A REPLY TO PETER BRIMELOW Julian L. Simon Peter Brimelow's goal in attacking me ("Facts and Fancies", NR, February 26, 1996) surely is not just to hurt me or my repu- tation. Rather, he aims to promote the idea that immigrants exploit natives by taking disproportionate funds from the public coffers. The research gets in his way. Because he lacks countervailing evidence, Brimelow employs many rhetorical gimmicks. But his main tactic is to smear those of us who publish the data and analyses showing that immigrants put into the public coffers as taxes more than they take out in benefits. Let's first get the facts on the table. Natives receive much more funds from the public coffers (average: $3800 per year) than do immigrants (average: $2200 or $2600). The central element is payments to the elderly - Social Security and Medi- care. And immigrant households on average pay more in taxes than native households. Because immigrants mostly come when they are young and strong, and without a generation of elders, they bestow a windfall upon natives through their excess of taxes over government expenditures on their behalf. This continues until the cohort resembles the age pattern of native families. Brimelow either does not understand this economic mechanism or refuses to acknowledge that he understands it. Now to Brimelow's diversionary attacks upon me. First you should know how he gathered his information. Brimelow has never interviewed me. He has never written down what I said face-to-face, as I remember. And our phone conversation was a call made by him whose purpose (he writes) was to "complain" that I had not quoted him. We also had a social dinner because he said he wanted to get to know me personally and obtain my opinion about a previous book he sent me. (I made a few polite remarks but held my tongue about my opinion of the book.) And we once chatted at a talk I gave, and twice more chatted before we spoke at the same events. That's it. next par not clear, and maybe omit second half Yet Brimelow publishes in his book such comments as these: "Julian Simon keeps rather odd hours. As I understood it, he had to break up our dinner early in order to go home and sleep for a few hours. Then he planned to get up in the middle of the night and work." (p. 128) (True. I also was bored out of my skull with the conversation.) And "Simon is the sort of engagingly frank fellow who will tell you what he thinks about sex before you've reached the main course of your first dinner together. (He's in favor.)" Quite right; I said it, and I stand four- square behind the judgment. Let's not inquire whether it is ethical journalism to treat conversation over dinner as "on the record," especially since he did not take notes. What's important about the tidbits he gath- ered in a manner outside the canon of journalism, and to which he devotes so much space in his book and article, is that his publishing them is an implicit concession that he cannot find statistical evidence to make his case and disprove mine. [It's embarrassing to say so, but ] Brimelow seems obsessed by me. The index to his book contains more lines referring to "Simon" than any other name, and he gossips and pop-psychologizes about me on dozens of pages. For example, he cites a third-hand (but true!) account of my throwing drinks into the face of a man who spoke ugly untruths about me before 2000 people and a radio audience, way back in 1970. (Brimelow apparently is horrified by this. Is there no insult to his honor that would induce him to use anything but words to fight with?) One further step toward journalistic absurdity, Brimelow refers to a remark that I made in our telephone conversation "without batting an eye." Clearly, this man has second sight. (No, no video phone.) [Age attack] He's right; I'm older than him] Instead of serious analysis, Brimelow begins in NR by label- ing me a religious ["icon"] who is so far from being alive and mobile that "The faithful still cart him around reverently. But the close observer can see unmistakable signs of decay." [At least he did not say he smells decay. I prefer his likening me to a "mummified saint". [At least mummies don't smell. Brimelow then says that I have "lost interest in immigra- tion." Not so, I say. [Of course Brimelow may really know my mind better than I do, but ] the following facts may help you to judge whether he is psychic:] Between the appearance of my 1989 book on immigration (when I supposedly "lost interest") and the end of this year, I will have published seven books on various subjects and about 35 professional articles, plus a bunch of popular articles, mostly stuff that was in process before the appearance of my 1989 book on immigration. In other words, I have been finishing up a few other things between then and the recent booklet on immigration that raised Brimelow's ire. I also have made five new as-yet-unpublished technical studies of immigration, theoretical and empirical. [Does this not refute his "charge"?] Clearly, clever-writer Brimelow can turn any positive (my large volume of other writings) into a seeming negative (the crime of "lost interest in immigration"). Brimelow tells us he "naturally felt an author's disgust [toward me]. I had wasted an inscribed copy on Simon... So