May 8, 2013

Gang of Eight's well-oiled push becoming a ClusterZuck

A weasel
Repeat after me: The Gang of Eight and Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg and the Gang of Eight. 

It's a meme. Spread it.

A long time ago I wrote that much of modern journalism has become a form of marketing criticism. Just like movie reviews consist of critiques of how well the movie was made, the news increasingly consists of critiques of how skillfully the special interests are pushing their interests. For months, most of the "news" about immigration has consisted of admiring puff pieces about how seamlessly the amnesty pushers had gotten all their ducks in a row, marketing-wise. Americans, especially journalists, love a winner, and the Gang of Eight had checked all the boxes in setting up their marketing to make themselves look like winners.

Now, though, the Gang of Eight's once-smooth running promotional hotrod is starting to look instead like a circus jalopy bursting with clowns. The focus of the push is supposed to be the inoffensive face of Marco Rubio, not Marco Zuckerberg, who was the subject of a hit movie about what a weasel he is.

From the New York Times just now:
Silicon Valley Group’s Political Effort Raises Uproar 
By SOMINI SENGUPTA and ERIC LIPTON 
Published: May 8, 2013

“Move fast and break things” has been the motto at Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, embodying the Silicon Valley ethos of unapologetically finding new ways to solve old problems. His latest foray into politics in Washington, however, might be characterized as “Move fast, play hardball and be prepared for blowback.”

Fwd.Us, the new nonprofit advocacy group created by Mr. Zuckerberg and several technology executives and investors to push for an overhaul of immigration law, has bankrolled television ads endorsing the conservative stands taken by three lawmakers, prompting an outcry from liberal groups and a call to withhold advertisements from Facebook. 

The liberal attacks on Zuckerberg are pretty boring:
... Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist who finances some of the same clean energy companies as Mr. Doerr’s firm and who was once a major partner at Mr. Doerr’s investment firm, said on Twitter over the weekend: “Will Fwd.us prostitute climate destruction & other values to get a few engineers hired & get immigration reform?” ...

But the point is this: You know how, these days, the worst thing you can hold on a political issue currently up for consideration is a "divisive opinion"? There is nothing worse in 2013 than a divisive individual, like you controversial creeps who aren't all on board with the Gang of Eight.

But, now, Mark Zuckerberg is on board with the Gang of Eight, and he is, by nature, divisive and controversial, thus spreading his contagion of divisiveness via guilt by association to the immigration "reformers."
Still, others say the ads signal a calculated pragmatism. Fwd.Us is led by experienced political operatives, including Joe Lockhart, a former Clinton Administration official, and Rob Jesmer, a former Republican Senate political adviser. One executive involved in the effort said the advertisements were vetted with executives backing it — and that the executives realized before they were shown that they might alienate certain liberal audiences.... 
“We did not just fall off the turnip truck,” the executive said. 

This could get fun.

By the way, did I ever mention the Spring iSteve fundraising drive is going on?

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Washington Post: Crimethink!

Jennifer Rubin, who scribes the pro-immigration "Right Turn" column in the Washington Post, denounces Jason Richwine for the high crime of Noticing Things:
Heritage stumbles, again and again 
Posted by Jennifer Rubin on May 8, 2013 at 4:23 pm 
It’s been a tough go of it for Heritage ever since it released its study asserting immigration reform would cost trillions. It was roundly criticized by both liberal and conservative analysts. Then today the dam really broke.

The Post reports that the dissertation of the study’s co-author, Jason Richwine, asserted, “The average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population, and the difference is likely to persist over several generations. The consequences are a lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low-IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market.” No wonder he came up with such a study; his dissertation adviser was George Borjas, a Harvard professor infamous for his crusade against immigration (legal or not). 
Jennifer Korn, executive director of the pro-immigration-reform conservative Hispanic Leadership Network, responds: “If you start with the off-base premise that Hispanic immigrants have a lower IQ, it’s no surprise how they came up with such a flawed study.” She continued: “Richwine’s comments are bigoted and ignorant. America is a nation of immigrants; to impugn the intelligence of immigrants is to offend each and every American and the foundation of our country. The American Hispanic community is entrepreneurial, and we strive to better our lives through hard work and determination. This is not a community hampered by low intelligence but a community consistently moving forward to better themselves and our country.” 
Heritage scrambled to distance itself from the author’s IQ views, with a spokesperson insisting that they did not relate to the viability of its study. But for the reasons Korn gives it most certainly does. No wonder the study postulates that legalized immigrants will be poor and become a drain on society. 
Moreover, that Heritage engaged such a person to author its immigration study suggests that the “fix” was in from the get-go. It also raises the question of whether Heritage is now hiring fringe characters to generate its partisan studies of questionable scholarship. I expect that will be about all we hear from Heritage on the study for a while. 
It certainly undermines the cause of all immigration opponents to have their prized work authored by such a character. It’s an unpleasant reminder that sincere opponents of reform should distance themselves from the collection of extremists and bigots who populate certain anti-immigrant groups. One can certainly be anti-immigration-reform and not be anti-Hispanic, but it doesn’t help to be rallying around a report by someone convinced that “the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ.”

