“National Conservatism” & Immigration

Professor Amy Wax

This week, various players from the American Right gathered in DC for a conference focused on “national conservatism” also called “conservative nationalism.”

What exactly is conservative nationalism? According to the National Review, the following understanding emerged from the conference: “The nation is the most logical vessel for political organization known to man, and supranational entities threaten the social attachments that allow for human flourishing. Those attachments have been frayed by decades of unfettered capitalism and inattention to traditional social structures, like the family and organized religion.”

Immigration, unsurprisingly, was a topic of note at the conference. And Vox reports that University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax spoke on the topic. Here is how Vox describes her comments:

Amy Wax claimed that immigrants are too loud and responsible for an increase in “litter.” She explicitly advocated an immigration policy that would favor immigrants from Western countries over non-Western ones; “the position,” as she put it, “that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.” (She claims this is not racist because her problem with nonwhite immigrants is cultural rather than biological.)

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She argued for what she called a “cultural distance” approach to immigration, drawing on a 2018 paper, which would give immigrants preference based on their ethnonational background.

“Conservatives need a realistic approach to immigration that … preserves the United States as a Western and First World nation,” she said on the panel. “We are better off if we are dominated numerically … by people from the First World, from the West, than by people who are from less advanced countries.”

-KitJ