Showing posts with label illegal immigration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label illegal immigration. Show all posts

May 2, 2012

Mayday illegal alien rallies flop 6th straight year

From the Associated Press:

May Day Protests Show Weak Immigration Movement
ATLANTA (AP) — While a black preacher told 100 immigration protesters that incarcerated blacks and detained immigrants faced similar challenges, Jesse Morgan stood to one side of the May Day demonstrators, holding a large sign that read "Radical Queers Resist." 
Although the rally was geared toward illegal immigrants, the 24-year-old Georgia State sociology major said gays can relate, too, because they often face discrimination. 
"And besides," he said. "There are queers who are undocumented." 
Over the last several years, May Day rallies in the United States have been dominated by activists pushing for a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million people in the country illegally. But since 2006, when hundreds of thousands took to the streets in cities across America, the rallies have gotten smaller, less focused and increasingly splintered by any number of groups with a cause. 
In New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., May Day protests were dominated by Occupy Wall Street activists, a sign of how far the immigration has fallen off the radar, unable to compete with the economy.

And yet, everybody knows that the only way the GOP can win the crucial Hispanic vote is by caving in on amnesty, because that's what American citizen Hispanics care so much about.

April 22, 2012

The déformation professionnelle of Jewish organizations on immigration

This 2010 article from The Jewish Week isn't new, but it's important.
Curve Ball For Jewish Leaders On Immigration 
In recent AJC poll, 52 percent of Jews favored Arizona’s tough immigration law, which focuses on an enforcement-only policy. 
Some wonder if American Jewry’s traditional empathy for all newcomers could be waning. 
Wednesday, October 20, 2010 
Doug Chandler Special To The Jewish Week 
One of the rare issues on which nearly all mainstream Jewish organizations agree — and on which they’ve always believed they had the backing of most American Jews — involves how the United States should treat immigrants, including those who are undocumented. 
More than a dozen national agencies, including the congregational arms of all four major branches of Judaism, have publicly announced their support for comprehensive immigration reform, which would go beyond an enforcement-only policy to offer unauthorized residents “a path to citizenship.” 
But this week some Jewish leaders are beginning to wonder if American Jewry’s traditional empathy for all newcomers is now waning. 
Their concern follows the Oct. 12 release of a survey by the American Jewish Committee that asked respondents if they supported or opposed Arizona’s controversial new law on illegal immigration. Fifty-two percent of the 800 respondents said they supported the law, while 46 percent opposed the measure and 2 percent said they weren’t sure. 
“It’s a reminder that Jews are part of America and are influenced by some of the same currents that influence other Americans,” said Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. At the same time, he noted that the 52-percent figure remains lower than the 65 percent of Americans, overall, who’ve told pollsters they favor the law. 
The query was among 29 questions in a survey that focused largely on the Obama administration, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the upcoming midterm elections. But it touched on a subject that has a special resonance for American Jews, confusing and dismaying some Jewish leaders because of the result. 
“That one took us by surprise,” said David Harris, AJC’s executive director. 
Noting that the result seems “to defy conventional wisdom” about the Jewish commitment to progressive social policy, Harris said he couldn’t explain, but could only guess, why respondents answered as they did.  
“When Americans, including Jews, see the words ‘illegal immigration,’ that helps define their answer,” he said, referring to a term used in the question. “But we don’t have enough data to tease that out, and we didn’t expect it.” 
Another AJC leader close to the issue also seemed taken aback by the result. 
“When I first heard about this, my first thought was, ‘Why this question?’” said Ann Schaffer, director of the organization’s Belfer Center for American Pluralism, who wasn’t alone among her colleagues in wondering why the question was asked. 
“I don’t know if we know what to make of this,” Schaffer said. 
As Harris suggested, one explanation for the result may rest with how the question is worded: “A new law in Arizona gives police the power to ask people they’ve stopped to verify their residency status,” it begins, simply enough. “Supporters say this will help crack down on illegal immigration. Opponents say it could violate civil rights and lead to racial profiling. On balance, do you support or oppose this law?” 
“‘Racial profiling’ is not a term that people understand, but they do know that something illegal is wrong,” said Sammie Moshenberg, director of Washington operations for the National Council of Jewish Women.

In other words, according to professional Jewish Leaders, the people they claim to lead are complete morons who can't understand simple questions and are manipulated by wily media experts who use inflammatory terms like "illegal immigration." (Of course, the rest of the question is loaded with the hot button phrases "racial profiling" and the holy of holies of righteous indignation-generation: "violate civil rights.")

Are American Jews as dumb as their paid leaders insist they must be for engaging in crimethink on immigration? Razib recently went through the General Social Survey's 10 question vocabulary quiz for various groups. On most graphs, you get most groups having bell curves centering around getting six out of ten words right, with rapid falloffs above that. The religion graph, however, really stood out:
Granted, the Jewish advantage wouldn't be quite as huge if the other religions were restricted to just their white members, but still ...

So, the data suggests that average American Jews are relatively good at reading the newspaper. 

