April 11, 2006

NBA height

A reader who is a 6'-6" former NBA player writes in response to my posting that the average height of pro basketball players hasn't gone up in 20 years:

Some examples of difficulty in thinking about this: 1) The countries where people are growing tend to be countries where they are short. (There is one Mexican in the NBA; and he isn't from Oaxaca where all the really short people seem to be. I think there are two Chinese, a very tall guy, Yao Ming, and a short one who looks like a mixture, named Lieu.)

2) I have read that the tallest people are Nordic (including Scotland), but they aren't interested in basketball.

As I've written, "Europeans tend to grow tallest where the climate is cold but not frigid. Writing in 1965 before the Dutch grew quite so tall, the prominent physical anthropologist Carlton Coon noted, "In mean stature, we find the tallest people in Scotland, Iceland, Scandinavia, the eastern Baltic region, and the Balkans, particularly Montenegro and Albania. In general, the crest of tallest stature runs on the cold side of the winter frost line." The two places where height and basketball enthusiasm come together are the Baltic and the Balkans, which is why Lithuania, Serbia, and Croatia have done so well in the Olympics, despite their small populations.

3) The NBA is super-specialized. On the inside we have "the bigs", two of 'em. They had better be close to 7" or the team is doomed. At least one substitute who is also huge is needed. The remaining three players are where the 6-6 to 6-9 players reside (although a point guard can be almost any height if he has the skills). For a championship team, all these players must be able to shoot. Because inaccuracies propagate directly with the length of arms and hands, as do response times to stimuli, it is very unusual for a very tall man to be a good shooter (not talking about slam-dunk contests here!).

I recall the impact of Bob McAdoo in 1973-1974, a very tall man (although I see now that they've reduced his listed height to 6'-9" from the 6'-11' he was advertised to be back then) and outstanding leaper, who averaged 15.1 rebounds per game, yet who was a deadly outside shooter. His shooting percentage was a gaudy .547 while scoring 30.6 per game (and that was without the 3-point line back then). It's hard for somebody to average 30 points per game while shooting much over .500 because of the large number of shots required to score that much. Diminishing marginal returns sets in. For example, none of the top 10 scorers in the NBA this season is shooting .500 from the field. But even McAdoo couldn't stay that much of an anomaly for long, and his career declined under the pressure of carrying every club he was on, until he found a role as a valued substitute on the great Laker teams of the 1980s.

And 4) Although it is a huge advantage, height is somewhat counter-balanced by quickness and body-control. So we may be on a plateau here. We've leveled out at an average of 6-6 to 6-8. I don't think you can improve the speed of the electro-chemistry by which impulses are transmitted around inside the human body or the way errors are propagated by extra length. Ergo, you can't get rid of the penalty for being tall.

That sounds likely to me. I was an extremely average schoolboy athlete. My impression is that my outsized height (I'm 6'-4") meant that I looked gawkier than average when playing sports, but tended to be a little more effective than I looked. For example, I looked lousy playing tennis, but won more than you'd think judging by my form because of my long reach. Overall, in regular life, I'd say the best height for a man is a little over 6 feet, like 6'-1.5"President Reagan. He was a mediocre athlete, but recall how much better he moved than the first President Bush, who at 6'-3" looked gawky, even though he was a much better athlete.

One other thing -- The NBA has expanded from 23 teams to 30 teams over the last 20 years, which, all else being equal, would reduce average heights, but that's not an extreme degree of expansion and the growth in the game around the world should have made up for that.


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

What Arnold Schwarzenegger didn't understand

From my upcoming American Conservative [subscribe here] article debunking the widespread myths about the politics of California (such as that Pete Wilson's support for Proposition 187 cost the GOP the state):

After getting off to a strong start, including repealing the illegal alien drivers license bill as promised, Gov. Schwarzenegger stumbled badly in 2005 by not realizing that his slate of initiatives to undermine the power of the public employees unions were perceived by his natural base, the white lower middle class, as an assault on their survival in California's outlandishly expensive housing market. Firemen, cops, nurses, and teachers, finding themselves squeezed between the Silicon Valley venture capitalists and Hollywood entertainment lawyers above them and the masses of illegal immigrants below them, and in direct competition for homes with extended families of Asian legal immigrants who often muster three or four paychecks per household, rallied support from their neighbors, who saw their union perks not as sinecures, but as life preservers.

