It is only since the 1960s, with the great increase in the numbers of people from non-European backgrounds, that the battle cry of cultural relativism has become ideologically dominant. In demanding that non-European cultures, as cultures, be given the same importance as the European-American national culture, the multiculturalists are declaring that the non-European groups are unable or unwilling to assimilate as European immigrants have in the past (Feagin 101).

A number of modern critics argue that the “combined forces of open immigration and multiculturalism constitute a mortal threat to American civilization” (Gutierrez 78). They claim that because any society has the moral right to preserve its identity Americans (presumable white Americans) have the right to open up this issue and re-evaluate immigration law without fear of the charge of racism.

Of individuals published by major houses, Peter Brimelow is clearly the most outspoken about culture and racial issues. He begins his Alien Nation
with a curious sentence: “There is a sense in which current immigration policy is Adolf Hitler’s posthumous revenge on America” (1) He notes incorrectly that the United States elite emerged from the war determined to erase all taints of racism or xenophobia and subsequently changed the immigration laws to trigger “a renewed mass immigration, so huge and so systematically different from anything that had gone before as to transform — and ultimately, perhaps, even to destroy — the one unquestioned victor of World War II: the American nation, as it had evolved by the middle of the twentieth century” (xv).  

Peter Brimelow’s conviction that mass immigration is a disaster, economically, politically, and culturally, makes him worry about the future life of his son Alexander in an America undergoing so much demographic change. Readers are reminded of Alexander, for whom Alien Nation is dedicated and who is featured on the back cover, more than once. He wants Alexander to grow up with white people around. “It is simply common sense that Americans have a legitimate interest in their country’s racial balance. It is common sense that they have a right to insist that their government stop shifting it. Indeed, it seems to me that they have a right to insist that it be shifted back [to a point when whites were 90 percent of the population]” (Brimelow 264).  But unless the immigration disaster is halted, this will not happen.

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