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

August 3, 2011

Environmentalism & Nativism

For some time, environmentalists have been aggressively nativist when it comes to plants and animals. Environmentalists don't like, say, foreign transplants, such as rats driving extinct all the native birds on remote islands. They don't like kudzu covering up much of the Southeast.

But that increasingly raises feeling of psychological unease and impurity in the minds of 21st Century environmentalists. If, as we all know, nativism is the worst thing in the history of the world when it comes to people, how can nativism be good when it comes to plants and animals? Why aren't we more sensitive to the plight of the poor immigrant kudzu vines, emerald ash borers, and Asian longhorn beetles?

After all, conservation in America was largely invented by people who were nativists about flora, fauna, and people, such as Madison Grant. Back in the 1990s, the wealthy couple of David Gelbaum and Monica Chavez Gelbaum bought the Sierra Club's soul for $100,000,000 on the condition that they drop their immigration restrictionist stance and thus their stance against population growth in the U.S. and in the Sierra Club's home state of California. This epochal switch has largely disappeared down the memory hole. Today, everybody assumes that plant nativists are, by the nature of their superior morality, human antinativists. But there are psychological tensions in this inherent contradiction.

Now, the easiest thing to do is to simply ignore the contradiction. But it gnaws away at some.

From the Boston Globe:
The invasive species war 
Do we protect native plants because they’re better for the earth, or because we hate strangers? A cherished principle of environmentalism comes under attack 
By Leon Neyfakh 
... The reasons to fight invasive species may be economic, or conservationist, or just practical, but underneath all these efforts is a potent and galvanizing idea: that if we work hard enough to keep foreign species from infiltrating habitats where they might do harm, we can help nature heal from the damage we humans have done to it as a civilization. 
In the past several months, however, that idea has come under blistering attack. In a polemical essay that appeared in the leading science journal Nature in June, a biologist from Macalester College in Minnesota named Mark Davis led 18 other academics in charging that the movement to protect ecosystems from non-native species stems from a “biological bias” against arbitrarily defined outsiders that ultimately does more harm than good. According to Davis and his co-authors, the fight against invaders amounts to an impossible quest to restore the world to some imaginary, pristine state. The world changes, they argue, and in some cases, the arrival of a new plant or animal can actually help, rather than hurt, an ecosystem. 
The whole idea of dividing the world into native and non-native species is flawed, the article says, because what seems non-native to one generation might be thought of as a local treasure by the next. Instead we should embrace “novel ecosystems” as they form, and assess species based on what they do rather than where they’re from. 
“Newcomers are viewed as a threat because the world that you remember is being displaced by this new world,” Davis said recently. “I think that’s a perfectly normal and understandable human reaction, but as scientists we need to be careful that those ideas don’t shape and frame our scientific research.” 
The article in Nature joined similar arguments that had recently appeared in the journal Science as well as the op-ed page of The New York Times, where an anthropologist who had recently become a naturalized US citizen likened the control of invasive species to the anti-immigration movement. These critiques of so-called “ecological nativism” inspired equally spirited responses by scientists, including a letter in Nature signed by 141 scientists arguing that Davis and his cohort had downplayed the dangers of non-native species while distorting the work of ecologists and conservationists. 
For environmentalists and anyone worried about a local lake or forest, trying to keep the potential carnage at bay seems like a no-brainer: if non-native species might destroy an ecosystem we cherish, then of course we should do what we can to suppress them. ...
One of the first people to publicly make this “anti-nativist” argument was, somewhat surprisingly, the journalist Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and hero to locavores everywhere. He wrote an essay about it in the New York Times Magazine in 1994, focusing on the native gardening movement that was sweeping the United States at the time. Proponents of natural gardening had been calling on their fellow green thumbs to stop planting exotic species in their backyards; Pollan did not mince words in communicating his distaste for the practice, suggesting it came out of an impulse that was “antihumanist” and “xenophobic,” and even tracing its history back to a “mania for natural gardening” in Nazi-era Germany. 
While Pollan said in an interview that he now regrets resorting to the Hitler button to make his point, he maintains that there is something worrying about the zeal with which some environmentalists seek to keep foreigners out of places where they think they don’t belong.
“We should always be alert that even those of us who think they’re practicing pure science or pure environmental policy are sometimes influenced by other ideas, other feelings,” Pollan said. “And we should interrogate ourselves to see if that’s what’s going on.”

Have you ever noticed how much the left loves the word "interrogate?" Ve haf veys of making you talk!
This point was echoed this past spring by Hugh Raffles, an anthropologist at the New School who wrote the essay comparing invasive species to immigrants. “We choose to designate some plants and animals as native because they fit with the way that we want the landscape to look,” said Raffles in an interview. If you call something native, he added, “you should realize you’re just making certain claims about what you want to see and what you think is important to preserve.” 
THE SCIENTISTS WHO study non-native species and try to control them are called invasion ecologists, and they’re used to feeling embattled. But their opponents usually come from the political right, and can be counted on to dismiss most any effort at conservation as an expensive nuisance or an impediment to industry. This other contingent, though - the one that includes Davis, Pollan, and Raffles - comes from a less obvious place. Suddenly, these environmentalists who have always identified with progressive ideals are themselves being accused of being conservative, backwards - even intolerant. 
Their reply is that, as scientists, their job is to save plants and animals from extinction, protect their habitats, and make sure that subsequent generations get to enjoy as much of the earth as possible. To suggest that the work has xenophobic connotations, they say, amounts to little more than academic noodling - a philosophical stance at best, and a harmful distraction at worst. 
... Is the debate simply over rhetoric, then? If it is, its fierceness has highlighted just how important rhetoric is to the environmentalist movement, and how valuable the distinction between native and non-native is in terms of rallying people to the cause of conservation. Psychologically, it’s not hard to see why the anti-nativist position holds an appeal, and why it would worry environmentalists.

One of my readers comments:
The Left finds a psychologically worrying element in environmentalism. Environmentalism's defense of native species against invasive species that may decimate or marginalize the natives could have psychologically 'racist' ramifications. (After all, some racial ideologues have said if species of animals and plants deserve to be protected, so should the races and cultures of man.)  
Environmentalism, associated with the Left, is now suspected of harboring subconscious 'racist', 'nativist', and 'xenophobic' tendencies, which though applied to animals and plants, may contaminate our view of races, cultures, and nations as well.  
Again, it goes to show that the Leftist war on the West isn't only ideological but psychological. It doesn't only oppose 'racism' but all forms of thoughts and feelings that may be psychologically connected to 'racism' and 'nationism'.  
Sierra Club gave up on immigration-control, and it may now even have to give up on saving native species. I suppose it was great tht cats and rats introduced to the Galapagos ate up all the eggs of tortoises. And what did American Indians have to worry about when the white man came? Those damned racists! And what did Palestinians have to worry from the massive inflow of Jews in the 1940s? Terrorist scum.

I increasingly find myself as The Last Moderate. Consider the question of native plants in my native land, Southern California. Before the white man arrived, Southern California was remarkably lacking in food crops. The Indians gathered acorns, which is a last resort food, because it takes a fair amount of work to make them edible. You'll notice how nobody bothers eating acorns these days.

Americans quickly noticed that, given enough irrigation, practically any plant from anywhere in the world will grow in Southern California. For much of the first half of the 20th Century, Los Angeles County was the number one agricultural producer in the country. 

Moreover, in ornamental plants, this welcoming climate led to comic levels of diversity in landscaping, with one street having 150-foot tall fan palms (the iconic plant that makes a good logo for L.A. in silhouette, but looks like a hyperextended mop in reality) in one yard, next door to giant, dusty eucalyptuses from Australia, next door to large but not quite thriving redwoods from northern California, next door to a colossally wide Moreton Bay fig tree from Australia, etc. SoCal tends to have good yards but not good streets, due to an excess of individualism leading to an excess of diversity. It's like yesterday's discussion of free verse: poetry where anything can happen isn't as fun as poetry where the end of the next line will either fulfill your expectation or surprise you. 