And their views on immigration are closer to those of their fellow citizens than to the groupthink of their self-proclaimed leaders. 
All that is nonsense to Stephen Steinlight, the lone figure who has advocated an anti-immigration stance in talks to Jewish groups and in the op-ed pages of Jewish newspapers. 
“What we’ve found is a gigantic gulf between the pulpit and the pew [on the issue], and this is true of every religion in America, including Jews,” said Steinlight, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies and a former staff member at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and AJC. “Not only is it a slam dunk that Americans don’t support illegal immigration or amnesty, but Jews are no different.” 
Steinlight’s contention is that illegal immigrants are taking jobs away from Americans during tough economic times, and their presence only benefits large companies looking for cheap labor. 
“When Jews talk about tikkun olam [repairing the world], they have to ask themselves a question: Tikkun olam for whom? The illegal immigrant who entered the country last night or their struggling neighbor?”

Ken Jacobson of the Anti-Defamation League responds:
“If you want to talk in terms of being overwhelmed demographically, Jews are already overwhelmed demographically,” Jacobson continued. “We’re something like 2 percent of the population.”

Obviously, Ken Jacobson makes his living by goading Jews to feel "overwhelmed demographically" by white gentiles. But the reality is that typical American Jews don't feel all that overwhelmed. Their view tends to be that America has been very, very good to them and that they've been good to America. They tend to identify with their neighbors, their fellow American citizens, their fellow whites, their fellow "historic Americans," white and black (e.g., Willie Mays is a hero to a lot of older Jewish guys), and so forth and so on. But, this healthy state of affairs is bad for the balance sheets of a few powerful organizations.

All this suggests that that fundamentalist frenzy of Ellis Island kitsch ethnocentrism that currently dominates acceptable thought about immigration has less to do with average Jewish-American citizens than it has to do with the déformation professionnelle of the leaders of explicitly Jewish organizations, of organizations such as the SPLC that are implicitly Jewish because, as Willie Sutton said about why he robbed banks, that's where the money is; and the media types who interact with them.

Hence, the key to understanding many of the reigning irrationalities in American thought is to understand that déformation professionnelle. Since those interest groups have declared themselves off-limits to critical analysis (literally, in the very name of the ADL), however, don't expect anybody to learn anything.

February 13, 2012

Ross Douthat gets the Charles Murray book's biggest oversight

To avoid inflaming his liberal critics, Charles Murray specifically states that he won't talk about illegal immigration in discussing the state of changes in the white working class over the last 50 years. Fortunately, Ross Douthat in the NYT points out how unrealistic this is:
Third, if we expect less-educated Americans to compete with low-wage workers in Asia and Latin America, we shouldn’t be welcoming millions of immigrants who compete with them domestically as well. Immigration benefits the economy over all, but it can lower wages and disrupt communities, and there’s no reason to ask an already-burdened working class to bear these costs alone. Here the leading Republican candidates have the right idea: We should welcome more high-skilled immigrants, while making it as hard as possible for employers to hire low-skilled workers off the books.

This aside, the debate over the white working class has have been a little surreal, with Murray, who grew up in Newton, Iowa and clearly retains a natural degree of loyalty, and who now lives in a rural town, is being attacked for insensitivity to the white working class by NYC-DC pundits who wouldn't live amongst the white working class if you paid them to.

I see the shapes,
I remember from maps.
I see the shoreline.
I see the whitecaps.
A baseball diamond, nice weather down there.
I see the school and the houses where the kids are.
Places to park by the fac'tries and buildings.
Restaunts and bar for later in the evening.
Then we come to the farmlands, and the undeveloped areas.
And I have learned how these things work together.
I see the parkway that passes through them all.
And I have learned how to look at these things and I say,

(CHORUS)

I wouldn't live there if you paid me.
I couldn't live like that, no siree!
I couldn't do the things the way those people do.
I couldn't live there if you paid me to.

I guess it's healthy, I guess the air is clean.
I guess those people have fun with their neighbors and friends.
Look at that kitchen and all of that food.
Look at them eat it' guess it tastes real good.

They grow it in the farmlands
And they take it to the stores
They put it in the car trunk
And they bring it back home
And I say ...

(CHORUS)

I say, I wouldn't live there if you paid me.
I couldn't live like that, no siree!
I couldn't do the things the way those people do.
I wouldn't live there if you paid me to.

I'm tired of looking out the windows of the airplane
I'm tired of travelling, I want to be somewhere.
It's not even worth talking
About those people down there.

David Byrne, Talking Heads, "The Big Country," 1978

December 12, 2011

Strange New Respect for Newt

"The Good Newt" by recently retired NYT supremo Bill Keller is a classic example of how immigration has become the central issue for the mainstream media dividing Good from Evil. Keller's conclusion:
There are plenty of reasons the thought of President Newt Gingrich makes me shudder. But on this hard, defining American issue, he’s shown a combination of brains, heart and guts that puts the rest of his party to shame.

Here's the opening:
Immigration is a subject that brings out the best and the worst in Americans. 
As taught to my fourth-grade daughter this semester, the story of the peopling of America encourages us to celebrate our identity as the land of e pluribus unum. It reminds us of the tolerance required to coexist in a culture of many cultures. It honors the courage to uproot your life so your children can have a better one. 

Thank God that the brain trust of the New York Times takes its guidance on this complex issue not from intellectually unsophisticated sources, but from textbooks for fourth graders. And bonus points for the historically accurate usage of e pluribus unum.
As it is practiced in our politics, the subject often dredges up darker feelings: tribalism, xenophobia, envy, a pull-up-the-ladder stinginess. This is not new. The English and Dutch colonists resented the immigrant waves of Irish and Germans, who resented the later waves of Italians and Poles and Jews. 

