“However, it seems unlikely that this is because neoconservatism inherently favors open borders, as some critics have suggested. A more probable reason is neoconservatism’s penchant for compromise, pragmatism, and moderation.”
There is a persistent myth that neoconservatism is ideologically committed to allowing large-scale immigration. A case in point is this piece by Samuel Francis, which misunderstands just about every aspect of neoconservatism. Francis draws on Pat Buchanan, who also attributes an “agenda” of “open borders” to neoconservatives. Historian Paul Gottfried has been an equally assiduous promoter of such notions. “Insofar as Gottfried is concerned,” summarizes Joseph Cotto, “neocon ideology is repackaged lefty dogma,” as evidenced by its supposed “emphasis on open borders…and at times open support of multiculturalism,” among other issues.
Whether one is for or against mass immigration, the fact remains that the Buchanan-Francis-Gottfried view is a distortion. Although neoconservatives are a highly heterogeneous bunch, as a whole they seem no more liberal on immigration than regular, unprefixed conservatives. The examples below should attest to this reality.
“Neoconservatism” is a famously imprecise term. Still, a useful idea of what it means is found in Irving Kristol’s essay “The Neoconservative Persuasion.” For Kristol, neoconservatism puts much stock in economic growth but is less anti-government than most American conservatism. It deems state involvement in cultural matters legitimate. On foreign policy, it believes in “patriotism” and opposes “world government.” It believes that “statesmen should, above all, have the ability to distinguish friends from enemies.” It construes major powers’ national interests as extending beyond their borders and as including, in some cases, “ideological interests.” It holds that the preponderance of American power is grounds for leveraging said power abroad.
Norman Podhoretz, one of neoconservatism’s two patriarchs alongside Irving Kristol, has grown less friendly to immigration in recent years. At the same time, Podhoretz has continued to claim the label “neoconservative.” In 2019, he stated: “[Donald Trump] hires John Bolton and Mike Pompeo who, from my point of view, as a neoconservative…couldn’t be better.” Moreover, Podhoretz claimed to stand by the invasion of Iraq. Yet, in the same interview, he professed a newfound strictness on immigration. “What has changed my mind,” he explained, “about immigration now—even legal immigration—is that our culture has weakened to the point where it’s no longer attractive enough for people to want to assimilate to.” (Emphasis original)
Douglas Murray is another writer with solid neocon credentials. His treatise Neoconservatism: Why We Need It was his first notable piece of political writing, published in 2006. Nevertheless, Murray has been among the most outspoken opponents of mass immigration. His 2017 book The Strange Death of Europe is a notable example. In a video promoting the volume, he asserts that “Europe is committing suicide” through mass immigration. “By 2017,” he observes, “the most popular boys’ name in the United Kingdom was Muhammad.” Indeed, Neoconservatism: Why We Need It reveals that, for Murray, neoconservatism itself implies skepticism towards immigration because it opposes cultural relativism. Thus, in Murray’s estimation, “neoconservatives understand that…Britain does not want unstoppable immigration across its borders because it wants to remain Britain; to remain identifiably British; and to remain so in perpetuity.” Accordingly, he inveighs against Britain’s “excessive levels of immigration” and urges his audience to question the premise “that immigration cannot be halted.”
That book’s back cover features a pull quote from Roger Scruton calling it “required reading for all conservatives,” and the late philosopher is frequently cited in its pages. This suggests that Scruton had at least some affinity for neoconservatism. Other evidence points in the same direction. Scruton had great respect for Leo Strauss, often considered a formative influence on neocon thought. In his memoir Gentle Regrets, he calls Strauss’s brand of conservatism “effective and durable.”
In Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition, Scruton explicitly identifies himself as a neocon, though he has a somewhat idiosyncratic notion of what that means:
“The invention of the ‘neo-conservative’ label, to denote the political advisors and think tanks which have tried to turn American foreign policy towards a direct confrontation with despotic and Islamist movements in the wider world, is in part a recognition that conservatism, in so far as it now exists, is no longer about market economics and free trade, but about the wider global agenda.”
For Scruton, typical representatives of this school are “Samuel Huntington in America, Pierre Manent in France, and myself in Britain.” Scruton implicitly approved of the Iraq War in 2003 and implicitly repudiated it a decade later.
