Re: border controls

[djones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (rakesh bhandari)]

Well, Francis N., I was quoting--not agreeing with--Francis Fukuyama's
review of Peter Brimelow's book, and I must say that your response is on
the mark, though I don't think that men are called "bitch" much in the
circles Fukuyama hangs out in.

Taking Chris B' kind advice up, I will include some ramblings of my own.

  Fukuyama doesn't think he is a racist; he  is critical of Brimelow's
arguments for the preservation of the racial core (?) of America while he
supports Brimelow's agenda for reform.  Nathan Glazer and many others have
taken the same position.


  Fukuyama neither supports nor distances himself from Brimelow's call for
a revival of Operation Wetback, a state policy for violent repatriation of
immigrants.  Some time back I read that the project was put in full gear in
the early 50s actually in order to whip up anti-Latino sentiment in
preparation for the overthrow of the Arbenz regime of Guatemala in 1954.

That is, according to author, the project was only seriously implemented
not to terrorize migrant labor but to create nationalist antipathy towards
Latinos.   This argument seems to me not to be supportable; I think this
essay appeared about a decade ago in *Research in Political Economy*,
edited by Paul Zarembka.

At any rate, Brimelow calls for a new Operation Wetback neither for the
purposes of imperialist propagana nor for the maintainence of terrorism
against the migrant proletariat.  He wants to preserve the racial core of
this country; at least that is how he understands his own argument.  He
also thinks class conflict is likely to become violent in a racially and
ethnically homogeneous nation.

Brimelow wrote one of the most sympathetic reviews of Murray and
Herrnstein's Bell Curve.   The review appeared in Forbes, the magazine of
which Brimelow is an editor.  In this book however Brimelow emphasizes that
his argument does not depend on the 'findings' of Murray and Herrnstein
(very excited to read the essays on the 'new racism' in this issue of
Science and Society).

 Brimelow is quite critical (in Schumpeterian fashion) of the new
managerial, intellectual class he thinks has come to rule the country and
in particular to stifle 'politically incorrect' debate about the need to
curtail immigration. (I have not finished Brimelow's book yet.)

What is interesting here is that William Darity, Jr also thinks that
capitalism has been superceded by a new managerial class (see Daedulus,
Winter 1995).  However, he thinks that since the new mode of production in
which they are dominant no longer relies on the exploitation of labor, the
new managerial class will be predisposed towards the progressive
elimination of the underclass, especially the Black unemployed.  For
Darity, the new managerial class is the protagonist of racist population
control; for Brimelow the politically correct new class stands in the way
of the recovery of America's racial core through racist immigration reform.


I think there has been a serious sociological debate about the character
and defintion of the new class.   About which here, as elsewhere, I know
too little.

Rakesh Bhandari









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