Growing up, I found L.A. residents' penchant for decorative diversity, self-expression, and phoniness in landscaping and architecture amusing. More aesthetically sensitive souls, however, did not. For example, Nathanael West raged apocalyptically in Day of the Locust against L.A.'s diversity of architecture: "But not even the soft wash of dusk could help the houses ... Only dynamite would be of any use against the Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles that lined the slopes of the canyon."

Over time, I increasingly have come to appreciate the native environment, or at least it's better aspects. Let's prioritize, however, what we want to preserve. Not every bit of Southern California natural environment is as worth preserving as every other.

In Southern California, for example, southern-facing slopes are blasted by the midday sun, and thus tend to be covered by impenetrable, gray-green-brown sage brush. We've got plenty of sage brush, so, go ahead, pave it over. I don't care enough to pay much to save some more sage brush. In contrast, cooler north-facing slopes tend to be forested with a small variety of native oaks, sycamores, and a few other trees. Low altitude Southern California is only slightly forested, so its worth preserving much of what little is left. Thus, north facing slopes should be higher up on the conservation priority list than south facing slopes.

July 24, 2011

Blue Labour: The Rapid Rise and Faster Fall of an Immigration Realist Leftist

My new VDARE column is about Maurice Glasman, one of the most interesting leftist thinkers in recent years to emerge (and then get rapidly submerged as he made clear the full logic of his worldview). Lord Glasman served for the last half year as the idea man for the new British Labour Party boss Ed Miliband. 

Glasman, who is almost utterly unknown in the U.S. media, articulated a new old-fashioned, pre-multiculti leftism for Labour of the kind that George Orwell might have approved of. Not surprisingly, last week he got stomped down for calling for a halt to mass immigration, but he had an interesting ride while it lasted. 
Lord Glasman has found himself on the less privileged side of the central ideological divide of the 21st Century—a gap that sprawls across the more familiar ideological chasms of the 20th Century. The crucial question is no longer capitalism vs. communism, but globalism v. localism, imperial centralization v. self-rule, cosmopolitanism v. patriotism, elitism v. populism, diversity v. particularism, homogeneity v. heterogeneity, and high-low v. middle. 
Barack Obama, for example, epitomizes the first side of these dichotomies, especially the high-low coalition. By being half-black, he enjoys the totemic aura of the low, but has all the advantages of the high. He has never, as far as anyone can tell, had a thought cross his mind that would raise an eyebrow at a Davos Conference. 
In contrast to the President, Glasman is certainly an original thinker. But anybody on his side of these new dichotomies faces a tactical disadvantage. 
Because globalists want the whole world to be all the same, they share common talking points, strategies, conferences, media, and so forth. 
In contrast, because the localists want the freedom to rule themselves, they often don’t even realize who else is on the same side of this divide. 
For example, to most Americans, "socialism" is a very foreign-sounding word. To a lot of Brits, however, socialism is what their grandfathers looked forward to while they fought WWII and then came home to create the National Health Service.

Read the whole thing there.

July 21, 2011

A not worthwhile Canadian initiative

Canada's population has been steadily growing due to immigration. It's now up to 34 million from 27 million in 1988. Immigrants have, not surprisingly, stayed away from Manitoba and Saskatchewan, while crowding into Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. 

Canadian Liberal Party senior statesman Robert Kaplan enthusiastically explains in the Toronto Globe & Mail that tripling the population of Canada would be terrific for Canada's ruling caste.
Fulfilling Laurier's vision: A Canada of 100 million 
We don’t have enough people. The Liberals should stand today for a strategic immigration policy of reaching 100 million by 2100. 
If we become a nation of this size: 
1. Our culture would be less strained to survive. Our arts, books, magazines, newspapers, movies and music, electronic media, with more than triple the producers and consumers would become self-sustaining. They might even become better. Our comedians could be funnier. Our elusive search for definition as Canadians could be realized.

A Canadian = A random foreigner. 

The thinking behind this is that if the population of Canada were 100,000,000, then there would be lots of cool media jobs for funny Canadian Scotsmen and Jews, whose media products would be purchased (mandatorily, under the Canadian Content Quota laws) by the teeming new masses of unfunny Muslim immigrants.

He's a man with a plan!
2. Canadians could better take up our vast opportunities. Domestic markets that justify branch plant operations today could attract Canadian entrepreneurs from the start. We would be a serious stand-alone market. Truncation could be reversed. Foreign capital coming in would be more challenged by growing Canadian domestic capital. We could still welcome foreign investors, but we would give them more of a run for their money, and see our economy benefit.

It's hard to get a billion dollars in Canada, which peeves Canadians with merely a hundred million dollars.
3. On the world stage, our skills at exercising soft power by finding project partners and leading by example could be supplemented by some “hard” power. We could address and solve problems single handedly if we wanted. Our military could be comfortably triple its present size, as could our aid programmes.

Kaplan's view of existing Canadians is kind of like Gen. Douglas Haig's as he was planning the First Battle of the Somme in 1916: Canadians are okay, I guess, but they'd be better if they could provide more cannon  fodder.

Under Kaplan's plan, Canadian political leaders could, just like American leaders, decide, off the top of their heads, to invade or bomb countries they don't like. What's the fun of being a national leader if you don't get to shoot cruise missiles at  countries that annoy you?
4. We Canadians believe we stand for something good in the world, that we have some values and some institutions worth promoting in the interests of international social harmony, peace and prosperity. At 100 million, the world audience might be more alert.

Nobody ever pays attention to America Jr. 

Kaplan then explains that while global warming is all so sad for, say, Bangladeshis, Canada  should do all it in its power to speed it up. It's damn cold in Canada.
Before turning to some conditions of the strategic plank I recommend, two points need to be made. Firstly, Canada’s ecology is changing. We oppose global warming for good reasons and should continue to do so, but we can see it coming, and it brings certain advantages to Canada. We will have much more arable land and a much broader range of foods that we will be able to grow – foods that the world needs. This is already happening. More farmers are needed. Also Northern opportunity is becoming, and has become, viable. Northern waterways are now accessible eight months a year, a window that is increasing. We need cities up there, and people for them.

How's that working out in Siberia, anyway? Is Magnitogorsk a hot real estate market? A commenter responds:
So much for all our empty talk about sustainability and the environment.
Let's bring a bunch of people over from relatively low energy consumption countries and settle them in the frigid Great White North . . . with its need for central heating, long distances, and our addiction to energy consumpton - that ought to be great for that carbon footprint that the Liberals are so concerned about. I guess that greenhouse gases are only bad when its us Albertans who are generating them - everyone else is exempt - especially if they vote Liberal. 
How exactly does this fit with the supposedly "green" side of the Liberal party's platform?

Kaplan continues:
Secondly we should not ignore the growing world population and the growing number of refugees worldwide. It is not inconceivable that world organizations may begin telling us to increase what we now consider to be a generous immigration policy. Today’s limits are stingy for us. We could get ahead of this and gain world respect for doing so. ...

We would also probably need to direct some immigrants and commit them to stay somewhere for periods of as much as 10 years. We would do this to hold support for the policy in our “crowded” cities, to satisfy some provinces as to their proportionate place in Confederation and to prepare for the optimum population distribution for our long-term opportunities. The natural preference some immigrants might have to be, for example, near their existing ethnic community in Canada might need to be challenged. Are there potential immigrants willing to accept such conditions? The fact is that there are hundreds of millions of them. Permission to come to Canada could be the greatest event for their family in its history, as it was for most of us. Such immigrants would not be subjected to the isolation of many of our foreparents, where a young couple could be completely alone on the Prairies, miles from other humans for months at a time. With the Internet, Skype, radio and television, there would be a lot to compensate for accepting conditions.

So, the idea is to round up all the new Bangladeshi immigrants each time they sneak back to their cousins' neighborhood in Toronto and send them back to their Gulag encampments in Moose Jaw and Medicine Hat. Yeah, I can see that working out. A commenter responds:
He may envisage forcibly filling Saskatchewan or Inuvik with immigrants, but it would be immediately challenged to the Supreme Court, probably successfully. Thereafter, Toronto's borders and traffic jams, already the continent's worst, would continue to grow. 

