all across the country, there were all kinds of local initiatives against immigration that were going on there.
00:33:46.280And what happened was they elected all kinds of people locally.
00:33:50.540And then they were systematically betrayed by the Republican Party, by the Republican people they elected.
00:33:55.220All of these local issues were undermined, and, of course, none of them were taken up at the congressional level.
00:34:02.260I mean, at that point, after 2010, the Republicans had control of the House.
00:34:06.140They could have started to pass legislation and force the Democrats to vote against it and force the president to veto it and this kind of thing.
00:34:13.680They did absolutely nothing on immigration throughout that Congress, with the result, of course, that they lost the general election in 2012.
00:34:20.900Now, again, in 2014, I think you could argue that immigration was clearly an issue, and it was working at an inchoic, grassroots level.
00:34:29.160And the Republicans did seize control of the Senate.
00:34:33.940But, again, the Senate has done absolutely nothing on any of these issues.
00:34:38.620And so this is kind of an unusual situation.
00:34:41.540I don't see that the Republican Party can survive, frankly.
00:34:45.460I mean, it really is a House department.
00:35:17.940It's an implicit identity issue that informs the elections, even when you think this election is actually about, you know, religious freedom or abortion or something.
00:35:27.600It's, in a way, about, you know, implicit identity.
00:35:32.340And so I totally agree with you there.
00:35:36.140But maybe the reason why fair and the immigration movement failed is because it, in a way, wasn't like the early 20th century immigration reform.
00:35:47.420Because that really was a heady, idealistic movement.
00:35:52.900And, yes, you can't create a political movement based around professors or something.
00:36:00.340But you need to be able to articulate something.
00:36:03.260You need to have those power of those big ideas that attract all levels of society and that kind of trickle down to people who aren't intellectuals and who are, you know, blue-collar, normal people.
00:36:15.360And that is when a movement can succeed.
00:37:14.420It's a kind of wonky movement that isn't idealistic and therefore kind of doesn't reach either intellectuals or the people.
00:37:22.520You know, like a real white identity movement would, that is not supremacist and is not racist, quote unquote, as that word is usually used.
00:37:33.100It's about, you know, in the sense of hating people or so on and so forth.
00:37:38.260That could attract heady intellectual people and it could actually resonate with blue collar people.
00:37:45.640But when you're just talking about numbers and statistics and new policies and blah, blah, blah, you're not going to attract either of those.
00:37:55.540So actually the answer to building an immigration reform movement is for us not to act but to think, to come up with bold, idealistic dreams that capture the imagination, that light a fire in someone's mind.
00:38:12.360Because I'm just speaking for myself, you know, numbers and fair, I don't read anything they produce.
00:39:11.040That's all they're allowed to talk about and retain their access to the mainstream media.
00:39:15.160When I started VDARE.com, and for that matter, in Alien Nation, I deliberately went beyond what the bounds of, I pushed the envelope.
00:39:22.420I started to talk about race and stuff like that and, and, and, and, and culture and so on in ways which were not used.
00:39:29.340They would never talk about racial balance and so on.
00:39:32.300Uh, and the result of that is that, uh, that, uh, the Southern Party Law Center denounced, uh, announced we're a hate group and all of our bookings from the mainstream media prominently dried up.
00:39:41.280That was the end of our relationship with the mainstream media.
00:39:43.320Uh, and that's been very, very damaging to us.
00:39:45.920Uh, although, of course, thanks for the internet, we found, we found, we found, we can find our own audience.
00:39:51.380But there's a real price to making that step, and there's people inside the bell where people are acutely aware that, that, that it's too dangerous for them to take, they think.
00:39:58.940And that's why they're crippled, and that's why they're impotent.
00:40:01.480Uh, you know, so we're, my position is basically to go back, you know, go back to the hills and start, start trying to mobilize people to the grassroots level by, by, by discussing these things.
00:40:12.960Uh, I, I mean, I think it's true for political discourse generally.
00:40:17.440I mean, I think the concept of coxervatism, although, um, you know, uh, it's, uh, vulgar and everything, it's profound.
00:40:26.360I mean, there are a lot of conservatives who will not address these issues and consequently are, uh, uh, bound not to reproduce themselves.
00:41:22.040And I, I think that is what this coxervative meme, that's why it's powerful.
00:41:26.780And, and that's why we have to keep it away from, uh, you know, silly conservatives who want to turn it into, you know, a euphemism for liberal or something.
00:41:34.620We, we need to keep it as ours because it's a way of saying, you're, you're, you're done.