Mayor: Fight Crime by Being More Like NYC
NEW YORK (AP) — New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg says places that want to reduce gun violence might want to emulate the Big Apple.
Mayor: Fight Crime by Being More Like NYC
NEW YORK (AP) — New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg says places that want to reduce gun violence might want to emulate the Big Apple.
With gun control, murder, and race much in the news, it’s worth noting that the Obama Administration has solved its longstanding problem that, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, blacks commit the majority of homicides in the US.
How I am partly to blame for Mass Immigration
When I was a Revolutionary Marxist, we were all in favour of as much immigration as possible.
It wasn't because we liked immigrants, but because we didn't like Britain. We saw immigrants - from anywhere - as allies against the staid, settled, conservative society that our country still was at the end of the Sixties.
Also, we liked to feel oh, so superior to the bewildered people - usually in the poorest parts of Britain - who found their neighbourhoods suddenly transformed into supposedly 'vibrant communities'.
If they dared to express the mildest objections, we called them bigots.
Revolutionary students didn't come from such 'vibrant' areas (we came, as far as I could tell, mostly from Surrey and the nicer parts of London).
We might live in 'vibrant' places for a few (usually squalid) years, amid unmown lawns and overflowing dustbins.
But we did so as irresponsible, childless transients - not as homeowners, or as parents of school-age children, or as old people hoping for a bit of serenity at the ends of their lives.
When we graduated and began to earn serious money, we generally headed for expensive London enclaves and became extremely choosy about where our children went to school, a choice we happily denied the urban poor, the ones we sneered at as 'racists'.
What did we know, or care, of the great silent revolution which even then was beginning to transform the lives of the British poor?
To us, it meant patriotism and tradition could always be derided as 'racist'.
And it also meant cheap servants for the rich new middle-class, for the first time since 1939, as well as cheap restaurants and - later on - cheap builders and plumbers working off the books.
It wasn't our wages that were depressed, or our work that was priced out of the market. Immigrants didn't do the sort of jobs we did.
They were no threat to us.
The only threat might have come from the aggrieved British people, but we could always stifle their protests by suggesting that they were modern-day fascists.
I have learned since what a spiteful, self-righteous, snobbish and arrogant person I was (and most of my revolutionary comrades were, too).
I have seen places that I knew and felt at home in, changed completely in a few short years.
I have imagined what it might be like to have grown old while stranded in shabby, narrow streets where my neighbours spoke a different language and I gradually found myself becoming a lonely, shaky voiced stranger in a world I once knew, but which no longer knew me.
I have felt deeply, hopelessly sorry that I did and said nothing in defence of those whose lives were turned upside down, without their ever being asked, and who were warned very clearly that, if they complained, they would be despised outcasts.
Obama administration pushes banks to make home loans to people with weaker credit
By Zachary A. Goldfarb, Updated: Tuesday, April 2, 5:48 PM
The Obama administration is engaged in a broad push to make more home loans available to people with weaker credit, an effort that officials say will help power the economic recovery but that skeptics say could open the door to the risky lending that caused the housing crash in the first place. ...
In response, administration officials say they are working to get banks to lend to a wider range of borrowers by taking advantage of taxpayer-backed programs — including those offered by the Federal Housing Administration — that insure home loans against default.
Housing officials are urging the Justice Department to provide assurances to banks, which have become increasingly cautious, that they will not face legal or financial recriminations if they make loans to riskier borrowers who meet government standards but later default.
Officials are also encouraging lenders to use more subjective judgment in determining whether to offer a loan and are seeking to make it easier for people who owe more than their properties are worth to refinance at today’s low interest rates, among other steps. ...
“If you were going to tell people in low-income and moderate-income communities and communities of color there was a housing recovery, they would look at you as if you had two heads,” said John Taylor, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a nonprofit housing organization. “It is very difficult for people of low and moderate incomes to refinance or buy homes.”
“If the only people who can get a loan have near-perfect credit and are putting down 25 percent, you’re leaving out of the market an entire population of creditworthy folks, which constrains demand and slows the recovery,” said Jim Parrot, who until January was the senior adviser on housing for the White House’s National Economic Council.
The effort to provide more certainty to banks is just one of several policies the administration is undertaking. The FHA is also urging lenders to take what officials call “compensating factors” into account and use more subjective judgment when deciding whether to make a loan — such as looking at a borrower’s overall savings.