The facts won't calm Ms. Rubin down, because, obviously, the facts are hatestats, but here's a meta-analysis of the enormous amount of data available on the subject:

Roth, P. L., Bevier, C. A., Bobko, P., Switzer III, F. S. & Tyler, P. (2001) "Ethnic group differences in cognitive ability in employment and educational settings: a meta-analysis." Personnel Psychology 54, 297–330.

As I wrote in 2005:

This 2001 meta-analysis of 39 studies covering a total 5,696,519 individuals in America (aged 14 and above) came up with an overall difference of 0.72 standard deviations in g (the "general factor" in cognitive ability) between "Anglo" whites and Hispanics. The 95% confidence range of the studies ran from .60 to .88 standard deviations, so there's not a huge amount of disagreement among the studies.

One standard deviation equals 15 IQ points, so that's a gap of 10.8 IQ points, or an IQ of 89 on the Lynn-Vanhanen scale where white Americans equal 100. That would imply the average Hispanic would fall at the 24th percentile of the white IQ distribution. This inequality gets worse at higher IQs Assuming a normal distribution, 4.8% of whites would fall above 125 IQ versus only 0.9% of Hispanics, which explains why Hispanics are given ethnic preferences in prestige college admissions.

In contrast, 105 studies of 6,246,729 individuals found an overall white-black gap of 1.10 standard deviations, or 16.5 points. (I typically round this down to 1.0 standard deviation and 15 points). So, the white-Hispanic gap appears to be about 65% as large as the notoriously depressing white-black gap. (Warning: this 65% number does not come from a perfect apples to apples comparison because more studies are used in calculating the white-black difference than the white-Hispanic difference.)

For screen shots of data tables from Roth et al, click here.

This fits well with lots of other data. For example, Hispanics generally do almost as badly on the National Assessment of Educational Progress school achievement tests as blacks, but that average is dragged down by immigrant kids who have problems adjusting to English. The last time the NAEP asked about where the child was born was 1992, and Dr. Stefan Thernstrom of Harvard kindly provided me with the data from that examination. For foreign-born Hispanics, the typical gap versus non-Hispanic whites was 1.14 times as large as the black-white gap. But for American-born Hispanics, the gap between non-Hispanic whites and American-born Hispanics was 0.67 times as large as the gap between non-Hispanic whites and blacks, very similar to the 0.65 difference seen in the meta-analysis of IQs.

For more on Mexican-American educational attainment, see the landmark "Generations of Exclusion" study by Telles & Ortiz.

Telles & Ortiz: 5th generation Mexican-Americans not catching up educationally

A major empirical question about immigration is whether or not the descendants of Mexican immigrants will turn out to be prosperous people who pay in far more in taxes than they require in government services. To East Coast pundits who have only recently come into contact with large numbers of Mexicans, this seems like a slam dunk. Aren't Italian-Americans doing well? And aren't Mexicans the New Italians?

To native Southern Californians like myself, however, who grew up around a lot of Mexican-Americans way back in the 1960s, this doesn't seem like such a sure thing.

Pancho Gonzales
On the one hand, in my experience, Mexican-Americans who more or less left their culture and married into non-Hispanic families seemed to do pretty well, as my quasi-in-law Larry showed. (Let me apologize in advance for this example's genealogical complexity.) My mother's first husband was a Minnesota Swede who joined the Marines and was killed in combat on Iwo Jima. We socialized frequently with my mother's first husband's extended family, including his niece, who married in the early 1960s a Chicano named Larry and took his Spanish surname as her married name. Larry is an athletic six-footer who looks about 7/8ths white (think of Pancho Gonzalez, the great 1940-1970s tennis player from Los Angeles, and that's pretty much what Larry looks like). Starting in the 1960s, Larry worked for decades in corporate sales, selling Kraft products to supermarket headquarters. He made a solid middle class living and bought a nice home in the Santa Clarita exurb.

