Parenting & Family Quote by Peter Brimelow

The line performs a neat rhetorical two-step: it pretends to speak the language of corporate pragmatism, then flips it into a taxpayer panic. Brimelow opens with a feint of insider realism - "I suppose the White House thinks" - a phrase that signals skepticism while granting himself the posture of the only adult in the room. He then invokes "Big Business" as a shadowy puppet master, not to defend labor markets but to accuse elites of either cynicism or incompetence. The implied audience is the middle-class reader who already suspects that policy is written for boardrooms, and is waiting for the second shoe to drop.

That shoe is the word "because". The argument hinges less on economics than on kinship. "Guest workers" is framed as a temporary, transactional arrangement; "allowed to bring their children" reframes it as permanent settlement. The subtext is that the real threat isn't wages or jobs, it's demographic continuity - families, schools, public services, belonging. Taxes become the socially acceptable proxy for a deeper anxiety: who gets to be included in the nation's future, and who foots the bill for that inclusion.

Context matters: Brimelow’s work sits in the late-20th/early-21st-century immigration debate where "guest worker" proposals were sold as business-friendly compromise. His sentence punctures that marketing by treating family reunification not as a humane norm but as a fiscal booby trap. It’s effective because it converts an abstract policy detail into a parental image, then weaponizes it: not workers at the border, but children in classrooms, receipts in your mailbox.