This is the kind of thing that Mayor Daley of Chicago understands in his bones, but Schwarzenegger just didn't get.


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

La Griffe du Lion is back

The Zorro of statisticians returns with an essay on

POLITICS, IMPRISONMENT AND RACE

To the civil rights activist few things are more vexing than the profound racial disparities in our prison system. An adult black man, for example, is seven times more likely than a white to be housed behind bars. Paradoxically, the largest disparities are found in political domains controlled by liberals -- the very leaders in the struggle for racial justice. By revealing how criminal behavior is distributed among the races, Prodigy resolves this paradox showing it to be an unintended consequence of liberal benevolence and goodwill.

We all know that African Americans are imprisoned disproportionately to their numbers in the general population. According to the last decennial census a black man was 7.4 times more likely to be found behind bars than his white counterpart. In the language I'll use today, we would say that the disparity or incarceration ratio was 7.4. State-by-state, the figures varied widely from 3.1 to 29.3. But contrary to expectation, the highest disparity ratios turned up mostly in politically progressive states, while the smallest ratios were mostly found in conservative states. Though the numbers change a bit from year to year, this racial-political pattern of imprisonment endures. One of the questions I will answer today is, why?...

Social critic Steve Sailer observed in 2001 that conservative states tend to incarcerate whites at high per capita rates. Figure 1 confirms Sailer's observation. It shows, for adult men, the relationship between a state's white incarceration rate and its average LQ. The relationship is strong and inverse (R = -0.56).

[More]

One question that I don't know the answer to is whether conservative states tend to imprison more whites because they are more conservative, or they are more conservative because they have more hell-raising white people who need more locking up for society to function. La Griffe shows that the simple assumption that liberal states have higher thresholds of criminal behavior before locking people up goes a long way to explaining the imprisonment patterns that we see. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if, say, liberal Connecticut really does have better behaved white people than conservative Oklahoma. (Also, the imprisonment data by state could be adjusted for the age of the population -- states with lots of old white people like Pennsylvania and North Dakota are going to naturally have fewer people imprisoned than states with younger folks.)


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

NBA players not getting taller

Basketball players used to get taller all the time, but not anymore. The average height of an NBA player at the beginning of the 2005-2006 season was 6'-7.18", down from 6'-7.36" 20 years before. For each of the last 20 years, players have averaged more than 6'-7" and less than 6'-8". (Average weight, however, has gone up from 214.4 to 223.1 pounds, with the largest increase taking place in the early 1990s.) This stability in height is rather surprising, however, considering how much more globalized is the pool of athletes from which the NBA is now drawn. Although Americans aren't getting much taller, lots of foreign populations are.

Perhaps the NBA has gotten more rigorous about measuring athletes' heights (e.g., Charles Barkley, drafted in 1984, was usually listed at 6'-6" but was really about 6'-4"). Or perhaps there has been a trend toward more agile and coordinated -- and thus, all else being equal, shorter -- players that has balanced out the trend toward taller players that drawing from a larger pool would normally induce.

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

"Lucky Number Slevin"

A clever but hideously violent gangster movie with an impressive supporting cast of Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman (playing a bad guy!), Ben Kingsley, and Stanley Tucci. Josh Hartnett and Lucy Liu are better than you'd expect as the leads, too.

Freeman is "The Boss," the leader of a black mob. For 20 years he has been at war with his former partner Kingsley, "The Rabbi," the leader of a Hassidic mob. They live in penthouses across the street from each other behind three inches of bulletproof glass, and try to dream up ways to kill each other. Bruce Willis is the arch-hitman they both hire to get the other. It's a lot like the old "Spy vs. Spy" cartoon in Mad Magazine where the secret agent in the white trenchcoat and the secret agent in the black trenchcoat devise elaborate ways to blow each other up.