Another commenter writes:
Oh Bob, dear Bob,  
Do you really think it's possible to increase the amount of arable land by merely raising the temperature of the air? Ah, if only it were so simple. Vast tracts of the country are covered by the boreal forest, which for the most part sits on a thin layer of acidic soil, which in turn rests on bedrock. Canadian Shield that is, Bob. Good luck getting your plough to penetrate solid granite. Good luck getting wheat or corn to germinate in acidic soil. And even if by some miracle you solve those problems, what happens if climate change makes Canada's climate drier? Ask any Canadian farmer, in the middle of this heat wave, if he'd prefer drier conditions. Anyone for drought, Bob? 
And I see that you also want to build big cities way up north? On permafrost? [They'd sink.] Bob, that's where I stopped reading. That's where I decided that your article is nothing more than a very late April Fools' joke. 

The 321 comments are pretty funny.

July 1, 2011

Asylum Fraud and DSK

Here's part of the letter from the district attorney's office to Dominique Strauss-Kahn's accuser's attorney explaining why they don't trust her anymore.
In an application for Asylum and for Withholding of Removal dated I)eccmber 30, 2004, the complainant provided the United States Department of Justice Immigration and Naturalization Service with factual information about herself, her background and her experiences in her home country of Guinea. This information was in the form of a written statement attached to her application, and was submitted as a basis for her request for asylum. In her application, she certified under penalty of perjury that her written statement was true. In substance, the complainant's statement claimed that she and her husband had been persecuted and harassed by the dictatorial regime that was then in power in Guinea. Among other things, the complainant stated that the home that she shared with her husband was destroyed by police and soldiers acting on behalf of the regime, and that she and her husband were beaten by them. When her husband attempted to return to what was left of their home the next day, she stated that he was again beaten, arrested and imprisoned by police and soldiers. She stated that she also was beaten when she attempted to come to her husband's aid. In her statement, she attributed the beatings to the couple's opposition to the regime. She stated that during her husband's incarceration, he was tortured, deprived of medical treatment and eventually died as a result of his maltreatment. FoIlowing his death, according to her, she began to denounce the regime and finally fled the country in fear of her life, entering the United States in January 2004 to seek refuge (she has told prosecutors that she used a fraudulent visa). She repeated these facts orally during the course of her asylum application process.  
In interviews in connection with the investigation of this case, the complainant admitted that the above factual information, which she provided in connection with her asylum application, was false. She stated that she fabricated the statement with the assistance of a male who provided her with a cassette recording of the facts contained in the statement that she eventually submitted. She memorized these facts by listening to the recording repeatedly. In several interviews with prosecutors, she reiterated these falsehoods when questioned about her history and background, and stated that she did so in order to remain consistent with the statement that she had submitted as part of her application. Additionally, in two separate interviews with assistant district attorneys assigned to the case, the complainant stated that she had been the victim of a gang rape in the past in her native country and provided details of the attack. During both of these interviews, the victim cried and appeared to be markedly distraught when recounting the incident. In subsequent interviews, she admitted that the gang rape had never occurred. Instead, she stated that she had lied about its occurrence and fabricated the details, and that this false incident was part of the narrative that she had been directed to memorize as part of her asylum application process. Presently, the complainant states that she would testify that she was raped in the past in her native country but in an incident different than the one that she described during initial interviews.  

The asylum process tends to attract con-artists to America.
In the weeks following the incident charged in the indictment, the complainant told detectives and assistant district attorneys on numerous occasions that, after being sexually assaulted by the defendant on May 14, 2011 in Suite 2806, she fled to an area of the main hallway of the hotel's 28" floor and waited there until she observed the defendant leave Suite 2806 and the 28" floor by entering an elevator. It was after this observation that she reported the incident to her supervisor, who arrived on the 28" floor a short time later. In the interim between the incident and her supervisor's arrival, she claimed to have remained in the same area of the main hallway on the 28" floor to which she had initially fled. The complainant testified to this version of events when questioned in the Grand Jury about her actions following the incident in Suite 2806. The complainant has since admitted that this account was false and that after the incident in Suite 2806, she proceeded to clean a nearby room and then returned to Suite 2806 and began to clean that suite before she reported the incident to her supervisor. 

Do fancy hotels have hallway video cameras? It would seem like they should for security reasons, but, on the other hand, they would give the hotel blackmail material. So I couldn't say off hand. It sounds here like they may have had hallway cameras and that's what tripped her up? But if they did have footage, why did DSK spend 6 weeks locked up? I had assumed that the hallway video camera upheld the accuser's story, doubtful as it sounded, and that's why they perp walked him.
Additionally, the complainant has stated that for the past two tax years, she declared a friend's child in addition to her own as a dependent on her tax returns for the purpose of increasing her tax refund beyond that to which she was entitled . She also admitted to misrepresenting her income in order to maintain her present housing.

She was living in an AIDS charity. Does she have AIDS? Why do we let people with AIDS into the country?
Initially, during the course of this investigation, the complainant was untruthful with assistant district attorneys about a val-iety of additional topics concerning her history, background, present circumstances and personal relationships. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions.

I'm not totally convinced that DSK was just a simple purchaser of a prostitution service, either. Maybe he felt entitled to more than he paid for, and the maid / part time pro felt sore about it and then decided to complain, but then realized she'd have to accuse him of being a full-blown rapist to keep her job.

So, who would you bet on to get deported first: DSK's accuser, Obama's Aunt Zeituni, or neither, ever?

June 30, 2011

DSK accuser not proving credible

From today's NYT:
The sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn is on the verge of collapse as investigators have uncovered major holes in the credibility of the housekeeper who charged that he attacked her in his Manhattan hotel suite in May, according to two well-placed law enforcement officials. 
Although forensic tests found unambiguous evidence of a sexual encounter between Mr. Strauss-Kahn, a French politician, and the woman, prosecutors do not believe much of what the accuser has told them about the circumstances or about herself. 
Since her initial allegation on May 14, the accuser has repeatedly lied, one of the law enforcement officials said. 
Senior prosecutors met with lawyers for Mr. Strauss-Kahn on Thursday and provided details about their findings, and the parties are discussing whether to dismiss the felony charges. Among the discoveries, one of the officials said, are issues involving the asylum application of the 32-year-old housekeeper, who is Guinean, and possible links to criminal activities, including drug dealing and money laundering.

Here's the beginning of my May 19th posting kicking around the DSK charges:
Is there enough evidence to convict Dominique Strauss-Kahn in court? I can't tell. Maybe on Friday at the Grand Jury hearing more will be revealed. I expected there to be more by now, though. 
From the outside, we have what looks like a He Said She Said case. The accuser is being kept anonymous, while the accused is the head of the International Monetary Fund. So, this being 2011, we naturally believe the accuser on the grounds that an anonymous person is likely more reliable than a famous international financial expert.  
In the case of this particular international financial expert, moreover, we have a long chain of rumors about him abusing women under his influence. DSK is an expert at misusing influence. On the other hand, a maid with a vacuum cleaner isn't somebody who thinks that maybe if she gives in to his advances, she'll get put in charge of the Portugal bailout.  
What facts have been revealed might be consistent with a variety of scenarios, none of which would reflect well on DSK. But not all of them would be consistent with outright stranger rape. For example, say he lays a few Benjamin Franklins on the table. Needing cash, the maid accepts them. A few minutes later, out in the corridor, she runs into her boss, who asks why her lipstick is a mess. Panicking about losing her job, she makes up a story about a naked presidential candidate jumping her and forcing her to make a mess of her lipstick.  
Well, maybe. And, keep in mind, that's probably the scenario that makes DSK look best (short of a gigantic movie-style conspiracy), which isn't very good. 

You know, as we saw with the Duke lacrosse case, on a personal level, it's generally a good idea to stay away from strippers and hookers. Yeah, it's unfair when they make up accusations against you, but, you're safest from phony rape charges when they haven't ever met you.