Or, a close friend of mine from elementary school was the son of a Central American banker who married a lady from Iceland. Another close friend had a Spanish surname too, although his dad dropped out of Yale on December 8, 1941 to enlist in the Army, so he wasn't Hispanic in anything except the Spanish surname. (The family claimed they were descended from an admiral in the Spanish Armada who was shipwrecked in Ireland in 1588.)

On the other hand, there were plenty of working class and poor Mexicans in Southern California in the 1960 who did not marry out of their cultures. Their numerous children and grandchildren have not, on the whole, set the world on fire.

The lack of high-achieving Hispanics in Southern California in 2013 is startling when you start to look for them. The current mayor is Mexican, but he's a mediocrity who took four tries to pass the bar exam. The leading candidate to replace him, the dapper Rhodes Scholar Eric Garcetti, claims to be Mexican on the grounds that an Italian ancestor got kicked out of Mexico during the Revolution one hundred years ago.

In general, what you see in California today is that while the rich are even richer than ever, there is less of the broad middle class prosperity that made California a global cultural leader in the postwar era. (Yes, I realize that non-diverse white bread Republican suburbs like Orange County couldn't, by definition, possibly have produced anything vibrant: except, they did.)

My observations have been systematically verified by a major social science project affiliated with the UCLA Chicano Studies department. The 2008 book Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race by UCLA sociologist Vilma Ortiz and Princeton sociologist Edward Telles documents a 35-year-long study of, first, a sizable 1965 sample of Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles and San Antonio, followed by a 2000 study of the 1965 sample's children, plus questions about the 2000 sample's children.

In their sample, not surprisingly, they saw rapid growth in total years of education from first generation (immigrants from Mexico) to the second generation (American-born children of the immigrants). In the 2000 sample, however, there was no further continued ascent, even unto the fifth generation. From p. 113-116 of their 2008 book:
Our data also allowed us to investigate the educational achievement of the grandchildren of the original respondents, enabling us to distinguish a fifth generation-since-immigration. ... Figure 5.3 shows that these grandchildren of the original respondents, who are third to fifth generation, seemed to be doing no better than their parents. By this time, the third, fourth, and fifth generation were performing equally, with no significant differences among them. In the third generation, 85 percent had graduated from high school, versus 84 of the fourth generation and 81 percent of the fifth generation. ...
Many have assumed that the educational inequalities are attributable to the disadvantages of poor immigrant households, but the data here show that schooling outcomes stubbornly continue at low rates even into the fourth or fifth generation. The statistics presented thus far show that the education progress of Mexican Americans does not improve over the generations. At best, given the statistical margin of error, our data show no improvement in education over the generation-since-immigration and in some cases even suggest a decline.

Here are some graphs from the book. The first demonstrates the structure of their complex study. The "Original Respondents" column represented Mexican-Americans surveyed in 1965. Back then, among the first generation (immigrants) only 30% had graduated from high school. In 1965, the children of immigrants from Mexico had a 48% rate of high school graduation, and the grandchildren a 57% rate. But, when Ortiz and Telles interviewed the children of the 1965 respondents in 2000, they found stagnation, instead. In 2000, the fourth generation Mexican-Americans in their sample of the children of their original respondents had less education than the second and third generations. And the third column shows the same stagnation for the grandchildren of the original respondents, some of whom are fifth generation Americans.


The college graduation rates makes Mexican-American lack of progress starker:


And here's a graph in Generations of Exclusion from p. 110 using a different source of data but giving similar results. These are restricted to American-born third generation or higher citizens:
The light gray bars to the left represent high school dropout rates, the shorter the better. The dark gray bars to the right represent college graduation rates, the longer the better. The dashed vertical line represents the non-Hispanic white rates. Third generation or higher Mexican-Americans in this study do slightly worse on educational attainment that African-Americans.

These findings obviously have major implications for Rector and Richwine's estimate of the fiscal effects of the Gang of Eight's amnesty bill.

David Brooks and Gail Collins debate immigration

From the New York Times:
David: Anyway, I was hoping we could talk about immigration and immigration reform. 
Gail: I have a sinking feeling this is going to be one of those conversations where we fail to disagree, which is so much less exciting. I don’t suppose you’d rather fight about Social Security again? 
David: When I was a kid my grandfather drew me an ethnic map of his neighborhood. Some buildings were dominated by Finns, some by Norwegians, some by Germans. He made all sorts of ethnic distinctions that we don’t think to make today. When immigration works, ethnicity drops from the foreground to the background over time. It stops being a public destiny and starts being a private source of meaning. 
Others disagree, but I think the current wave of immigration is going to end up working out like past waves, which is wonderful news for this country. 
Gail: Obviously I agree. However, it’d be a lot easier for the newcomers to find the American dream if we could juice up the economy with some infrastructure spending and improve early childhood education. But that’s another economic fight, and I can tell you don’t want to go down that road right now. 
David: I do worry about immigration reform, though. I think the proposal emerging in the Senate is a no-brainer. It increases high-skill immigration. It brings people out of the shadows. It’s got to be better than what we have. Is that your basic take? 
Gail: Yes. Of course it took Mitt Romney getting drubbed in the Latino and Asian communities to get Republicans interested in the issue.