Unfortunately, "Lucky Number Slevin," while stylized almost to the point of surrealism, is almost never funny. It reminded me of Wes Anderson's movies like "The Royal Tenenbaums," where he unleashes prodigious amounts of creativity and whimsy but goes out of his way not to be funny. So, the characters aren't amusing and are horrifically unlikable, so the whole picture is distasteful.

By the way, I'm reviewing "Friends with Money," a chick flick "Sideways" with an impressive female case of Jennifer Aniston, Frances McDormand, Catherine Keener, and Joan Cusack in the next American Conservative.


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

The Wind from the South

The NYT reports:

Ollanta Humala, a former military officer and fierce nationalist, received the most votes in the presidential election on Sunday, edging out a pro-globalization candidate, a former president and 17 other candidates by pledging to guide Peru away from Washington-backed market reforms. By Sunday night, unofficial results showed that Mr. Humala, 43, was far from securing the majority needed to win the vote outright and avoid a runoff...

His father founded an ultranationalist movement, etnocacerismo, that celebrates the superiority of the Indian race over those Peruvians descended from the Spanish. His mother has called for gays to be shot and a brother, Antauro, led a rebellion against the government last year.

Ollanta Humala has distanced himself from his family and tried to stress his message of a new economic direction for Peru. He has provided little detail, saying his plans are similar to those in countries like Venezuela, Bolivia and Argentina, where leftists have won office.


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

The fence-couldn't-work meme

One of the strangest bits of conventional wisdom in the media is that no fence along the Mexican border could possibly work. These pronouncements are often made by people who have paid a lot of extra money to live in gated communities. Within America, there are countless miles of high-security fences and walls around prisons, nuclear power plants, armories, warehouses, factories, target ranges, airports and the like. All in all, it works quite well. This isn't nanotechnology. It's something we know how to do.

Similarly, the Israelis have found their fences around the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to be quite effective at keeping out suicide bombers, who are, by definition, highly motivated. Here's a diagram of the Israeli fence. The Israeli economy is about 1/200th of ours, but they've succeeded in effectively fencing off a border about 1/10th as long as ours with Mexico.

***


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

April 10, 2006

At the San Fernando Valley pro-amnesty demonstration: Not too impressive ... a couple of thousand people marching south on Van Nuys Blvd. Lots of American flags, but plenty of Mexican flags too, including the biggest flag of all. The most striking thing to me is how short illegal aliens turn out to be on average. I would guess that there wasn't a big turnout of American-born Hispanic adults because the average height was well below the Mexican-American average. I didn't see anybody who wasn't mestizo taking part.

Why, exactly, did they schedule protests by "undocumented workers" on a work day instead of a weekend day?

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

The Duke Lacrosse Goat Rodeo only gets better: KTLA reports:


Lawyers representing members of the Duke University lacrosse team say DNA tests found no link between players and an exotic dancer who says she was raped at a team party.... An attorney representing the team says tests by the state crime lab found no DNA material from any young man on the body of this complaining woman.

Defense attorneys also say time-stamped photographs show the woman was already injured when she arrived at a party.


Also, WRAL reports:


According to a 2002 police report, the woman, currently a 27-year-old student at North Carolina Central University, gave a taxi driver a lap dance at a Durham strip club. Subsequently, according to the report, she stole the man's car and led deputies on a high-speed chase that ended in Wake County.

Apparently, the deputy thought the chase was over when the woman turned down a dead-end road near Brier Creek, but instead she tried to run over him, according to the police report.

Additional information notes that her blood-alcohol level registered at more than twice the legal limit.

In spite of that incident, her attorney at the time, Woody Vann, asserts that what happened then should not cause people to question her character now. He said she is a decent and credible human being.


Isn't it about time that Tom Wolfe's critics publicly admit that the man understands modern American better than any of them could ever dream of?