On a national level, it's generally not a good idea to let in to your country foreigners like this lady who seem only skilled at working the system. From today's NYT:
“It is a mess, a mess on both sides,” one official said. 
According to the two officials, the woman had a phone conversation with an incarcerated man within a day of her encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn in which she discussed the possible benefits of pursuing the charges against him. The conversation was recorded. 
That man, the investigators learned, had been arrested on charges of possessing 400 pounds of marijuana. He is among a number of individuals who made multiple cash deposits, totaling around $100,000, into the woman’s bank account over the last two years. The deposits were made in Arizona, Georgia, New York and Pennsylvania. 
The investigators also learned that she was paying hundreds of dollars every month in phone charges to five companies. The woman had insisted she had only one phone and said she knew nothing about the deposits except that they were made by a man she described as her fiancé and his friends. 
In addition, one of the officials said, she told investigators that her application for asylum included mention of a previous rape, but there was no such account in the application. She also told them that she had been subjected to genital mutilation, but her account to the investigators differed from what was contained in the asylum application.

Will they kick her out?

This is not going down in the history books as an impressive performance by either the prestige or tabloid presses. Back in May, there quickly emerged questions about why this woman was living in an apartment building for AIDS sufferers (I read it in the Daily Telegraph -- the Brits tend to be better at scandal than us), but then those questions just went away because ... I guess everybody really, really wants to find the real life Great White Defendant like we've seen on Law & Order for 20 years.

On the other hand, the stuff in this article doesn't prove DSK didn't do it either. We just have a doubtful-sounding story from a doubtful-sounding accuser.

By the way, the prosecutors say they haven't found any evidence that a political conspiracy was behind it.

May 13, 2011

Why does the government do this?

The Washington Post reports:
Tens of thousands of would-be immigrants may be unable to move legally to the United States after the State Department said Friday that a computer glitch is forcing them to scrap the results of an annual worldwide lottery for U.S. visas. 
More than 14 million applicants entered a lottery last fall for one of 50,000 visas distributed as part of the annual Diversity Visa Lottery, designed for people who would otherwise have little chance of legally entering the country. The program doesn’t require applicants to have a family or employer as a sponsor.

So, there are 280 applications for every visa? 
Each year the State Department selects about 90,000 applicants and trims the list to 50,000 through an extensive series of interviews, background checks and medical exams. 
The lottery has been conducted by computer since its inception in 1994, according to State Department officials. 
David Donahue, deputy assistant secretary of state for visa services, said the glitch discovered earlier this month prompted the computer program to unfairly select people who submitted applications in the first two days of the 30-day application process that ended Nov. 3. 
“These results are not valid because they did not represent a fair, random selection of the entrants as required by U.S. law,” Donahue said ...

So, there are 280 applications for every visa and we select them randomly? And then hand out visas for, essentially, free?

Why?

Fortunately, the article provides the answer:
Congress established the lottery program to attract immigrants from countries with lower rates of immigration to the United States. Residents of countries with larger rates of U.S. immigration — including China, El Salvador, Haiti, India and Mexico — are not eligible for the program.

You see, the intention is for immigrants to be attracted from countries that don't send as many immigrants.  How could I have overlooked a simple, sensible, downright tautological explanation like that? When you think of it that way, of course the U.S. must randomly pick out one out of each 280 people who apply and give them free lifetime residency in the U.S. What else could the government do? This way, we can jumpstart chain migration from even more countries. Have you noticed how immigrants from Indonesia, population 230,000,000, haven't really begun flooding in yet,? Well, our government has a plan to fix that problem!

In fact, the government should also give each of the 900,000 winners over the last 18 years (plus their spouses, adult children, parents, and and their spouses' parents, adult children's spouses, parents' adult children, and the rest of their entourages, people of the caliber of Hesham Mohamad Hedayet) a free tour of Willie Wonka's Chocolate Factory.

It's the least we can do.

Another thing we should do for those 900,000 is have the Bureau of Engraving print up $1,000,000 in cash for each one and give it to them in Gucci suitcases. C'mon, it's just like immigration: I mean, how much does the paper and ink cost? Not much, right? It's the same thing with American residency, right? We just printed up 900,000 green cards. How much could that have cost?

April 18, 2011

Point 'n' Sputter

From the New York Times:
The Anti-Immigration CrusaderBy JASON DePARLE 
WASHINGTON — Three decades ago, a middle-aged doctor sat outside his northern Michigan home and saw a patch of endangered paradise. 
A beekeeper and amateur naturalist of prodigious energy, John Tanton had spent two decades planting trees, cleaning creeks and suing developers, but population growth put ever more pressure on the land. Though fertility rates had fallen, he saw a new threat emerging: soaring rates of immigration. 
Time and again, Dr. Tanton urged liberal colleagues in groups like Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club to seek immigration restraints, only to meet blank looks and awkward silences. 
“I finally concluded that if anything was going to happen, I would have to do it myself,” he said. 
Improbably, he did. From the resort town of Petoskey, Mich., Dr. Tanton helped start all three major national groups fighting to reduce immigration, legal and illegal, and molded one of the most powerful grass-roots forces in politics. The immigration-control movement surged to new influence in last fall’s elections and now holds near veto power over efforts to legalize any of the 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States. 
One group that Dr. Tanton nurtured, Numbers USA, doomed President George W. Bush’s legalization plan four years ago by overwhelming Congress with protest calls. Another, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, helped draft the Arizona law last year to give the police new power to identify and detain illegal immigrants. 
A third organization, the Center for Immigration Studies, joined the others in December in defeating the Dream Act, which sought to legalize some people brought to the United States illegally as children. 
Rarely has one person done so much to structure a major cause, or done it so far from the public eye. Dr. Tanton has raised millions of dollars, groomed protégés and bequeathed institutions, all while running an ophthalmology practice nearly 800 miles from Capitol Hill. 
“He is the most influential unknown man in America,” said Linda Chavez, a former aide to President Ronald Reagan who once led a Tanton group that promoted English-only laws.

After this promising opening, you might expect the article to move on to using Tanton's fascinating experience as a modern day Jefferson Smith as the lens through which to examine one of the bizarre developments of the last quarter century: the emasculation of the environmental movement by pro-immigrationist interests. For example, you might expect the NYT to cite the brand new Census data to show that Tanton's fears are coming true and then ask: Why have groups like the Sierra Club dropped their traditional insistence on immigration restriction, despite the huge impact immigration-driven population growth has had on, say, America's (and thus the world's) carbon emissions? [Answer here at VDARE, not in NYT for some reason.]

Well, you might expect that if you'd been living on Mars for the last few decades. Instead, the article immediately turns into the usual exercise in point-and-sputter guilt by association:
While Dr. Tanton’s influence has been extraordinary, so has his evolution — from apostle of centrist restraint to ally of angry populists and a man who increasingly saw immigration through a racial lens.

Etcetera, etcetera ...

Really, doesn't the childishness of contemporary thinking just wear you down? Junior high school girls  engage in more principled thinking than the Who? Whom? that is the standard assumption of the conventional wisdom on immigration.

November 29, 2010

Immigrants and Exurbs

Ever since African-American voters in Washington D.C. kicked out school reformer Michelle Rhee, lowering property values in gentrifying sections of D.C., blogger and D.C. condo-owner Matthew Yglesias has been on the warpath to admit 165,000,000 immigrants to the U.S.. You might think that the subsequent increase in global carbon emissions alone would make that an expensive way to drive African Americans out of D.C. in order to improve the public schools and raise Yglesias's property value, but, you see, Yglesias has a triple bankshot plan to remake America into his beloved native Manhattan. He thinks 165 million immigrants couldn't help but come in handy in the Manhattanization of America so that everybody will take the subway to work.

But, has Yglesias ever asked immigrants where they want to live? Much of the evidence suggests: in the exurbs, in big houses, with big air conditioners, driving big SUVs. For example, here's a 2009 article by Alan Ehrenhalt in Governing entitled Immigrants and the Suburban Influx. It describes exurban Gwinnett County, about 30 miles outside of Atlanta. Famous as a white flight region just a couple of decades ago, Gwinnett is now majority minority, with lots of prosperous Indians and Koreans. Maybe in a generation or two, affluent Indians and Koreans will want to lead the downtown hipster life, but right now they want the traditional American Dream of a home with a yard and a big car (i.e., they want to emit a lot of carbon.)

November 14, 2010

Corporations and Left Conspire in Australia

Australians have been deeply worried in this century about two problems: running out of water and potentially rising seas due to carbon emissions. As Jared Diamond pointed out in Collapse, one obvious step is to take the pedal off the metal when it comes to immigration to Australia. The more people in Australia, the less water per person. And the more people who move to Australia from Asia, the more people on Earth shift from public transport and motor scooters to roaring around like Mad Max, with an inevitable increase in carbon emissions. (Australia and Canada are right behind the U.S. in carbon emissions per capita.)