“My view is that there are lots of creditworthy borrowers that are below 720 or 700 -- all the way down the credit score spectrum,” Galante said. “It’s important you look at the totality of that borrower’s ability to pay.”
Sought or Sold? Social Embeddedness and Consumer Decisions in the Mortgage Market
Carolina Reid,
Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
Working Paper, December 2010
The anecdotes also provide insight into why so many borrowers ended up in loans that they could not afford over the long term, and why borrowers with prime credits cores—particularly among Hispanic and Black borrowers—received a subprime loan. Did borrowers actively “seek” out subprime loans, or were they “sold” loans by unscrupulous brokers and lenders?
In the interviews, three key themes related to social embeddedness emerged. ... social networks to help them identify mortgage brokers and lenders, and particularly for the immigrant and African‐American respondents, revealed a strong preference for brokers who were part of the local community [i.e., racial community, not geographical community). This preference was driven by perceptions that outsiders would not treat them fairly, and that a broker who “understood” their situation would be more likely to result in a positive outcome.
The shared identity that borrowers felt with their brokers, coupled with the broker’s perceived expertise about the mortgage process, led borrowers to trust their advice and not seek external validation of the information provided. As I show using the quantitative data, this led to mortgage outcome sthat were not necessarily in their best economic interest.
One of the strong themes that emerged from the interviews was the extent to which respondents of color expressed their desire to work with a broker from their own community or background, and that they turned to friends and family members to identify a broker or lender that had a history of serving other families in the community.
In, numerous interviews, borrowers said that they turned to their social networks and relations in the neighborhood to identify a local mortgage broker who would be willing to “work with someone like me.” Part of this was driven by a lack of trust in traditional lenders, and several respondents in Oakland noted a historical distrust of banks in the community.
….Empirical research studies, however, have revealed that during the subprime boom, yield spread premiums coupled with a push for a greater volume of loan originations provided a financial incentive for brokers to work against the interests of the borrower(e.g. Ernst, Bocia and Li 2008). In addition, since there was no statutory employer‐employee relationship between lending institutions and brokers, there were few legal protections to ensure that brokers provide borrowers with fair and balanced information. This aligns with the “trust” that social relations engender. …
In both Stockton and Oakland, respondents did not seem to be aware of the potential for perverse incentives on the part of brokers, and instead trusted them fully to actin their best interests.
… The quantitative data, however, shows that the decision to “trust” a broker often worked against the best financial interests of the borrower, especially for minority borrowers. Research has shown that regardless of their FICO score, Blacks and Hispanics were much more likely to receive a high‐cost loan, especially when that loan was facilitated by a mortgage broker. This hold strue even when we control for other factors, such as local housing and mortgage market conditions, fico score, and loan to value and debt to income ratio.
Indeed, in a multivariate model that controls for the majority of underwriting variables, we find that origination by a mortgage broker has a large statistically significant effect on the likelihood of getting a high cost loan for certain borrowers, and that this effect is greater for Hispanics and Blacks. (Figure 5) The marginal effect of using a broker is 22 percent for Hispanics, and 18 percent for Blacks. While it may not seem like an extremely large effect, it is approximately equivalent to a 200 point decrease in a borrower’s FICO score. In contrast, white borrowers who used the services of a mortgage broker were 4 percent less likely to get a high cost loan, suggesting that in their case, on average, brokers helped them to navigate a better mortgage product based on their risk characteristics.
So, were these loans “sold” or “sought”? While certainly not conclusive, the interviews suggest both are true. First, mortgage brokers in Oakland and Stockton were specifically targeting their services to borrowers with lower FICO scores, and much of the marketing focused on reaching borrowers with poor credit records. (Figure 6) Second, borrowers with lower credit scores actively sought out mortgage brokers who they had heard would help them wade through the paperwork and get a mortgage approved. What was less clear from the interviews was whether or not brokers had intentionally duped borrowers into taking on irresponsible loan products.
U.K. Independence Party finds its voice amid growing anti-immigrant wave
By Anthony Faiola, Published: March 31 | Updated: Monday, April 1, 4:46 AM
EASTLEIGH, ENGLAND — For the United Kingdom Independence Party, defeat has never looked this much like victory.