I called to complain" that I [Simon] have not read his book. As to reading Brimelow's book: What I surely said was that I had not read all of his book. I clearly had read [or looked at] parts of it, and just as clearly Brimelow had to know that I had, because I quoted from it when we were together on the Charley Rose PBS show. Check your tape, Peter, or maybe you don't want to remember. The transcript shows that I said "Race suffuses your book." Let's back up that statement about racism. Brimelow tries to deflect such charges by saying in advance that people will accuse him of racism. "Anyone who says anything critical of immigration is going to be accused of racism" (p. 9). But then he goes on to write, "current immigration policy... is turning the United States into a multiracial society ... with extraordi- nary speed" (p. 129), and "Race and ethnicity are destiny in American politics. The racial and ethnic balance of America is being altered" (p. xvii). These sorts of statements are every- where in his book - indeed, this race consciousness is its main message. And these are the sort of inflammatory events that he suggests as our destiny: 1. "In January, 1993, a Pakistani [applicant for political asylum] (and, simultaneously, for amnesty as an illegal immigrant) opens fire on employees entering CIA headquarters, killing two and wounding three." 2. "In February, 1993, a gang of Middle Easterners... blow up New York's World Trade Center, killing six and injuring more than 1,000!!" (his exclamation points, of course). 3. "In December, 1993, a Jamaican immigrant [Colin Ferguson, a black] opens fire on commuters on New York's Long Island Rail Road, killing six and wounding 19!!" He gives us details: "Colin Ferguson... motivated by hatred of whites" (p. 7), and "about 6 million of the 22 million U. S. Hispanics are uninsured." Textbook demagoguery. The index lists references to blacks on more than 35 pages of his book, and I found many other pages where color is men- tioned that aren't listed in the index. He includes a full-page graph showing racial composition from 1790 to now, with the black and Hispanic proportions growing so that the lines look like the scary title of the graph: "The Pincers." The index also is replete with Mr. Brimelow's references to Haiti, Africa, Enoch Powell (Great Britain's notorious religion- baiter), Zulus, Asians, Nigeria, and South Africa (as in "commuter train murders"). Mention of "whites" and ethnicity is everywhere. Indeed, the very first sentence in Brimelow's book is "There is a sense in which current immigration policy is Adolph Hitler's posthumous revenge on America". And Brimelow asks us not to say that this is a race-focused tract? As to his slams against my work: There is no way that I can here refute Brimelow's assertion that my 1989 book The Economic Consequences of Immigration and my 1996 pamphlet Immigration: The Demographic and Economic Facts are not simply the "chaotic piles of erratically annotated clippings" as he calls them. That's powerful stuff; the reader who has read no other reviews, and not looked at the books, is likely to judge that Brimelow would not say such a thing if there was absolutely no truth to it, even if he exaggerates; this is the "big lie" tactic. I can only ask the open-minded reader to consult those works and judge for yourself. What else can one say to refute such a vague charge [(and one particularly offensive to me)]? But when Brimelow and his colleagues make the mistake of getting specific, I can then show you how he and they are wrong and worse. Brimelow apparently lacks either the knowledge, or the guts, or both, to himself make specific criticisms of my work. Instead he turns the job over to someone else. He writes that my recent booklet "will soon have a counterweight: the Federation for American Immigration Reform [FAIR] is shortly to issue a long, closely argued critique by Jack Martin". Okay, let's look at Brimelow's "counterweight" that FAIR spent thousands of dollars to produce and distribute. It is a pamphlet entitled Behind the Curtain: Julian Simon's Manipulation of Immigration Studies, by John L. Martin and C. Scipio Garling. Please bear with me; the Martin-Garling blunder is monumen- tal but not simple. Their prime tabular exhibit was a table of data that I reproduced from an Urban Institute paper by Jeffrey Passell and Michael Fix. That table shows that the aggregate proportion of immigrants aged 15 and over receiving "welfare" (defined as food stamps, AFDC, Supplemental Security Income, and General Assistance) declined from 1979 to 1989. But over the same period the proportions in both the 15-64 and 65+ two sub- groups increased. These results seem internally inconsistent on their face. Martin and Garling therefore wrote at length that the table is "obviously wrong", and something that "Simon [and presumably the Urban Institute] should have recognized". They say that "the data belie that conclusion" which the Urban Institute and I arrived at, and that "he [Simon] disproves his own claims". Despite the apparent internal contradiction, however, the data are not at all implausible, and they are explained by Simp- son's Paradox, which I (and other instructors) teach in the elementary statistics class. The