This logic is so obvious that it actually broke through to public consciousness in the last Australian election, with both parties calling for moderation on immigration. 

But now the election is over, with Labour (the left in Australia) winning a very narrow victory, so business interests are back to quietly shushing up this outbreak of common sense and potential majority rule. From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Josh Gordon

November 14, 2010
JULIA GILLARD's election pitch to avoid a ''big Australia'' is to be abandoned after a Treasury warning that strong future immigration is ''probably inescapable''.

In another policy retreat, the government's population review has been delayed and ''recalibrated'' to focus on skills shortages and regional growth, rather than nominating population targets.

During the election campaign in August, Ms Gillard said Australia should not ''hurtle'' towards a big population. At the time, she said a Treasury projection that Australia would have a population of 36 million people by 2050 was excessive. ''I don't support the idea of a big Australia with arbitrary targets of, say … a 36 million-strong Australia,'' she said.

However, a Treasury briefing sent to Ms Gillard after the campaign suggests she could have no choice. The briefing warns that the prediction of 36 million people ''factors in a significant reduction'' in migration, from a recent peak of 300,000 to an annual average of 180,000.

It concludes that even if annual net migration was lowered to an unrealistically low 60,000 per annum, Australia's population would still reach 29 million by 2050.

''Given the powerful global forces driving the Australian economy, net immigration figures well in excess of that low number are probably inescapable,'' the briefing says.

''Strong population growth is not necessarily unsustainable. It need not adversely affect the environment, the liveability of cities, infrastructure and service delivery, provided the right plans and policies are put in place now in anticipation of it.''

I realize that a Treasury ministry can't be expected to keep up to date with all the breakthroughs in economic reasoning made between the Enlightenment and 1914, but there is this hot new idea around called "opportunity cost."
A senior Labor source said business groups had been pressuring the government to adopt a default position ''where the issue of specific targets is not addressed''.

''I believe the government has accepted the reality that it is not prepared to cut migration to the extent needed to significantly reduce population growth,'' the source said. ...

Days before the election was called in July, Mr Burke appointed three population panels to provide advice on demographic change and liveability, productivity and prosperity, and sustainable development.

Treasury's budget update released last week predicted that unemployment will fall to 4.5 per cent by June 2011, heightening concerns that skills shortages could re-emerge as a key issue.

Asked if it was prudent to be talking about immigration cuts at such a time, Treasurer Wayne Swan said the government had refocused the migration program on skills.

Unemployment could fall to 4.5%? The horror, the horror ...

November 2, 2010

LINK FIXED: "Second generation immigrants in Europe are de-assimilating"

Here's an important statistic from a new study giving employment rates in three big European countries. For example:
Germany

Native Men: 75.3%
First generation non-European immigrant Men: 68.5%
Second generation non-European immigrant Men: 53.9%

Much of the immigration to Europe can be characterized as welfare fraud.

Immigration in Germany: Sarrazin v. Habermas

From my new VDARE.com column:
The continuing success of the German high wage economy relative to the Anglo-American low wage / high finance system is raising worries among the global great and good that a newly confident German public might start thinking for itself on immigration.

Particularly agitating to transnational elites is that Social Democratic central banker Thilo Sarrazin published an immigration restrictionist book, Germany Abolishes Itself. (Here’s Rafael Koski’s informative review of Sarrazin’s book in VDARE.com.) Since August, it has sold a million copies. (Trust me when I tell you that’s an astonishing total for a statistics-heavy social science work.)

Germany’s economic model requires, on average, a highly productive population with strong human capital. Germans deeply value extensive technical education or demanding apprenticeships in the skilled crafts. But high investment parenting means that, especially in a crowded country like Germany, children are expensive. Thus, the main long-term threat to Germany’s high investment / high wage model is the below-replacement birthrate among Germans.

Sarrazin advocates policies to boost the birthrate so that Germany won’t abolish itself. Yet there’s an obvious problem: incentives to reproduce would tend to appeal more to parents who don’t invest as much in their children’s human capital, especially Germany’s Muslim immigrants.

Germany is now into its third generation of Muslims.  As Sarrazin documents, they tend to lag behind in achievement, much as Mexicans do on average here in the U.S., even after four generations

What are the causes of these gaps? Genes? Culture? Or whatever?

We’ll eventually find out for sure. But meanwhile, this is the pragmatic take-home message: these disparities have been long enduring. Therefore, they can’t just be assumed away when discussing future immigration policy.

Conclusion: immigration restriction is a logical necessity.

This is especially true in welfare state Germany. There, immigration from the Muslim world since the abolition of guest worker programs in the 1970s has been more or less an elaborate form of welfare fraud carried out through marriages arranged to obtain “family reunification” visas. As Christopher Caldwell pointed out in Reflections upon the Revolution in Europe, from 1971 to 2000, the number of foreign-born people in Germany rose by 150 percent—but the number of foreign-born workers didn’t go up at all.

Neighboring Denmark, the epitome of a civilized country, has had an immigration-restrictionist party in the ruling coalition since 2001.The Danish government has actually cracked down to some extent on arranged marriage immigration scams by not accepting foreign spouses under 24.

Like American scientist James Watson in 2007, Sarrazin was quickly forced to resign his post. Here, when somebody gets fired for political incorrectness, the general assumption is that he must have had it coming. Yet the German people have responded by assuming that if the ruling elite is desperate to silence Sarrazin, he must have something important to say.

Elite efforts to dissuade anyone from listening to Sarrazin’s analysis have now spread to America.

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it here.

October 19, 2010

The Land of the Defunct Empires

From my column in VDARE:
The F.B.I.  announced charges last week against 73 Armenian gangsters, almost  half of them in the  Los Angeles area, for running the largest Medicare fraud in history.

Or—to be strictly accurate—the largest the FBI yet knows about.

The indictment alleged that most of the defendants were "were Armenian nationals or immigrants and many maintained substantial ties to Armenia." They laundered their ill-gotten gains in Las Vegas casinos and/or couriered them back to Armenia.

Michael J. Gaeta, head of the New York F.B.I. office’s Russian Organized Crime Squad, explained: “New York and the U.S., to them it’s a big pot of gold, and they’re coming after it. And with the world getting smaller, it’s much easier for them to do it.”

Among the arrested: Armen Kazarian of the pleasant LA suburb of Glendale, who drives a $350,000 Rolls Royce Phantom. Kazarian is only the second “vor” (the ex-Soviet equivalent of a godfather) yet charged in the U.S. 

I’d never previously heard the term “vor” but I must say, it has a ring to it—like capo di tutti capi or Keyser Söze.

Why was Kazarian in this country in the first place? He was granted asylum in the U.S. in 1996. But he subsequently returned frequently to Armenia to oversee his transcontinental criminal doings.

Naturally, this got me thinking about TV crime dramas.

Law & Order has been the most successful drama in American television history. Counting its countless spinoffs, about 900 hour-long episodes have aired. L&O’s two-decade old formula has been to take a scandal from the news, add a murder, and then show that the richest, whitest, and most conservative character dunnit.

This year, however, NBC shut down the New York-based flagship show and substituted Law & Order: Los Angeles. ... The Wednesday, October 20 episode “Sylmar” will explore the national security threat posed by ... blue-eyed, blonde Americans who espouse extremist Islam:
Deputy District Attorney: “An All-American jihadi terrorist cell …”

Assistant District Attorney: “With enough explosives to take down the Staples Center!”

You can't make this stuff up. (Or, at least, I can't.)

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it below.


September 2, 2010

The Value of Vapidity

From Slate:
Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor. Really. We Mean It.
Economists are making the case politicians are afraid to: Immigration is great for the U.S.
By James Ledbetter

If you pay attention only to politics, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the current debate about immigration in America is limited to how severely it should be restricted—whether we need only to seal the border or actually change the birthright citizenship clause in the Constitution.

