Peter Brimelow

Peter Brimelow is a British immigrant to the United States and a senior editor at Forbes and National Review magazines. The following viewpoint is an excerpt from his 1995 book Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster. Brimelow argues that, for centuries, the vast majority of immigrants to the United States were white Europeans. White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Europeans are the people that make up America’s ethnic core, he asserts. When other groups of immigrants (such as Catholics, Slavs, or Asians) began to immigrate to the United States, nativists tried to protect America’s historic ethnicity by passing restrictions to keep them out. It is entirely appropriate, Brimelow maintains, that Americans would want to ensure that their ethnic core remained white...