Born November 2, 1938

Washington, D.C.

Presidential advisor, newspaper columnist, presidential candidate, anti-immigrant crusader

Pat Buchanan. Corbis.

"Uncontrolled immigration threatens to deconstruct the nation we grew up in and convert America into a conglomeration of peoples with almost nothing in common."

Some Americans take pride in describing the United States as a nation of immigrants, and there is no doubt that since 1620 the character of the North American continent has been drastically changed as a result of people arriving from Europe, Africa, and Asia. But the celebration of the nation of immigrants has often been countered by a strong backlash against new arrivals. It happened in the middle of the nineteenth century, with the secretive Know Nothing Party, and it happened again at the end of the twentieth century with the repeated presidential aspirations of Pat Buchanan, a well-known conservative (supporting traditional values) newspaper columnist and...