November 27, 2012

Quantifying "He's an SOB but he's our SOB" by state

There is alway a lot of talk in politics about "swing states" and "swing groups" but it usually turns out to be whomever you want more attention paid to: We Massachsetts Afrolesbians are the crucial swing demographic in this year's Presidential election! Or it turns out to mean that some state is close.

Last spring, Nate Silver pointed out that it makes more sense to talk about "elastic states:" i.e., one's where voting isn't set in stone.
Let’s define an elastic state as one that is relatively sensitive or responsive to changes in political conditions, such as a change in the national economic mood. (This is in the same way that, in economics, an elastic good is one for which demand is highly sensitive to changes in prices.) 
For instance, if there are a series of strong jobs reports this summer, and President Obama’s standing improves by five percentage points nationwide, we’d expect his standing to improve by more than 5 points in an elastic state. This works both ways: if we went into another recession and Mr. Obama suffered a five-point decline in his popularity, he’d experience a larger decline in an elastic state. 
An inelastic state, by contrast, is one which is relatively insensitive to these changes. In an inelastic state, a five-percentage-point change in the national environment might only affect Mr. Obama’s numbers by three percentage points instead. 
Elastic states are those which have a lot of swing voters — that is, voters who could plausibly vote for either party’s candidate. A swing voter is very likely to be an independent voter, since registered Republicans and registered Democrats vote with their party at least 90 percent of the time in most presidential elections. The swing voter is also likely to be devoid of other characteristics that are very strong predictors of voting behavior. For instance, he is unlikely to be African-American, which very strongly predicts Democratic voting. And she is unlikely to be a Southern evangelical, which very strongly predicts Republican voting, at least recently. 
The classic example of an elastic state is New Hampshire. It has a very high percentage of independents, and those voters are also independent-minded in practice. Almost all of New Hampshire’s voters are white, but very few of them are evangelicals, characteristics that roughly balance out (Mr. Obama won about 55 percent of the nonevangelical white vote in 2008). 
A good example of an inelastic state is North Carolina. It has quite a few African-American voters, who are almost sure to vote for Mr. Obama. But it also has plenty of rural white Southerners, many of them evangelical conservatives, who almost certainly won’t. To a lesser extent, it also has some highly educated and very liberal white voters in the Research Triangle, who are also quite likely to be Obama voters. That doesn’t leave very many voters left over. North Carolina is a swing state (or at least it was in 2008), because the coalition of Democratic base voters was quite close in size to the coalition of Republican base voters. But it wasn’t a state with a lot of persuadable voters: it’s the kind of place where elections mostly boil down to turnout, and Mr. Obama — with his considerably stronger ground game — was able to edge out a win there in 2008. ...

In theory, the more elastic the better. You'd rather live in a state where citizens will, say, turn against a corrupt politician because he's corrupt rather than hunker down and say he's an SOB but he's our SOB. (Cue Lee Kwan Yew.)

Then Silver estimates elasticity by state, using a complex methodology that I'll take his word for:

No surprise, high elasticity states tend to be white states or white/Asian states, with heavily black places being the worst, with Washington D.C. being by far the most SOB-loyal.

On the other hand, Rhode Island is pretty notoriously crooked at the local level. Interestingly, it's the only majority Catholic state in the country.

It would be interesting to try to apply this type of analysis to state and local politics. Washington D.C., which re-elected Marion Barry mayor after he got out of jail, would still be pretty SOB-loyal even compared to other cities.

What about for groups? Which voting demographics are most elastic?

Tech question

I want to build a forecasting spreadsheet that I can embed in a website (such as here, Taki's, or VDARE) so that readers can input their own assumptions and get their own forecasts. I know how to build the spreadsheet, but I don't know how to make it interactive over the web. Any suggestions?

Look what raccoons did to this cardboard box full of food I left out in the yard

Oh, wait, sorry, this is the new $185 million Perot Museum in Dallas designed by award-winning genius Thom Mayne. It only looks like it was slashed up by angry raccoons.

However, the Perot Museum is cheaper than the Giant Japanese Robot from Outer Space high school in L.A., so it's got that going for it, which is nice.

Mayne's big breakthrough was the Ministry of Love in downtown L.A., a.k.a. the Death Star, a.k.a. the Caltrans Building

Seriously, I've walked around Mayne's Caltrans Building for 15 minutes, and it simply radiates hostility toward any humans unlucky enough to have to deal with it. For example, on the ground floor, Mayne designed a large outdoor staircase that twists up and around out of sight and then ... dead ends. It's a trick! Ha-ha, burn on you, you pathetic sap who got lured in.

I had a chance once to visit Stalin's Lubyanka Prison in Moscow, which was at the heart of the Great Terror. I passed on it in revulsion. But, Caltrans would be a highly appropriate setting for the Black Mariahs to unload.

But, here's the thing. Big money (Caltrans, Ross Perot or one of his kids) loves Mayne. He's edgy! So, eventually, we will too. Over time, we will get the message: this is what expensive good taste looks like. Get with the program.

Ray Sawhill points out that Thom Mayne has inflicted this upon his pleasant, tree-lined, midrise Greenwich Village for Cooper Union, the small, very rich engineering and architecture college:
Look at the two traditional (1890s?) buildings beyond this thing.

Let me ask a question about trends: when I visited a bunch of colleges a half decade ago, it seemed to me that most of the new buildings (and there were a lot of new buildings) were not unattractive. Mostly, rather than attention-hogging monstrosities, they looked as if the architects had been given firm instructions: "Make it look like the 1920s buildings on campus, just with bigger windows." Was my sample skewed or had there been an unexpected outbreak of good taste?

The Way of the World

Here's an article about a highly profitable "expert network" company that gets paid to put hedge funds into contact with individuals with inside information, such as doctors overseeing clinical trials of new drugs. The article is cautious, but a commenter explains:
RBSF San Fancisco, CA 
Nobody pays $100,000 at $1,000 [per hour] just to chat with an expert about information that's already public. Of course, they're fishing for insider information, and finding it--the $100,000 paid by SAC resulted in a $250 million profit, or 2,500 times its investment. Gerson's revenues are $300 million per year--it has been paid over a billion dollars in the last five years, and there are many other firms like this. At a multiple of 2,500 this would amount to trillions of dollars of profit by insider trading, which is money stolen from ordinary investors.  
Hedge funds's performance this year is trailing S&P 500, after trouncing it every year for the past 20 years. Everyone is wondering at the deep reason behind this--the answer is likely much simpler. The titans running hedge funds are not smarter than anyone else; but this year they've been scared to act on insider information following the well publicized Gupta and Rajratnam convictions. 