If mass immigration was good enough for the Mark Hanna and the other Robber Barons, it should be good enough for us! You know what would also be good for the economy: the 12-Hour Day. Hey, isn't Newt in favor of Child Labor, too? What a state-of-the-art thinker!
But wait. Why are we even talking about this? 

Right. Why doesn't everybody shut up about immigration? How can we have the needed national conversation on immigration if people insist on talking about it instead of listening to me explain what my fourth grader thinks? How come everybody doesn't dummy up and listen to the New York Times like they're supposed to? What's wrong with people these days?
I hate to distract you with actual facts, but here are a few that have been overlooked in the din of alarm: illegal immigration is falling ...

Similarly, have you noticed how over the last few weeks, global warming isn't anything to worry about anymore? The weather has been distinctly nippy this month, so why are we even talking about global warming?

September 22, 2011

Rick Perry's Texas Miracle (Americans need not apply)

Steve Camarota has done a very useful piece of research for the Center for Immigration Studies:
Governor Rick Perry (R-Texas) has pointed to job growth in Texas during the current economic downturn as one of his main accomplishments. But analysis of Current Population Survey (CPS) data collected by the Census Bureau show that immigrants (legal and illegal) have been the primary beneficiaries of this growth since 2007, not native-born workers. This is true even though the native-born accounted for the vast majority of growth in the working-age population (age 16 to 65) in Texas. Thus, they should have received the lion’s share of the increase in employment. As a result, the share of working-age natives in Texas holding a job has declined in a manner very similar to the nation as a whole. 
Among the findings: 
Of jobs created in Texas since 2007, 81 percent were taken by newly arrived immigrant workers (legal and illegal).  
In terms of numbers, between the second quarter of 2007, right before the recession began, and the second quarter of 2011, total employment in Texas increased by 279,000. Of this, 225,000 jobs went to immigrants (legal and illegal) who arrived in the United States in 2007 or later.  
Of newly arrived immigrants who took a job in Texas, 93 percent were not U.S. citizens. Thus government data show that more than three-fourths of net job growth in Texas were taken by newly arrived non-citizens (legal and illegal).  
The large share of job growth that went to immigrants is surprising because the native-born accounted for 69 percent of the growth in Texas’ working-age population (16 to 65). Thus, even though natives made up most of the growth in potential workers, most of the job growth went to immigrants.  
The share of working-age natives holding a job in Texas declined significantly, from 71 percent in 2007 to 67 percent in 2011. This decline is very similar to the decline for natives in the United States as a whole and is an indication that the situation for native-born workers in Texas is very similar to the overall situation in the country despite the state’s job growth. 
Of newly arrived immigrants who took jobs in Texas since 2007, we estimate that 50 percent (113,000) were illegal immigrants. Thus, about 40 percent of all the job growth in Texas since 2007 went to newly arrived illegal immigrants and 40 percent went to newly arrived legal immigrants.

A commenter in the one newspaper that has covered this study argues:
In reading the study, they came up with 2 sets of findings depending on how they compared the data: gross vs net showed 29% immigrant growth taking 81% of the new jobs and a net vs net comparison showed 31% immigrant growth taking 54% of the new jobs. The second finding is the more valid comparison (as noted above) but only the first is being reported in most of the media reports and headlines. 
An interesting part of their conclusion: 
"This analysis shows that job growth was significant in Texas. But, depending on how one calculates the impact of immigration, between 2007, before the recession began, and 2011 more than three-quarters or more than half of that growth went to immigrants. This is the case even though the native-born accounted for more than two-thirds of the growth in the working-age population. Some may argue that it was because so many immigrants arrived in Texas that there was job growth in the state. But if immigration does stimulate job growth for natives, the numbers in Texas would be expected to look very different. The unemployment rate and the employment rate show a dramatic deterioration in the Texas for the native-born that was similar to the rest of the country. Moreover, if immigration does stimulate job growth for natives, why have states that received so many new immigrants done so poorly in recent years? (See Table 2.) For example, unemployment in the top-10 immigrant-receiving states in 2011 averaged 8.7 percent, compared to 8.1 percent in the other 40 states. Moreover, unemployment is 7.2 percent on average in the 10 states where the fewest immigrants arrived since 2007. These figures do not settle the debate over the economics of immigration. What they do show is that high immigration can go hand in hand with very negative labor market outcomes for the native-born. And conversely the native-born can do relatively well in areas of lower immigration."

So, I'm going to suggest caution in quoting that 81% figure. You can read the report here and make up your own mind.

In a 2006 VDARE.com article, I explained why the then-current boom in Las Vegas wasn't doing American workers much good:
What [economist David] Card doesn't grasp is that illegal immigration is denying Americans the traditional wage premium for undergoing the pain of moving to a boomtown.{NYT writer Roger] Lowenstein can't see it either, as he writes: "Immigrants do help the economy; they are fuel for growth cities like Las Vegas …"
Imagine you are an American blue-collar worker in Cleveland, making $10 per hour. You know the local economy is stagnant, so you're thinking about relocating to fast-growing Las Vegas. But your mom would miss you; and you're not a teenager anymore so you don't make new friends as fast as you once did; and you really like the wooded Ohio countryside you grew up around and the fall colors and the deer hunting; and there's this girl that maybe you could get serious about, but her whole family is in Cleveland and she'd never leave. 
So, you decide, you'll leave home behind if you can make 50 percent more in Las Vegas, adjusted for cost of living. That seems fair. 
But, then you look through the Las Vegas want ads and discover you'd be lucky to make 10 or 20 percent more because the town is full of illegal aliens. They're moving from another country, so it's not much skin off their nose to move to Las Vegas rather than some place slower-growing. 
Well, forget that, you say. I'll stay in Cleveland. 
Unfortunately, too many economists forget that too. They can't—or won't—put themselves in other people's shoes and see how the world really works. 
That doesn't seem to hurt them professionally. But it can hurt America.