Once again we see from the media's frenzied hunt for the Great White Defendant (to use Wolfe's term from 1987's Bonfire of the Vanities), so reminiscent of the last umpteen episodes of the Law & Order franchise, that what white Americans really like is sticking it to other white Americans. As Wolfe pointed out in his description of the New York City district attorney's office, white Americans find the transgressions of African Americans and Hispanics to be depressing and boring, in large part because whites see themselves (condescendingly) not as being in status competition with minorities, just with other whites. This is not because white people hate white people as a whole, just other white people they are competing with for status. The Duke lacrosse team, a bunch rich preppie jerks, makes a wonderful target for other whites wishing to parade their moral superiority.


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

I made Liz Smith's gossip column

And I didn't even have to do anything humiliating! The grande dame of gossip quotes from my review of "Thank You for Smoking:"

ARE MOVIES more anti-cigarette these days?

On the contrary, Steve Sailer tells us in "The American Conservative," "Lighting up is presently considered the surest way to give characters that edgy 'indie' attitude. A study in The Lancet found there was as much smoking in movies in 2002 as in Humphrey Bogart's heyday. Despite all its high-minded talk, Hollywood cares more about its coolness quotient than its social conscience."

Google allows any movie reviewer to do rapid factual research on the issues brought up in a movie, but it's remarkable how few bother, even with a film like "Thank you for Smoking," which is aimed directly at the kind of people who watch cable news more than movies. Instead, they typically check off what they liked about the film (of the "The fourth male lead, Tom Sizemore, was really good" ilk) and disliked.

For a good description of what a critic should do, Ben Yagoda's analysis of the failures of the NYT's Stakhanovite book reviewer Michiko Kakutani is worth reading:

It should be clear to anyone who has read Kakutani's reviews that she has an estimable intelligence; she backs this up with what must be many real or virtual all-nighters in which she digests every word ever published by the writer under review. She takes books seriously, a valuable and ever-rarer trait. Furthermore, in my observation, she is more or less right in her judgments most of the time...

But the sour-grapes sniping from spurned authors should not obscure the fact that Kakutani is a profoundly uninteresting critic. Her main weakness is her evaluation fixation. This may seem an odd complaint—the job is called critic, after all—but in fact, whether a work is good or bad is just one of the many things to be said about it, and usually far from the most important or compelling... Kakutani doesn't offer the stylistic flair, the wit, or the insight one gets from Kael and other first-rate critics; for her, the verdict is the only thing. One has the sense of her deciding roughly at Page 2 whether or not a book is worthy; reading the rest of it to gather evidence for her case; spending some quality time with the Thesaurus; and then taking a large blunt hammer and pounding the message home...

As a student at Oxford, the future drama critic Kenneth Tynan got back a paper with this comment: "Keep a strict eye on eulogistic & dyslogistic adjectives—They shd diagnose (not merely blame) & distinguish (not merely praise.)" Tynan's tutor, who happened to be C.S. Lewis, was offering a lesson Kakutani could have benefited from... (Another Lewis quote with relevance to Kakutani: "If we are not careful criticism may become a mere excuse for taking revenge on books whose smell we dislike by erecting our temperamental antipathies into pseudo-moral judgments.")


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

April 9, 2006

Immigration: Don't Worry, Be Sappy

Dennis Dale writes on Untethered:

You’ve probably tired by now of those of us opposed to illegal immigration bemoaning the use of sentimental clichés in its defense; but it is exasperating, especially since the bromides work so well. People never seem to tire of comforting platitudes designed to make them feel morally superior. It is a cozy alternative to complexity and the effort of will necessary to tell someone no. Don’t worry, be sappy.

Steven Pinker told me:

Sophisticated people sneer at feel-good comedies and saccharine romances in which everyone lives happily ever after. But when it comes to science, these same people say, "Give us schmaltz!" They expect the science of human beings to be a source of emotional uplift and inspirational sermonizing.

Isn't it striking how the same liberal intellectuals who bemoan movies with happy endings as unrealistic and who demand careful Portland-style city planning to prevent sprawl and population growth are fervent defenders of our unplanned immigration shambles on the grounds that while it looks out of control, maybe if we all just clap our hands together and wish real hard, we might get a happy ending.


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

Do cops need much IQ?