David: But I worry about the proposal’s prospects in Congress. If this were still the same old Republican Party of Reagan, then things would be fine. But the corporate wing is much weaker and the populist wing is much stronger. The struggle within the party for control is now playing out as a struggle over immigration policy. A few weeks ago I would have said the bill had a 70 percent chance of passage. Now I’m down to 50. 
Gail: It’s been a long time since I gave a 50 percent chance to any piece of legislation larger than renaming a post office. I’d say 35 or 40 percent. 
David: I must say I admire Marco Rubio’s role in all this. He’s taken a bold position. He’s really staked his political future on it. And he’s getting beaten up on the right. If he can hold the Gang of Eight together and then add about six or seven Republican Senators, then this thing has a chance. 
Gail: On the other side of the picture, you have Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who is currently trying to take the credit for destroying gun control while vowing to do the same thing to immigration reform. Cruz is a great example of how the Tea Party affects the Republican senators. Every six years during election season they’re in the right wing’s pocket. Witness John McCain. In 2005, he sponsored a similar immigration bill. In 2010 he was running for re-nomination against a Tea Party type, and suddenly he’s talking about illegal immigrants murdering people and running “complete the danged fence” ads. 
But once they’re safely re-elected they remember how much they hate the Tea Party’s dogmatic craziness. Now McCain is back to the old mavericky 2000 version. That’s partly because he doesn’t have an election coming up. But I think he’s also been driven to the center by his loathing for Ted Cruz. You don’t often see such a combination of irritating personality, insane political convictions and total implacability in one so young. 
So I think it’s very possible immigration reform will pass the Senate handily, if only because so many people are eager to disappoint Cruz and Company. But the real problem, on this as on so very many things, is the House of Representatives.

I realize that I haven't presented a point-by-point rebuttal. But recall what Virginia Heffernan pointed out on the evolution of blogging:
Surprisingly, though, the focus of modern fact checks is rarely what we 20th-century fact-checkers would have underlined as checkable facts. Instead, Web fact-checkers generally try to show how articles presented in earnest are actually self-parody. These acts of reclassifying journalism as parody or fiction — and setting off excerpts so they play as parody — resembles literary criticism more than it does traditional fact-checking. 

May 7, 2013

Niall Ferguson, John Maynard Keynes, and hysteria

From my new VDARE.com column:
Harvard financial historian Niall Ferguson has gotten himself into the usual sort of Larry Summers / James D. Watson-style trouble for answering a question about economist John Maynard Keynes’s famous quip—“In the long run, we are all dead”—by cheekily pointing out that Keynes was a childless homosexual. ... 
Ferguson commented: “In the long run our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are alive, and will have to deal with the consequences of our economic actions.” ...
(In contrast to Keynes, the philoprogenitive Ferguson has three children by his first wife and one by his latest, the courageous anti-Islamist activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali.) 
Ferguson’s off-the-cuff comments generated a vast global spasm of gasping and tsk-tsking. A Google search of “niall ferguson keynes gay” comes up with over two million hits. 
Why the hysteria?

Read the whole thing there.

Tony Stark's favorite architect: John Lautner

Iron Man's John Lautner-inspired house at Point Dume meets its doom
From my new column in Taki's Magazine:
With Iron Man 3 hauling in $174 million at the box office last weekend, this is a good time to pay tribute to a great architect whose hold on the American imagination is finally getting the respect it deserves: John Lautner. 
No matter where they’re filmed or when they’re set, the Iron Man movies take place, at least aesthetically and psychologically, in the shiny, optimistic, future-infatuated Southern California that peaked in the early 1960s. 
Billionaire Tony Stark’s Iron Mansion in Malibu is a fictitious CGI homage to the sometimes hilarious—but often surprisingly lovely—science-fiction houses and coffee shops, gas stations, and motels that Lautner erected all over the Los Angeles area from the 1930s into the 1980s.

... Lautner, a protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright, was the finest exponent of the boyish fantasy school of design—Tom Swift books turned into cantilevered Googie drive-in restaurants—that is the indigenous style of the Southern California car-centered culture in which I grew up. Lautner’s school of commercial architecture required an unprecedentedly broad and affluent middle class, one perhaps never seen in world history before Los Angeles in the 1940s.