But among economic pundits, the discussion is heading in exactly the opposite direction. Pro-immigration arguments are booming, and reached a zenith this week with the publication of a paper by the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank [i.e., Giovanni Peri], arguing among other things that immigrants, despite popular misconception, do not displace American workers. This has led a number [Felix Salmon] of economic bloggers [Kevin Drum] to make the very rational argument that one of the best things America could do now to fix our sagging economy is to encourage more people to come here and work.

According to the econo-blogosphere lately, immigration is a cure-all for America's economic ills. We'll get to the question of whether anyone is listening, but here is a guide to the virtues-of-immigration arguments that have been making the rounds in recent weeks.

Immigrants will solve our housing crisis. ...

Immigrants are needed to replenish the American workforce. ...

Immigrants make the economy better. ...

I'm always getting accused of being obsessed with IQ, but it seems an awful lot of people are obsessed with showing off how smart they are. In general, that would be a good thing, except that our culture has got itself into a culdesac whereby a proof of being "thoughtful" is by how little thought you give to crucial topics such as immigration, and by how mindlessly you sneer at those who actually have thought hard on the subject.

August 8, 2010

Carbon Emissions and Immigration Reduction

From my new VDARE.com column:
Of the millions who claim to be deadly serious about Saving the World from global warming by limiting carbon emissions, how many are truly sincere?

There’s one surefire test: Do they demand reductions in immigration to the U.S.?

Answer: almost none of them do.

A Google search for “carbon emissions” brings up 3,680,000 web pages. (August 8, 2010). Add “immigration reduction” to the search, however, and the hit count falls to 114. [Try it yourself now by clicking here.]

The causes of global warning are disputed, but let’s assume for the sake of analysis that human output of “greenhouse gases” does indeed cause global warming. It ought to be close to self-evident that immigration to America increases this country’s—and the world’s—output of those gases.

The logic is very simple: If immigrants from poor countries successfully assimilate to American norms of earning and consuming, they, and their descendants, will emit vastly more carbon than if they had stayed home.

According to the UN’s International Energy Agency, residents of America in 2007 put out an average of 19.1 tons of carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas, by fossil fuel combustion—e.g., by driving around, by being warm in winter and cool in summer, and by watching TV.

In contrast, the residents of, say, Mexico each emit 4.1 tons per year. In other words, the typical inhabitant of America churns out 4.6 times as much carbon dioxide as the typical inhabitant of Mexico.

So, if an average Mexican immigrates to the U.S. and fully assimilates to average American patterns of earning and spending, he will emit 4.6 times as much carbon dioxide as if he stayed home in his own country. (Even more important are the impact of his descendants, which we’ll get to below).

This table gives a sampling of the carbon emissions per capita of immigrant importing and exporting countries.
 

... So let’s examine some logical objections to my argument for the benefit of global warming worriers.

Consider a very simplified model in which an immigrant from Mexico will either succeed or fail at assimilating to American norms on two dimensions: Earning and Consuming.
 
Let’s start with the upper left hand corner of this quadrant: American Dream. In this scenario, the typical Mexican who immigrates to the U.S. achieves the American Dream. He succeeds at consuming like an American (e.g., big SUV, big air-conditioned house in the suburbs, big TV, and so forth) and also (this is important) earning like an American. Therefore, his contribution to global greenhouse gas emission will be vastly greater than if he stayed home in Mexico. Even more importantly, so will his descendants’ carbon emissions. ...

In the lower left corner is the unspoken liberal assumption about the impact of Mexican immigration: Ecotopia. This logical possibility is the favorite of the sort of white liberals who have farm simulators on their iPhones. Of course, it is the least logical or possible.

They assume Mexican immigrants rapidly achieve American levels of income to pay the taxes for all the social programs that progressives favor. Yet, for unexplained reasons, the Mexican immigrants and their progeny choose to live like Portland trustfunders whose hobby is a “sustainable” lifestyle based on driving their vegetable oil-powered Toyota Prius hybrid to Whole Foods for heirloom tomatoes.

The Ecotopia assumption is the only logical way to square enthusiasm about immigration with alarmism about greenhouse gases.

Of course, ...

Read the whole thing there (including data on the burning question of how many Priuses do Mexicans buy) and comment upon it here.

Gallup: "Young, Less Educated Yearn to Migrate to the U.S"

From an April 30, 2010 posting on Gallup.com:
Young, Less Educated Yearn to Migrate to the U.S.
Canada more attractive to older, more educated adults
 
by Neli Esipova, Julie Ray, and Rajesh Srinivasan
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Fifteen countries attract about 500 million of the roughly 700 million adults worldwide who say they would like to relocate permanently to another country if they could. Gallup finds the U.S. is clearly the No. 1 desired destination among these potential migrants, with more than 165 million saying they would like to move there, and neighboring Canada is a distant second with 45 million.

Gallup's findings on adults' desire to move to other countries are based on interviews with 347,713 adults across multiple surveys in 148 countries between 2007 and 2009. The 148 countries represent more than 95% of the world's adult population.

Together, the number of potential migrants who would like to move to the United States, which represents 24% of adults who would like to move overall, and Canada, which represents 7%, make Northern America the most desired region to move to in the world. But individually, both countries appeal to people from different parts of the world. Gallup finds the U.S. appeals more to the youngest and least educated adults, while those who choose Canada are on average slightly older and more educated.

These differences may partly reflect the emphasis each country's immigration policy places on different categories of migrants.

August 1, 2010

The Jobs of the Future

The Financial Times has a nearly-4000 word article on "The Crisis of the American Middle Class" that manages never to mention any words beginning with the letters "immigra." The closest reference is:
Much as they disagree on what has caused the Great Stagnation, economists also differ on the remedies. Most agree that better education improves people’s earnings potential, even if it does not solve the underlying problem. Others point out that not everybody can be a bond trader, a software entrepreneur or a Harvard professor.

Many of the jobs of the future will be in “inter-personal” roles that cannot be easily replaced by computers or ­foreigners – janitors, beauty technicians, home carers and landscape gardeners, for whom college is often superfluous."

Huh? "Janitors, beauty technicians, home carers and landscape gardeners" "cannot be easily replaced by ... foreigners." 

Thank God we don't have to worry about that happening in the future in America. Thank God America leads the world in jobs for economists.

What country is this article about again?

July 26, 2010

"Jim Webb, the GOP, and The Sammy Sosa Solution"

An excerpt from my new VDARE.com column on "Jim Webb, the GOP, and The Sammy Sosa Solution:"
These rather striking photos of retired baseball slugger Sammy Sosa Before and After! he began using one of those lotions so popular in the Third World for bleaching skin got me to thinking (as usual) about the future of American politics

What's particularly ironic about these amusing Sosa pictures is this: I have been involved in dozens of discussions where some naive newcomer has asked, reasonably enough, "On what grounds do Hispanics get racial preferences? Are they a race?" Then, somebody familiar with the federal categories of legally protected groups will explain that, officially, Hispanics can be any race, such as, say, black. And the most frequently cited example of a black Hispanic has been, in my experience ... Sammy Sosa.

Yet, nobody asked Sammy if he wanted to be the face of black Hispanicity. Apparently, the Dominican ballplayer wasn't too happy about it. (Hey, powerful chemicals worked for Sammy before in challenging Mark McGwire for the home run record. So why not try some new ones?)

Weird and painful as it looks, this kind of thing happens all the time all over the world, although it’s usually women expensively bleaching their skin.

Watching foreign TV commercials can be eye opening. In India, leading cosmetic products have names like Fair and Lovely (you definitely must watch this one minute Indian TV commercial) and Fair and Handsome. In Thailand, Vaseline Healthy White Body is popular. ...

Why this near universal prejudice in favor of fairness among non-Europeans?

Fairer people tend to be of higher social rank in India, Mexico, the Philippines, the Middle East, and so forth. ...

Some of it has to do with indoor jobs typically being of higher prestige. And of course there are deeper roots, such as the prestige associated with whites in Latin America and India by their conquests. It’s not just the British influence on India. The Indian caste system, with its color prejudices, reflects, in part, the prehistoric conquest of South Asia by northerners. In general, over the course of human history, northerners have conquered southerners more often than vice-versa.