Do cops need much IQ? In response to my posting about how the U.S. Justice Department is forcing a Virginia police department to water down its entrance exam because blacks and Hispanics are less (surprise!) less likely to pass the math test, a reader writes:

You are probably already aware of it, but I would like to direct you to page 87 of the "The Bell Curve" (hardback version). On that page is a mini-article called "Choosing Police Applicants by IQ", that immensely bolsters the case for highly g-loaded testing in law enforcement (which is obviously the true reason that some tough math should be on the test). Here are a few excerpts: "...

In April 1939, after a decade of economic depression, New York City attracted almost 30,000 men to a written and physical examination for 300 openings in the city's police force...."

"...The written test was similar to the intelligence test then being given to the federal civil service. Positions were offered top down for a composite score on the mental and physical tests, with the mental test more heavily weighted by more than two to one."

"....Times being what they were, the 300 slots were filled by the men who earned the top 350 scores." [Some top scorers didn't ultimately accept the job]

"....They attained far higher than average rank as police officers. Of the entire group, four have been police chiefs, four deputy commissioners, two chiefs of personnel, one a chief inspector, and one became commissioner of the New York Police Department. They suffered far fewer disciplinary penalties, and they contributed significantly to the study of teaching of policing and law enforcement. Many also had successful careers as lawyers, businessmen, and academics after leaving the police department."

That reminds me of one of the hidden forces in American history is this: One of the things that led American liberals to develop unrealistically high expectations about the competence of government is the strong quality of government employees recruited during the Depression, WWII, and early Cold War years. Government jobs were more appealing back then to higher quality workers. In contrast, by the time the Bush Administration took on the vast job of remaking Iraqi society, the quality of the government work force had been depleted by two decades of private sector prosperity.

In contrast, when Congress gave Washington D.C. a huge budget increase to hire 2,000 more cops about 15 years ago, they brought in some really low rent people, and their murder conviction rates plummeted because semi-illiterate cops couldn't fill out the evidentiary paperwork well enough for prosecutors to present a persuasive case.

Anyway, the question of IQ tests for cops raises the issue of whether IQ is negatively correlated with any desirable traits in policemen. We know that most cognitive traits are positively correlated with each other. This is called the g (for "general") factor theory and it appears to be well established. Rhythmic ability is the one major exception (which won't surprise you if you've ever heard high IQ rock stars like Mick Jagger, David Bowie, or Pete Townshend tell anecdotes about drummers they've known -- Townshend's story about Keith Moon's unfortunate experience with the drug that naturalists use in dart guns to tranquilize polar bears is a classic).

For example, the assumption behind the NFL mandating the Wonderlic IQ test for football draft prospects is that IQ is uncorrelated with physical or emotional traits of interest, so, all else being equal, the higher IQ prospect is a little more desirable.

One personality trait that's useful in cops and other security personnel is verbal dexterity to pacify and intimidate potential troublemakers. For example, I interviewed political scientist Frank Salter about his study of nightclub bouncers:

"Bouncers can all fight," Salter noted, "But they rank each other by their talking ability. The lowest ranked fought the most. The highest ranked had the best social skills." Salter found, "The best bouncers and doormen are articulate and quick with comebacks."

In contrast, I'm totally lacking in this ability. My brain is geared for the long haul, not for the short burst. I suspect that IQ correlates positively with this kind of talent at most levels, but at some high level, the correlation might break down with people tending to be too intellectual to make good cops.

One municipality got in the news a few years ago for turning down an applicant for the police force because he had an IQ of something like 128. The city argued that a smart cop would be too likely to use his brainpower to invent complicated frauds.

In my experience, smart people tend to be more honest. For example, my wife has twice dropped a credit card in the Costco parking lot, where the customers are pretty average. Both times she called it in a few hours later, but by then the finders had run up huge bills on it. (The first one spent 1,800, about $300 at each of six grocery stores within the first three hours, probably buying liquor or cigarettes, I would guess.) Tonight, she left her wallet at the art house cinema in Encino. She figured, based on her Costco experience that there was no hope, but I said, "It's a different demographic." So, I called the office at the movie theatre, and it had already been turned in. Similarly, when I was at Rice U., a strong science and engineering school, several times I'd accidentally left my $200 HP calculator sitting out, but it was never stolen.


