I'm going to keep adding names to this list as I find them. I'm a little amazed.

"I don't always agree with @BretStephensNYT, but when I do, I really really do." Daniel Drezner, WaPo, The Fletcher School, et al.

"Brilliant and compelling." Anthony Blinken. Deputy Secretary of State and Deputy National Security Advisor under Obama.

"Good column by good columnist; very worth a read. (Don't @ me; I already know that you feel sad about this.)" Jennifer Steinhauer. NYT Congressional reporter.

"A smart column." Steven Greenhouse, former NYT Labor Reporter. Author of “The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker.”

It's takes a conservative ironist, a comedian, to make liberals acknowledge tacitly what they've never had the courage to admit. And they don't seem to realize they've done it.

Stephens explains Trump, and Brexit if you look at the details.

Bret Stephens for mass deportation, and not in Israel this time.

...On point after point, America’s nonimmigrants are failing our country. Crime? A study by the Cato Institute notes that nonimmigrants are incarcerated at nearly twice the rate of illegal immigrants, and at more than three times the rate of legal ones.

Educational achievement? Just 17 percent of the finalists in the 2016 Intel Science Talent Search — often called the “Junior Nobel Prize” — were the children of United States-born parents. At the Rochester Institute of Technology, just 9.5 percent of graduate students in electrical engineering were nonimmigrants.

Religious piety — especially of the Christian variety? More illegal immigrants identify as Christian (83 percent) than do Americans (70.6 percent), a fact right-wing immigration restrictionists might ponder as they bemoan declines in church attendance.

Business creation? Nonimmigrants start businesses at half the rate of immigrants, and accounted for fewer than half the companies started in Silicon Valley between 1995 and 2005. Overall, the share of nonimmigrant entrepreneurs fell by more than 10 percentage points between 1995 and 2008, according to a Harvard Business Review study.

Nor does the case against nonimmigrants end there. The rate of out-of-wedlock births for United States-born mothers exceeds the rate for foreign-born moms, 42 percent to 33 percent. The rate of delinquency and criminality among nonimmigrant teens considerably exceeds that of their immigrant peers. A recent report by the Sentencing Project also finds evidence that the fewer immigrants there are in a neighborhood, the likelier it is to be unsafe.

And then there’s the all-important issue of demographics. The race for the future is ultimately a race for people — healthy, working-age, fertile people — and our nonimmigrants fail us here, too. “The increase in the overall number of U.S. births, from 3.74 million in 1970 to 4.0 million in 2014, is due entirely to births to foreign-born mothers,” reports the Pew Research Center. Without these immigrant moms, the United States would be faced with the same demographic death spiral that now confronts Japan.

Bottom line: So-called real Americans are screwing up America. Maybe they should leave, so that we can replace them with new and better ones: newcomers who are more appreciative of what the United States has to offer, more ambitious for themselves and their children, and more willing to sacrifice for the future. In other words, just the kind of people we used to be — when “we” had just come off the boat. 

2003

The politics of educated liberalism is the politics of reassurance, of protecting your own interests while wanting to be liked. If you're a leftist, even the bourgeois variety, you need to make the hard choices. This country feeds off the energy of new arrivals, who trample its exhausted native underclass. But I love these new people, who live a double life of greed and community, a double life Americans of any class seem unable to understand. Of the immigrants I know who've been both here and Europe, most would live there if they could. They don't love the American dream, but they need American money.  I'm rewriting this on June 17, 2005, softening the tone, but I'll leave the original punch line just for laughs. After American workers gain the imagination and the pride that immigrant tradesman bring with them, I'll move back to this country; because once they close the borders, I'm leaving. 

New tag for Immigration