Yet why is fairness associated with higher social class even in never-colonized countries such as Japan? As anthropologist Peter Frost has documented, the "fair sex" actually is about ten percent fairer on average than their own brothers. Thus, lighter skin registers subconsciously as a slightly feminine trait. (That’s why Sluggin’ Sammy looks so creepy above. It's the increased contrast between cheeks and lips.)

Sexual selection then comes into play. Men of higher class are more able to choose wives they view as attractive. And thus the children of higher-class men and fairer women tend to be lighter-skinned than average. ...

There are of course endless individual exceptions to this pattern. But this general tendency appears to be part of the deep structure of human nature.

Let’s keep that in mind as we review the American conventional wisdom about the future of politics:

Unless the Republican Party leadership becomes even more obsessive than it already is about promoting amnesty and racial preferences, the GOP is doomed by immigration-driven diversity! (In fact, the GOP is probably doomed anyway no matter how many Bushes and McCains it runs for President, unless it purges, or at least silences, all its voters who don’t agree with its elites.)

After all, the GOP is the Party of White People. And, as countless American TV commercials inform us, what could be more shameful than being white? Voting is aspirational, and who would ever aspire to associate themselves with anybody as uncool as white people? Surely, nobody in Latin America, Asia, or Africa would ever aspire to be considered whiter! It’s a tribute to the nobility of spirit of immigrants that they deign to immigrate to a country built by whites at all!


However, when seen from a global perspective, this assumption that the Republican Party is doomed because immigrants view it as The White Party in an increasingly nonwhite America seems … parochial.

The real question in American politics might turn out to be: Can the Democrats of the Post-Obama Era thrive as The Black Party in an increasingly non-black America?

Of course, that real question won’t be asked much as long as the government continues to offer immigrants and their descendants money and prizes for identifying as non-white.

Amazingly, this policy was to a significant extent invented by appeasement-minded Republicans (see below).  In effect, Republicans have been practicing a long-term strategy that is the opposite of Divide and Conquer—namely, Unify and Surrender.

As a result, the immigrant ethnicities reason that, "Sure, everybody know it better to be light-skinned. But in this crazy country, my friend, the government pay you to tell them you aren't white!"

And, under the current system, the primary job of Hispanic and Asian leaders has become to defend and extend their groups' racial/ethnic privileges (including immigration policies that de facto favors them).

Not surprisingly, these leaders overwhelmingly identify with the Democrats, who are always going to be more enthusiastic than the Republicans about defending and extending affirmative action, disparate impact law and swamping the historic American nation with non-traditional immigrants

Case in point: while the percentage of Latinos who vote Democratic fluctuates over time, politically ambitious Latinos (with the exception of Cubans) are almost unanimously Democratic. A National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials study found that 91 percent of Latino officeholders who had been elected in partisan races were Democrats.

Read the whole thing to find out what we can do about it (along with your weekly allotment of Bush-bashing).
  

July 17, 2010

Solid gold anchor babies

Washington Post reporter Keith B. Richburg, author of Out of Africa: A Black Man Confronts Africa, writes:
For many pregnant Chinese, a U.S. passport remains a powerful lure

SHANGHAI -- What can $1,475 buy you in modern China? Not a Tiffany diamond or a mini-sedan, say Robert Zhou and Daisy Chao. But for that price, they guarantee you something more lasting, with unquestioned future benefits: an American passport and U.S. citizenship for your new baby.

USA! USA! USA!

You can tell how great something is by the number of people stuffed within its boundaries, not by how many people are lined up waiting to get in (don't even think about that). That's why Arizona State is the most prestigious university in the country: because it has 67,082 students. That makes Arizona St. much more prestigious than piddling little colleges like Harvard and Caltech. (Of course, Arizona St. has a long way to go to catch up in prestige with the Allama Iqbal Open University in Islamabad, Pakistan, enrollment three million.)

Conversely, the Augusta National Golf Club made Bill Gates wait for years to become a member despite Warren Buffett sponsoring him, so who'd want to belong to Augusta? There's probably some golf club in Calcutta that has three million members and they each get one teetime per lifetime (but you get an additional teetime per reincarnation, so you've got that going for you, which is nice), and thus it would be much better to belong to Calcutta Municipal than empty old Augusta National.
Zhou and Chao, a husband and wife from Taiwan who now live in Shanghai, run one of China's oldest and most successful consultancies helping well-heeled expectant Chinese mothers travel to the United States to give birth.

The couple's service, outlined in a PowerPoint presentation, includes connecting the expectant mothers with one of three Chinese-owned "baby care centers" in California. For the $1,475 basic fee, Zhou and Chao will arrange for a three-month stay in a center -- two months before the birth and a month after. A room with cable TV and a wireless Internet connection, plus three meals a day, starts at an additional $35 a day. The doctors and staff all speak Chinese. There are shopping and sightseeing trips.

The mothers must pay their own airfare and are responsible for getting a U.S. visa, although Zhou and Chao will help them fill out the application form.

At a time when China is prospering and the common perception of America here is of an empire in economic decline, the proliferation of U.S. baby services shows that for many Chinese, a U.S. passport nevertheless remains a powerful lure. The United States is widely seen as more of a meritocracy than China, where getting into a good university or landing a high-paying job often depends on personal connections.

"They believe that with U.S. citizenship, their children can have a more fair competitive environment," Zhou said.

Such as qualifying for minority set-asides on U.S. government contracts and for low-interest SBA minority development loans. What could be more fair and competitive than that?
Zhou and Chao insist that everything they do is legal, noting that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed in 1868, says anyone born on U.S. soil has the right to citizenship.

"We don't encourage moms to break the law -- just to take advantage of it," Zhou said. "It's like jaywalking. The policeman might fine you, but it doesn't break the law." ...

U.S. officials confirm it is not a crime to travel to the United States to give birth so that the child can have U.S. citizenship. "You don't deny someone because you know they're going to the U.S. to have children," said a U.S. Embassy spokesman in Beijing, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing embassy rules.

The spokesman, who said expectant mothers typically claim they are going to the United States as tourists, compared the baby consultancies to services that help foreign students apply for American universities: "If you have the money, they give you the service. They tell you how to prepare your dossier."

"I'm sure people in Congress would call it a loophole," the spokesman said.

Yes, because people in Congress are constantly sounding off about legal immigration abuses. I typed into Google:
"legal immigration abuses" Congress

and got back:
Your search - "legal immigration abuses" Congress - did not match any documents.

Richburg continues:
Many anti-immigration activists in the United States agree. Some argue that the 14th Amendment -- aimed at guaranteeing citizenship rights to freed black slaves -- was never meant to provide an instant passport to the children of people who are in the country illegally or who travel there expressly to gain U.S. citizenship for their child.

Richburg is an African-American who seems to think the 14th Amendment was passed to provide justice for his ancestors, not perks for random foreigners.
The Department of Homeland Security and the State Department have no specific regulations regarding pregnant foreign visitors, which critics see as an issue....
Zhou, a former marketing director, and Chao, a former television producer in Taiwan, said they have helped between 500 and 600 mothers give birth to American babies in the five years they have been in business. They started with themselves, when Chao went to the United States to give birth to their daughter Fiona, now 4. 
Now, they said, their clients include Chinese doctors, lawyers, business leaders, government officials, well-known media personalities -- most of whom do not want media attention and, Zhao said, would not agree to be interviewed. 
About 40 percent of their clients come from Shanghai, 30 percent from Beijing and the rest from Guangzhou and elsewhere, including Taiwan. Some, the couple said, were giving birth to their second child to skirt China's one-child policy. Most say they do not intend to live in the United States themselves.

In other words, they do not intend to pay taxes in the United States themselves, if they can avoid it.
And all are affluent, Zhou and Chao said. Unlike the poor illegal immigrants from Central America who try to cross the border to have their babies in America, Zhou said, these Chinese parents fly in on first-class seats.

"They also do some shopping," he said, "So they are contributing to the economy."

The reasons they want American passports for their babies are varied, but most come down to two key factors -- education and setting.

"The mainland [China] moms believe the U.S. has better educational resources," Zhou said. This year, 10 million students are battling for 6.6 million spots at Chinese universities and the chance for a better life. "The competition is too fierce on the mainland," Zhou said.