Notwithstanding, Scruton was no friend of open borders. Columnist Kenan Malik has lambasted him on this basis, providing examples of the late thinker’s nationalist leanings: “Immigration, [Scruton] claimed in a 2006 defence of Enoch Powell, had led to ‘the people of Europe… losing their homelands.’” (Ellipsis original) Malik adds that, according to Scruton, “pious Muslims from the hinterlands of Asia” would not “produce children loyal to a secular European state.”
Samuel P. Huntington is another interesting example if one follows Scruton in counting him as a neocon. The Harvard professor was one of the most vocal critics of mass immigration, as exemplified by his much-noted opus Who Are We?. Similarly, in a guarded-sounding passage in his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations, he lists “issues…increasingly important on the international agenda.” These include the West’s attempts “to maintain its military superiority,” “to promote Western political values,” and to preserve its own “cultural, social, and ethnic integrity…by restricting the number of non-Westerners admitted as immigrants or refugees.” This segment is not explicitly normative, but the pages that follow cast these efforts as being genuinely in the West’s interest. Huntigton’s first two policy recommendations have a distinctly neoconservative ring. The third is an appeal to restrict immigration.
Political scientist Lawrence Mead is not a confirmed neocon but has notable neocon ties and proclivities. He works for the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), often considered a neoconservative organization, and has written about foreign policy for the neocon-leaning magazine The National Interest. In that piece, Mead expresses some common neocon ideas. He stresses the United States’ role as the world’s hegemon and argues that a foreign policy informed by ideals serves the national interest in the long run. For Mead, “in moments of military crisis, America seems ‘bound to lead’.” Atypically for a neocon, however, he takes a jab at “the current Bush unilateralism.”
Mead has been frank about what he sees as problems caused by immigration. For instance, he has contributed an article to the neoconservative publication National Affairs in which he blames the disintegration of America’s social fabric partly on increased immigration, especially of the non-European variety:
“A century ago, most immigrants came from Europe and were not that different from the nation’s older migrant population. But after the immigration rules were liberalized in 1965, they came mostly from Latin America and Asia, and were much more distinct. Assimilation became tougher.”
Mead adds that “growing racial or ethnic diversity tend[s] to undermine solidarity by making people more distrustful of other races, one’s neighbors, and even one’s own race” and describes “diversity” as “a weakness.”
National Affairs has also published articles by immigration restrictionist Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies. It has hosted more pro-immigration content, too, but this is hardly a publication committed to open borders.
Dutch parliamentarian Martin Bosma has been described as “the man behind Geert Wilders.” The same profile explains that Bosma’s journey to the right was occasioned by his reading of “neoconservative” authors such as Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom, and Podhoretz. (It also, more questionably, includes William F. Buckley in this list.) Bosma credits Strauss with the idea that “cultures are not equal,” which is singled out as the Dutch politician’s “most important insight.” It is this notion that drove him to crusade against Islam and mass immigration.
David Horowitz is another influential neocon intellectual. In his book Hating Whitey: And Other Progressive Causes, Horowitz opines:
“America’s unique political culture was indeed created by white European males, primarily English and Christian. It should be obvious…that these antecedents are not incidental to the fact that America and England…led the world in abolishing slavery and establishing the principles of ethnic and racial inclusion―or that we are a nation besieged by peoples ‘of color’ trying to immigrate to our shores…”
This paragraph contains mixed implications. Should the importance of the founders’ white, European and English identity be taken to imply that these groups should continue to make up as large a share of the American population as possible? Or should “ethnic and racial inclusion” be interpreted to imply liberal immigration policy? Regardless, this passage discusses the ethnic side to immigration much more openly than do most conservatives.
Even as a socialist, Horowitz already believed that the “moral condition of mankind,” which was by no means illegitimate, involved “national territorial identifications, which…remain firmly anchored in the morality of tribal [ethnic] loyalties.”
A few neocons have even been willing to entertain the racial hereditarianism favored by the likes of Paul Gottfried. As one source puts it, Charles Murray has been employed “at the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute” since 1990. The Bell Curve, co-authored by Murray with Richard Herrnstein, was published in 1994. In 2009, Murray received the AEI’s Irving Kristol Award, partly for his work on The Bell Curve. Bill Kristol has interviewed him twice on his own podcast, and the two spoke amicably about The Bell Curve and Murray’s later book Human Diversity. To cite a more bizarre example, the anonymous person behind the YouTube channels “AustralianNeoCon1” and “AustralianNeoCon2” apparently also runs the channel “AustralianRealist,” which uploads race-hereditarian content.
