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VDARE.com, or VDARE, is a website that advocates reduced immigration into the United States. This includes higher selectivity in legal immigration, favoring Europeans. Former Forbes editor Peter Brimelow supports the site through his VDARE Foundation. The viewpoints on the site range from immigration reduction to anti-immigration. Many in the immigration-reduction movement pass around links and reprints of its articles.

The name VDARE and the site's symbol, the head of a white doe, refer to Virginia Dare, the first child born to English immigrants in the New World. Soon after her birth she disappeared with the rest of an early English settlement, and legend says she transformed into a white doe.

Contributors

Contributors include:

• Peter Brimelow, English founder of VDARE and an immigrant to Canada and the U.S. and a former editor at Forbes and National Review
• Pat Buchanan
• Paul Craig Roberts, syndicated columnist and a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration
• Steve Sailer, a writer and movie critic for The American Conservative, especially controversial for his articles on race, human biology, and gender issues
• Howard Sutherland (attorney), an attorney in New York
• Chilton Williamson, an author and columnist who has written extensively about life in the American West

Notable VDARE guest contributors include: Virginia Abernethy, Paul Gottfried, Kevin Michael Grace, Kevin B. MacDonald, Michelle Malkin, Rob Sanchez and Jared Taylor. Sam Francis was also a regular guest contributor until his death in 2005. D.A. King, an activist against illegal immigration in Georgia, USA, is another former contributor.

Peter Brimelow immigrated to the United States from Canada in the late 1970s; he had left his homeland of the United Kingdom shortly after receiving an MBA from Stanford University in 1972. While he is a paleoconservative, he claims "many of the neoconservative leaders as personal friends" and immigration reform allies. According to the VDARE website, Brimelow is currently a U.S. citizen.

Controversy and criticism

Some critics of VDARE claim that it publishes racist or racialist material. The nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), called VDARE a "hate group," that was "once a relatively mainstream anti-immigration page," but by 2003 became "a meeting place for many on the radical right." The group also criticized VDARE for publishing articles by Jared Taylor and Sam Francis, along with other authors who deal with race and intelligence.

VDARE claims neutrality on all issues save immigration reduction. VDARE columnist James Fulford says allegations of racism and hate are unavoidable since "the majority of Americans are white, and the majority of immigrants are non-white." Fulford lists others who the SPLC points out are racist, and argues that the group's tactics hurt their own cause more than they're hurting genuine racism. Also, Brimelow argued in his 1996 book Alien Nation the term 'racist' is a political "smear" (p.10). He states "the only rational definition of racism" is "committing and stubbornly persisting in error about people, regardless of evidence."

VDARE contributors respond to racism charges by noting that the site carries authors from various of ethnic backgrounds, including Filipina-American (Malkin), Hispanic-American (George Borjas), one Native American (David A. Yeagley), and Japanese-American (Lance T. Izumi).. All of these authors have faced allegations of being self-hating, or at least being at odds with the majority of people of their own background.

Hurricane Katrina and IQ

Steve Sailer, who often writes about race and intelligence, argued on VDARE following Hurricane Katrina that the lower average IQ of African-Americans found in intelligence research correlates with "poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups resulting in the need for stricter moral guidance from society."

John Podhoretz called Sailer a racist — and Sailer responded that his accusers admitted a correlation between low IQ and poor judgment by supporting the Supreme Court's 2002 Atkins v. Virginia decision "that, in effect, banned the death penalty for killers with IQs under 70." John Derbyshire defended Sailer, citing large variance in crime rates by race and birth rates for unmarried women by race.

According to Peter Brimelow, Sailer's original article has been emailed out by readers (through the link to "email to a friend") at among the highest volumes seen by VDARE's articles.

External links

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• Official website
• "Keeping America White", an article by the SPLC critical of VDARE

Notes and references

1. Isaac, Gideon (2003-10-25). "Today's Letter: A Reader Is Tired Of Neoconservative-bashing; Peter Brimelow Sympathizes". VDARE. Retrieved 2006-09-22.

• Activism
• Political websites
• Paleoconservatism
• Immigration political advocacy groups in the United States