September 17, 2011

Mayor Bloomberg's latest

A distinguished reader points to this from CNN:
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is worried that high U.S. unemployment could lead to the same kind of riots here that have swept through Europe and North Africa.

Fortunately, Bloomberg has long used his massive political, media, and financial influence to increase the supply of marginally employed workers / potential rioters in the U.S.

From UPI in 2006:
Bloomberg: Illegal immigrants help golfers 
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg says golf fairways would suffer if illegal immigrants were returned to their native country. 
"You and I are beneficiaries of these jobs," Bloomberg told his WABC-AM radio co-host, John Gambling. "You and I both play golf; who takes care of the greens and the fairways in your golf course?" 
However, Robert Heaney, general manager of Deepdale Golf Club -- a Long Island course where Bloomberg often plays -- told The New York Daily News that no illegal immigrants work at the club.

Deepdale is "maybe the most reclusive club in America," and it "hosts maybe ten rounds per day," according to golf course architect Tom Doak in his indispensable Confidential Guide to Golf Courses. Thank God that billionaires like Bloomberg don't have to choose between paying groundskeepers a little more or putting up with fluffy lies in the fairway that might make it harder to draw a 3-iron shot into Deepdale's notoriously unreceptive 15th green. If it weren't for illegal immigrants holding costs down, Deepdale might have to let an extra two or three golfers per day play the course to pay the wages of those greedy American citizens. And then, Mayor Bloomberg might one day see another foursome playing on a different hole, which could ruin for him, perhaps permanently, the entire Deepdale Experience of having what appears to be his own personal golf course. C'mon, people, we have to get our priorities straight. 

August 1, 2011

Do Hispanic leaders have followers?

We constantly read articles in which Hispanic leaders, such as the head of the National Council of La Raza, threaten that any politician who takes a stand against illegal immigration will be buried at the polls. But do these media-acclaimed Hispanic prophets have all that many disciples?

From my new VDARE column:
In a Pew Hispanic Center survey in late summer 2010, 1,375 Hispanics were asked an unprompted question: “In your opinion, who is the most important Hispanic / Latino leader in the country today?” 
The landslide winner: “Don’t know,” with 64 percent. 
The runner-up: “No one,” with ten percent 
In third place: recently-appointed Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor, with seven percent. Then came the Congressional spokesman for amnesty, Luis Gutierrez, down at five percent; Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa at three percent; and Univision news anchorman Jorge Ramos at two.

Read the whole thing there.

July 11, 2011

Asylum Fraud

From the New York Times:
Immigrants May Be Fed False Stories to Bolster Asylum Pleas

Note the passive voice -- It's not their fault, it's that those poor immigrants are being fed false stories.
By SAM DOLNICK 
The man caught on the wiretap urged his immigrant client to fabricate a tragic past if he wanted asylum in the United States. To say that he was a victim of political repression in Albania. Or police brutality. Or even a blood feud. 
“Maybe you had to leave because someone threatened to kill you,” the man suggested. “Because of something that your father did to somebody else or something to do with the land. You understand? That can be a way to get asylum.”

It's easier to get let into the U.S. legally if you or your loved ones have done something back home that makes your fellow countrymen want to kill you. Emphasize to the U.S. government official how much you are loathed by many of the people who have gotten to know you. What could be better for the citizens of the United States than to import people involved in blood feuds in Albania? If you are some Albanian who minds his own business and stays away from crime and murder, well, good luck in Senator Kennedy's diversity lottery. But, if you are some Albanian that other Albanians want to kill, well, come on over!
Often enough, it is. A shadowy industry dedicated to asylum fraud thrives in New York, where many of the country’s asylum claims are filed. Immigrants peddle personal accounts ripped from international headlines, con artists prey on the newly arrived and nonlawyers offer misguided advice. 

Ah, the poor passive victim immigrants, getting preyed on by nonlawyers who offer misguided advice on how to con the system so that they get asylum.
The revelation that the West African hotel housekeeper who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault apparently lied on her asylum application has focused new attention on the use of these schemes.
The embellished stories go in and out of fashion along with the news of the day, reflecting turmoil in nations around the globe, lawyers say. 
West Africans claim genital mutilation or harm from the latest political violence. Albanians and immigrants from other Balkan countries claim they fear ethnic cleansing. Chinese invoke the one-child policy or persecution of Christians, Venezuelans cite their opposition to the ruling party, and Russians describe attacks against gay people.

Oh, for heaven's sake, can't gay people in Russia go to Google and type in the Russian equivalent of "gay Russia"? In English, I get:
About 102,000,000 results (0.14 seconds) 

Dear Russian gays: Go look up a gay neighborhood in Moscow or St. Petersburg and move there.

