From Politico:

Should We Be Turning Japanese?

With economic instability and terror plaguing the open West, a case emerges for the insular approach. By Michael Auslin

April 12, 2016

… Since World War II, the predominance of the concepts of openness and diversity has never been seriously challenged in the West. The almost universally accepted identification of modernity with openness has prevented needed discussions of the costs associated with such an approach.

Good article, but I’d suggest that the statement, “Since World War II, the predominance of the concepts of openness and diversity has never been seriously challenged in the West” is overly credulous about how much retconning of history has been done in the last few years. Open Borders has always been a very, very tough sell, so it’s perhaps truer to say that the case for Open Borders has seldom been seriously argued because it was so obviously weak.

As the Google Ngram graph of books shows, the triumph of the word “diversity” was a fad of the early 1990s, much like “deconstructionism,” “postmodernism,” and the “Duke University Dept. of English.”

In fact, I’d hardly be surprised if a sober historical retrospective concluded that all of those fevered fads were basically brainchilds of the restless intellect of Duke English Dept. chairman Stanley Fish — a.k.a., Morris Zapp in the 1970s-1980s comic novels of David Lodge, in which Zapp/Fish proclaims his ambition to use his avowal of French leftist hoo-ha to become the first literature professor to receive a six figure salary and has various unfortunate (but deserved) fates befall him, such as being kidnapped by Italian Marxist terrorists.

As Fish got older, he seemed to lose respect for his earlier posturings. Nobody else cares about Deconstructionism either anymore, but the rest of us are still stuck with Diversity because their are so many hustlers trying to hack out an easy career based on their being Diverse.

In reality, a centrist, effective President like Eisenhower presided over a mass deportation of illegal aliens to Mexico with barely any controversy. The 1965 immigration act was sold to Congress explicitly as having minimal impact on diversity. The 1986 amnesty was sold as a one-time deal that would impose harsh employer penalties that would eliminate future illegal immigration. Bill Clinton appointed a black lesbian civil rights leader, Barbara Jordan, to chair an immigration commission, and Jordan reported back that America should crack down hard on illegal immigration and significantly cut legal immigration. The New York Times editorialized strongly against amnesty as recently as 2000 for the same reasons that Donald Trump and Ann Coulter give today: it’s bad for Americans’ wages.

Instead, the long-term impact of the drip-drip-drip of demographic change has been denied and hushed up as nothing to worry about. Only in the last few years when the negative effects have become obvious has the tune been changed to: Americans and Europeans have always favored massive demographic inundation from abroad. That’s who we are.

But this is a rewrite of history.