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

April 8, 2006

War Nerd on analogies of Iraq to the American Civil War:

Gary Brecher writes:

The most common stupid parallel is to the US Civil War, especially the gloom Northern voters felt just before the 1864 election, which is supposed to remind us that there are always quitters who lose their nerve just when victory is about to dawn...

People won't face the fact that guerrilla war is dirty by design. That's the whole idea: making the occupier so sick of you, so disgusted with what you do to him, and what he has to do to you, that he'll just go home. That's what happened to the French in Algeria, the Israelis in South Lebanon, and us in Nam. The idea of guerrilla war is as simple and horrible as eye-gouging: the locals care more about the place than the occupier, so they'll outlast him, out-atrocity him....

You know, that's what keeps shocking me: how these bastards, who are supposedly so American and patriotic, don't think twice about smearing the magnificent soldiers who manned both sides from 1861-1865 with these dirty kid-killing militias in Iraq. It just confirms what I've thought from day one: these people don't care about America, never did.

I grew up studying the Civil War, dreaming of all the great battles, staring at those great paintings of Gettysburg for hours. It was maybe the only war in history where the noble ideal of soldiering actually worked: those men fought like demons on the battlefield but were almost always decently behaved, even polite, with civilians.

Federal commanders who treated locals as the enemy, like Fremont in Missouri, were relieved of their commands, fast. And when Lee marched into Pennsylvania, his soldiers showed the same decency to their fellow Americans, even though the poor bastards were starving. They hit Gettysburg hoping to scrounge up some shoes, but as far as they could, they tried to pay for what they commandeered.


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

UPDATED: America dodges a bullet ... for now

The NYT reports:


Effort to Pass Immigration Bill Collapses in Senate
Blame and Uncertainty as Immigration Deal Fails


To which I can only add:


O Lord our God arise,
Scatter her enemies
And make them fall;
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On Thee our hopes we fix,
God save us all!


Mickey Kaus has been all over the politics of immigration lately. He points to an AP report on why the Senate Democrats let the bill die Friday:


In private as well as public, Reid and Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, who heads the party's campaign effort, said they did not want to expose rank-and-file Democrats to votes that would force them to choose between border security and immigrant rights, only to wind up with legislation that would be eviscerated in future negotiations with the House.

Outside the Senate, several Democratic strategists concluded that the best politics was to allow the bill to die, leaving Republicans with a failed initiative in the Senate at a time when the GOP in the House had passed a measure making illegal immigrants subject to felony charges.


Mickey comments:


In other words, there was a penalty to pay with voters for looking soft, and the Dems chickened out of paying it.That's the advantage to the Dems of killing the deal: Not just that it won them voters who didn't like the House bill. It saved them from voters who didn't like Specter's semi-amnesty bill.


In VDARE.com, Donald A. Collins lists Dr. John Tanton's 24 questions about any guest worker program. Here are some of them, reorganized for greater impact:


1. Will spouses and children be able to accompany the guest worker? Just minor children, or adult ones as well?

5. Will any children born in the United States, automatically become U.S. citizens?

8. Will those who marry a U.S. citizen, or have a child while here, be able to stay beyond the six-year period? Would a man who fathers an "illegitimate" child qualify for citizenship on petition by the child when it reaches legal majority?

3. Will the children be eligible to attend school, and if so, at whose expense? In what language(s) will they be educated?

4. How will health care services - including birth control - be provided and paid for?

2. Will any or all of the above be able to demand government services in the language of their choice, per President Clinton's Executive Order 13166? Will the workers be required to have at least a minimal working knowledge of English?

10. If the job for which the worker came to the United States evaporates or otherwise disappears, will workers be required to take a different job, or returned home? If relocation is required, who will pay the expense? Will they be eligible for unemployment? If so, who pays the premium?