Dolnick continues:
Of course, thousands of those claims are legitimate. But each cataclysm provides convenient cover stories for immigrants desperate to settle here for other reasons, forcing authorities to make high-stakes decisions based on the “demeanor, candor or responsiveness” of the applicant.

In other words, the asylum process selects for people with con-man skills.
... Amadou Diallo, the street vendor from Guinea who was shot 41 times by New York police officers in 1999, came from a well-off, stable family. But he told immigration authorities that he was from nearby Mauritania, and that his parents had been killed in that country’s conflict.

How closely related were Amadou Diallo, whose relatives won a $3 million settlement from the NYPD and whose relatives to the U.S. was sponsored by Rep. Charles Rangel, and DSK's accuser, Nafissatou Diallo? How closely related were either to Cellou Dalein Diallo, who was prime minister of Guinea from 2004 to 2006? (It's a common name.)
It was not true, but he was granted asylum. The scheme was revealed after his death. 
Every immigrant neighborhood has businesses that guide newcomers — many of them here illegally — through the complicated process of gaining legal status. Sometimes that means claiming asylum in immigration court, one of several ways to receive it. ... 
“Often, the applicant is misled by various actors with a story that is much more compelling,” said Claudia Slovinksy, a longtime immigration lawyer. “Weren’t they soldiers? Wasn’t it a gang rape?”

More passive voice ...
Whether here legally or illegally, immigrants can apply for asylum within one year of arriving. To qualify, they must show a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group — which could cover gays or abused women.

How about nerds and geeks? If you are some foreigner who got bullied in fourth grade by the big boys, doesn't that grant you a right to live in America forever? Why the discrimination against the neurodiverse?
Immigration courts across the country granted 51 percent of asylum claims last year, government statistics show. Such courts in New York City, which heard more cases than in any other city, approved 76 percent, among the highest rate in the nation. 
Because many claims are based on events that occurred in countries in disarray, with evidence hard to collect, judges have to make decisions based on intuition. 
“A true refugee does not have a note from their dictator,” said Judge Dana Marks, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, paraphrasing a legal aphorism. She said many judges erred on the side of caution. “The mistake of granting a fraudulent asylum case is far less disastrous than denying a genuine one,” she said.

Huh? Have you thought about that for more than 3 seconds, Judge Marks. For example, letting Ms. Diallo stay in America has led to America being humiliated in the eyes of France and the world.
The Manhattan lawyer peddling Albanian blood feuds, James Christo, who was caught on a wiretap, is one of the few people who have been prosecuted recently for helping immigrants commit fraud.

The real crimes are A) Few have been prosecuted; B) Claiming to be involved in an Albanian blood feud is seen as a plus by our immigration bureaucrats.

July 10, 2011

Convergence between America and Mexico

In my new VDARE.com column, I analyze a recent feature package in the New York Times centering on Damien Cave's article: Better Lives for Mexicans Cut Allure of Going North.
The essential concept that evades the mental grasp of Damien Cave and the NYT’s editors: convergence. 
Mexico has indeed been—very slowly—becoming more like the U.S. 
For example, Walmart, a firm that clawed its way out of the Ozarks by being ruthlessly efficient, now operates 1,773 stores in Mexico and Central America. Walmart bans even the normal American corporate etiquette of salesmen taking buyers out to lunch. So its stern morality is likely teaching Mexico’s traditional culture of corruption some much-needed lessons. 
But, just as the temperature inside your house in July or January will eventually converge with the unpleasant temperature outside if you leave your doors open (unless you spend ever more on air conditioning or heating), decades of mass immigration from Mexico mean that America is also converging on Mexico: poorly-paid, underemployed, economically unequal, educationally unmotivated, and oligarchical. 
Not surprisingly, the more America becomes like Mexico economically, the less attractive of a destination it is to Mexicans. 
Another lesson to be learned from the theory of convergence: while you could, at vast expense, air condition a few feet of your porch by keeping your windows open, you can’t cool off the whole world. 
The global population will hit seven billion next spring. The U.N. predicts ten billion by 2100. It forecasts that Mexico’s southern neighbor, Guatemala, will grow from five million in 1970 to 46 million in 89 years. 
These billions of people are going to have to solve their own problems. We can’t do it for them by letting them into America.

Read the whole thing there.

July 9, 2011

Unstoppable Mexican political juggernaut somehow derailed by apathy again

From the LA Times article on the complete flop of plans to boycott Tuesday's baseball All-Star Game in Arizona to protest SB1070:
Shortly after Arizona lawmakers passed SB 1070, a number of All-Star-caliber players promised to boycott the game if it were held in Arizona. Among the most prominent was Adrian Gonzalez, who was born in San Diego and grew up in Tijuana. Last year, Gonzalez, then playing for the Padres, called the law "immoral" and a violation of human rights that "goes against what this country is built on." 
But recently Gonzalez, who as a member of the Boston Red Sox was voted into the American League's starting lineup at first base, said he was "not big into politics" and that he intended to play in Phoenix.

July 4, 2011

The hunt for the Great Bright Illegal

The hunt for the Great Bright Illegal continues. Everybody who is anybody keeps proclaiming that we are lucky to be getting all these highly talented illegal immigrants from Mexico, but, as the decades and generations go by, it's hard to come up with very many names of high achievers to anecdotally illustrate the bromides.