After a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Commons was jailed on criminal charges, this struggling railroad town near the English Channel held a special election to pick his successor. The anti-immigrant U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) took up the challenge, setting up offices next to a Turkish kebab shop and narrowly losing its bid to win its first elected seat in the British Parliament.
Its best-yet showing in a national race has, nevertheless, thrust into the national limelight a political movement that is part of a wave of anti-immigrant populism surging across Europe. The outcome of the Feb. 28 vote, coupled with national polls showing UKIP support at an all-time high, seemed to terrify Britain’s three traditional parties. In response, the Conservatives, the Labor Party and the Liberal Democrats are suddenly tripping over each other in a race to see who can more closely echo the Independence Party’s hard-line pledge to get tougher on immigration.
UKIP’s ability to spark a policy stampede without even winning a seat in Parliament underscores the increasing capability of anti-immigrant forces to set the agenda amid Europe’s economic malaise. An issue at the core of the party’s platform is the withdrawal of Britain from the European Union to stem the tide of immigration — as an E.U. member, Britain is legally bound to allow the citizens of 24 other European countries to resettle here with few restrictions — which speaks to the concerns of a continent where a debt crisis and high employment are increasingly making foreigners the target of popular rage.
That fear is surging as countries including Britain, Germany and France prepare for new flows of migrants from two of Europe’s poorest countries — Bulgaria and Romania, whose citizens will win unlimited access to the E.U.’s labor market as of Jan. 1.
With concern growing that the Independence Party will poach more and more voters from the political right, Prime Minister David Cameron, a Conservative, last week announced a plan to make it tougher for recently arrived immigrants to claim welfare benefits. The government additionally announced a dramatic makeover of the U.K. Border Agency to deal more expeditiously — and harshly — with illegal immigrants.
Not to be outdone, Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister from Cameron’s junior coalition partner, the Liberal Democrats, announced his own plan to control illegal immigration. In a speech less than three weeks after the vote in Eastleigh, Clegg vowed to force visitors from countries with high numbers of visa violators to post a $1,500 bond — with the cash returnable only upon their departure from Britain.
At the same time, Ed Miliband, leader of the opposition Labor Party, has offered a mea culpa for lax immigration policies during his party’s rule from 1997 to 2010, a period when net migration to Britain soared. In an apparent reference to then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s campaign gaffe in 2010 — when the Labor leader was caught off camera describing an elderly white woman as “bigoted” for complaining about immigration — Miliband said: “It’s not prejudiced when people worry about immigration. It’s understandable. And we were wrong in the past when we dismissed people’s concerns.”
Although not wholly new — Britain’s top parties have for years been leaning toward tougher immigration policies— observers say the steps taken since the Independence Party’s surge have amounted to some of the most aggressive yet.
“There is no doubting the influence of UKIP is now being felt in our immigration debate, partly because the main parties have refused to have a debate about this before,” said Keith Vaz, a Labor Party lawmaker. “We should stamp out illegal immigration, but we also need to avoid an arms race between the parties as they react to UKIP support.”
With a debt crisis and deep austerity entering their fourth year, Europe is facing a period of record unemployment that has allowed unpredictable political forces to take root. By comparison to some of these unconventional movements — such as the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn in Greece — the U.K. Independence Party is relatively mild.
The party was founded in the 1990s by British politicians furious about London’s acceptance of the Maastricht Treaty, which created the European Union. Today, the party is led by the spiffily dressed Nigel Farage — a savvy, speaks-in-sound-bites politician known for his dry sense of British humor. Although he is campaigning heavily for Britain to leave the E.U., his wife is a German national.
Under his leadership, the party has largely avoided the racially and religiously tinged jabs against Muslim immigrants taken by, say, the Nationalists in France.
Rather, UKIP ascribes to a school of thought always just under the surface in Britain — that this is a nation that is culturally apart from Europe and has no business being part of that exotic world across the English Channel.
Those sentiments have been exacerbated by an influx of hundreds of thousands of Europeans — mostly from the east — who over the past two decades have taken advantage of the E.U.’s open-borders policy to find jobs and resettle in Britain.
This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
... This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Leader: Liberalism now feels inadequate in this new age of insecurity
The stakes could not be higher.