Did the GOP's Asian vote really drop 9 points?

I've been reading a lot of learned explanations of why Asian support for the GOP suddenly collapsed between the 2008 Edison exit poll (35%) and the 2012 Edison exit poll (26%), such as Richard Posner's, Charles Murray's, and Razib's

But, how sure are we that this drop-off really, fully happened? For example, if you haven an explanation for why the Asian vote swung sharply away from the Republican candidate in the 2012 poll, then why did the Other race vote swing almost as sharply toward the Republicans (up from 31% in 2008 to 38% in 2012)? And while you are at it, who are The Other anyway?

One common theory, for example, is that Asians were reacting negatively to all that Southern Protestant Jesus Talk coming from Romney and Ryan. Those Baptists really get on Asians' nerves. 

Except that Romney and Ryan aren't Southern and aren't Protestant and tried hard to avoid talking about religion and only talk about marginal tax rates. Granted, the GOP has plenty of Southern Protestants (who presumably due to some oversight are still allowed to vote), but, then, Romney and Ryan apparently did quite a bit better with Jews in 2012 than McCain and Palin did. Maybe Palin reminded Jewish women of all those sexy shiksas they fear and loathe, while Ryan kind of looked like a nice Jewish boy?

Or, maybe, we shouldn't get too invested in explaining changes from 2008 to 2012 that might just be artifacts of limited sample sizes and other polling problems?

Exit polling is difficult to do exactly right because you have to choose ahead of time which tiny percentage of voting places you are going to send workers to. This makes for lumpy results. 

Unfortunately, the Reuters-Ipsos online panel, which had a sample size of 41,000 voters, lumps Asians and Other together. Unfortunately, their convenient webpage for crosstabbing results lumps Asians and Others together. This Other Minorities (Asians plus American Indians plus who knows what) category went 38% for Romney. 

A third approach is to look at overall vote totals in heavily Asian communities. A commenter points to Orange County, CA, a traditionally Republican county with a lot of prosperous Asians who often register Republican:
Wisckol: O.C. Asian Americans - GOP in name only? 
They’re more likely to register as Republican than Democrat, but appear to have supported Obama. 
By MARTIN WISCKOL  
THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER 
mwisckol@ocregister.com 
Orange County's Asian American voters, led by Vietnamese Americans, are more likely to register as Republicans than Democrats. But party allegiance is loose and there are indications the demographic favored Barack Obama over Mitt Romney. 
There were no extensive exit polls in Orange County, but the county's four cities with the highest proportion of Asian Americans all favored Obama – despite all four having more Republicans than Democrats. Irvine (39 percent Asian American) and Garden Grove (37 percent Asian) each gave Obama 53 percent of their vote. Westminster (47 percent Asian American) gave Obama 49.7 percent and Romney 48.2 percent – even though the GOP has an 8-point voter-registration advantage there. Tiny La Palma (48 percent Asian) favored Obama by half a percentage point. 
Except for Tustin, all of the county's other 24 GOP cities voted for Romney. All six Democratic cities backed Obama.

This suggests New York-style voting among Orange Co. Asians: vote for Obama for the symbolism, vote against the Democrats for local, practical matters.

Unfortunately, this column doesn't look specifically at changes since 2008.

So, the entire topic remains one where I don't have anything very interesting to say, just to caution that we should be worried about overtheorizing.

November 26, 2012

"The Myth of Meritocracy: How Corrupt Are Ivy League Admissions?"

That's Ron Unz's cover story in the new December print edition of The American Conservative.

Here's one section heading: "The Strange Collapse of Jewish Academic Achievement."

It's not online at present, so check it out in person.

Dogwhistling and the Asian vote

David Weigel writes in Slate:
Charles Murray Whiffs on Asians 
The grand master of the Bell Curve is used to liberals pointing and sputtering at his conclusions. He typically pre-empts this by burying them with research -- research they, the sort of people who believe that human evolution happened but that human biodiversity is a myth, sure have not done. 
So this piece on why Asian voters went so heavily for the Democrats is a head-scratcher. Where's the data?

Murray's essay concludes:
And yet something has happened to define conservatism in the minds of Asians as deeply unattractive, despite all the reasons that should naturally lead them to vote for a party that is identified with liberty, opportunity to get ahead, and economic growth. I propose that the explanation is simple. Those are not the themes that define the Republican Party in the public mind. Republicans are seen by Asians—as they are by Latinos, blacks, and some large proportion of whites—as the party of Bible-thumping, anti-gay, anti-abortion creationists. Factually, that’s ludicrously inaccurate. In the public mind, except among Republicans, that image is taken for reality.

Meanwhile, Judge Richard A. Posner writes on why Asians vote Democratic:
Jews are an even wealthier American ethnic group than Asian Americans, and they also have strong family values and are highly educated, are they are more prominent in business and government than Asian Americans even though they are an even smaller percentage of the American population (2 percent versus 6 percent). No longer are they newcomers. They have arrived! (Milton Friedman couldn’t understand why they weren’t all Republicans.) Yet Jews gave 69 percent of their votes to Obama in this past election, not far short of the Asian-American percentage, and this despite the fact that the Republican Party is more supportive of the current Israeli government than the Democratic Party is. 
Jewish voting behavior is further evidence for the expressive theory of voting. For obvious reasons, Jews have an acute sensitivity to discrimination; this may explain their continuing affinity for liberal policies, which does not seem to be in their economic self-interest. Furthermore, historically anti-Semitism in the United States was private rather than governmental; for example, government agencies employed Jewish lawyers in great number at a time when Jews found it hard to get jobs in leading law firms. Big government was a friend, and apparently the friendship is still reciprocated. And this may be a factor in Asian-American voting as well, for it is the government that decides whom to allow to immigrate, and although until a few decades ago our immigration laws discriminated strongly against Asians, they no longer do.

My theory is that voting Republican expresses an aspiration to belong to the core of America, while voting Democrat expresses either that you are in the fringe or so well ensconced in the core that you think it's cool and edgy to vote like you are in the fringe.

Obama basically ran a campaign of anti-white male dogwhistling. Immediately after the election was over, the stone got flipped over in all the touchdown dances in the press and the ugliness lying beneath exposed itself.