A couple of weeks ago, the NYT Magazine made a big whoop over a reporter named Jose Antonio Vargas, who won a share of a Pulitzer Prize for being part of a team of Washington Post reporters who covered the Virginia Tech mass murders of 31 students (by an immigrant, of course, but that part usually gets left out). Not surprisingly, Vargas is gay. More surprisingly, he's an Asian, a Filipino. That's pretty weak when you can't even find a Mexican after decades of trying.

Now, the Chronicles of Higher Education has a long article by Amherst professor Ilans Stavans, that might be a hoax because it fulfills so many stereotypes that sophisticated observers have noticed:
Academic Purgatory 
An illegal immigrant earns a Ph.D. Now what? 
By Ilan Stavans 
Jorge Arbusto isn't the type of person who seeks the limelight. In fact, for years he has thrived in the shadows. But ask him today what he wants, and his answer is unequivocal: to be recognized.
A sweet, passionate, steadfast student originally from Mexico, Jorge (his name has been changed for this article)

I'll say. "Jorge Arbusto" is Spanish for "George Bush." That raises questions about whether the whole article is a hoax intended as satire on the cult of the illegal alien, but the tone is so authentically maudlin that that seems unlikely.
may be the only undocumented immigrant to successfully defend a doctoral dissertation in the United States.

Wow. Tens of millions of illegal aliens over the years and a grand total of one Ph.D. from that vast population? Wow. That's such a miserably low a level of achievement that even I can't believe it's true. But, the takeaway lesson is that it's close enough to be true that nobody except me questions it.
Certainly he is among a very small group. Yet his case poses questions that not only affect thousands of undergraduates today—some sources put it at around 50,000—but also challenge our ideas about hard work, the choices that colleges do or should make, the value of education (for students and society), and, yes, that thorn in our political side—immigration and the Dream Act, which is still stalled in Congress.

So, what kind of dissertation did Jorge Arbusto write? Did he solve the problems of fusion energy generation?
Having defended his dissertation on Spanish-language popular culture, Jorge received his Ph.D. in Hispanic studies this past spring.

Swell.

Not surprisingly, the mystery man is gay:
He left Mexico to escape a dangerously homophobic atmosphere.

This is a weird new theme in Diversity Talk: the assumption that we need to have open borders to protect homosexuals from the homophobia of Mexicans. Your Lying Eyes points to a bizarre NYT article by Sam Dolnick entitled For Many Immigrants, Marriage Vote Resonates that tries to tie together, somehow, the Wall Street-funded triumph of gay marriage in the New York legislature with the Carlos Slim-funded NYT's campaign for illegal immigration amnesty:
Gay Latino immigrants like Gamaliel Lopez, a native of Mexico, came to this country because they could not imagine an openly gay life at home. They found acceptance in some ways — Mr. Lopez says he can express his sexuality without fear in New York — but they also felt as if they entered the country with two black marks: one for being an immigrant, another for being gay.

Uh, are gay/immigration articles not factchecked because it would be heresy to doubt anybody's assertions on such sacred topics? A Google search on the words Gay Mexico brings up 212,000,000 pages starting with a Gay Mexico Map. Mexico City has a population of 18 million -- there's no gay district there? In John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces (set about 1963), Dorian Greene (get it?) of the French Quarter tells Ignatius that Dorian's gay party is going so strong that 
"Several people will be completely ruined after this evening. There's going to be a mass exodus for Mexico City in the morning. But then Mexico City is so wonderfully wild."

The Derb points out in the comments on Your Lying Eyes that Mexico instituted gay marriage in 2009. 

Obviously, Mexico is full of lunkheaded machos, but why importing millions of them into the U.S. makes American gays less likely to be bullied is unclear. If Mexico is full of dim, mean, homophobes, how is letting millions more dim, mean, Mexican homophobes into America going to make America better? (I have a different suspicion: that affluent gays like having lots of poor young men around who come from a culture that says a maricon isn't defined by who he goes to bed with but by what he does there.)

Back to the article by Ilans Stavans about Jorge Arbusto. I had never heard of Professor Stavans, but it turns out that he's an extremely energetic Mexican-American. He's only 50 and he's published 25 books. Granted, I've never heard of any of them, even his The Essential Ilans Stavans, and his career seems mostly testimony to the huge demand among academics for something, anything by Mexican immigrants.

But he clearly shatters the stereotype of Mexican immigrants as unintellectual and unmotivated. Let's find out more about him from his Wikipedia article, which begins:
Ilan Stavans (born Ilan Stavchansky on April 7, 1961, in Mexico City) is a Mexican-American, essayist, lexicographer, cultural commentator, translator, short-story author, TV personality, and teacher known for his insights into American, Hispanic, and Jewish cultures. 
Ilan Stavans was born in Mexico to a middle-class Jewish family from the Pale of Settlement, his father Abraham was a popular Mexican soap opera star. 

June 30, 2011

Not The Onion

The Great and the Good are getting together in Aspen right now at the Aspen Ideas Festival to tell each other how good and great they are. Financial blogger Felix Salmon asks:
Will the world ever have open borders? 
My favorite bit in this video comes towards the end, when I ask Charles [Kenny] about the wonderful tweet he sent out last Friday, after the gay marriage bill passed the New York senate.
"One day we’ll see legal discrimination by *place* of birth as evil as discrim. by other features of birth –gender, orientation, color."

Ah, Twitter ... Helping elite opinion on immigration become ever more bumperstickerish.