Read the whole thing there.

Ortiz & Telles: Mexican-Americans lag for 4 generations (at least)

The sociologists who authored the major Generations of Exclusion study tracking two generations of Mexican-American families in Los Angeles and San Antonio from 1965 to 2000 (which I reviewed for VDARE) wrote to the New York Times.

Their second paragraph is an important social science finding and should be cited in immigration debates. 
Mexican Immigrants 
To the Editor: 
Re “Hispanics, the New Italians,” by David Leonhardt (Sunday Review, April 21), and “When Assimilation Stalls,” by Ross Douthat (column, April 28): 
In our book “Generations of Exclusion,” we show that the descendants of Mexicans do not experience the steady progress into the third and fourth generations that has been documented for those of European ancestry. [Bold added]
Throughout the 20th century, Mexicans immigrated primarily to fill low-wage jobs and have been held in low regard, a status shared by many of their descendants. Although many Mexican-Americans do well, too many do not pursue education because they attend low-quality schools or receive the brunt of negative expectations by educators. 
Mexicans and other Latinos — especially Salvadorans, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans — also appear to share similar experiences and a nonwhite status that in effect racializes them and channels them into the lowest sectors of our society. 
The solution to poor treatment of immigrants is not to exclude them but to improve educational conditions for all! 
VILMA ORTIZ
EDWARD TELLES
Los Angeles, April 28, 2013

The writers are professors of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Princeton, respectively.  

In their sizable sample, fourth generation Mexican-Americans (i.e., people who had a grandparent born in American) had only a 6% college graduation rate. My recollection is that their preliminary data on the educational attainments of young fifth generation Mexican-Americans was also unpromising.

Jerry Seinfeld on Emma Lazarus's poem

I am for open immigration, but that sign we have on the front of the Statue of Liberty, "Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses..." can't we just say, "Hey, the door's open, we'll take whoever you got"? Do we have to specify the wretched refuse? I mean, why don't we just say, "Give us the unhappy, the sad, the slow, the ugly, people that can't drive, that they have trouble merging, if they can't stay in their lane, if they don't signal, they can't parallel park, if they're sneezing, if they're stuffed up, if they're clogged, if they have bad penmanship, don't return calls, if they have dandruff, food between their teeth, if they have bad credit, if they have no credit, missed a spot shaving, in other words any dysfunctional defective slob that you can somehow cattle prod onto a wagon, send them over, we want 'em."
Seinfeld
Broadcast date: January 27, 1993

David Brooks goes beyond self-parody

Mrs. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, beneficiary
of immigrant social conservatism.
Note leopard-skin hijab.
From the New York Times:
Beyond the Fence
By DAVID BROOKS

... First, immigration opponents are effectively trying to restrict the flow of conservatives into this country. In survey after survey, immigrants are found to have more traditional ideas about family structure and community than comparable Americans. ... Immigrants go into poor neighborhoods and infuse them with traditional values.
When immigrant areas go bad, it’s not because they have infected America with bad values. It’s because America has infected them with bad values already present. So the first thing conservative opponents of reform are trying to restrict is social conservatism.

I really despise this kind of divide-and-conquer shuck-and-jive. Besides being just stupid and dishonest empirically (Gen. Douglas MacArthur was an American conservative, a Chechen boxer or a Mixtec day laborer is just kind of backward), one of the basic patterns of history is that, no matter how much your fellow countrymen get on your nerves, you are a better off being stuck arguing with them endlessly than in inviting in people from beyond the seas to help you win your petty domestic disputes.

For example, in 1167, one Irish lord was losing a struggle with another Irish lord. But then he had a great idea: he'd invite over some Norman knights from England to help him put that other Irishman in his place.

The Normans were Vikings who had conquered a chunk of France, learned French, then conquered England. What could possibly go wrong if he brought some to Ireland? What?  Were the English Normans going to conquer Ireland and own it for most of a millennium? Hah! Likely story ...

No, the truly important priority was to show High King Ruaidri mac Tairrdelbach Ua Conchobair that he couldn't push King Diarmait Mac Murchada of Leinster around. These cool new English underlings of King Diarmait's would show High King Ruaidri who's boss!

And that's when I say, "And that reminds me to remind you of the continuing Spring 2013 iSteve Panhandling Drive."

Except that this post didn't really remind me, my American Express bill reminded me.

I want to thank everybody who has contributed so far. And for those who haven't gotten around to it:

First: you can make a non-tax deductible contribution to me by credit card via WePay by clicking here.