Univision anchorman Jorge Ramos is the whitest man this side of C-3PO

Spanish-language Univision's anchorman Jorge Ramos, who makes Gloria Vanderbilt's son Anderson Cooper look like the I-don't-have-to-show-you-no-stinking-badges undocumented federale in Treasure of the Sierra Madre, is the subject of a fawning write-up in The New Republic. 
Immigration Reform’s Wild-Card Power Broker 
Eliza Gray  [Photos added by S. Sailer]
The night after the presidential election, the news anchors on the Spanish-language network Univision,  Jorge Ramos and Maria Elena Selena, began their nightly newscast with something of a celebration. As Ramos opened the broadcast, the screen lit up with the numbers 71 and 27—the share of the Hispanic electorate that voted, respectively, for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. The surge in Latino voting was a coup for Ramos, who is as much an immigration activist as he is a news anchor. In an ABC News advertisement targeting Latino voters, Ramos explained the stakes: “I know we are 50 million strong, but it means nothing if we don’t vote. The lesson is very simple: If you vote, we will be powerful.” ...
Over the phone last week, Ramos told me that he sees Univision as a “social leader” in the Hispanic community. The network’s role in the community was especially clear in the weeks before the election, when it devoted extensive news coverage to the voter suppression efforts across the country and provided information for their viewers about voter registration in hopes of getting out the Latino vote. “Some people have really no other option than to watch us to find out what is going to happen with their life,” Ramos told me. In 2010, a survey from the Pew Hispanic Center found that Ramos was one of four people Hispanics identified as the “most important” national Latino leader—along with Sonia Sotomayor and Democratic Congressman Luis Gutierrez.

That's one way to put it. I covered that Pew Hispanic Center survey for VDARE.com last year, and the actual results are more amusing:
In the Pew survey, done in late summer 2010, random Hispanics were first asked an unprompted question: “In your opinion, who is the most important Hispanic / Latino leader in the country today?” 
The landslide winner: “Don’t know”, with 64 percent. 
The runner-up: “No one”, with ten percent 
In third place: recently-appointed Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor, with seven percent. Then came the Congressional spokesman for amnesty, Luis Gutierrez, down at five percent; Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa at three percent; and Univision news anchorman Jorge Ramos at two. 
Nobody other than this Feeble Four broke the one percent barrier.

Back to TNR:
When the immigration debate begins in earnest, “from that table in Miami, he is a player in the negotiations,” says Roberto Suro, an expert on Latino politics and media at USC’s Annenberg School (and a friend to Ramos). 
Ramos, who is 54, was born in Mexico, where he worked as a radio journalist until 1983 when government censorship compelled him to move to America. In 1986, at the age of 28, he became the anchorman for Univision, and in the years since, he has become an impassioned advocate for undocumented immigrants. 
Ramos and Univision have not been shy about promoting their liberal stance on immigration. In A Country For All: An Immigrant Manifesto, one of several English-language books Ramos has written on the subject, he lays out his stance on immigration reform, making it clear that he wouldn’t accept anything short of citizenship—not even permanent legal residency—for the undocumented workers in this country. 
Like thorough, unbiased reporting that challenges your way of thinking? Subscribe to The New Republic for $3.99/month.
Univision’s activism in this regard, Ramos admits, sets it apart from its English-language counterparts. “Within the Hispanic community, since we are gravely under-represented politically, Univision and the Spanish language media have become social leaders or activists,” he says, adding that while Latinos make up nearly 17 percent of the population, they only have 28 members of Congress when they should have at least 75. “Something has to compensate for that. That’s where Univision and Spanish language media comes in. We do things you would not expect other networks to do in terms of giving guidance to our viewers on a lot of issues like immigration, health care, and voter registration.” 
... If the GOP’s strategy of embracing immigration reform has any chance of wooing back Latino voters, it will have to depend on Spanish-language media, particularly Univision, to get its message across. Eighty-eight percent of Latinos watch Spanish-language television, according to the American Journalism Review, and Univision is the clear leader in that market. For many Latinos, Univision is their only source of news.“72 percent of Latinos who watch Univision’s main evening news broadcast with Ramos and Salinas do not see any other television news,” according to the Guardian.

Aren't you supposed to pass an English test to become a citizen? Or is that just too racist to enforce these days?
This will be difficult for Republicans, because Univision has helped drive the perception that the GOP is hostile to Latinos—for example, when the Spanish language networks covered Arizona’s immigration law, the authors of "Not Business as Usual" wrote that Telemundo and Univision “contributed to a discourse of fear by choosing to frequently include the most outrageous and polemic anti-immi-grants examples, such as the statements of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.” 
Still, Republicans did little to counter their party’s image on the network. Only Newt Gingrich and Romney showed for Univision’s Republican primary debate and Romney’s forum with Univision during the general election was disastrous. According to reporting from Buzzfeed, when Ramos mentioned in Romney’s introduction that the candidate had agreed to a 35-minute segment, while the President had agreed to a whole hour, Romney “threw a tantrum” and refused to go on stage until they re-taped it. And, once the forum began, Romney’s audience—made up of campaign volunteers to make up for the lack of interest from University of Miami students— cheered for Romney and booed questions from the moderators, offending Ramos’ co-anchor, Maria Elena Salinas. (Romney’s unusually orangey-tan complexion during the forum also gave way to speculation that he’d intentionally made his face darker for the event, but the make-up artist at Univision later told reporters that the tan was natural.)

You might think this would be a good point to mention what Ramos looks like. But, that would be too ironic. The joke is that the typical Hispanic Leader Demanding Immigration "Reform" Now is a white person who makes his living off the sheer quantity of Hispanics in the country, and is of course constantly demanding more warm brown bodies to boost his bank account. (I reviewed Ramos's 2004 book about how Latinos were going to elect the next President and noted the huge number of product placement pitches in his constant stories about candidates who lost because they didn't buy enough ads on Univision.)

But jokes are funny, and immigration, diversity, race, and all that are too sacred for irony.

Back too TNR.
It also probably won’t help that the Republicans’ supposed leader on immigration reform, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, has a troubled history with the network regarding a dispute over its coverage of his family, a story detailed in The New Yorker by Ken Auletta. 
It isn’t too late for Republicans to learn to better use Univision, and Democrats shouldn’t take their lead for granted. Ramos writes and speaks fondly about George W. Bush, who may have been the only presidential candidate to understand the importance of Spanish-language media, having hired Sonia Colin, a former Univision reporter, to handle his Latino outreach in his 2000 campaign.