apparent inconsistency is caused by the relative sizes of the sub-groups in the population. Given that the ratio of over-65 persons to 15-65s was 23 to 77 in 1979, and was 15 to 85 in 1989, the observed data are per- fectly consistent with each other. And a subsequent re-run of the analysis by the Urban Institute confirmed this theoretical analysis and the correctness of the original numbers. All the nasty charges against me on that matter therefore are entirely falsified. So much for the "counterweight" to my work. Lastly, the really ugly: Brimelow and his colleagues broadly suggest that I lie, though they don't say so in a fashion that might get them sued. [[They come close]] Brimelow cutely writes, "Simon is not, surely, being dishonest here. No crook would be so blatant. We're talking serious - What? - wishful thinking? Intellectual paralysis? creeping distaste for debate?" And his FAIR colleague Dan Stein headlines [a press release] "Julian Simon is not a liar." These are quite some sweet gentlemen I have fallen in with. But get this about Brimelow and the truth. He confesses: "I bring to the United States from Britain ...a certain (ahem) contempt for American debating technique... American competitive debaters are given their topics in advance and earnestly learn all the arguments by heart. But British competitive debaters are told their topics... only at the last moment. They are expected to succeed by quickness of wit and whatever facts they can dredge (or make) up". Can you believe an author telling us that he sympathizes with making up facts, and then asking us to take his book seri- ously? This exemplifies one of Brimelow's specialities: accusing his opponents of doing exactly what he does (even if the opponent does not do it) and then even brags about doing it himself. When advocates resort to ad hominem attacks, using such devices as innuendo, diversionary trivialities, and pop psychology, you can bet that they lack solid evidence. The lawyers say: When you have the facts, pound the facts. When you have the law pound the law. When you have neither the law nor the facts, pound the table. That explains why Brimelow and his anti-immigration buddies [and the population control movement] pound [me]. [It will be interesting to see Brimelow's reply. He's good on the attack. Let's see what he does when someone comes back at him.] article5 brimelow April 30, 1996 page 1 OUTTAKES Peter thinks that most of the audience comes here believing the opposite of what he does - and I come believing that most of you believe the opposite of whast I do. On culture and "alien ways": Mostly, what Brimelow says is simply pop psychology or sociology, anecdotes without any reliable supporting data. I don't agree with most of it, but my views are mustly just curbstone opinion, too. But I am supposed to be a scientist and therefore it is not appropriate for me to spout my cocktail-party thoughts in public, because someone might get confused and think that I offer them with the same confidence that I publish my tested research data, or my readings ot the research of others. Not only does Mr. Brimelow not assume the responsibilities of a truth-seeker, but instead forthrightly announces that he is operating as an advocate. Unfortuntely, he cannot seem even to understand a person who tries to follow the facts where they lead. When I come up with a brand-new theory which argues against the usual interpretation of immigration's benefits, Brimelow says that "Even Julian Simon, although he favors immigration, says explicitly..." Hey, that's a piece of economcs so radical I can't even get it into mainstream journals. Or when I say we should not simply open the borders, he makes it "Julian Simon has quietly declined to go that far." (p. 136). There has been nothing quiet about my statement, nor did I "decline" anything. I simply urge a different policy. When I raise another new piece of theory to support a gradual change, Brimelow simply gets it wrong, calling it a "crucial theoretical concession" (p. 137). I'm "conceding" nothing. I'm telling you the theory and facts as I see them; these happen to argue against simply opening the borders, but that's simply the way the cookie crumbles. He gets some of it wrong - some of it to his disadvantage. He gets it wrong that I simply "revert to a classic non-economic view: labor is good, more labor is better". But his honest attempt to give Neal and Uselding a notice, with their eduation- capital argument, could have been omitted, because their argument doesn't square with the earlier new theory of mine - which Brimelow himself noticed. On immigrant "quality", he simply has the facts wrong. On recent welfare, he gives no source in his table. And he either misreads Borjas on absolute-relative, or uses Borjas's ambiguous language for that purpose. It is all debate and verbal combat with him. Poll shows most economists favor immigration? That's "because efonomists are part of the elite benefittingng at the expense of their fellow Americans", though he puts it as a rhetorical question. (p. 159)He talks about "why immigration enthusiasts have been able to get away with arguing tht ...??? Brimelow produces one of the nicest pieces of pro- immigration evidence, without knowing it, I've