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Steve Sailer
P.O Box 4142
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Thanks.

The highest law of the land: Emma Lazarus's poem

You maniacs, you blew it all up.
Emma Lazarus's poem inscribed near the Statue of Liberty is a bit of ethnocentric kitsch that has been turned into an all-conquering mind virus that is making impossible intelligent thought about the future of America. The Constitution may not be a suicide pact, but Lazarus's dopey poem is turning into one.

In his column in the Washington Post, Dana Milbank points out that even if conservatives don't say that Hispanic immigrants tend to be badly educated, or even notice that Hispanic immigrants tend to be badly educated, conservatives are still racist because -- Gotcha -- Hispanic immigrants are badly educated! 
No poor and huddled need apply

By Dana Milbank, Monday, May 6, 5:47 PM 
Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint prefaced his condemnation of immigration legislation Monday with the same form of inoculation conservatives often use on such occasions: He quoted Emma Lazarus. 
“There’s a statement at the bottom of the Statue of Liberty,” said the former Republican senator who just took over as chief of the powerful think tank. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses . . . ”

He and his colleagues then went on to outline their version of immigration reform: No poor and huddled need apply. 
“We feel that the best immigration system is one that focuses on bringing high school [graduate] immigrants in,” said Robert Rector, the Heritage scholar seated beside DeMint for the rollout of a new study on the costs of immigration. “We think the proper policy is that you shouldn’t be bringing immigrants into the U.S. that by and large are going to impose additional costs on U.S. taxpayers by getting more benefits than they pay in taxes,” he explained. 
... Latinos have been suspicious of Republicans in part because they assume that conservatives’ desire to crack down on illegal immigration may extend to legal immigration as well. Republicans invariably proclaim that they are big fans of legal immigration. But the Heritage doctrine undermines that, because it would sharply curtail Hispanic immigration — legal and illegal alike. 
Of the Mexican-born people in the United States age 25 and older, nearly 60 percent didn’t graduate from high school, according to a Pew Hispanic Center compilation of census data. Among Central Americans, the figure is 50 percent. To shun those without high school diplomas would dramatically reduce eligibility among Latinos. 
Rector acknowledged that “all immigration in fact does make a larger GDP.” But, he added, “the question is fiscally whether they pay more in taxes than they take out in benefits. College-educated immigrants do that. Other immigrants do not.” 
Even the second generation doesn’t pay its way, he argued, citing “very sophisticated data on the expected upward mobility based on historical averages of kids given their ethnicity and their parents’ education level.” 
But even if you accept Heritage’s calculations, immigration isn’t purely a fiscal question. If Republicans don’t find a way to deal with illegal immigrants in the country, they risk political oblivion as the swelling ranks of Latino voters turn against them. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) recognized this in reaching a bipartisan agreement to allow legalization — a proposal being denounced by the right. ...

Never mind the rest of that Lazarus inscription DeMint cited, the bit about accepting “the wretched refuse” and the “homeless, tempest-tossed.” Now they’ll need a diploma.

The only way for conservatives to prove they aren't racist is by letting more badly educated Hispanics in. Of course, that will just make it more obvious that Hispanic immigrants are badly educated, which will mean that conservatives are even more under suspicion of noticing racist hatefacts. So, the only way for them to atone for that is to let more badly educated Hispanics in. And so forth and so on.

May 6, 2013

Good meme: Gang of Eight lets Southern white plantation owners discriminate against blacks

Typical Southern white farmer
You know and I know that the Gang of Eight's immigration bill is a grotesque farrago of mechanisms for special interests to exploit the public, but then you and I are horrible people for knowing that. Think of the DREAM children!

But, the more the spotlight gets shone on those special interests who each have their trotters in the immigration bill's trough, the more interesting things become. The Establishment's amnesty offensive is a rickety contraption and has the potential to implode, just like it did in 2001, 2004, 2006, and 2007. 

For example, it's promising that Mark Zuckerberg, the subject of The Social Network, has managed to insert his divisive personality into the immigration debate. Now Ethan Bronner of the New York Times has perhaps inadvertently opened the door for another traditional bad guy to take center stage: the Southern white farmer.
Workers Claim Race Bias as Farms Rely on Immigrants

By ETHAN BRONNER 
VIDALIA, Ga. — For years, labor unions and immigrant rights activists have accused large-scale farmers, like those harvesting sweet Vidalia onions here this month, of exploiting Mexican guest workers. Working for hours on end under a punishing sun, the pickers are said to be crowded into squalid camps, driven without a break and even cheated of wages.