Have you ever noticed how Mexican-American regard for George W. Bush as a natural amigo is never framed as reflecting the least bit badly on Mexican-Americans? I'm sure Bush would have won 10 to 1 over Romney in a poll of Latinos of who they'd rather watch Univision's Sabado Gigante with. But that Bush appealed to Mexicans because he seemed like kind of an idiot is always treated as a Good Thing in the context of liberal write-ups on immigration.
... Those in the GOP who think their party’s survival depends on winning the immigration reform debate would do well to pay attention to how their policies play with Ramos, who, like the president, supports a path to full citizenship (the White House’s blueprint proposes legal residency after eight years and possible citizenship five years after that).  ...
In an email, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s spokesman Rory Cooper punted on the GOP’s specific plans for reform by reiterating the need for the Presidents’ leadership and, tellingly, referred to a Republican-backed STEM Visa program that would make it easier to keep immigrants with degrees in science and engineering—a proposal that, while good, is mostly unrelated to Latino immigration.

Huh? I thought from the press coverage that all those DREAMers were rocket scientists who are going to enable America to finally go to the Moon.

Great moments in the history of the Diversity Visa Immigration Lottery

House Republicans have scheduled a vote for this Friday on an immigration compromise guaranteeing green cards to foreign STEM advanced degree holders in return for the end of Ted Kennedy's two-decade old Diversity Visa Immigration Lottery. 

This sounds like tough sledding to me to get it past the Democratic-controlled Senate and signed by the President. Consider the glamor of the four words:

Lottery -- States spend hundreds of millions per year to advertise the lotteries as fun, exciting, and a good investment

Visa -- the Visa consortium spends hundreds of millions per year to market the Visa name as fun and indispensable

Diversity -- One of the two highest values of 21st Century America

Immigration -- One of the two highest values of 21st Century America

So, good luck Republicans on being against the diversity immigration visa lottery just because it's a bad law. The GOP doesn't control the myth-making machinery, and that's what counts.

Anyway, here's something I wrote over a decade ago:
That Curious Diversity Visa Immigration Lottery
by Steve Sailer
UPI, July 29, 2002

One of the U.S. government's more obscure yet curious programs received some unwanted publicity on the Fourth of July when Egyptian immigrant Hesham Mohamed Hadayet killed two Jews at the Israeli El Al Airline counter of Los Angeles International Airport.

To be precise, received some unwanted publicity from me and, rounding to the nearest ten, maybe zero others.

Heck, the entire incident quickly vanished from memory, probably because it contradicted the talking point for George W. Bush that he had protected us from anymore terrorist attacks since 9/11 and it contradicted the Democratic meme that all we have to fear are Angry White Men like, say, George Zimmerman. (Fortunately, Wikipedia has a decent brief write-up noting that the FBI and DOJ eventually confirmed this was a terrorist attack.)
Hadayet had been scheduled for deportation in 1997, but was allowed to remain in America when his wife's application to receive a coveted "green card" for permanent residency was randomly drawn by the State Department from the millions of applicants to the annual Diversity Visa Lottery. 
What is this Diversity Visa Lottery that so few Americans have heard of, yet is of such avid interest around the world that anti-government riots raged in the impoverished African country of Sierra Leone in 1997 when 5,000 lottery applications mailed by locals were found floating in the Freetown harbor? 
In the latest drawing, 8.7 million foreigners filed free applications. Permanent residency visas will then be handed out to 50,000 individuals from 167 countries. (That's 174 applications per green card granted.) The lottery accounts for about 7 percent of all legal immigrants to the United States. 
According to New York City immigration lawyer Richard Madison, "The purpose of the diversity lottery is to make the immigrant population of the United States more varied." Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, who advocates abolition of the program, said, "The lottery is premised on the belief that America needs immigrants as such -- not people with relatives here, or with job offers, or fleeing persecution -- just more random people." 
The program allows more immigration from countries that don't send America large numbers of immigrants through the normal channels of family reunification (which accounted for 72 percent of all immigrants in 1998), employer sponsorship (12 percent, which includes the employee's spouses and children), and refugee status (8 percent). 
When the 1965 immigration law opened the new era of mass immigration, a few Asian and Latin American countries quickly came to dominate the flow of immigrants. Those early arrivers, in turn, brought in their relatives who eventually brought in their relatives -- what's called "chain migration." This left very little opportunity for people from countries that hadn't gotten in on the system early to qualify to immigrate. 
Oddly enough, the diversity lottery originated as a way to bring more whites to the United States. White ethnic politicians in America felt that their distant relatives in Europe had been squeezed out by chain migration from the Third World. So, natives of the 14 largest sources of legal immigrants -- such as Mexico, India and China -- are banned from participating. In particular, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., saw a diversity lottery as a way to boost the number of legal Irish immigrants. 
Krikorian explained, "It was cooked up in the 1986 law to provide a way to amnesty Irish illegal aliens, since the main amnesty in that law primarily benefited Mexicans. In fact, to this day the lottery is often referred to by congressmen and their staff as 'The Irish Program.' But as the program evolved, and as there were fewer and fewer Irish illegals, its emphasis changed, and it's now more accurately described as the Middle Eastern, East European and African program." 
Only 331 visas were awarded to Irish applicants this year. 
Requirements for qualifying are fairly minimal. To be eligible to win permanent residency, a high school diploma is required. Failing that, the lucky winner can still get by with "two years of work experience ... in an occupation that requires at least two years of training or experience." Winners also must undergo a physical exam and a background police check. 
Interestingly, this program run by the State Department increases immigration from the seven countries that the State Department has declared "state sponsors of international terrorism:" Iran (768 visas this year), Iraq (71), Syria (62), Libya (61), Cuba (529), North Korea (four) and Sudan (1,297). 
It also awards permanent residency to the natives of two countries that are the prime sources of al Qaida -- the network of suspected terrorists: Saudi Arabia (38) and Egypt (1,551). Other participating countries with active Islamist terrorist elements include Algeria (834), Lebanon (62) and Yemen (45). 
... Despite the enormous number of applications received annually, the government makes no attempt to skim the cream off the top. The lottery truly is a lottery. Rather than try to choose those applicants whose skills would most benefit America, the government simply draws blindly. 
Judith Golub, a spokeswoman for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, defended the arbitrariness of the selection process, saying, "Maybe it serves to reflect who we are as a nation. This country has always valued diversity." 
Of course, it's not logically necessary for the program to be a lottery for it to maintain its current commitment to diversity. The government could simply keep the present national quotas and just fill them with the highest potential applicants out of all those applying from each particular country. 
While Americans sometimes seem uncomfortable choosing among immigration candidates, Canada uses a point system to try to identify those would-be immigrants who possess the "human capital" to most benefit Canada as a whole. Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Elinor Caplan explained, "Independent skilled immigrants (the largest single class of those admitted to Canada) are selected on the basis of their potential contribution to Canada's economic and social well-being."

