Tom Barry*

SILVER CITY, New Mexico, Jul 20 2005 (IPS) — Two highly influential sectors in U.S. politics – the neo-conservatives and the Jewish community – are showing signs of renouncing their traditionally liberal views about immigration.

Before the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the neo-conservative political camp and U.S. Jews were dependable allies against the restrictionist immigration policies of such organisations as the Centre for Immigration Studies (CIS) and the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

Today, however, neocon institutes and synagogues are increasingly the forums for the type of nationalist immigration policies that were previously regarded as emblematic of the populist right-wing and the paleoconservatives in the United States.

Referring to the new anti-immigration politics within the Jewish community, Mark Krikorian, executive director of CIS, has observed that "American Jews have been a kind of leading indicator of important social developments in our country."

Krikorian, the most high-profile lobbyist for restrictionist legislation, notes with satisfaction that such leading neoconservatives as Daniel Pipes, director of the pro-Likud Middle East Forum, are now regularly raising alarms about immigration.

Echoing an opinion that is gaining support among Jews, Pipes cautions that "American Jewry’s golden age may actually be coming to an end with the arrival of large-scale Islamic immigration."

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, CIS associate Stephen Steinlight wrote: "We should give serious, immediate consideration to terminating our alliance with the advocates of open borders – we do not belong in their coalitions."

Warning that immigration will create new political constituencies that will not continue to support a pro-Israel foreign policy, Steinlight believes that Jewish "defence organisations have not responded" to the new political threats resulting from immigration-induced demographic change.

"When disaster comes," he predicts, "they will be asking themselves, ‘where were we?’"

Formerly a national affairs director for the pro-immigration American Jewish Committee and its representative in the pro-immigration National Immigration Forum, Steinlight now recommends that the American Jewish Committee end its association with the National Immigration Forum and other pro-immigration groups that he says advocate an "open borders" immigration policy.

In line with Samuel Huntington’s thesis that immigration is diluting the nation’s core identity and values, Steinlight contends that "mass immigration and mass immigration policy" not only threatens the Jewish people but "the American people as a whole and the future of Western civilization itself."

Although all U.S. citizens are threatened, "we Jews are once again the classic miner’s canary, whom history has chosen to feel the full effect of the toxin first."

Joseph Puder, the Israeli-born director of the Interfaith Task Force for America and Israel, recommended at a CIS forum that U.S. Jews and others work to "legislate and enforce and end, or severely restrict, Islamic immigration."

One novel way of preserving the Jewish presence in U.S. politics and society, aside from immigration restrictionism, is what Pudor calls a "conversion strategy." Given that the United States is "the most spiritual society in the world except for India", that "Protestantism is dead as a doornail" and that Catholicism is rapidly declining, "there is a role for Judaism" in evangelising, says Pudor, who notes that "20 percent of the Roman Empire was Jewish by conversion."

Ira Mehlman, cofounder of the American Jewish Immigration Institute and media director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, says that "American Jews need to look out for their own self-interest," including the diverse threats from Muslim and Latino immigration.

"This is not about right-left politics," according to Mehlman, but "about excessive numbers of immigrants coming here and placing a burden on our communities, our schools, and our economy."

Steinlight and other U.S. Jewish analysts of immigration also regard the rising Latin population as a threat to Jewish influence in U.S. society and politics. As part of his alarmist view of immigration trends, CIS analyst Steinlight points to "the loss of key Jewish legislators (the brilliant Stephen Solarz of Brooklyn was one of the first of these) and that once Jewish ‘safe seats’ in Congress now are held by Latino representatives."

According to Mehlman, who along with Steinlight has been speaking about immigration issues in synagogues around the country, there is a surge of support for restrictionist immigration policies from "amcha" or heartland Jews, while the national Jewish organisations are less willing to abandon their liberal positions on immigration.

For the most part, however, restrictionism has not yet taken a firm hold in the U.S. Jewish community. Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, said that "for Jews to suggest limiting immigration or imposing quotas is historical hypocrisy of the worst kind."

Influential groups like the American Jewish Committee have reexamined their immigration policy positions since Sep. 11, and while advocating tighter border security and visa enforcement, have stayed clear of adopting the alarmism about immigration that is surging in some quarters of U.S. Jewry.

Meanwhile, the immigration politics of the neo-conservatives are rapidly shifting. Disproportionately Jewish – and to a lesser degree Roman Catholic – most neo-conservatives have a strong sense of their European and Eurasian immigrant origins.

Consequently, unlike other conservatives, the neocons have generally favoured a liberal immigration policy. Their traditionally pro-immigration posture also stems from the close alliances that the neo-conservatives have forged with Corporate America through their policy institutes and think tanks, notably the American Enterprise Institute.

The global backlash against the George W. Bush administration’s war on terrorism and its Middle East policies is partly evident in increased anti-Semitism and anti-U.S. sentiment. This has raised neocon apprehension about the expanding Muslim population in the United States and Europe.

In their book "An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror", leading neocons David Frum and Richard Perle call for a national identification system as a way to break the alleged immigration-terrorism link.

The Foundation for the Defence of Democracies (FDD), a neocon think tank that focuses almost exclusively on promoting an Israeli-centred U.S. foreign policy, now includes leading cultural nationalist Richard Lamm on its board of advisers.

In an FDD policy paper, Lamm, a former governor of Colorado who also serves on the board of advisers of the anti-immigration Federation for American Immigration Reform, has reframed his longtime restrictionist positions within the new framework of counterterrorism, thus forming new common ground joining the neo-conservative political camp with right-wing nationalists and immigration restrictionists.

The broadening anti-immigration coalition is yet another sign that the new intensity of the immigration debate is not so much a factor of macroeconomic cycles, as traditionally has been the case. Rather the resurgent restrictionist sentiment is more a product of the politics of fear and nationalism now sweeping the United States, and a dimension of the cultural wars that are increasingly dividing the country and pitting the U.S. against foreign societies and nations.

*Tom Barry is policy director of the International Relations Center, online at www.irc-online.org, and an associate of the IRC Americas Programme and a regular Inter Press Service contributor.