VDARE.com has long viewed National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru with an appropriate contempt, but every once in a while I get letters saying he's not that bad on immigration. And of course (sigh) I agree, I agree—in fact, I think the last time I spoke to him, at a conference put on by Pat Buchanan’s The American Cause, he described the Wall Street Journal Edit Page position on immigration perfectly: “They just lie.”

But Ponnuru’s immigration stance is all too crassly a constant triangulation between the demands of NR’s readership (still apparently immigration patriots), the corrupt but potentially career-enhancing Beltway GOP leadership, and the capitulations necessary to survive as a professional Token Conservative in the Main Stream Media, for whom immigration is a forbidden hot button issue.

Thus Ponnuru’s Hillary Clinton, Immigration Extremist (Bloomberg, May 7) does open with a robust attack on the hypocrisy of Obama launching an Executive Amnesty that he himself said was illegal. And he then effectively points out that Hillary Clinton, outrageously, proposes to extend that illegality.

But, tellingly, Ponnuru continues:

Republican presidential candidates should respond by saying that they're open to legal status or citizenship—but that these things have to be accomplished through Congress, and should occur only after it's clear that existing immigration laws will be credibly enforced at the border and in the workplace. If Obama's amnesty is eventually cleared by the courts, Republicans should say that they'll respect it for the three years that it protects those eligible from deportation, but that they expect to reach a legislative solution when that protected status comes up for renewal. [Emphases added].

For anyone not all too familiar with this shellgame:

• “Open to legal status or citizenship” = Amnesty
• “Respect it for the three years that it protects those eligible from deportation” = accept de facto Amnesty. (What about their inevitable U.S.-born children?)
• “Reach a legislative solution” = Amnesty.

In his disastrous 1999 attack on Pat Buchanan (who like O’Sullivan is too tolerant, see above), Ponnuru smeared him as advocating “a form of identity politics for white people.”

Of course, until the catastrophic 1965 Immigration Act (after which Ponnuru’s family immigrated) “white people” = Americans.

But at least Ponnuru’s racial animosity liberates me to describe his attitude to the dominant political culture with a line from one of the great expressions of Victorian Anglo-Saxonism:

Let dusky Indians whine and kneel…