Sam Bacile: Why is this crook in my country?

The NYT assigned six reporters to write a long article on the life of Coptic Christian conman Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a.k.a., a lot of names, most aptly Sam Bacile (Some Imbecile), producer of the Youtube video "Innocence of Muslims." But the whole effort seems pretty pointless because of course the Obama Administration / Media's bizarre focus on this one meth dealer as the cause of the unraveling of Obama's foreign policy had just been a gimmick to deflect blame during the re-election And with Priority One now Mission Accomplished, who cares anymore?

The only interesting question is the one that never seems to have occurred to the NYT's half-dozen newshounds: Why is this guy in my country? Why was he let in? Why wasn't he deported after one of his previous offenses? The closest this long article comes to this is:
Nakoula Basseley Nakoula grew up in Egypt but came to the United States and wed Ingrid N. Rodriguez in 1986 in Nevada, according to state marriage records. They divorced in 1990, the records show. Soon afterward, while living in California, he married an Egyptian woman, Olivia Ibrahim, with whom he has three children. Although the couple divorced, the family members all lived together on a cul-de-sac in Cerritos until going into hiding after the video spread.

You know how Global Warming is something that We Must Do Something About Now? Well, Sam Bacile's immigration isn't like that. It's more like Continental Drift -- just something we have to live with, cuz whaddaya whaddaya?

As I mentioned before, you know how Congress created the National Transportation Safety Board to investigate airliner crashes because the FAA was too much in bed with the airlines? We need a National Immigration Safety Board to investigate immigrant screw-ups to shine a spotlight on what went wrong.

November 25, 2012

Whiteness as the recessive identity in 21st Century America

It's widely assumed that in the future everybody (except maybe blacks) will try hard to grab for the brass ring of White Privilege by identifying as white whenever possible. In reality, the opposite seems to be happening.

For example, here's a dull NYT op-ed on the recent Puerto Rican statehood plebiscite by a New York literary agent named David Royston Patterson, who was born and raised in North Carolina. He doesn't even have much of an opinion on the subject. What he does have is an identity: Puerto Rican. 

He's Puerto Rican in that modern sense, like the way Obama is black, only nobody can even notice by looking at this Tarheel (U. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, '96).
Will Puerto Rico Be America’s 51st State? 
By DAVID ROYSTON PATTERSON 
ONE of the little-noticed results of the Nov. 6 elections was a plebiscite held in Puerto Rico on the island’s relationship with the United States. The outcome was murky, much like the last century’s worth of political history between Washington and San Juan, and the mainland’s confused or disinterested attitude toward Puerto Rico that abetted it. ... 
Despite what my name suggests, I am Puerto Rican. I grew up with a mother from the island and a Scots-Irish father in a small town in rural North Carolina, at a time when there were so few Hispanics in the area that my mom liked to go to a Mexican restaurant just to speak some Spanish.

Wouldn't that suggest he is as as Scots-Irish by nature as he is Puerto Rican? And a lot more Scots-Irish by nurture? So, why not say you are both?

Of course, a lot of privileges come with identifying as a Puerto Rican that don't come with identifying as a Scots-Irishman.
That was 20-odd years ago. The local Latino population has grown so much since then that my mom, who retired two years ago, was able to work for a decade as a translator for the local school system. 

Thank God.
I was used to being “discovered” as Puerto Rican. Sometimes when this happened, I’d be called upon to explain things. In fourth grade, that meant being assigned to give the class — half black kids, and half white kids — a show-and-tell presentation on Puerto Rico and its strange status as a self-ruling commonwealth, with its own governor and legislature, the American president as its head of state, but whose residents lack a vote in national presidential elections or voting representation in Congress despite being American citizens. 
I was asked, “Do you eat a lot of tacos?” The answer, “Probably not any more than you do.” I was also asked, by one of the two dark-haired girls that I had a crush on, this one a doctor’s daughter, “Why don’t we just sell it?” 
Even fourth graders can be left speechless. It later occurred to me that I should have answered: “You can’t just sell it. It’s not your beach house!” 
If Puerto Rico were our beach house, we’d pay more attention to it.

And pay more attention to me. Did I mention I'm Puerto Rican?

(But did I also imply that I'm the kind of Puerto Rican whose clan has beach houses? It's so hard to get the balance just right.)
It has long been conventional wisdom among many Puerto Ricans that the status quo will hold because neither of the American national parties has decided that converting the island into a state would benefit them politically. 
Paired with this is the conventional wisdom that the Republican Party doesn’t actually want nearly four million more Hispanic voters, and their corresponding electoral votes, at play in national elections. (Both Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum did pronounce themselves pro-statehood when courting votes — and fund-raising dollars — on the island during last year’s Republican primaries.) 
When Spain granted Puerto Rico to the United States in 1898, President William McKinley initiated a project that he defined as “benevolent assimilation” on an island filled with people who already had a strong identity of their own and who, of course, primarily spoke Spanish. 
Some of the same people who had resisted rule by Spain, and who had even achieved an extremely brief autonomy — nine months — for the island before the American Navy’s arrival, continued to resist rule by the United States. 
Luis Muñoz Rivera.
Among them was a family member — the poet, journalist and statesman Luis Muñoz Rivera. It was during the Spanish reign that he had written, “Annexionism had always seemed to me absurd, depressing and inconceivable.” Though Mr. Muñoz Rivera continued to make the case for autonomy, he was also essential in the creation of some useful accommodations to American rule, like the Jones Act. 
Luis Muñoz Rivera’s son, Luis Muñoz Marín, was the first democratically elected governor of Puerto Rico — and my grandmother’s first cousin.

In other words, let me also make clear to the kind of Puerto Ricans who read the New York Times that I am the right kind of Puerto Rican, if you know what I mean.
David Royston Patterson is a literary agent at Foundry Literary + Media in New York.

Sunset for the Diversity Visa?

