Ramesh Ponnuru Misses The Point
10/04/2007
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Here's the latest Ramesh Ponnuru blog, part of a continuing series:

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Peter Brimelow Misses the Point   [Ramesh Ponnuru]

I'm not whining about the hate mail that Vdare generated against me (the way Brimelow regularly whines about his justly stalled career). I'm gloating about how Vdare failed in its attempt to generate hate mail, as it regularly fails.

When we add a link that says "[Send him mail]" after a writer's name in an article, we are not trying to generate "hate mail." We are providing a service for our readers who might want to email him, if he thinks he's important. And we do deprecate emailing pointlessly rude messages saying "go back where you came from."These don't help, and since Ponnuru is from Prairie Village, KS, they're particularly pointless.No one goes back to Prairie Village.

Of course, his presence in the US is a part of the modern immigration phenomenon. .Here's his description of his Road to Damascus conversion to really, really, moderate restrictionism, at the 2007 Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration (which was won by Stephen Dinan):

MARK KRIKORIAN: Ramesh has actually, he can talk about it a little more, but he’s actually had a kind of a migration of his views, moved from much more kind of expansionist view of immigration toward a more skeptical or critical view of immigration. I don’t want to ascribe any specific positions, but his views on this have changed as he’s seen how the issue works and how it’s covered, and I thought it would be interesting to hear from him some of his thoughts on what he thinks the quality and the nature and the reasons are for the way immigration is covered. Ramesh?

(Applause.)

RAMESH PONNURU: [Send him mail]

Well, the sea change was when I realized that I actually had enough relatives in the country and —

(Laughter.)

— and was having too much trouble keeping track of birthday cards as it was, so that was my sort of Damascene moment.

[Panel Discussion Transcript, Center for Immigration Studies, June 8, 2007]

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