Remember when conspiracy theorists used to get all worked up about the secret meetings of the Bilderbergers? Personally, I found the idea of senior bigshots like David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and Helmut Schmidt getting together in private to pull strings was reasonably reassuring. Thank God somebody knows what they are doing!

How naive I was ...

Now in the Davos Era, when much of this elite conspiring is done in public for self-promotion purposes, the terrifying truth becomes obvious: there is no Inner Party who actually knows how things work. There's no O'Brien or Mustapha Mond who can come on at the end of the dystopian novel to explain the sinister but logical and carefully thought through reasons for why things are the way they are.

Is there a single better question for determining whether someone has thought long and hard about how the world (and not just their own bailiwick where they made their bundle) really works (and exposes whose side they are on emotionally) than "Open Borders: Good Idea or Bad Idea for America?"

June 19, 2011

The All-Star Game Nonboycott of Arizona

My new VDARE column investigates the amusing rise and fall of the movement to boycott the baseball All-Star Game in Arizona next month. Who is it who really gets themselves enraged at Arizona voters? Not the average Mexican-American voter, that's for sure.

June 16, 2011

Caitlin Flanagan on Cesar Chavez

Here's an amusing reminiscence by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic, The Madness of Cesar Chavez, about growing up in Berkeley in the 1960s: 
In the history of human enterprise, there can have been no more benevolent employer than the University of California in the 1960s and ’70s, yet to hear my father and his English-department pals talk about the place, you would have thought they were working at the Triangle shirtwaist factory. ...
I spent a lot of my free time working for the United Farm Workers. 
Everything about the UFW and its struggle was right-sized for a girl: it involved fruits and vegetables, it concerned the most elementary concepts of right and wrong, it was something you could do with your mom, and most of your organizing could be conducted just outside the grocery store, which meant you could always duck inside for a Tootsie Pop. The cement apron outside a grocery store, where one is often accosted—in a manner both winsome and bullying—by teams of Brownies pressing their cookies on you, was once my barricade and my bully pulpit. 

Most of the article is devoted to how Chavez, like a lot of people successful in the 1960s, went nuts in the 1970s, but the bigger story is in this paragraph:
In fact, no one could be more irrelevant to the California of today, and particularly to its poor, Hispanic immigrant population, than Chavez. He linked improvement of workers’ lives to a limitation on the bottomless labor pool, but today, low-wage, marginalized, and exploited workers from Mexico and Central America number not in the tens of thousands, as in the ’60s, but in the millions. Globalization is the epitome of capitalism, and nowhere is it more alive than in California. 

Chavez is an official saint of the state of California, but a lot of the reason for all the strenuous celebration of Chavez is that there aren't that many other Mexican-American heroes to celebrate. All of his anti-illegal immigration activities have disappeared down the memory hole.

May 25, 2011

A proposal to Bibi

Dear Prime Minister Netanyahu: 

Congratulations on your triumphal tour of Washington D.C. You have emerged as the de facto leader of anti-Obama sentiment in America.

In return for all that America has done for you, may I ask, in all seriousness, that you do a favor for America?

Namely, please come to America again and deliver a high profile speech and slide show explaining the rapid construction and strong success of Israel's border security fence. Point out that a properly made border fence has been shown to deter not only drug smugglers and illegal immigrants, but even suicide bombers. Then, compare Israel's success at rapidly securing its borders to the American government's dithering and ineffectualness at constructing its own border security fence. Please point out that this kind of defeatism and corruption is unworthy of Israel's ally. You could conclude by offering to send Israeli experts to the American border to advise Americans on how to build the American fence.

Thank you very much.

Steve Sailer

May 20, 2011

It never ends

The front-and-center featured article on the NYT today reports that "by the time the children of illegal immigrants reached age 2, they showed significantly lower levels of language and cognitive development than the children of legal immigrants and native-born parents." 
Illegal Immigrants' Children Suffer, Study Finds
By KIRK SEMPLE
Published: May 21, 2011 
... Indeed, a recently published study of the early development of children born to illegal immigrants in New York City suggests that most stories that begin like Eulogia's do not end as well. 
Even though the children have citizenship and live in an immigrant-friendly city that offers them a wide array of services, many are still hobbled by serious developmental and educational deficits resulting from their parents' lives in the shadows, according to the study, whose author says it is the most comprehensive look to date at the effects of parents' immigration status on young children. 
"The undocumented are viewed in current policy debates as lawbreakers, laborers or victims - seldom as parents raising citizen children," wrote the author, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, a Harvard education professor who has published the study as a book, "Immigrants Raising Citizens" (Russell Sage Foundation, 2011). 
Professor Yoshikawa found that by the time the children of illegal immigrants reached age 2, they showed significantly lower levels of language and cognitive development than the children of legal immigrants and native-born parents. 

Since age 2 is the first point when you can test language and it's near the lower boundary of when you can test cognitive development in general, I'd say: that's bad, really bad. Translated into Occam-speak, what the NYT is reporting is: At the earliest point at which we can test, illegal immigrants' children are less intelligent on average.
"Millions of the youngest citizens in the United States, simply by virtue of being born to a parent with a particular legal status, have less access to the learning opportunities that are the building blocks of adult productivity," he wrote. ... 

