W. Wesley McDonald
Elizabethtown College

Russell Kirk and the Problem of Immigration: E Pluribus Unum

National Meeting of The Philadelphia Society
What Is An American?
April 30, 2005
Miami, Florida

When Peter Brimelow asked me last fall to write an essay for his vdare.com web site about Russell Kirk’s views on immigration, I knew it would be a daunting task.  Although I had served as Kirk’s research assistant intermittently during the seventies and eighties and my intellectual biography of Kirk, Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology, had just recently been published, I didn’t know whether my mentor had any settled views on immigration.  My subsequent investigations, however, revealed some interesting developments in Kirk’s thought late in his life and evidence of how contentious the issue continues to be even among Kirk’s most loyal followers. Let me begin by reviewing what Kirk wrote about immigration before moving on to how his disciples have interpreted his position—or positions.  Lastly, we might speculate on how his principles could be applied to the current situation.

Although Kirk always championed “The Permanent Things” during his long and varied career as one of chief architects of the American conservative intellectual revival, he did occasionally change his mind on particular subjects.  As Forrest McDonald observed in his contribution to Kirk’s Festschrift, “one of the truly impressive aspects of Kirk’s career that...has gone virtually unremarked…is his capacity to grow, despite his age and attainments.”[i] 

One issue on which McDonald’s subject did change his mind was immigration.  He was silent on this question up until 1989 when he published his Economics:  Work and Prosperity, as a high school economics textbook.  In the last chapter, he posed what he called “some cheerful responses to gloomy questions.”  One of the questions reads as follows:

“Will millions—or hundreds of millions—or people from the less prosperous countries shift into the industrialized advanced countries, taking away jobs from citizens and lowering everybody’s standard of living—besides undermining a nation’s old culture and unity?” 

Kirk offers this answer:   The “peaceful coming of people from abroad is not usually a cause of economic decay.  Rather such migrations mean that the host country is acquiring more human resources.  Most such immigrants, especially in the history of the United States, have been hard-working ambitious people who helped to improve their economic condition.  Often immigrants are willing to accept the least in the beginning, hard, dangerous, or unpleasant work for which it is difficult to find sufficient labor within a country’s established work force. 

            “In the long run, most immigrants become strong upholders of the culture, the political system, and the economy to which they come.  (Also, aspects of their culture enrich our own.)  America’s present economic success is built, in no small degree, upon the hard, intelligent work of millions of immigrants, coming in wave upon wave, decade after decade. New waves of immigrants during recent years already are being absorbed into American social and economic patterns.  Some are people who migrate from their native lands in search of employment…many of the highly educated and able.  It should not be unreasonable to cry, ‘The more, the merrier.’”[ii]

            Immigration is good for the culture, which it enriches if properly practiced.  We should welcome our immigrants was the gist of his message to his young readers in 1989.   

            Barely three years later, however, Kirk would express very different sentiments.  When Patrick J. Buchanan launched his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in 1992, Kirk became his Michigan State campaign chairman.  Buchanan had made opposition to mass immigration a primary theme in his campaign. Kirk explained in a press release that he was supporting Buchanan because he “would discourage indiscriminate immigration into the United States, for our country cannot play host to all the world and still maintain its established culture, its successful economy, and its social cohesion.”  Shortly afterwards, Kirk and his wife, Annette, in speaking to a Michigan newspaper reporter, added that they were drawn to Buchanan because of his “opposition to affirmative-action programs and more liberal immigration policies…”[iii]

Even after his death, Kirk’s disciples staked out opposing positions on immigration while simultaneously paying homage to his legacy.  Gleaves Whitney, for example, a long time family friend of the Kirks and a speechwriter for the former Republican governor of Michigan, John Engler, writes in the “Afterword” of the recently reissued The American Cause, originally published in 1957, that Kirk wrote his primer on American civilization to make the case for America as an “exceptional nation.”   Among the achievements that made this nation “different from other countries and civilizations is the success with which America has attracted and absorbed huge numbers of immigrants.  For more than two centuries, we have been the world’s number one destination for people in search of a better life.  More than 60 million people have voluntarily come to our shores.  No other nation in world history has even come close to that.  America represents the greatest voluntary migration of people in human history.”

            Moreover, immigration led to America’s moral transformation: Since this nation was built by immigrants “we do not behave the way lone superpowers have behaved in the past.”  While they acting out of “ruthless self-interest” crushed their adversaries, America strives to build a world community based on “mutual cooperation and moral suasion.”[iv] 

            I wonder what Kirk might have made of this construction of his words.  The teacher I knew was far too convinced of man’s fallen nature to have thought that America can always be counted on to exercise its power benignly.  He expressed strong reservations about President Bush the Elder’s Persian Gulf War; and might be even more troubled by Bush Junior’s opting for military force in Iraq.[v]  As a life-long Robert Taft Republican, Kirk consistently cautioned against the use of military force to influence the internal affairs of foreign nations.  The growing perception of America as a “cowboy” nation that has fed anti-American sentiments would not have surprised him, even though he might have qualified this opinion by pointing out it was too extreme and that those who held it had their own baggage to hide.