BY NEW STATESMAN PUBLISHED 27 MARCH 2013
Ever since the Thatcher era, British politics has been defined by forms of economic and social liberalism. The right won the argument for the former and the left the argument for the latter, or so it is said. Yet in the post-crash era, this ideological settlement is beginning to fracture. ...
Two thinkers, Phillip Blond and Maurice Glasman, and their respective factions – the Red Tories and Blue Labour – were quicker to recognise this than most. Mr Blond may no longer have the ear of the Prime Minister, if he ever did, but since the appointment of Jon Cruddas as the head of Labour’s policy review, the Blue Labour faction has emerged as the dominant intellectual influence on the Labour Party.
With his support for a technical baccalaureate, employee representation on remuneration committees and a new network of regional banks, the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, has embraced elements of the German social-market model long championed by Lord Glasman. At the same time, Blue Labour has encouraged the party to begin to articulate concerns on social issues that have long been neglected by the left and to speak about culture as well as economics.
In a recent speech to the Fabian Women’s Network, Diane Abbott, the shadow public health minister and once on the hard left of the party, spoke out against the “sexualisation” of childhood. “For so long,” she said, “it’s been argued that overt, public displays of sexuality are an enlightened liberation. But I believe that for many, the pressure of conforming to hyper-sexualisation and its pitfalls is a prison.” Ms Abbott concluded: “We’ve got to build a society based on open-minded family values and not ‘anything-goes’ market values.”
More contentiously, in the case of immigration, Blue Labour has provided Mr Miliband with a language in which to engage with what went wrong under New Labour. According to Tony Blair’s globalist narrative, an open immigration policy was an unalloyed good. The interests of workers who saw their wages undercut and who felt confused and left behind by the pace of change were subordinate to those of the corporations that benefited from a larger and more flexible labour pool. Mr Miliband appears to have accepted the argument of Lord Glasman, Mr Cruddas and others that the Labour Party was too slow to respond to such anxieties among its natural supporters in working-class communities. He has argued that Labour was wrong not to impose transitional controls on migration from accession states such as Poland, as other members of the EU had done. He has pledged to ban recruitment agencies that operate exclusively by bringing in foreign workers to Britain without trying to fill vacancies locally. If it is true that immigration has had a generally beneficial effect on aggregate output, it is also true, as Mr Miliband has observed, that: “People don’t live their lives in the aggregate.”
Lord Glasman has found himself on the less privileged side of the central ideological divide of the 21st Century—a gap that sprawls across the more familiar ideological chasms of the 20th Century. The crucial question is no longer capitalism vs. communism, but globalism v. localism, imperial centralization v. self-rule, cosmopolitanism v. patriotism, elitism v. populism, diversity v. particularism, homogeneity v. heterogeneity, and high-low v. middle.
Barack Obama, for example, epitomizes the first side of these dichotomies, especially the high-low coalition. By being half-black, he enjoys the totemic aura of the low, but has all the advantages of the high. He has never, as far as anyone can tell, had a thought cross his mind that would raise an eyebrow at a Davos Conference.
In contrast to the President, Glasman is certainly an original thinker. But anybody on his side of these new dichotomies faces a tactical disadvantage.
Because globalists want the whole world to be all the same, they share common talking points, strategies, conferences, media, and so forth.
In contrast, because the localists want the freedom to rule themselves, they often don’t even realize who else is on the same side of this divide.
For example, to most Americans, "socialism" is a very foreign-sounding word. To a lot of Brits, however, socialism is what their grandfathers looked forward to while they fought WWII and then came home to create the National Health Service. ...
Glasman recently described Orwell as "a conservative patriot working in a socialist tradition," and much the same could be said for Glasman himself.
Half of Australians want end to immigration: poll
AFP News – Tue, May 22, 2012
Some 50 percent of Australians want an end to the nation's immigration programme because they believe the country has too many people, a poll showed on Tuesday.
The survey of 2,000 people, conducted for the tabloid Sydney Daily Telegraph newspaper, found 51 percent thought "our population is too high (and) we should stop immigration".
Australia has some 23 million people, compared to 19.6 million a decade ago.
Canberra set its immigration programme for the year to June at 185,000 places, with another 13,750 slots available to refugees on humanitarian grounds.
But in the poll only 32 percent of respondents felt Australia should welcome more immigrants and almost two thirds, some 65 percent, said "migrants should adopt the Australian way of life".