seen recently. p. 147: "83 percent of illegal immigrants amnestied under IRCA had false Social Security numbers". This simply proves that most illegals pay income taxes and social security - negating the charge that they work off-books. To rely on Huddle's work, as Brimelow does, is to knowingly collaborate in an intellectual fraud. In truth, I have just one objection to Brimelow's exercise of journalistic skill and interpretation. He quotes me that "The notion of wanting to keep out immigrants in order to keep our instituions and our values is pure prejudice". He interpreted this as "racism". There are a zillion prejudices in the world - simply pre-judging, judging before you have facts - that have nothing to do with race. That said, I repeat what I have said before: Most opposition to immigration is either economic ignorance or racism. Or use the term "nativism", if you prefer. Indeed, if one is any doubt about this, The shot about A. M. Rosenthal, Haitians and HIV was truly a blast. If in doubt about the fact othe racism, consult Rita Simon's ...... Trade and immigration. Makes it sound like a concession. But read negative externalities wrong. But I ask you to keep in mind we must remember that he is acting as an advocate and not as a person trying to contribute to new knowledge - (the latter person being known as a scientist). "Common Sense About Immifgration" (16) "common political culture" (16) "There are important differences between the last Great Wave of Immigration and today's" (18 *************** USE TALKS3\IMMCATO4 FOR ALL EXCEPT LAST "CULTURE" PART. THE EARLIER PART OF FILE HAS BEEN TAKEN THERE. "recycling". Updating to the 1990s standard sets of data found in my 1989 book and other sources such as Report to the President of the Council of Economic Advisers, such as the number of immigrants since 1820, the rate of immigration, the numbers and proportions of immigrants in the population, the number of apprehensions of illegals, and the like. The term "recycling" is just plain false. Re "balkanization" as in Brimelow's "hog-like business lobbies [should] shuffle off and get the hell out of the way of those of us trying to save American from balkanization": No serious person would make a comparison between the U. S. and the historic and religious hatreds of ex-Yugoslavia. This clearly is a coded reference to Africans, Asians, and Hispanics in the U. S. Let's be straight, as Margaret Thatcher is willing to be straight about Great Britain, when she says she just "wants to keep Britain British" (check). That means that even if Mohandas Ghandi wore a proper tuxedo, and was an Anglicized barrister of the highest order, which he was, he was still a wog. Let's just get this out on the table, Peter, instead of making veiled references to Colin Ferguson. (See, Peter? There is still a bit of life in this old bod. I'm not yet ready that "Cardinal Crane should retire him to the crypt", as you ended your charming essay. And I'm hoping that some readers will conclude that rumors of my death and iconization have been at least slightly exaggerated.) Brimelow, Peter, Alien Nation (New York: Random House, 1995). The United States is being engulfed by the great- est wave of immigration it has ever faced. The latest immigrants are different from those who came before. These newcomers are less educated, less skilled, more prone to trouble with the law, less inclined to share American culture and values, and altogether less likely to become Americans in name or spirit. Brimelow be- lieves that we cannot continue to admit millions of legal and illegal immigrants if we wish to maintain our standard of living and our national identity. Nobody anticipated that it would rob us of the power to determine who can and cannot enter our national family and that it would trigger an ethnic and racial trans- formation without precedent in history. ... there is no example of a multicultural society that has lasted; many have disintegrated into racial and linguistic enclaves. (Brimelow, 1995, Jacket cover.) If I put anything personal into print, it is certainly fair for a journalist to quote it (though I confess that if I'd ever imagined that others would pay much attention to what a write, I'd have been more circumspect). But it seems quite a stretch for Peter Brimelow to quote from my book on psychological depres- sion an anecdote concerning my parents' mode of putting me in a contraption outside the window before I was a year old. (Inciden- tally, that - book about a new theory of depression, by the way, and not about my depression, which was only a case study.) I do not remember Brimelow ever interviewing me formally. At dinner and in casual conversations at the time of our debate, I do not remember him ever using a pad and pencil. Does he simply rely on his memory to get my supposed statements approximately right? And of course "aliens make up one quarter of the prisoners in federal penitentiaries" (p. 7) It is my written work that is relevant to the public policy issue. I do try to follow Milton Friedman's dictum to always, when speaking and writing casually, proceed as if any word might be made public, though I am far from a saint in my utterances. And nothing of what Brimelow attributes to me (so far as people have