But as Congress weighs immigration legislation expected to expand the guest worker program, another group is increasingly crying foul — Americans, mostly black, who live near the farms and say they want the field work but cannot get it because it is going to Mexicans. They contend that they are illegally discouraged from applying for work and treated shabbily by farmers who prefer the foreigners for their malleability. 
“They like the Mexicans because they are scared and will do anything they tell them to,” said Sherry Tomason, who worked for seven years in the fields here, then quit. Last month she and other local residents filed a federal lawsuit against a large grower of onions, Stanley Farms, alleging that it mistreated them and paid them less than it paid the Mexicans. 
The suit is one of a number of legal actions containing similar complaints against farms, including a large one in Moultrie, Ga., where Americans said they had been fired because of their race and national origin, given less desirable jobs and provided with fewer work opportunities than Mexican guest workers. Under a consent decree with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the farm, Southern Valley, agreed to make certain changes. 
With local unemployment about 10 percent and the bureaucracy for hiring foreigners onerous — guest workers have to be imported and housed and require extensive paperwork — it would seem natural for farmers to hire from their own communities, which they did a generation ago. ...
Mr. Stanley, like other farmers, argues that Americans who say they want the work end up quitting because it is hard, leaving the crops to rot in the fields.  

But, in response to this normally unanswerable crops-rotting-in-the-fields argument, the New York Times article printed two paragraphs of sheer racist hate-filled common sense economic analysis that normally you only read in the most disreputable rags:
"... farm work, like other difficult labor, could be made attractive to Americans at reasonable cost, and that farmers should not be excused from doing so. 
“There used to be lots of American pickers who moved around the country,” he said. “But wages have stagnated and conditions have deteriorated, and agriculture is unwilling to make these jobs attractive. Think of trash collection. That’s not very appealing, either. But if you offer a decent wage and conditions, people do it.”

Who dared say such evil?
"Jim Knoepp of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit group that has campaigned against the guest worker program..."

This could get fun.

Liberals debate whether Mark Zuckerberg is too weasely or just weasely enough

Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg is becoming the face of the Gang of Eight's immigration bill.

From the hometown San Jose Mercury News:
Herhold: Mark Zuckerberg needs to take Politics 101 
By Scott Herhold 
Mark Zuckerberg is an extraordinary young man who at age 28 has achieved things that most people in Silicon Valley can only envy. He also has a lot to learn about politics. 
You may have read how Zuckerberg's political group is funding TV spots on behalf of Senators Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Mark Begich, D-Alaska, taking stands that many tech industry veterans would privately decry. 
The idea is to give the politicians political "cover" in exchange for supporting key immigration proposals that Facebook wants, primarily a loosening of H1B visas. 
The TV spots laud Graham for fighting Obamacare and commend Begich for working to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling. 
Neither of those messages is central to the thinking of Silicon Valley. In fact, they would irritate a lot of Facebook users and managers. 
In adopting Machiavellian tactics, Zuckerberg has done more than upset his core constituency. In a real sense, the Facebook CEO has raised questions about what he and his company stand for.
Mustela silicona
"It's incredibly cynical," says Phil Trounstine, my former colleague and the co-founder of the political website Calbuzz. "It makes people believe that it's all just a game. And it's not a game. People are struggling for real stakes.' 
Here's the rule about politics that all Zuckerberg's billions have not taught him. Political opponents forgive self-interest. They don't understand the jab in the eye. 
A Midwestern politician critical of tech has no problem understanding why a Silicon Valley company would push hard for more favorable tax treatment. That's self-interest. 
If that same company wants to engage in hardball tactics over something that has little to do with its bottom line -- let's say, an oil pipeline -- then eyebrows are raised. 
You can fashion a short-term rationale for what Zuckerberg and his political group, FWD.US, are doing. But the people who practice politics most intelligently keep a long-term perspective. 
"From Zuckerberg's perspective, if he wants to get moderation out of a Republican, he has to help protect that Republican from a challenge from the right," says political consultant Rich Robinson. 
"But it's a hugely dangerous game. Ultimately, he wins the battle and loses the war." 

Meanwhile The New Republic, which is now owned by Chris Hughes, the WASP gay Facebook billionaire who managed one of Obama's social media campaigns, champions:
Mark Zuckerberg's Cynical, Necessary Washington Strategy 

Shorter version: Zuckerberg's ends justify his means!

One of the few effective freedoms of expression you are still allowed to have in the mainstream media is to not like Mark Zuckerberg, to make clear that Zuckerberg gets on your nerves. We're not being allowed to have a debate on about 90% of the likely effects of the immigration bill, but this flurry of respectable interest in whether or not Zuckerberg will triumph politically on immigration is a rare positive development for supporters of effective free speech and self-government.