The responses revealed a marked swing away from the more tolerant attitudes of previous surveys conducted in 2005, 2001 and 1995, the newspaper said.
Immigration expert Bob Birrell said fears over job security in the shaky global economy and local pressures on infrastructure were behind the shift in opinion.
Analyzing Foreclosures Among High-income Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino Borrowers in Prince George’s County, Maryland
Katrin B. Anacker, James H. Carr, and Archana Pradhan
Abstract
Although Prince George’s County, Maryland, is the wealthiest Black/African American county in the nation, the national foreclosure crisis has had a profound effect on it. Using a merged data set consisting of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), U.S. Census, and Lender Processing Services (LPS) data and utilizing a logistic regression model, we analyzed the likelihood of foreclosure in Prince George’s County in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. We found that the borrowers in Black/African American neighborhoods with high-income were 42% more likely and Hispanic/Latino neighborhoods with high income were 159% more likely than the borrowers in non-Hispanic White neighborhoods to go into foreclosure, controlling for key demographic, socioeconomic, and financial variables.
Analyzing Determinants of Foreclosure of Middle-Income Borrowers of Color in the Atlanta, GA Metropolitan Area
Katrin B. Anacker
George Mason University - School of Public Policy
James H. Carr
Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae)
Archana Pradhan
National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC)
July 14, 2012
GMU School of Public Policy Research Paper No. 2013-01
Abstract:
Foreclosures have disproportionately affected borrowers and communities of color. Many studies have concentrated on the nation and specific metropolitan areas, but few academic studies have focused on Atlanta. Using a merged data set consisting of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), U.S. Census, and Lender Processing Services (LPS) data and utilizing a logistic regression model, we analyze the likelihood of foreclosure in the Atlanta, GA metropolitan area. We find that African American borrowers are 52 percent and Hispanic borrowers 159 percent more likely to go into foreclosure, controlling for key financial variables. We also find that African American middle-income borrowers are 35 percent more likely to go into foreclosure. Moreover, we find that exotic mortgage products, such as balloon mortgages, adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) and mortgages with a prepayment penalty have a higher likelihood of foreclosure than standard 30-year fixed rate mortgages.
By Steve Sailer on May 19, 2007 at 1:00am
Under the leadership of Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), various Senators and Bush Administration officials pulled an all-nighter behind closed doors on Wednesday. By noon Thursday, the bleary-eyed politicos had concocted an illegal alien amnesty (a.k.a., "comprehensive immigration reform") bill.
I presume politicians don't have Smoke-Filled Rooms anymore. So you could call this the Red Bull-Filled Room approach to deciding the fate of America.
No committee hearings are to be held on what may well be the most important legislation of the decade. As Senator Chuck Grassley [R-IA] correctly pointed out:
"It's disappointing and even ironic how the deal announced today skirts the democratic processes of Congress. It was cut by a group of senators operating outside the committees of jurisdiction and without public hearings on key components."
As of early Saturday morning, May 19, the public has not even been shown the text of the bill. The ultimately failed amnesty legislation the Senate passed last year was 118,277 words long. This may well be more complicated. A photo of the first draft shows it to be almost twice as thick as a Bible.
So reading the new bill carefully will likely take at least 10 uninterrupted hours, and quite possibly twice that, a span of time that few Senators have readily available. To truly understand how the legislation would work and what its long term implications are would take weeks of questioning and debate.
Nonetheless, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) wants to have the entire bill passed by Memorial Day, a week from now.
Even more appallingly, Reid wants to hold the crucial "cloture" vote to shut off the possibility of a filibuster, the best chance to derail it, on Monday, May 21! [Two days later]
It is utterly impossible for the United States Senate to exercise the due diligence commensurate with the importance of major immigration legislation without extensive hearings.
The pro-amnesty Senate hearings spearheaded by McCain in early 2006 aroused tremendous opposition among the public. Although an amnesty bill passed the Senate in May, House Republican leaders wisely refused to be lured into a conference committee to reconcile their enforcement-only bill with the Senate's diametrically opposed bill. Instead, they held additional hearings on immigration last summer around the country. Foolishly, Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) tried to hold his own hearings in favor of the Senate bill, but the result of the dueling hearings was the collapse of any chance for amnesty last year.