So, the education is okay in China, it's the competition that's too much (i.e., a whole bunch of Chinese kids).
In their pitch to prospective clients, Zhou and Chao point out that as a U.S. citizen, a child has access to free public education from primary school through high school and that a full education in the United States can be much cheaper than at the top Chinese private schools and universities. ...

Chuo, 35, said her brother and sister both studied in the United States and "my parents paid a huge amount of money for their education" because they were foreign students. Giving her newborn American citizenship, she said, would "provide one more choice for our baby."

And one less choice for an American kid.

Another reason is to get chain migration going uphill, get the kid to sponsor the parents, and the parents sponsor the grandparents, who can be stashed into old people's public housing. I used to live next to an old folks high-rise public housing project in Chicago, which was mostly occupied by non-English speaking Asians. Considering the type-of-neighbor alternatives in Chicago public housing, it wasn't so bad, but I could never see why American taxpayers ought to pay for the lodging and medical care of old people who had never paid taxes to America.
Equally important was the setting. "It's spacious and with no pollution," Christina Chuo said. "We thought it would put us in a good mood looking at the nice scenery, the hills and the water."

No kidding. Also, California has nice weather.
Chuo said she and her husband like living in Taiwan and are not interested in migrating to America, except, perhaps, when they retire. She said they got their visas by saying their purpose was tourism. But she worries it will not be so easy for others.

"I am afraid in the future, with more people going to U.S., it will be harder to get a visa," Chuo said.

I wouldn't worry about it.

July 7, 2010

Joel Stein's Own Private Jesse Jackson

Joel Stein is in trouble with Indians (Asian) for his Time column "My Own Private India" about how he regrets the demographic changes in his Edison, New Jersey hometown since he grew up:
TIME responds: We sincerely regret that any of our readers were upset by Joel Stein’s recent humor column “My Own Private India.” It was in no way intended to cause offense. 
 
Joel Stein responds: I truly feel stomach-sick that I hurt so many people. I was trying to explain how, as someone who believes that immigration has enriched American life and my hometown in particular, I was shocked that I could feel a tiny bit uncomfortable with my changing town when I went to visit it. If we could understand that reaction, we’d be better equipped to debate people on the other side of the immigration issue.

The amusing thing is that Stein already wrote a 2006 column for the LA Times apologizing in advance to Jesse Jackson:
The reverend turns down a preemptive 'I'm sorry' and denies that he's the arbiter of apologies
Joel Stein
December 5, 2006
EVENTUALLY, I'M going to write something horribly offensive. And when I do, it might be several tense hours before I can get Jesse Jackson on the phone in order to apologize to him. So I figured I'd call him now and pre-apologize.

In addition to Michael Richards telling Jackson that he was sorry for his racist tirade at the Laugh Factory, Jackson has accepted apologies from Mexican President Vicente Fox (for saying Mexican immigrants will do jobs that "not even blacks want to do"), the producers of "Barbershop" (for a Rosa Parks joke in the film) and himself (for calling New York "Hymietown").

Needless to say, the new Seinfeld DVD is selling swiftly, Fox served his full term, "Barbershop" had a sequel and New York is still chock full of Jews. A Jackson pardon never fails.

So after putting in a request that I thought Jackson's staff wouldn't take seriously, I was startled when my phone rang two hours later and the reverend was on the other end. I would be absolved, I thought, in two or three minutes.

I was very wrong. When I explained my request, it became clear that this hypothetical offensive thing I might do someday was instead happening right now.

"Why should you be offensive?" Jackson asked, annoyed. "I don't know why you would do that."

Luckily, as I was stammering a response, Jackson smoothly segued into reciting his own agenda. I was not surprised to hear him tell me about America's lack of concern about Katrina victims, the media ignoring Trent Lott's return to party leadership and the dearth of black actors on television ("all day, all night, all white"). I was, however, surprised that it took him nearly four minutes before he mentioned that he worked with Martin Luther King Jr.

A smarter man would have thanked Jackson for his time and gotten off the phone. But as I predicted in the very premise of this project, I am not a smarter man. I asked again if he could slip me an indulgence.

"I don't know why you would insist on continuing to bring this up," he said. Oddly, I was thinking the exact same thing.

I explained that I was interested in finding out how a single person can play judge for damage done to an entire group, and why society needs a figurehead to represent its pain. Then I hoped and prayed that sounded smart.

Jackson said that when Richards called him, "I made it clear that I am not the arbiter of apologies." In fact, he said, "I'm more likely to be called upon to get someone out of a foreign jail than to accept an apology." Between the foreign arrests and the apologies for racist slurs, being a civil rights leader seems a lot like being a parent to rich children.

Then Jackson pointed out that listening to confessions is pretty common for someone in his line of work. "When people are distressed, when people are injured, when people need their cases argued, they tend to call a minister," he explained. "People tend to call someone to give them a listening ear. That's all. At the end of the day, it's about providing a service: to alleviate misery."

My future misery, however, was currently unalleviable. "It would be inappropriate," he finally told me. I am the first person in history to have an apology turned down by Jesse Jackson.

But as ridiculous as it seems to have people apologize to Jackson for things they didn't do to him, and for him to demand apologies for events he wasn't involved in (Outkast for dressing in Native American outfits; the U.S. for crashing a jet in China) — the theatrics do serve a purpose.

Confrontation is a necessary part of contrition. Apologizing in a press release to anyone offended makes sense in theory, but it has no stakes. We need to see human emotions expressed by real humans; our catharsis has to come from leaders playing our parts on stage.

And though Jay Leno, Barbara Walters and Dr. Phil may try, Jackson performs that role best. I know that after I finally got off the phone, my sweaty palms and aching stomach felt like they were taught a moral lesson.

I just hope that people don't find this column so offensive that I'll have to really apologize. Because I'm not sure Jackson would take my call after this. Oh, who am I kidding? Of course he will. 

Meanwhile, the second most-read article on LATimes.com last evening was 
Jewish organizations protest UC president's handling of reports of anti-Semitism
The groups assert that the university's reaction has been too weak. University chief Mark G. Yudof says the groups may be basing their responses on an unreliable sampling of student opinion.
By Larry Gordon, Los Angeles Times
July 7, 2010
The president of the University of California and leaders of a dozen prominent American Jewish organizations are in an unusual public dispute about the extent of anti-Semitism on UC campuses and the university's response to it.

In a letter to UC President Mark G. Yudof, such groups as the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the national governing bodies of Conservative and Orthodox Judaism have criticized the university's reaction to anti-Semitic acts on UC campuses as too weak. The letter, sent June 28, cited what it said were increasing incidents of swastika graffiti and anti-Israel speakers who use anti-Semitic language, and alleged that many Jewish UC students feel "an environment of harassment and intimidation." ...

Yudof, who is Jewish and whose wife, Judy, is the former lay president of Conservative Judaism in North America, also wrote that the Jewish groups may have based their concerns on an unreliable sampling of student opinion. Most Jewish UC students' "perspectives are more mixed than you suggest," he wrote.

The UC president said he was disappointed that the letter writers seemed to have dismissed the new UC Advisory Council on Campus Climate, Culture and Inclusion as destined to fail, and he urged them to support its work.

Considering that UC Campuses are typically located in places like La Jolla, Irvine, Westwood, Santa Cruz, and Berkeley, I'd say the the UC "Campus Climate" is pretty dog-gone nice: typically 70s and sunny.

Oh, wait, that's not what the word "climate" means anymore on campus. (Except when it's about "climate change.")
The panel, which met for the first time last week, was created after several controversial incidents over the last school year. Those included an off-campus "Compton Cookout" party by UC San Diego students that mocked Black History Month, and the spray-painting and carving of swastikas at several locations on the UC Davis campus, including the dorm room door of a Jewish student.

Some Jewish leaders have complained that UC administrators seemed to be more upset by the UC San Diego incident than the swastikas. UC officials have denied this.

Okay, so that's what this is all about: competitive aggrievement. The Jewish organizations are mad that the black organizations got more mileage out of their recent UC San Diego hate hoax brouhaha. Well, of course.

Still, the reigning heavyweight title contenders of competitive aggrievement, the blacks and the Jews, should be aware that there's a new Indian kid in town who is ready to rumble.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer