November 28, 2012

Counting by ancestral background: Mandatory for some, forbidden for others?

Over at Marginal Revolution, economist Tyler Cowen links to Ron Unz's The Myth of American Meritocracy, saying:
There is a new and stimulating piece by Ron Unz, in The American Conservative.  The article covers plenty of ground, but I took away two main points.  The first is that there is massive and quite unjustified bias against Asian and Asian-American students in the U.S. admissions process.  Yes, I already thought that but it turns out it is much worse than I had thought.  Yet many people support this aspect of our current admissions systems, either directly or indirectly.
The second point is the claim that Jewish academic achievement in America is collapsing at the top end, in relative terms at least.
For reasons which are possibly irrational on my end, but perhaps not totally irrational, I am not entirely comfortable with the religious and ethnic and racial “counting” methods applied in this piece (blame me for mood affiliation if you wish). Still, it is an interesting read and after some internal debate I thought I would pass it along, albeit with caveats.

I’d like to hear more from Tyler about why he had to struggle with his comfort level. After all, he is in a quantitative field, and vast amounts of quantitative analyses are published annually based on data collected about race and ethnicity. On the other hand, almost nothing quantitative is published in the mainstream about what is, arguably, the most influential ethnic, racial and/or religious group in 21st Century America.

On the other other hand, Jewish publications and organizations keep close tabs on quantitative measures of Jewish accomplishment. For example, the venerable Jewish Telegraph Agency estimated in 2009 that about 35% of the Forbes 400 were Jewish. (Here's a more careful count of the ethnicity of the 400 richest people in America.)

Similarly, in the 1995 book Jews and the New American Scene, the prominent social scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, a Senior Scholar of the Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Studies, and Earl Raab, Director of the Perlmutter Institute for Jewish Advocacy at Brandeis University, pointed out:
“During the last three decades, Jews have made up 50% of the top two hundred intellectuals, 40 percent of American Nobel Prize Winners in science and economics, 20 percent of professors at the leading universities, 21 percent of high level civil servants, 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington, 26% of the reporters, editors, and executives of the major print and broadcast media, 59 percent of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982, and 58 percent of directors, writers, and producers in two or more primetime television series.” [pp 26-27]

Finally, would Tyler have linked to Unz’s article about Jewish achievement if Unz wasn’t Jewish?

"Myth of American Meritocracy" now online

In the December issue of The American Conservative:
The Myth of American Meritocracy 
How corrupt are Ivy League admissions? 
by Ron Unz

"Shut up, you losers," he explained

From the NYT Editorial Page Editor's blog, the NYT's chief immigration reporter responds to the proposed compromise to increase STEM visas while cutting random diversity visas:
A Bad Start on Immigration Reform 
By LAWRENCE DOWNES 
Representative Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is offering a new version of an old immigration bill that’s due to be voted on this week. It’s being touted by supporters as a signal that the Republican Party understands the election message sent by voters – particular Latinos and Asians – in favor of immigration reform. 
Don’t be fooled. The resurrected STEM Jobs Act is a tweaked version of a bad bill that died earlier this year in the House, and it’s bad for the same reasons as before. The bill increases visas for immigrants skilled in STEM fields — science, technology, engineering and math — by eliminating another visa category entirely: the “diversity” visas set aside for people from countries with relatively low immigration rates to the United States. 
Here’s the math: add 55,000 new visas for immigrants with advanced STEM degrees. Take away 55,000 diversity visas. A zero-sum game, in pro-immigrant disguise. 
... If the Republicans are going to offer real immigration reform, they will have to do better than this.

We, on the winning side, don't have to justify our demands with reasons or evidence or appeals to the common good. You have to provide terms of your final surrender that we deem acceptable.

You can read the whole thing and see that Downes doesn't feel it necessary to offer any defense of the diversity visa lottery. His subtle, carefully reasoned position is

More Immigrants Now.

My review of Nate Silver's "The Signal and the Noise" in Taki's

From my book review in Taki's Magazine:
Nate Silver is most famous for steadily predicting Barack Obama’s reelection (which, as you may have heard, happened). Yet his new bestseller The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t is a fine all-around introduction to the science and art of forecasting, with interesting examples drawn from many fields. 
For example: You know those ten-day weather forecasts? Predicting the first week has gotten reasonably reliable, but the ninth and tenth days, Silver reports, are useless. They may even be negatively correlated with what actually transpires. 
The Signal and the Noise starts weakly with the oft-told cautionary tale of how credit-rating agencies such as Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s missed the subprime mortgage bubble. Fortunately, it improves as the author turns to topics with which he has more personal familiarity, such as sports, gambling, and sports gambling. 
Indeed, The Signal and the Noise is one of the better Frequent Flyer books of recent years.

Read the whole thing there.

November 27, 2012

WSJ: "Most-Racial America: Antiwhite bigotry goes mainstream"

Something I haven't been able to bring myself to do is make a list of the vast outpouring of animus toward white men since the election. Of course, this orgy of insults has nothing to do with the unfair strength of white men, and everything to do with their weakness and fairness.

James Taranto, WSJ editorial page editor, inspects a representative example of this rhetoric in the Wall Street Journal:
Most-Racial America 
Antiwhite bigotry goes mainstream.

By JAMES TARANTO 
... At issue is a Nov. 19 letter to the President Obama, written by Rep. Jeff Duncan of South Carolina and signed by 97 House Republicans, which declares that the signatories are "deeply troubled" that the president is considering nominating Rice secretary of state, and that they "strongly oppose" such a nomination. 
"Ambassador Rice is widely viewed as having either willfully or incompetently misled the American public in the Benghazi matter," the letter states. We noted Tuesday with some amusement that Rep. Jim Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat and member of the Congressional Black Caucus, was claiming that "incompetent" was the latest code word for "black." 
The Post focuses on the critics rather than their choice of words. Here's the passage that outrages Jacobson: "Could it be, as members of the Congressional Black Caucus are charging, that the signatories of the letter are targeting Ms. Rice because she is an African American woman? The signatories deny that, and we can't know their hearts. What we do know is that more than 80 of the signatories are white males, and nearly half are from states of the former Confederacy."

Rep. Jeff Duncan is suspiciously pale, according to the Washington Post. 
Let's examine this argument carefully. The Post acknowledges that "we can't know their hearts." But it finds a (literally) prima facie reason to suspect them of invidious motives: Almost all of them are persons of pallor. The Post is casting aspersions on Duncan and his colleagues based explicitly on the color of their skin. And it is accusing them of racism! 
A couple of other items related to race and politics caught our attention over the Thanksgiving weekend. First, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., an Illinois Democrat and CBC member, resigned from Congress "amid federal ethics investigations and a diagnosis of mental illness," as the Chicago Tribune reports. That sets up a special election to fill the vacancy: 
Some Democrats quickly offered to broker a nominee to avoid several African-American contenders splitting the vote in the heavily Democratic and majority black 2nd Congressional District, which could allow a white candidate to win.
This passes with neither editorial comment nor a disapproving quote. It's hard to imagine the same absence of reaction if a group of pols offered "to broker a nominee" with the goal of preventing a black candidate from winning a white-majority district. 
Then there's the email from the Obama campaign--yeah, they're still coming, though at a slower pace than before the election--inviting supporters to take a survey. Among the questions: "Which constituency groups do you identify yourself with? Select all that apply." 
There are 22 boxes you can check off. Some are ideological ("Environmentalists" and perhaps "Labor"), some occupational ("Educators," "Healthcare professionals"), some regional ("Americans abroad," "Rural Americans"). There's a box for "Women" but none for men, though there's a separate "Gender" question, which hilariously has three options: "Male," "Female" and "Other/no answer." TourĂ© will no doubt soon inveigh against the "otherization" of the Gender No. 3. 
What caught our attention were the ethnic categories: "African Americans," "Arab-Americans," "Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders," Jewish Americans," "Latinos" and "Native Americans" (the last, of course, refers to American Indians, not natural-born citizens). 
Notice anything missing? 
One explanation for the absence of a "white" or "European-American" category (or, alternatively, several dozen specific European ethnicities) could be that whites tend to vote Republican, and the campaign is interested in Democratic-leaning voting blocs. But several other of the Obama survey categories lean toward the GOP, too: "People of faith," "Rural Americans," "Seniors," "Small business owners" and "Veterans/military families." Counterpart groups that are Democratic-leaning or swing-voting are missing from the list, too, including nonbelievers, urban and suburban dwellers, and the middle-aged (though there are categories for both "Young professionals" and "Youth"). 
The reason for the absence of a "Whites" category is that white identity politics is all but nonexistent in America today. That wasn't always the case, of course: For a century after the Civil War, Southern white supremacists were an important part of the Democratic Party coalition. They were defeated and discredited in the 1960s, and the Democrats, still the party of identity politics, switched their focus to various nonwhite minorities. 
Obama's re-election was a triumph for this new identity politics--but the Post's nasty editorial hints at a reason to think this form of politics may have long-term costs for both the party and the country. 
The trouble with a diverse coalition based on ethnic or racial identity is that solidarity within each group can easily produce conflicts among the groups. Permissive immigration policies, for example, may be good for Hispanics and Asians but bad for blacks. Racial preferences in college admissions help blacks and Hispanics at the expense of Asians. 
One way of holding together such a disparate coalition is by delivering prosperity, so that everyone can feel he's doing well. Failing that, another way is by identifying a common adversary--such as the "white male." During Obama's first term, the demonization of the "white male" was common among left-liberal commentators, especially MSNBC types. The Post has now lent its considerably more mainstream institutional voice to this form of bigotry. 
This seems likely to weaken the taboo against white identity politics. Whites who are not old enough to remember the pre-civil-rights era--Rep. Duncan, for instance, was born in 1966--have every reason to feel aggrieved by being targeted in this way. 
The danger to Democrats is that they still need white votes. According to this year's exit polls, Obama won re-election while receiving only 39% of the white vote. But that's higher than Mitt Romney's percentage among blacks (6%), Latinos (27%), Asian-Americans (26%) or "Other" (38%). It's true that Republicans suffer electorally for the perception that they are hostile to minorities, but Democrats also stand to suffer for being hostile to whites. 
The danger for the country is that a racially polarized electorate will produce a hostile, balkanized culture. In 2008 Obama held out the hope of a postracial America. His re-election raises the possibility of a most-racial America.

Well said. But, notice, that as a white guy writing for white guys, Taranto can't help but say that the problem with the current orgy of demonization of white guys is that it's bad for everybody, not that it's bad for white guys.

Presumably, Taranto of the WSJ has been reading me for a long time. But he's kind of new to writing about this. So, he may figure that his nicely balance appeal to fairness and the public weal might persuade Democrats to moderate their course by frightening them that they are inciting a white backlash. But, I suspect they will have a succinct yet far-reaching reply:

"Shut up, you loser."

Why compromise when you can have it all? Control of the political process and control of the discourse?

What do you think Jorge Ramos, Univision's anchorman, will say to himself when reading this? "Hey, Taranto, your job is to promote 'There shall be open borders' and get my taxes cut. If I was worried about the natives I wouldn't insult them so much. So, get back to work and no more mouthing off, or I'll call you a racist for asking for equality and fairness."

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 MarĂ­n, 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 ORDOĂ‘EZ - 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?