12. Will the workers be able to purchase a car, and obtain a U.S. drivers license? If so, will they be required to purchase automobile insurance, and will this be available to them at a cost they can likely afford?

19. If conditions have not improved in the home country after six years, what are the chances that the guest workers will go home? [More]


VDARE will start a fund-raising drive Sunday night, and after the last two weeks of disinformation from the press and the Senate about immigration, all I can say is:


VDARE: We need it now more than ever.


So, please consider giving. (My special account for VDARE donations is here.)

A reader answers my question about why the press has shown so little interest in exposing the blatant corruption by which employers of illegal immigrants got Congressmen to warn off the INS from enforcing the 1986 employer sanctions:


Because at the same time, the civil rights organizations (ACLU, La Raza, etc) were pounding employers for having the unmitigated gall to actually check up on whether employees were legal or not. It gave employers a great out - "Hey we don't want to waste time, money, and effort on checking up on legality and besides when we do we get sued." MSM understands violating some protected minority's rights even if they don't understand national security etc.


Ah, yes, Congressmen on the take in the cause of political correctness... What could be more praiseworthy? No story here, just move along folks...


A reader writes:


We dodged the bullet this time but I wonder how much it matters. As matters stand now, we have massive invasion levels of illegal immigration and stealing of resources every year. The illegals increase every year and more and more jobs are lost to them.


With the current state of affairs, the cheap labor folks get everything they want. The race panderers get everything they want. The elites with a ‘z’ ending to their names get what they want. Why would they want change?


The only loser in the current cabal is the Democrats who have to illegally register the illegals to vote. However, that doesn’t seem to bother them. In my state (Washington) they just give them driver’s licenses and that is all you need to vote. You do have to check a box that says you are a legal citizen so I am sure that stops most of the illegals.


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

April 7, 2006

The Senate's immigration "compromise" (i.e., surrender)

Well, that was a disaster, wasn't it?

Here's a question: We all know that the enforcement provisions of the 1986 compromise amnesty-plus-employer-sanctions bill were not carried out because employers of illegal aliens would call up their Congressman and tell him that their campaign contribution would not be arriving unless the Congressman leaned on the INS to call off its dogs. In other words, the law of the land was gutted through pure corruption. So, how come the media never showed much interest in investigating this open scandal?

Have you noticed how nobody has a good logical argument against putting up a fence along the Mexican border? All the responses are purely mindless emotion. Now, even Charles Krauthammer has admitted that and is calling for erecting a fence before any amnesty. In "First a Wall -- Then Amnesty," the neocon writes:


Build a barrier. It is simply ridiculous to say it cannot be done. If one fence won't do it, then build a second 100 yards behind it. And then build a road for patrols in between. Put in cameras. Put in sensors. Put out lots of patrols.

Can't be done? Israel's border fence has been extraordinarily successful in keeping out potential infiltrators who are far more determined than mere immigrants. Nor have very many North Koreans crossed into South Korea in the past 50 years.

Of course it will be ugly. So are the concrete barriers to keep truck bombs from driving into the White House. But sometimes necessity trumps aesthetics. And don't tell me that this is our Berlin Wall. When you build a wall to keep people in, that's a prison. When you build a wall to keep people out, that's an expression of sovereignty. The fence around your house is a perfectly legitimate expression of your desire to control who comes into your house to eat, sleep and use the facilities. It imprisons no one.

Of course, no barrier will be foolproof. But it doesn't have to be. It simply has to reduce the river of illegals to a manageable trickle.


Well said, but a little late.


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

More on Jews and immigration

A reader writes:


I wanted to see how diverse Jewish opinion is on the issue of immigration. The General Social Survey asked respondents if immigration improves America. Fifty-two percent of Protestants said yes. The numbers for Catholics and those with no religion were both around 61%. For Jews, it was 90%.


A reader who has a degree from an Israeli university writes:


Re Europe/Arab immigration: It's important to note that the Jewish community in France (and other Western European countries) were opposed for many years to the efforts by right-wing political parties to restrict immigration from the Middle East. Ironically, these Muslim immigrants (and their kids) are responsible for almost all the anti-Jewish incidents in Western Europe.

