It’s 25 years to the month since I proposed an immigration moratorium in my book Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster (you can see me explain the concept to NBC Today’s obviously dumbfounded Bryant Gumbel here) and 28 years since I first broached it in my 1992 National Review cover story that grew into Alien Nation. So I wasn’t unmoved to see a President of the United States finally adopt the idea on Monday night. Nor, again because it has been 25-28 years, am I particularly moved now to see the Executive Order promptly watered down by the usual suspects, savagely denounced by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson here.

Must Watch @TuckerCarlson Monologue: Trump's EO Fails To Protect American Jobs



"There is only one point in handing out hundreds of thousands of these visas to foreign nationals & it is to placate big business."



"If the point of this EO was to protect American jobs it failed." pic.twitter.com/XzFsoxpXbT — The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 (@ColumbiaBugle) April 22, 2020

I’ve been waiting a long time, and I’ve learned patience. The key point: unlike the 2008-2009 Great Recession when, incredibly, the idea of an anti-unemployment immigration moratorium literally never entered the heads of key policy makers, the idea is now, as they used to say on Wall Street of a company that had attracted a takeover bid, “in play.” It can be extended and expanded. It can no longer be ignored.

(On the other hand, Trump could have won the election if he'd stuck to his guns on the Executive Order. And, judging from VDARE.com readers' reactions, this game of bait-and-switch is wearing dangerously thin.)

Also gratifying: Trump’s now-famous tweet specifically cited the need to protect jobs, rather than sticking to the easy option of keeping out disease. To judge from the aftermath of the Great Recession, unemployment will be with us long after the disease has subsided, and depressed wages even longer.

The next step: to point to the political advantages of an immigration moratorium—that it will stop the Left from entrenching itself by Electing a New People, as Hillary Clinton openly planned to do in 2016. The heroic Michelle Malkin has recently made this argument, saying “Do The Math!” And back in 2012, the twentieth anniversary of my National Review cover story, our Edwin S. Rubenstein wrote How A 1992 Moratorium Could Have Helped Preserve the Historic American Majority. The American population would have been about 288 million, 26 million less than its 2012 level.

And whites—known until the 1965 Immigration Act as “Americans ”—would have been 68% of the population, instead of 63%.

I don’t expect Trump, who contrary to advertisement seems quite color-blind, to make this argument. But someone will.

And while we’re waiting…

There are 684 articles on VDARE.com discussing an immigration moratorium. A couple are from Alien Nation reviewers like Paul Glastris who said, "These disturbing trends can almost certainly be reversed without resorting to a "moratorium" on all immigrants, as Brimelow demands," and Jacob Weisberg, xenophobically wanting “an indefinite moratorium on right-wing Brits coming to tell us about threats to American values.” Some of them are false positives, referring to, say, Obama’s offshore drilling moratorium of ten years ago, but most are suggesting an immigration moratorium. There are 363 examples of the exact phrase “immigration moratorium” in our archives, and we have an “Immigration Moratorium” tag.

Here are two most recent… before Trump’s tweet.

Last year we had this:

Let’s go back to the dawn of the Great Recession (caused, as you will have read on VDARE.com but not elsewhere, by the Minority Mortgage Meltdown) when unemployment soared to …half current levels.

Great Recession Unemployment actually sent some immigrants home (it’s cheaper to be unemployed in Mexico) and discouraged others from coming. But as soon as some jobs came back, so did illegals:

A number of different people have called for moratorium:

More

Michelle Malkin notes elsewhere on the site that forces within Trump's Administration (Javanka, Pompeo, businessmen, etc.) are fiercely trying to make him backtrack on the idea of a moratorium, but when and if Trump decides to go ahead, he can count on the support of an even more powerful force: the American people.

A recent IPSOS/USA Today poll found that 80% of Americans support halting immigration. Thank you President Trump!https://t.co/Td6NX2xoBm — Ryan James Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) April 21, 2020

Peter Brimelow [Email him] is the editor of VDARE.com. His best-selling book, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, is now available in Kindle format.