It makes sense that immigration restrictionists who are also isolationists would like to present hawkishness on foreign policy as logically linked to tolerance for unfettered immigration. In reality, no such connection exists. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Senator Tom Cotton are surely among the more restrictionist Republicans, not the more liberal ones.
In fact, neoconservatism is perfectly compatible even with Buchanan’s level of ethnonationalism. Evidence of this comes from neoconservative Michael Gove, who himself is no open-borders fanatic. In his contribution to The Neocon Reader, Gove identifies George Canning, Lord Palmerston, and Winston Churchill as neoconservatives avant la lettre. Canning and Palmerston supported a preemptive takeover of the Danish fleet to prevent it from falling into Napoleon’s hands. Likewise, in 1940, Churchill destroyed “84 per cent of France’s naval strength” to prevent the vessels from being used by the Axis. Gove argues that Canning, Palmerston, and Churchill were foreign-policy neoconservatives in that they were willing to promote freedom abroad, as well as to use preemptive strikes when intelligence reports suggested a threat and diplomatic talks―with the Danes in one case, the French in the other―had failed.
Churchill, as the most recent of the three, is the most pertinent example. The great statesman was hardly a libertarian on immigration. In Churchill: The Unexpected Hero, Paul Addison writes: “On racial questions, Churchill was still a late Victorian…He tried in vain to manoeuvre the Cabinet into restricting West Indian immigration. ‘Keep England White’ was a good slogan, he told the Cabinet in January 1955.” Such attitudes did not, however, imply cruelty toward non-whites, and recent depictions of Churchill as a callous racist rely on flagrant distortions of the historical record.
To reiterate, this article’s main point is that neoconservatives seem no more supportive of immigration than normal, run-of-the-mill conservatives. Think of Senator Barry Goldwater, whom Samuel Francis identifies as an exemplar of good, genuine (non-neo) conservatism. Senator Goldwater was no diehard immigration hawk.
In 2009, neocon David Frum actually criticized Senator Goldwater for having been a bad presidential candidate. Among Frum’s arguments was that, had the GOP fielded a better candidate, the 1965 immigration law “might have been more carefully written” so as to avoid “expanding the overall number of immigrants from the modest level prevailing in the 1950s and early 1960s.” Essentially, this is a neocon’s criticism of a Francis-approved conservative for failing to prevent the era of mass immigration!
It is true, of course, that the average neocon has always been less strict on immigration than self-identified “paleoconservatives” of the Buchanan variety. However, it seems unlikely that this is because neoconservatism inherently favors open borders, as some critics have suggested. A more probable reason is neoconservatism’s penchant for compromise, pragmatism, and moderation. Neocons have been reproached for this tendency, including by libertarian Daniel Shapiro, who lamented their “anti-ideological, practical, nonmoralistic approach to political matters” as well as their “need for stability” and “dislike of a turbulent polity.”
Here is a classic instance of this mindframe. In 2016, neocon Charles Krauthammer backed then-candidate Donald Trump’s plan for a border wall. However, he also proposed “legalization” of “noncriminal illegal immigrants.” Krauthammer’s argument was not that such legalization was good policy but simply that it was “a political necessity,” a needed “quid pro quo” to Democrats in return for “serious enforcement” of the border in the future. Whether he was right or wrong in this assessment is beside the point.
(Krauthammer was fairly consistent in this centrist position over the years. In 2006, he defended the same two policies―legalization and construction of a barrier on the border to prevent future illegal entries. The same year, he argued that English should be made the United States’ official language. In 1986, in an article entitled “Sanctuary: Don’t Whine If You’re Guilty,” he condemned activists who, for religious reasons, had sheltered illegal immigrants.)
Relatedly, some neocons have likely been repulsed from immigration restrictionism by the uncouth and incendiary manner in which it has sometimes been presented. In one article, David Frum acknowledges that “[r]ace and ethnicity are huge…issues” and that “the liberal orthodoxies on the matter” are flawed. He also recalls “an impressive speech” by Buchanan about economic downsides of mass migration. Yet Frum seems to view Buchanan’s argument as somehow tarnished by the latter’s crass racial remarks:
“His words were persuasive, even moving, but they would have been far more convincing if they had not been spoken by the same man who had written nine years earlier that he wished only to ‘get clear’ of those high-school graduates who had been born with dark skins.”.
Simon Maass is a writer living in Germany. His work has previously appeared in publications such as Providence, VoegelinView, and Cultural Revue. He holds a degree in International Relations from the University of St Andrews and writes on various topics in politics, religion, and literature.