House Republicans have been pushing a small immigration compromise that at least sounds like a positive sum deal. But in the current environment, A Could Be Worse Deal sounds like it won't get anywhere without massive concessions elsewhere (which, no doubt, the cheap labor wing of the party will gladly agree to -- by the way is "wing" the right word?).
High-skill green cards get lame-duck push in Congress 
By Matt O'Brien 
San Jose Mercury News 
In the first test of a new political climate on immigration reform, the lame-duck House of Representatives is renewing a push to eliminate America's random visa lottery and replace it with a bill favored by thousands of Silicon Valley immigrant workers:

And by hundreds of Silicon Valley employers looking to pay lower salaries. The attitudes of American citizens who work in Silicon Valley does not appear to be of interest.
one that would give green cards to foreigners with advanced U.S. degrees in science, engineering and math. 
House Republicans say they are wasting no time putting the bill up for a Friday vote after a similar measure failed in September.

So, what happened on Friday? Can't find any mention of it.
The maneuver follows a vigorous debate in the conservative movement over how to warm up to a growing Latino and Asian-American electorate that was pivotal in re-electing President Barack Obama. 
Republicans are even adding a provision they once opposed to allow the spouses and minor children of legal immigrants to join their family members in the United States instead of waiting for years in their home countries. ...
Some Democrats, however, are deriding the new push as a deceptively limited measure that will pass the GOP-led House but fail in the Senate, where majority Democrats would be reluctant to give the GOP what it wants now because it needs conservative votes to enact broader reforms next year. 
Republicans are "trying to pretend they're pro-immigrant by this bill, knowing that it goes nowhere," said U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, the top Democrat on the House immigration subcommittee. 
Passage of the visa swap would fulfill a goal of reigning House Republicans to gut the annual "diversity visa lottery," which randomly awards 50,000 green cards for permanent residency to people from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States as long as they have a high school degree. 
Those green cards would instead go to immigrants with much higher education credentials -- a master's or doctorate in the so-called STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and math. 
The high-skill STEM visas have bipartisan consensus in Congress, but most Democrats have been unwilling to sacrifice the two-decade-old visa lottery to get them. One problem, said Lofgren, is that the Republicans' swap would actually cut immigration, since there are not enough foreigners with advanced degrees who want to emigrate to fill all the high-tech slots once a backlog is taken care of.

And actually cutting immigration in an age of high unemployment would be the worst thing in the world because the whole point is to increase immigration to prove you aren't racist.
For many people in Africa who are not already in the upper classes, cutting off the diversity visa takes away "one of the few options that individuals have to legally enter the United States," said Joe Sciarrillo of the San Francisco-based African Advocacy Network.

And what could be more important than the right of random Africans without any particularly skills to legally enter the United States.
"The diversity visa is more open and egalitarian in terms of who qualifies for it," Sciarrillo said. "A single mother with a high school degree in Eritrea has as good a shot as an elite businessman."

Not to mention the Eritrean single mother's Islamic extremist son.
Technology worker lobbyists in Silicon Valley and elsewhere have been pushing for a compromise, hoping to persuade lawmakers that the visa lottery has achieved its original purpose of diversifying the immigration pool.

By "technology worker lobbyists," the newspaper does not mean people who lobby for American technology workers in Silicon Valley.
"The visa lottery has done its job," says a report being released Monday by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, or IEEE. "It is
that rarest of things: an act of Congress which so plainly achieved its purpose that it is no longer necessary."

Indeed.
The group's report concludes that the lottery over the past 20 years helped open the doors to Africans and Eastern Europeans who had been excluded from America's family-focused immigration, but now the program is outdated. For instance, 2,800 Nigerians won a diversity visa last year by the luck of the draw; but there were also more than 3,000 highly educated Nigerian foreign students in the United States who would have benefited from a STEM green card. 

The Diversity Visa is a disaster because it should really be called the Chain Migration Initiation program. The 50,000 Diversity Visas per year get multiplied over time by the larger "Immediate Relative" and "Family Sponsored" categories. Plus, they provide connections for illegal immigrants.
It is better policy to give the green cards to those with the highest skills whom American universities have already invested in, said IEEE's Berg, a Saratoga resident. The chapter counts nearly 12,000 members. ...
The House voted 257 to 158 in favor of a similar bill on Sept. 20, but the vote was structured in a way that required a two-thirds majority, allowing Republicans to blame Democrats for its defeat just weeks before the presidential election. 
This Friday, however, the vote will need only a majority and is likely to coast through the House, facing its bigger obstacles in the Senate. 
"It's really just an effort to try to divide people once again," Lofgren said.

Who are these people "Lofgren" is so worried about not dividing? American citizens and random people in Africa?

Seriously, getting rid of the Diversity Visa is going to be a tough fight because it's the Diversity Visa, and what is better than Diversity?

GOP pols offer immigration compromise: amnesty plus guest workers!

From the McClatchy Newspapers:
Biggest challenge to immigration bill may be guest workers 
BY FRANCO ORDOÑEZ - MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS 
WASHINGTON -- As immigration talks resume, the public debate has once again zeroed in on the merits of granting some type of so-called amnesty to 11 million illegal immigrants. But another, more complicated dispute – where the sides are equally entrenched – is brewing behind the scenes between organized labor and business interests. 
That debate, over how to manage future flows of legal immigration, particularly the size and scope of some kind of temporary worker program, could just as easily derail any type of immigration overhaul. 
Farmers from California to North Carolina say they need more temporary workers to grow and pick crops. Increased border enforcement has made it harder to fill crucial agriculture jobs. 
Plant managers in North Carolina and South Carolina, for example, have been forced to turn to prisons to man assembly lines at poultry plants. 
Farmers need more hands in the orchards picking nuts and fruits in California’s Central Valley and grapes at vineyards in Washington state’s Tri-Cities area. 
“The workers are not here,” said Manuel Cunha, president of the Fresno, Calif.-based Nisei Farmers League. 
“You got to have milkers. You don’t bring anyone out of the unemployment line to milk cows.” 
But labor unions are wary of expanding guest-worker programs, insisting on a path to citizenship and worrying about what they say are abuses of the guest-worker programs and unfair competition to American laborers.