From a good government standpoint, what we are witnessing is perhaps the most irresponsible and shameless attempt to hustle a pig in a poke past the public in recent memory. Of course, that's the whole point of the exercise—to not let us simple citizens in on the process of deciding who our fellow citizens will be.
It's only a modest exaggeration to call this an attempted coup against the American people.
Of course, the Main Stream Media finds this elite putsch admirable. U.S. News' Political Bulletin commented on Friday: "Media Revels in Bipartisanship Bliss The bipartisan process that led to the Senate deal is being celebrated in media reports." Today's press probably would have spun the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact as a triumph of bipartisan bridge-building. Who cares if the American people have to play the role of the betrayed Poles?
Why this obscene haste?
Rubio is joining with other Senators who are urging a go-slow approach, such as Ted Cruz and Jeff Sessions, who may be urging a slowdown so the armies of the right have time to mobilize and strike fear into any reform-minded Republican officials, killing reform.
Indeed, one group opposed to reform has explicitly called on Senators to slow the process down, apparently for the purposes of derailing it. And we’ve seen this before: back in 2007, opponents of reform similarly tried to slow the process, with Senator John Cornyn urging colleagues to “slow down and read this bill” because Americans had not yet digested the plan. Now, six years later, we’re again hearing the calls to “slow down.” But the American people have made their verdict clear: They want a path to citizenship.
SATURDAY ESSAY: Why we on the Left made an epic mistake on immigration
By David Goodhart
PUBLISHED: 18:21 EST, 22 March 2013 | UPDATED: 18:21 EST, 22 March 2013
Among Left-leaning ‘Hampstead’ liberals like me, there has long been what you might call a ‘discrimination assumption’ when it comes to the highly charged issue of immigration.
Our instinctive reaction has been that Britain is a relentlessly racist country bent on thwarting the lives of ethnic minorities, that the only decent policy is to throw open our doors to all and that those with doubts about how we run our multi-racial society are guilty of prejudice.
And that view — echoed in Whitehall, Westminster and town halls around the country — has been the prevailing ideology, setting the tone for the immigration debate.
But for some years, this has troubled me and, gradually, I have changed my mind.
... I am now convinced that public opinion is right and Britain has had too much immigration too quickly.
For 30 years, the Left has blinded itself with sentiment about diversity. But we got it wrong.
I still believe that large-scale immigration has made Britain livelier and more dynamic than it would otherwise have been. I believe, too, that this country is significantly less racist than it once was.
In many places immigration is working as the textbooks say it should with a degree of harmony, with minorities upwardly mobile and creating interesting new hybrid identities in mixed suburbs.
But it has also resulted in too many areas in which ethnic minorities lead almost segregated lives — notably in the northern ‘mill towns’ and other declining industrial regions, which in the Sixties and Seventies attracted one of the most clannish minorities of modern times, rural Kashmiri Pakistanis.
In Leicester and Bradford, almost half of the ethnic population live in what are technically ghettos (defined as areas where minorities form more than two-thirds of the population). Meanwhile, parts of white working-class Britain have been left feeling neither valued nor useful, believing that they have been displaced by newcomers not only in the job market but also in the national story itself.
Those in the race lobby have been slow to recognise that strong collective identities are legitimate for majorities as well as minorities, for white as well as for black people.
For a democratic state to have any meaning, it must ‘belong’ to existing citizens. They must have special rights over non-citizens. Immigration must be managed with their interests in mind. But it has not been.
The justification for such a large and unpopular change has to be that the economic benefits are significant and measurable. But they are not.
One of the liberal elite’s myths is that we are a ‘mongrel nation’ that has always experienced high inflows of outsiders. But this isn’t true. From 1066 until 1950, immigration was almost non-existent (excluding Ireland) — a quarter of a million at the most, mainly Huguenots and Jews.
Post-World War II immigration has been on a completely different scale from anything that went before. These days, more people arrive on our shores as immigrants in a single year than did so in the entire period from 1066 to 1950, excluding wartime.
... By 2066, according to one demographer, white Britons will be in a minority.
This is already the case in some towns and cities, including London, Leicester, Slough and Luton, with Birmingham expected to follow in the near future.
If Britain had a clear and confident sense of its national culture and was good at integrating people, then perhaps this speed of change would be of little concern. But this is not the case.
