By Peter Brimelow

 "National Guard Quietly Ending Mission on U.S.-Mexico Border."

A few days ago, I saw this headline signifying the end of the National Guard's two-year mission to bolster the nation's scandalously porous southern border.

It also signified, of course, the Washington elite's conclusion that, with the Presidential primaries safely over, it can safely go back to sleep on the nation-breaking issue of out-of-control legal and illegal immigration.

Which is why, when I googled around, I found this story:

"Border governors worried about National Guard pullout

(My italics.)

It was always pretty silly, needless to say. As VDARE.COM reported, when the Bush Administration dispatched the National Guard to the border, it was also deprived of guns. Don't want to offend Mexico City!

One National Guardsman has just told a reporter that illegal aliens walked right by him: "I've seen it quite a few times...We have to continue working."

The National Guard ploy was simply a ruse, a ploy by an Administration and a political elite stunned and scared by the outpouring of patriotic fury unleashed by Washington's bipartisan attempt to push through amnesty for illegal aliens.

But at VDARE.COM, we welcomed it. Someone once said: "Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue." Washington was making an empty gesture, but it was a gesture that it made because it was afraid.

And Washington was afraid because of the power that patriotic immigration reformers displayed during the debate on amnesty.

Afterwards, as we reported on our blog, one newspaper who supported amnesty wrote ruefully:

"The opponents of the bill prevailed and they did so in a grand manner that I had to respect. It was democracy at its best-and an instructive lesson for anyone interested in politics. Countless time a day, I received messages from a variety of groups that had Freedom or American or Liberty as part of their title.

"The discipline of these groups was a sight to behold. Someone created a set of talking points that declared opponents need only focus on one word-amnesty-to denounce the legislation. And every group that came out against it did precisely that."

I'm not going to say that it was VDARE.COM that created that set of talking points-although early we did run articles emphasizing the decisive importance of the term amnesty-but I do believe we played a key role in the greatest patriotic uprising for many years. And that role was supplying ammunition-facts, analyses and arguments.

Now, almost exactly a year later, the political elite thinks it's got the patriotic immigration reform movement back under control.

After some hopeful moments, both major parties have nominated candidates who want to keep immigration reform out of the election.

My view: we'll see. The political elite was wrong about the power of the patriotic immigration reform movement during the amnesty debate. It is wrong if it thinks that power won't be felt again soon-maybe even in this election.

Meanwhile, we have to regroup. Rebuild. Stockpile facts. Refine our arguments and analyses for when our moment comes again.

That's why we publish writers like Steve Sailer on the latest science of human groups, Edwin S. Rubenstein on the latest government statistics, Allan Wall on the National Question as seen from Mexico, Joe Guzzardi on immigration's Ground Zero-his California classroom. And many others, every day. (And most hours of the day when you count the blog!)

At VDARE.COM, we are in this for the long haul. We are building an institution.

But we need money to do that. We can only do it with your help.

Money is our secret weapon at VDARE.COM. Our fixed costs are very low. We have no offices, we operate entirely virtually. We don't have to pay printing and postage (thank goodness!)

What this means: essentially everything you give goes to pay writers and editors.

Our writers and editors are not paid as much as I would like. But they do get something. This ability to pay our writers is what has distinguished VDARE.COM from a host of excellent but evanescent blogs which have come and gone.

Writers will often write for love-because they passionately believe in our cause. But in the long run, they need to be able to justify the time spent, to their families and to themselves.

To me as a professional journalist, the quantity and quality of non-professional writing on the immigration issue that comes in over the e-transom has been a revelation. Many of these writers have full-time careers in other fields, some are students; I encourage them all to write anonymously because of the very real reign of terror imposed by the curse of Political Correctness. Others are struggling, idealistic free-lancers; I shudder for them. All are patriots deprived of outlets because of the orthodoxy of the Mainstream Media.

Right now, I want to make a special offer.

We've just received copies of the Spring 2006 issue of The Social Contract, the quarterly magazine on immigration and related issues.

As they did last year, this issue is entirely devoted to material that originally appeared on VDARE.COM.

This is from my introduction:

This is the second issue of The Social Contract to be devoted entirely to material originally posted in the webzine VDARE.COM, the first being TSC's Winter 2006-2007 issue. I am once again most grateful to TSC's publisher, Dr. John Tanton, and to its editors for giving, in Shakespeare's words, "to airy nothing/ A local habitation and a name."

Of course, I don't at all think the internet is an "airy nothing," although I do recognize that many people still find tree-based journalism comforting and somehow more real.

I think, in fact, that the internet is the most important development since the invention of writing, and that it will have equally profound effects on human society.

Two quick examples:

I regret that in this volume we cannot reproduce our "hyperlinks"-in effect footnotes, which if you click on them take you to supporting articles both on VDARE.COM and elsewhere.  These exponentially enhance an argument's credibility-and also our traffic, as we can tell from our internal tracking data.

I also note that several VDARE.COM writers represented in this collection originally made themselves known to me by email, thereafter rapidly coalescing to form the VDARE.COM e-community.

And it couldn't happen a moment too soon. It is now absolutely clear that common sense in the immigration debate is not going to triumph through the conventional process of debate in the established MainStream media, academe or politics.

Indeed, there is still essentially no debate at all on immigration and related topics-as Steve Sailer's account, republished here, of the lynching of the eminent scientist James D. Watson makes clear.

Political correctness is no mere figure of speech, but an active totalitarian force. Further frightening evidence, also republished here, are Athena Kerry's reflections on her experiences as a student in a Jesuit (!) university.

For me, the saddest lines in this collection are at the end of my own long interview with Harvard's Professor George Borjas.

Despite his own great intellectual triumph in establishing that the economic utility of immigration is much exaggerated, and that in fact there is no economic rationale for the current mass influx, Borjas tells me that he discourages his graduate students from studying immigration:

"I don't think it would do them much good."

Earlier, explaining why no work is done on the question of what, in theory, is the optimum number of immigrants, he laughs and says:  "There's an academic's career to think of. You have to worry about getting tenure..."

George Borjas is remarkably cheerful about all this.

But he began his career in Communist Cuba. For those of us who thought we lived a free society, experience of the immigration debate is bitter.

Nevertheless, there are reasons for cheer. I argue elsewhere in this collection that the business community may not prove the immovable obstacle to immigration reform that it appears to be.

And Steve Sailer recounts the greatest triumph for patriotic immigration reformers to date: stopping the 2007 Bush Amnesty bill.

The truth, and the internet, shall set us free.

Please help us now. For every $100 donation, we will send a free copy of this Social Contract special issue. (Remember to include your address if you donate by PayPal!). For $125, we'll send two. For $150 or above, three. 

Please give generously.

You have our profound gratitude.

Peter Brimelow

NOTE: VDARE.COM is no longer associated with the Center For American Unity, which plans to focus on litigation. We are grateful for their past help and wish them well in future. Our sponsor is now the VDARE Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.