Well, that's what the unions say. But you can't take their word for anything, not the way you can take a big landowner's word that he's got to have more cheap labor.
... Talks on developing comprehensive immigration legislation resumed this month after Latino voters overwhelmingly supported President Barack Obama for another term. 
Republican leaders, mindful of the electorate’s demographic changes, now say they’re willing to discuss some type of path to legalization for some of the estimated 11 million people who are living in the United States illegally. But in return, they say, border security must be improved and Democrats have to stand up to unions and support an expanded guest-worker program, including some non-agriculture jobs, in order to prevent future waves of mass illegal immigration. 
Some fear that a path to legal status without an accompanying worker program would lure more undocumented immigrants into the United States. 
“There is so much agreement on border security, employment verification,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told McClatchy. “It breaks down on the number of guest workers. Unions hate that, but we have to have it."

So, what you're saying, Lindsey, is that the way to prevent the luring of more undocumented immigrants into the United States is to document them?

November 23, 2012

What Stoppard copied from Waugh for "Anna Karenina"

This isn't hugely important, but it's fun to note where major writers get their ideas. From my movie review in Taki's Magazine of Anna Karenina, which features an adaptation of Tolstoy's novel by playwright Tom Stoppard:
Stoppard is often attacked for his notorious cleverness, but he tries to use his brainpower to make audience comprehension as simple as possible (but not simpler). 
Russian novels, however, are notorious for their endless characters with endless names. For example, Anna’s husband is Count Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, while her lover is Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky. In his narration, Tolstoy gets around this self-inflicted problem by calling the father of Anna’s son “Alexei Alexandrovich” and the father of her daughter “Vronsky.” To help Western audiences, Stoppard mostly skips the patronymics. 
Besides cutting away until he ends up with an efficient rendition of the grand plot, Stoppard adds a brilliant new climax to the steeplechase scene that Tolstoy had overlooked, perhaps because it didn’t occur to him how confounding having two Alexeis might be to foreigners. In Stoppard’s variation, when Vronsky falls in a horse race for cavalry officers, Anna screams “Alexei!” Her husband comes running when she calls his name, only for her to ignore him in front of tout le Moscou in her anguish over her new Alexei. 
Stoppard presumably lifted this device from the most shocking scene in Evelyn Waugh’s 1934 novel A Handful of Dust, in which the wife has a young son and a lover both named “John.” Informed only of the death of “John,” she exclaims “Oh, thank God” when she then learns that it was merely her little boy who was killed in an equestrian accident.  (Here’s a recent interview with Stoppard to promote Anna Karenina where, unprompted, he cites A Handful of Dust as a “masterpiece.”)

In other words, Stoppard has been thinking about Waugh's plot device recently. That shouldn't be surprising: Back in the 1990s, Stoppard told a reviewer that his three favorite writers were Waugh, Vladimir Nabokov, and Thomas Babington Macaulay, so there's nothing new here. (By the way, I like Waugh, Nabokov, and Macaulay, too, so it's hardly surprising I like Stoppard.) Indeed, when I type "Stoppard Waugh" into Google, I find this:
From September 1962 until April 1963, [Stoppard] worked in London as a drama critic for Scene, a new arts magazine, writing reviews and interviews, both under his name and under the pseudonym William Boot which was taken from the protagonist in Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop. Stoppard says he was drawn to this character because he was "a journalist who brought a kind of innocent incompetence and contempt to what he was doing.... I used it, and got quite fond of Boot as a name." He liked it so much in fact, that his early tv and radio plays frequently feature characters with the name Boot.

In turn, I wonder if Waugh's original scene in A Handful of Dust was a parody of the horseback accident scene in Anna Karenina? I can't find any evidence online that Waugh ever read Tolstoy -- in general, Waugh hated 19th Century novels for their long-windedness, but he mostly excoriated Dickens in print -- but I can imagine Waugh muttering his way through Anna Karenina, "Alexei Alexandrovich? Alexei Kirillovich? Why can't this loquacious Muscovite use proper English names, such as, say, John? Wait a minute, that gives me an idea ..."

A few years ago, I bought myself for Christmas War and Peace and a new copy of Scoop to replace the one that I had reread so often it fell apart. After 100+ pages of War and Peace, I said to myself, "You know, the plot is kind of like Scoop -- rich people socialize in the city and the country, and then off to war -- but Waugh only needs about 1/3 as many words as Tolstoy to communicate." So, I reread Scoop for a 10th time instead of War and Peace for the first time.

Waugh's non-verbose style was influenced by 1920s silent films. I believe he was employed as a screenwriter at a big studio for awhile, but only the amateur 28-minute silent comedy The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama, made by Waugh's friends in 1925, ever made it to the screen.

Religious breakdowns of 2012 vote by region

Hail to You uses Reuters' America Mosaic polling explorer to check out his theory that the reason Episcopalians voted for Obama more than other Protestants did is because they are concentrated in the Northeast. So he looks at whites' voting by religion for the Northeast and the South.

Mostly, it looks to me like whites in the Northeast went about 15-25 points less for Romney than did whites in the South and that holds for religious subsets. For example, Romney won 29% of the Jews in the Northeast and 46% of the Jews in the South. Romney got 45% of the Episcopalians in the Northeast and 66% of the Episcopalians in the South; 52% of the white Catholics in the Northeast and 72% of the white Catholics in the South. 

In general, the Reuters-Ipsos results are so beautiful in terms of how perfectly they would fit into a multiple regression model of how people vote that I sometimes fear that Reuters-Ipsos is pulling my leg. Maybe they didn't really survey 41,667 voters online. Maybe they just started with a multiple regression model with reasonable weights for race, gender, marriage, religion, region, state, homeownership, education, and so forth, and then just made up the data to fit the model?

I'm just being paranoid. I have zero evidence that this is a hoax. Indeed, a few times I've seen anomalous results from Reuters that represent small sample sizes that wouldn't appear in mocked-up data. For example, there is a reverse gender gap among white working class non-college voters in those Slippery Six upper Midwestern states that Romney lost fairly narrowly.

By the way, for polling wonks only, I figured out a way to get a reading on groups too small to get a readout on the Reuters polls. Reuters’ American Mosaic Polling Explorer is set up to not let you see the results for groups with a sample size of less than 100 respondents, such as Southern Mormons. But, you can figure out the numbers by combining groups below the cutoff with groups a little above the cutoff. For example, in Hail's 12 Southern states, there were 180 Jewish voters (excluding 3rd party voters), who went 45% for Romney. If I select Jewish _and_ Mormon, now I get a sample size of 266 that went 63% for Romney. This suggests 266 Mormons+Jews – 180 Jews = 86 Mormons in the South. Romney carried 63% of the Southern Jewish+Mormon group, so that would suggest he got 78 of the 86 Southern Mormons, or around 90%. (I’m doing the arithmetic in my head, so I might be off by a little.)

