Michael Lind writes in Salon.com that Comprehensive immigration reform is dead — and the left is to blame. [May 17, 2011] A quick glance at his arguments show that he's using Sailerian analysis of immigration and its effects on voting patterns, although I'm  afraid he gives the Republican leadership too much credit—once you've decided that Republicans are the sinister enemy, there's a tendency to assume that they know what they're doing. When they're supposed to be on your own side, it's much easier to see how feckless and incompetent they are.

Lind notes the strength and importance of the white vote—still the majority, which is pure Sailer:

"According to the monolithic propaganda of the corporate media and Democratic strategists, Latinos are a) single-issue voters who care chiefly about immigration and b) the new swing vote in American politics. But the polls show that the chief concerns of Latinos are those of other Americans: jobs and the economy.

It is true that nativists on the right have driven many Latino voters away from the Republicans. But that did not stop the Republican Party from recapturing the House and may not stop it from recapturing the Senate and presidency in 2012. Nor did it prevent the Republicans from electing two Latino Republican governors last year in New Mexico and Nevada and a Republican senator from Florida.

In any event, the Latino presidential vote is concentrated in big states that are either safely Democratic (California) or safely Republican (Texas). And while Latinos may make up a third of the population in 2050, the Latino vote was only around 9 percent in 2010. In contrast, the white working class continues to account for nearly half of the electorate, according to Democratic analyst Ruy Texeira in 2006:

"Progressives' difficulties here are underscored by the large size of this group. According to the 2004 Current Population Survey (CPS) Voter Supplement data, white working-class voters are a larger portion of the electorate than indicated by the exit polls — 52 percent, rather than 43 percent. Based on educational attainment trends and population trends by race, a reasonable guess is that the size of the white working class in another 10 years, even though it is shrinking, will still be around 46 percent to 47 percent — a very large group among which to be doing very poorly."

In 2010 Texeira and Alan Abramowitz, who argue that Democrats will benefit in the long run from the growth of the Latino electorate, qualified their optimism:

"For the Democrats, the electoral challenge will be to keep their deficit among white working class (non-college-educated) voters as close to single digits as possible. Allowing the GOP to run up super-majorities among these voters will remain a recipe for [Democratic] electoral defeat for many election cycles to come."

One of the wedge issues that Republicans can use to run up super-majorities among white working-class voters for years to come is the claim that Democrats care more about foreign nationals who violate American law than about hardworking American citizens.

All of this is a pity."

At this last point, of course, I part company with Lind. It's not a pity. But if you look at the comments on Salon.com, you'll see that Salon readers do not want to hear this. A typical example

    "yes we know Mr. Lind you believe as you have stated before the problem for the DEMS is those dirty Mexicans and gays wasn't that one of your first columns here. Not that I believe for a second you have anything to add to this complex matter but both parties have played games with this issues and will continue to do so.

And in case you didn't get it I was showing contempt for your position on the Dems and gays right and immigration in the first part of that. Lets just say your past comments on these matters have not been forgotten by me even if I agree with you here on the fact that neither party really wants to address this issue."

The thing is, Michael Lind's analysis has always been pretty close to Steve Sailer's or Peter Brimelow's, which has required him to denounce right-wingers bitterly. In 2000, Steve Sailer wrote

"Michael Lind is indeed an odd duck. His tendencies toward self-promotion, narcissism, and paranoia unfortunately distract attention from his flashes of genuine insight and originality. For example, his articles on mass immigration's deleterious impact on America's poor are also sound. This excellent 1996 column ("Huddled Excesses") from the New Republic (!) is illustrative. [NR, April 11, 1996]

What's not unusual at all about Lind, though, is his practice of ferociously denouncing writers with whom he substantially agrees in order to make himself sound more politically correct than he really is. Russian peasants fleeing across the frozen steppe in a sleigh will occasionally toss one of their own number to the pursuing wolf pack. Far too many well-known thinkers who try to stay both modestly realistic yet socially acceptable try the same thing. If you want to say anything at all realistic about immigration, race, genes, or IQ, yet still maintain your reputation as "mainstream," you must pick out somebody with whom you generally agree, distort his position shamelessly, and then viciously attack this human straw man of your own concoction."

I think the Salon.com commenter may have caught him at it.