We are deep into a huge social experiment. To give it a chance of working, we need to heed the ‘slow down’ signs that the electorate is waving. And all the more so given that the low economic growth era we are now in means people’s grievances cannot easily be bought off with rising wages and public spending.
The fault lies with our leaders, not with the people who came for a better life. There has been a huge gap between our ruling elite’s views and those of ordinary people on the street. This was brought home to me when dining at an Oxford college and the eminent person next to me, a very senior civil servant, said: ‘When I was at the Treasury, I argued for the most open door possible to immigration [because] I saw it as my job to maximise global welfare not national welfare.’
I was even more surprised when the notion was endorsed by another guest, one of the most powerful television executives in the country. He, too, felt global welfare was paramount and that he had a greater obligation to someone in Burundi than to someone in Birmingham.
Such grand notions run counter to the way most people in this country think or arrange their priorities.
The British political class has never prepared existing citizens for something as game-changing as large-scale immigration, nor has it done a good job at explaining what the point of large-scale immigration was and whose interests it was meant to serve.
Crucially, they failed to control the inflow more overtly in the interests of existing citizens. On the contrary, the idea that immigration should be unambiguously in the interests of existing citizens was blurred from the start.
Then, whenever there were problems with immigrant communities, the tendency was for the host society to be blamed for not being sufficiently accommodating or for being racist, rather than considering the self-inflicted wounds of some minority cultures.
Parts of white working-class Britain believe that they have been displaced by newcomers not only in the job market but also in the national story itself
Thus, the absence of fathers in many African-Caribbean households was excused as a cultural trait that just had to be accepted rather than a dereliction of duty that needed addressing.
Yes, being a newcomer can be hard, even in a liberal society such as Britain’s that today offers undreamed of protections and rights compared with earlier eras. But what has been largely ignored is that mass immigration makes big demands on host communities, too, and a successful strategy must engage the attention, consent and sympathy of the host majority as well.
Democratic common sense demands that politics and law cannot concern themselves only with the problems of minorities. The majority must have a voice, too, in how we manage a multi-racial society.
What, for example, do we say to the elderly white people of the Pollards Hill estate in Merton, in South-West London — which I visited on my travels — many of whom feel displaced and disrupted by the arrival of a large Ghanaian population in recent years?
To the local whites, the Ghanaians are not fitting in but imposing their own way of life on the neighbourhood. Similar small battles are taking place in thousands of other housing estates up and down the country.
Why the left is wrong about immigration
Mass immigration is damaging to social democracy, argues David Goodhart in his controversial new book – it erodes our national solidarity. What's more, welcoming people from poor countries into rich ones does nothing for global equality
David Goodhart
In busy offices up and down the land some of Britain's most idealistic young men and women – working in human rights NGOs and immigration law firms – struggle every day to usher into this society as many people as possible from poor countries.
They are motivated by the admirable belief that all human lives are equally valuable. And like some of the older 1960s liberal baby boomers, who were reacting against the extreme nationalism of the first half of the 20th century, they seem to feel few national attachments. Indeed, they feel no less a commitment to the welfare of someone in Burundi than they do to a fellow citizen in Birmingham. Perhaps they even feel a greater commitment.
Charity used to begin at home. But the best fast-stream civil servants now want to work in DfID, the international development department. Their idealism is focused more on raising up the global poor or worrying about global warming than on sorting out Britain's social care system.
Many people on the left, indeed many Guardian readers, are sympathetic to these global citizen values: they see that the world has become smaller and more interdependent, and feel uneasy about policies that prioritise the interests of British citizens. The progressive assumption seems to be that it is fine to have an attachment to friends and family, and perhaps a neighbourhood or a city – "I'm proud to be a Londoner" – and, of course, to humanity as a whole. But the nation state – especially a once dominant one like Britain (above all its English core) – is considered something old-fashioned and illiberal, an irrational group attachment that smart people have grown out of.
... If all human lives are equally valuable, how can we any longer favour our fellow national citizens over the impoverished masses of the global south?
This "post-nationalism" nags away at the conscience of many liberal-minded people.