            The late John Attarian was a Michigan freelance writer who had written extensively about Kirk.  Although he grounds his thinking as much as Whitney in Kirk’s thought, Attarian saw little cultural or economic benefit that might come from further immigration. He grimly warned that unlimited immigration will “destroy the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant character of America’s mores, culture, government, and institutions, risk calamitous racial friction, and inflict environmental ruin from overpopulation.”  Immigration, he declared, is “causing wages to stagnate and displacing American workers at all skill levels” “creating the worst economic insecurity since the Great Depression.”  The main problem with conservatives today is that they have forgotten (if they ever knew) the Burkean side of Anglo-American heritage.  They have instead become like the economists, metaphysicians, and calculators against whom Edmund Burke famously railed in his Reflections on the Revolution in France.  Rather than beings existing within a cultural context, Americans have been reduced to shortsighted, acquisitive creatures.  “Thus, mainstream conservatism’s enthusiasm for immigration plays up the purported economic contribution of immigrants and deems their religion, race, mores, and customs, and their social, political, demographical, cultural, and civilizational  impacts on America, irrelevant, even unimportant—if it acknowledges them at all.”[vi]   Once mixed in with the multicultural ethos of Euro-American political, educational, and journalistic elites, this immigration imperative, according to Attarian, took on an especially sinister aspect.

Following the posting of my article on Kirk and immigration on the vdare.com website, two of Kirk’s former research assistants weighted in with similar opposing views on immigration:

If it's the choice is between Whitney and Attarian, one proclaimed, “I’m in Whitney's camp.  Even as a White, European Protestant, I find it appalling to conceive of the incredibly rich heritage conveyed in [Kirk’s Roots of American Order}” as limited to just the “‘white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant character of American mores.’”

Another reader, though, praised my article for having pinpointed that uncontrolled immigration “was NOT at all what [Kirk] was talking about earlier. His ideas, clearly outlined in various works, not just in Roots of American Order, are fairly clear: that the United States grew over time with sustainable levels of immigration and with the integration of those immigrants into our European and Christian cultural environment. When this began to change, with the tremendous influx of those who did not and do not share this cultural community (and in very many cases, worked against it), [Kirk] spoke out in opposition.”

I would agree.  Kirk had changed his mind on immigration because the nature of the problem was not what it had been earlier. 

            Kirk’s earlier enthusiasm for immigration can be attributed to two major influences on his thought:

            First, he believed that cultural diversity enriches society.  Kirk was curious about other cultures and traveled through Europe, absorbing its art, literature and other civilizational achievements.  He also delved into the culture and history of North Africa from which he drew material for his fabulous romantic adventure novel, A Creature of Twilight.  Later, he traveled to South Africa and wrote admiringly of Zulu culture.  He placed a high value on cultural diversity before that concept was deformed into “multiculturalism”—which, as we know, has become an ideological weapon aimed at the destruction of Western culture.

            Second, his own limited experience with immigration would have encouraged his pro-immigration views.  Kirk’s home, “Piety Hill,” situated in the tiny village of Mecosta, Michigan, was a gathering place for refugees from communist totalitarianism and natural disasters.  Poles, Czechs, Bolivians, Brazilians, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Croats, and Abyssinians were among the many peoples one could find at the Kirks.  There, they would remain until they could look after themselves.  What Kirk witnessed were troubled, dislocated people who needed to be given a chance to get back on their feet.  He offered them that chance, and many left to pursue successful lives elsewhere.  Masses of ill-educated peoples who would be taking advantage of American social programs are, of course, another matter.

Note also that until after the Immigration Act of 1965 the vast majority of immigrants coming to the U.S. were European as well as Christian. The Asians, who came in smaller numbers, posed few social problems and were rarely found on welfare rolls or among violent criminals. There also was no multicultural ideology taught in schools and enforced through the state here and in Europe that downplayed or vilified traditional Western societies. For all of these reasons, immigration did not represent a significant problem to postwar conservatives, and Kirk may have carried that attitude until forced to confront a different set of circumstances toward the end of his life.

             In one of his last books, America’s British Culture, Kirk defended the transplanted culture of Britain as “one of humankind’s more successful achievements.”   The principle features of our culture, Kirk insisted, are British in origin.  Among these inheritances bequeathed by our British ancestors are language and literature, American common and positive law, the American form of representative government and finally the body of moral habits, beliefs, conventions, customs that constitute our moral heritage.  This is our legacy, without which the ties which bind Americans together as nation could not long endure. He warned that this common British culture, upon which our moral and political order depends, is now endangered by the rise of what he denounced as ‘the fraud of multiculturalism.”  “[A]nimated by envy and hatred,” the ideologues of multiculturalism, detest “the achievements of Anglo-American culture, they propose to substitute for real history and real literature—and even for real natural science—an invented myth that all good came out of Africa and Asia (chiefly Africa).”  If they should succeed, Kirk gloomily predicted, American culture would “end in heartache—and in anarchy.” [vii] 

These multiculturalists, wrote John O’Sullivan in his 1994 review of Kirk’s book, seek to balkanize the nation further into tiny warring cultural enclaves “via high levels of immigration.  Above all, they seek to make ordinary Americans feel guilty…about the ‘privileged’ position that American culture enjoys in America.”[viii]

Pat Buchanan had evidently convinced Kirk by 1992 that the nature of immigration had radically changed.  New immigrants were not expected to assimilate into the inherited America culture.  Instead, they threatened by their shear overwhelming numbers the very existence of that civilization-- and of its achievements that Kirk had fought his entire life to preserve.  Unquestionably, Kirk would not now be voicing the sanguine views on immigration he did nearly two decades ago.  Instead, he would be joining forces with those are battling the enemies of America’s cultural identity and the right to secure borders.