Tiger Mothers in their natural habitat

From the NYT:
A Chinese Education, for a Price

The demands for bribes can start before a child enters kindergarten. 
By DAN LEVIN 
BEIJING — For Chinese children and their devoted parents, education has long been seen as the key to getting ahead in a highly competitive society. But just as money and power grease business deals and civil servant promotions, the academic race here is increasingly rigged in favor of the wealthy and well connected, who pay large sums and use connections to give their children an edge at government-run schools. 
Nearly everything has a price, parents and educators say, from school admissions and placement in top classes to leadership positions in Communist youth groups. Even front-row seats near the blackboard or a post as class monitor are up for sale. 
Zhao Hua, a migrant from Hebei Province who owns a small electronics business here, said she was forced to deposit $4,800 into a bank account to enroll her daughter in a Beijing elementary school. At the bank, she said, she was stunned to encounter officials from the district education committee armed with a list of students and how much each family had to pay. Later, school officials made her sign a document saying the fee was a voluntary “donation.”


But, how different are things here?

Jeb Bush's Mexican oligarch cronies

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush is being talked up as the frontrunner for the GOP Presidential nomination in 2016 because of his close ties to Mexico. A dozen years ago, however, a small bilingual magazine called El Andar courageously investigated the Mexican friends of the Bush Dynasty.

From my article for UPI in 2001:
Although a Feb. 13 Washington Post story claimed that President Bush's links to Mexico have been largely "ceremonial," El Andar has documented ties between the Bush family and a colorful cast of Mexican power-brokers going back four decades to an oil business partnership between George Bush and Jorge Diaz Serrano. 
The Bushes are of course a famously friendly family, with a huge circle of acquaintances. Several of their Mexican connections, however, have later caused them some embarrassment. For example, Diaz Serrano would go on to spend much of the 1980s in a Mexican prison for embezzling $58 million while he headed Mexico's Pemex oil monopoly. 
El Andar also reported that Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother, occasionally vacationed at the Puebla ranch of Raul Salinas, the brother of former Mexican president Carlos Salinas (1988-1994). Raul can no longer host anyone, though. He is currently serving a 27-year prison sentence for the murder of his ex-brother-in-law. Raul's wife was arrested in Switzerland when she attempted to remove close to $100 million from their Swiss bank account. 
The Florida governor, whose wife Columba was born in Mexico, told Andres Oppenheimer of the Miami Herald, "I've seen [Raul Salinas] 10 times, at the most. I found him to be a very nice person, with very nice children . . . It's kind of shocking [to learn of] all these allegations.'' Jeb Bush said that he and Raul "never did any business.'' 
... Indeed, one target of [El Andar], the family of Carlos Hank Gonzales, a powerful politician in Mexico's former ruling party (the PRI), has threatened to sue the tiny magazine for $10 million over Reynolds' article "The NAFTA Gang." 
According to Forbes Magazine, Carlos Hank Gonzales, a lifelong public servant, is a self-made billionaire. He justifies his good fortune with this elegant saying: "A politician who is poor is a poor politician." 
His son, Carlos Hank Rohn, is the primary shareholder in the $2 billion dollar Laredo National Bank of Texas. The controversial bank's CEO Gary G. Jacobs contributed a total of $85,000 to George W. Bush's two campaigns for governor, according to the campaign contribution database maintained by Texans for Public Justice. Jacobs has also contributed to numerous Democrats in recent years. 
A draft report leaked from the federal National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) alleged, "Several years of investigative information strongly support the conclusion that the Hank family has laundered money on a massive scale, assisted drug trafficking organizations in transporting drug shipments and engaged in large-scale public corruption." ...
Jacobs has attributed federal criticism of his chief stockholder to ethnic bias: "They don't want Latinos to own or control banks in the U.S." 
Journalists in Mexico who write too bluntly about the rich and powerful have more to worry about than lawsuits. For example, a Tijuana gossip columnist named Héctor Félix Miranda was gunned down in 1988. Two Hank family bodyguards were eventually convicted. 

And here's Julia Reynolds' story in El Andar on "Los Amigos de Bush" on the narco ties of some of the Bush family's chief Mexican-American supporters in Texas.

Back in 1995, Jorge G. Castaneda, who was Mexican Foreign Minister in the early 2000s, wrote in the Los Angeles Times:
There has also been a great deal of speculation in Mexico about the exact nature of Raul Salinas' close friendship with former President George Bush's son, Jeb. It is well known here that for many years the two families spent vacations together--the Salinases at Jeb Bush's home in Miami, the Bushes at Raul's ranch, Las Mendocinas, under the volcano in Puebla. There are many in Mexico who believe that the relationship became a back channel for delicate and crucial negotiations between the two governments, leading up to President Bush's sponsorship of NAFTA.

In 2004, another Salinas brother, Enrique, was found murdered in his car, gangland-style.

The difference in this regard between George W. and Jeb was twofold: Jeb really does speak Spanish and really isn't a screw-up, so he was much more plugged into what was going on at the top in Mexico in the early 1990s, which was pretty Borgia-like.

GOP announces foolproof plan for winning elections

House Republicans still smarting from their poor showing among Hispanics in the presidential election are planning a vote next week on immigration legislation that would both expand visas for foreign science and technology students

That will appeal to Hispanics voters. What Mexican-American family doesn't have a cousin with a physics Ph.D.?
and make it easier for those with green cards to bring their immediate families to the U.S. 

Who will vote Republican in gratitude, no doubt.
Republican leaders made it clear after the election that the party was ready to get serious about overhauling the nation’s dysfunctional immigration system, a top priority for Hispanic communities. Taking up what is called the STEM Jobs Act during the lame-duck session could be seen as a first step in that direction. 
The House voted on a STEM bill — standing for science, technology, engineering and mathematics — in September, but under a procedure requiring a two-thirds majority. It was defeated, with more than 80 percent of Democrats voting against it, because it offset the increase in visas for high-tech graduates by eliminating another visa program that is available for less-educated foreigners, many from Africa.

Punishing American computer programmers and engineers by letting in more Asians, who vote heavily Democratic, seems like a brilliant strategy for whipping up enthusiasm for the GOP brand among American computer programmers and engineers.