But it is a category error. It does not follow from a belief in human equality that we have equal obligations to everyone on the planet. All people are equal but they are not all equal to us. Most people in Britain today accept the idea of human equality, but remain moral particularists and moderate nationalists, believing that we have a hierarchy of obligations starting with our family and rippling out via the nation state to the rest of humanity. Britain spends 25 times more every year on the NHS than on development aid. To most people, even people who think of themselves as internationalists, this represents a perfectly natural reflection of our layered obligations, but to a true universalist it must seem like a crime.
Many people on the left are still transfixed by the historic sins of nationalism. But if people are squeamish about the word "nation" they should use another: citizenship or just society. And the modern law-bound, liberal nation state is hardly a menacing political institution. You join automatically by birth (or by invitation) and an allegiance to the liberal nation state is compatible with being highly critical of the current social order and with support for bodies such as Nato and the EU.
Indeed, the modern nation state is the only institution that can currently offer what liberals, of both right and left, want: government accountability, cross-class and generational solidarity, and a sense of collective identification. As societies become more diverse, we need this glue of a national story more not less. This is ultimately a pragmatic argument. The nation state is not a good in itself, it is just the institutional arrangement that can deliver the democratic, welfare, and psychological outcomes that most people seem to want. It is possible that in the future more global or regional institutions might deliver these things; the EU is one prototype but its current difficulties underline what a slow and stuttering process this is likely to be. (Germany, the least nationalistic of the big European states, was happy to spend about $1tn on unification with east Germany but is very reluctant to spend much smaller sums supporting the southern European economies.)
Anti-nationalists also underestimate just how much the nation state has liberalised in recent decades. One might say that the great achievement of post-1945 politics, in Europe at least, has been to "feminise" the nation state.
The nation was once about defending or taking territory and about organised violence.
But now that Britain's participation in a world war is highly improbable, the focus has switched to the internal sharing of resources within the nation – and the traditionally feminine "hearth and home" issues of protecting the young, old, disabled and poor. Notwithstanding recent trimming, Britain's social security budget has increased 40% in just the last 15 years.
The modern nation state has become far more inclusive in recent generations and is underpinned by unprecedented social provision, free to all insiders – but towards the outside world it has become, or is trying to become, more exclusionary. There is nothing perverse or mean-spirited about this. As the value of national citizenship in Britain has risen, so the bureaucracy of border controls has had to grow.
No one knows for sure how many people would come to live in a rich country like Britain if border controls were abolished. But in many poor parts of the world, in Africa in particular, there has been rapid urbanisation without industrialisation or economic growth or job creation. That has created a large surplus of urban labour well connected enough to know about the possibilities of life in the west and with a miserable enough life to want to get there. Who could say confidently that 5 million or 10 million people would not turn up in the space of a couple of years, especially to a country with the global connections that Britain already has?
A few countries, such as the Philippines, have become part-dependent on exporting people to rich countries and benefit in many ways from the process.
But they are the exception. Most poor countries are actively hostile to permanent emigration. And it is hardly surprising. Desperately poor countries cannot afford to lose their most ambitious and expensively educated people.
... Rich countries should be saying: we will help you to grow faster and to hold on to your best people through appropriate trade and aid policies; we will also agree not to lure away your most skilled people, so long as you agree to take back your illegal immigrants (which many countries don't). The coalition government's combination of a lower immigration target and its exemption of the aid programme from cuts is an expression of this idea.
Average height of adolescents in the Dinaric Alps.
[Article in French]
Pineau JC, Delamarche P, Bozinovic S.
Dynamique de l'évolution humaine, CNRS, UPR 2147, 44, rue de l'Amiral-Mouchez, 75014 Paris, France. jc.pineau@wanadoo.fr
This study contributes to an update of average heights among European populations. Our investigation covering 2705 boys and 2842 girls aged 17 years, shows that, contrary to the general belief, adolescents of the Dinaric Alps are, on average, the tallest in Europe. With an average height of 185,6 cm [6'-1.1"], they are taller than Dutch adolescents (184 cm on average [6'-0.4"]).
Above all, the density of very tall subjects appears to be characteristic of the Dinaric Alps, since 28% measure 190 cm [6'-2.8"] or more in height, as opposed to only 20% in Holland and 1.5% in France.
Although our information is not complete, adolescent girls in the Dinaric Alps, with an average height of 171 cm [5'-7.3"] come a close second to girls in Holland.
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| Artist's conception of Cesar Chavez (Chavez's photo unavailable on Internet as of press time) |
| Lee Trevino |
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