Let's reread the crucial clause: "simply by virtue of being born to a parent with a particular legal status." Uh, no.
Poor cognitive development can lead to lower school performance, which in turn can lead to higher dropout rates, an undertrained work force and lower economic productivity. 

Indeed.

Therefore,  the article suggests, the appropriate response to the relative stupidity of the children of illegal immigrants is granting their parents amnesty.

There's a second cognitive problem that goes unmentioned in this article, but one that might be even more threatening to America's future. A close reading of most illegal immigration-related articles in the New York Times over the last decade reveals that the topic of illegal immigration make the New York Times stupider. 

May 10, 2011

WTF is causing rising disability

David Brooks writes:
As my colleague David Leonhardt pointed out recently, in 1954, about 96 percent of American men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked. Today that number is around 80 percent. One-fifth of all men in their prime working ages are not getting up and going to work. 
According to figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has a smaller share of prime age men in the work force than any other G-7 nation. The number of Americans on the permanent disability rolls, meanwhile, has steadily increased. Ten years ago, 5 million Americans collected a federal disability benefit. Now 8.2 million do. That costs taxpayers $115 billion a year, or about $1,500 per household. ...

Fortunately, Dave has a long list of suggestions about how to Win The Future:
It will probably require a broad menu of policies attacking the problem all at once: expanding community colleges and online learning; changing the corporate tax code and labor market rules to stimulate investment; adopting German-style labor market practices like apprenticeship programs, wage subsidies and programs that extend benefits to the unemployed for six months as they start small businesses. 

A reader comments:
Wow, a fifth of men out of the workforce. Dave is waxing speculative about redirecting some huge tranche of resources from the welfare state as a result. What's the one huge factor, which would have a much cheaper solution, that he dare not mention? 

I don't know ... Sunspots? Continental drift? Fluoride? I'm as baffled as Dave. What could be causing all these American guys to develop bad backs who are expected by people like me and Dave who type for a living to compete with illegal immigrants for $9 per hour jobs lifting stuff? Mercury in vaccines? It's a complete mystery. Global warming? Yeah, it's usually global warming.
Really, are establishment Republicans so cowed that touching the Medicare third-rail looks better than coming to Jesus on immigration and the national question?

Well, it looks like a lot of Republican politicians are developing cold feet on privatizing Medicare for under 55s. But, yeah, cowed is the right word.

Meanwhile, President Obama is crowing about the success of his plan to discourage new illegal immigration through high unemployment and how therefore the health of the economy depends upon putting illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship and voting Democratic. Or something like that. Frankly, beginning in 2001, every couple of years (e.g., 2001, 2004, 2006, 2007, and 2011) the President announces some gibberish about how it's a national priority to amnesty illegal immigrants, so we can Win The Future.

WTF is the right acronym.

April 3, 2011

The Cash Value of American Citizenship

In my new VDARE column, I return to the subject of pregnant foreign tourists holing up in America to acquire birthright citizenship for their babies.
Unfortunately, the New York Times' reporter Jennifer Medina couldn’t get much of a grasp on why foreigners would go to all this expense and trouble. It seems to her, to have something to do with passports:
"Immigration experts say they can only guess why well-to-do Chinese women are so eager to get United States passports for their babies, but they suspect it is largely as a kind of insurance policy should they need to move."

... To help the NYT’s puzzlement in case it should ever want to return to this subject, let’s find out what the Chinese themselves say are the reasons. An enterprising reader of mine went to the trouble of looking up a Chinese birth tourism website—the extremely pink Chinese Baby Care. He then had Google Translate render the Chinese characters into approximate English.

And figuring out the motives behind birth tourism is well worth doing. It’s a hugely significant phenomenon—because it makes explicit a topic that is almost never discussed in the American media, but is feverishly analyzed abroad: the scarcity value of the right to live in America.

Read the whole thing there.


December 9, 2010

The DREAM amnesty

Mickey Kaus has been covering in Newsweek the maneuvering to pass the DREAM amnesty by the lame duck Senate (after it was passed by a lame duck House this week).  First, DREAM is potentially a huge amnesty:
because there are no penalties to lying on a DREAM application, and because once you file the application you get a work permit good for 10 years (while you comply with the Act's requirements), DREAM is basically a 10 year free pass to any illegal in a broad under-35ish age range who either qualifies or is willing to say he qualifies even if he doesn't.

Second, that Harry Reid postponed a vote today shows he's not just going-through-the-motions to prove his good intentions to Hispanic activists. Instead, he's trying to keep it alive in case it can become part of the tax cut extension compromise:
Delay offers the hope that something will break in his favor, that the ongoing big negotiations on taxes and spending will offer a moment of leverage to pry a recalcitrant Republican (or, more likely, Democrat) or two over to the DREAM side. At the very least, it offers the prospect that, once the big tax-cut-extension deal is done, Republican senators will consider themselves released from their "Wall of No" pledge not to give any other legislation priority.

October 21, 2010

Border Fence Not Only Invisible, But Also Ineffectual, and, Soon, Nonexistent

From the LA Times:
The Department of Homeland Security, positioning itself to cut its losses on a so-called invisible fence along the U.S.-Mexico border, has decided not to exercise a one-year option for Boeing to continue work on the troubled multibillion-dollar project involving high-tech cameras, radar and vibration sensors.

The result, after an investment of more than $1 billion, may be a system with only 53 miles of unreliable coverage along the nearly 2,000-mile border.