told me about the NR article) is illegal or immoral. And if making me seem to be a fool, or telling someone something is sufficiently interesting rather than to continue talking about it, I can live with that. Here's another example of how Brimelow is an expert at making something sinister out of nothing at all. He accuses me, based on his phone call to me to complain (as he tells us) about my not reading his book, of saying that I "hadn't thought about that" when he raised some point about immigration and the Fourteenth Amendment (whose topic I confess forgetting even now). From my polite statement to him, probably said (if I said it) in order to end a line of conversation that I did not find interest- ing, which he then repeated to someone else who heard the same phrase from me, Brimelow implies that I am diabolically lying. Though I don't remember the statement, I'm willing to confess that I might have made it; I have made such a social evasion from time to time. But for that he wants to hang me as a liar? Wow. He clearly is pretty hard up for charges to bring, and for ways to deflect the reader from the economic facts about immigration. Maybe Brimelow was emboldened to redouble the attacks on me in NR because I did not then respond to the attacks in his book. I did not do so because I begrudge the effort (and I am subject to lots of such attacks; answering would be a full-time job), and also because there was no medium through which to respond. But when he attacks me in a journal, I can obtain from editor John O'Sullivan the opportunity to reply. 1) He claims that research studies done earlier than 1990 are obsolete, and those done in Canada are irrelevant. 2) He con- fines his attention to the small elements of true "welfare" within the overall government expenditures on immigrants, those in which immigrants receive more than natives, and disregards the big payments to retired people. I do plead guilty to not reading most of Brimelow's book. I try not to spend time with poor research and ugly rhetoric except when I must do so in order to deal with it. I did not enjoy the abounding mis-statements of fact and theory, and the out-and-out racism I found there. Why would I want to read it all when the author airs my privately-offered views on sex and my sleeping habits? Why would I want to read through a volume whose author describes as a "toolkit of arguments for ordinary Americans" to oppose immigration? (xviii) Given that the ratio of over-65 persons to 15-65s was 23 to 77 in 1979, and was 15 to 85 in 1989, the observed data are per- fectly consistent with each other. And a subsequent re-run of the analysis by the Urban Institute confirmed this theoretical analysis and the correctness of the original numbers. All the nasty charges against me on that matter therefore are entirely falsified. You might think that with this much egg on his face, Brime- low's man Martin might apologize or at least cool his rhetoric; instead, he leaps to the attack again with a Washington Times letter with the usual hints that I am dishonest: "Julian Simon is up to his usual tricks with numbers again", "Simon knows better..." and all that. But Brimelow's warrior got his charges wrong again: It is plain false that "Mr. Simon simply ignores SSI in his calculations" as he wrote. It is also false that Medicaid and food stamps "are not included in Mr. Simon's calcu- lations". The calculations by the Urban Institute that I used include all three categories. So much for the author of the "counterweight" to my work. When advocates turn to ad hominem attacks, you can bet that they lack solid evidence. The lawyers say: When you have the facts, pound the facts. When you have the law pound the law. When you have neither the law nor the facts, pound the table. That explains why Brimelow and his anti-immigration buddies pound me. Lastly, the really ugly: Brimelow and his colleagues broadly suggest that I lie, though they don't say so in a fashion that might get them sued. Brimelow cutely writes, "Simon is not, surely, being dishonest here. No crook would be so blatant. We're talking serious - What? - wishful thinking? Intellectual paralysis? creeping distaste for debate?" And his FAIR colleague Dan Stein headlines "Julian Simon is not a liar" (check). These are quite some sweet gentlemen I have fallen in with. But get this about Brimelow and the truth. He confesses: "I bring to the United States from Britain ...a certain (ahem) contempt for American debating technique... American competitive debaters are given their topics in advance and earnestly learn all the arguments by heart. But British competitive debaters are told their topics... only at the last moment. They are expected to succeed by quickness of wit and whatever facts they can dredge (or make) up". Can you believe an author telling us that he sympathizes with making up facts, and then asking us to take his book seri- ously? This exemplifies one of Brimelow's specialities: accusing his opponents of doing exactly what he does (even if the opponent does not do it) and then even brags about doing it himself. It will be interesting to see Brimelow's reply. He's good on the attack. Let's see what he does when someone comes back at him. article5 brimelow April 30, 1996 page 2