Similarly, I've always thought that there was something very hypocritical about American-Jewish attitudes on the issue of immigration to Israel which is very restrictive (just recently the Knesset passed a law that doesn't allow Palestinians from the West Bank who married Israeli-Arabs to move to Israel) while celebrating free immigration to America (in general).

Even more intriguing is the way heads of American-Jewish organization collaborated with the Israeli governments in the past to restrict the immigration of JEWS from the old Soviet Union to the U.S. As Sheldon Richman recalls in a pro-immigration study published by Cato called "Let the Soviet Jews Come to America:"


"Until 1989 Soviet Jews, who could leave the Soviet Union only if they had Israeli visas, were free to head for the United States after stopping over in Vienna. They did so under an American refugee program designed to help victims of repression who had no other place to go. Israel hoped to stanch the flow of immigrants elsewhere by providing direct flights from Moscow to Tel Aviv or by having immigrants stop in Bucharest, where they could be better controlled. To limit the Jews' options, Israel persuaded the United States to cap the number of Soviet refugees. The Soviet quota was set at 50,000, about 90 percent of whom have been Jewish. Germany also virtually ended Jewish immigration after being pressured to do so by Israel in early 1991. Before then more than 100 Soviet Jews were registering each day for entry into Germany."


(With the collapse of the Soviet Union all of that became irrelevant).

Similarly, the Israeli government has pressed American-Jewish organization to refrain from creating any outreach programs to help absorb (legal) immigrants from Israel to the United States so as not to "encourage" emigration from Israel (no exact figures are available but probably around 500,000 Israeli immigrants live in the U.S.).


I admire how Israel does what's in its own interest. I wish America would follow Israel's example.


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

The Senate's immigration "compromise" (i.e., surrender)

Well, that was a disaster, wasn't it?

Here's a question: We all know that the enforcement provisions of the 1986 compromise amnesty-plus-employer-sanctions bill were not carried out because employers of illegal aliens would call up their Congressman and tell him that their campaign contribution would not be arriving unless the Congressman leaned on the INS to call off its dogs. In other words, the law of the land was gutted through pure corruption. So, how come the media never showed much interest in investigating this open scandal?

Have you noticed how nobody has a good logical argument against putting up a fence along the Mexican border? All the responses are purely mindless emotion. Now, even Charles Krauthammer has admitted that and is calling for erecting a fence before any amnesty. In "First a Wall -- Then Amnesty," the neocon writes:

Build a barrier. It is simply ridiculous to say it cannot be done. If one fence won't do it, then build a second 100 yards behind it. And then build a road for patrols in between. Put in cameras. Put in sensors. Put out lots of patrols.

Can't be done? Israel's border fence has been extraordinarily successful in keeping out potential infiltrators who are far more determined than mere immigrants. Nor have very many North Koreans crossed into South Korea in the past 50 years.

Of course it will be ugly. So are the concrete barriers to keep truck bombs from driving into the White House. But sometimes necessity trumps aesthetics. And don't tell me that this is our Berlin Wall. When you build a wall to keep people in, that's a prison. When you build a wall to keep people out, that's an expression of sovereignty. The fence around your house is a perfectly legitimate expression of your desire to control who comes into your house to eat, sleep and use the facilities. It imprisons no one.

Of course, no barrier will be foolproof. But it doesn't have to be. It simply has to reduce the river of illegals to a manageable trickle.

Well said, but a little late.


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

April 6, 2006

A feminist admits the importance of human biodiversity!

A reader writes:


I showed to a feminist friend your blog item quoting Christina Hoff Sommers that "Seventy-four percent of the women passengers survived the April 15, 1912 [sinking of the Titanic], while 80 percent of the men perished. Why? Because the men followed the principle 'women and children first.'"

Rather than admitting the prevalence of men who gave up their lives for women she said, "This may have something to do with women having more body fat. Better to float and survive in the cold with."


So, say not the struggle naught availeth. Here's proof that iSteve.com has gotten a feminist to admit that men and women are different!


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