Post gay marriage

Now that the biggest issue in the history of the world, gay marriage, is winding down, what's next? Here's a big story in the New York Times tonight on what might be the next burning issue for ten or twenty years:

Changing Sex, and Changing Sports Teams
Tony Bias at a court near his home. After his announcement that he is transgender was greeted with taunts, he decided not to try out for the boys’ basketball team.
California could become the first state to guarantee that transgender students are allowed to play school sports on teams that match their gender identity.

Rector and Richwine weigh in on fiscal cost of amnesty

Out today, from Robert Rector and Jason Richwine of the Heritage Foundation:
The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer 
By Robert Rector and Jason Richwine, Ph.D. 
May 6, 2013 
... As noted, at the current time (before amnesty), the average unlawful immigrant household has a net deficit (benefits received minus taxes paid) of $14,387 per household. 
During the interim phase immediately after amnesty, tax payments would increase more than government benefits, and the average fiscal deficit for former unlawful immigrant households would fall to $11,455. 
At the end of the interim period, unlawful immigrants would become eligible for means-tested welfare and medical subsidies under Obamacare. Average benefits would rise to $43,900 per household; tax payments would remain around $16,000; the average fiscal deficit (benefits minus taxes) would be about $28,000 per household. 
Amnesty would also raise retirement costs by making unlawful immigrants eligible for Social Security and Medicare, resulting in a net fiscal deficit of around $22,700 per retired amnesty recipient per year. 
In terms of public policy and government deficits, an important figure is the aggregate annual deficit for all unlawful immigrant households. This equals the total benefits and services received by all unlawful immigrant households minus the total taxes paid by those households. 
Under current law, all unlawful immigrant households together have an aggregate annual deficit of around $54.5 billion. 
In the interim phase (roughly the first 13 years after amnesty), the aggregate annual deficit would fall to $43.4 billion. 
At the end of the interim phase, former unlawful immigrant households would become fully eligible for means-tested welfare and health care benefits under the Affordable Care Act. The aggregate annual deficit would soar to around $106 billion. 
In the retirement phase, the annual aggregate deficit would be around $160 billion. It would slowly decline as former unlawful immigrants gradually expire. 
These costs would have to be borne by already overburdened U.S. taxpayers. (All figures are in 2010 dollars.) 
The typical unlawful immigrant is 34 years old. After amnesty, this individual will receive government benefits, on average, for 50 years. Restricting access to benefits for the first 13 years after amnesty therefore has only a marginal impact on long-term costs. 
If amnesty is enacted, the average adult unlawful immigrant would receive $592,000 more in government benefits over the course of his remaining lifetime than he would pay in taxes. 
Over a lifetime, the former unlawful immigrants together would receive $9.4 trillion in government benefits and services and pay $3.1 trillion in taxes. They would generate a lifetime fiscal deficit (total benefits minus total taxes) of $6.3 trillion. (All figures are in constant 2010 dollars.) This should be considered a minimum estimate. It probably understates real future costs because it undercounts the number of unlawful immigrants and dependents who will actually receive amnesty and underestimates significantly the future growth in welfare and medical benefits.

May 5, 2013

Mark Zuckerberg's Save the Billionaires fund

Reid Hoffman, $3,100,000,000
The new tech firm lobbying group FWD.us has played a major role in writing the Gang of Eight's immigration legislation to make it easier for technology companies to import foreign computer programmers to drive down the ruinously high cost of American labor. I thought it would be fun to rank the names on FWD.us's "Our Supporters" page by net worth.

 $66,000,000,000 Bill Gates, Chair of Microsoft & Gates Foundation
 $15,200,000,000 Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft
 $13,300,000,000 Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook
 $8,200,000,000 Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google
 $3,100,000,000 Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of LinkedIn
 $2,700,000,000 John Doerr, General Partner at Kleiner Perkins 
 $2,700,000,000 Elon Musk, CEO SpaceX and Tesla Motors
 $2,000,000,000 Sean Parker, Founders Fund
 $1,500,000,000 Ron Conway, Special Advisor to SV Angel
 $1,200,000,000 Jim Breyer, Partner at Accel Partners
 $760,000,000 Mark Pincus, Founder, CEO Zynga
 $600,000,000 Drew Houston, Founder and CEO of Dropbox
 $559,000,000 Reed Hastings, Founder and CEO of Netflix
 $400,000,000 Matt Cohler, General Partner at Benchmark
 $400,000,000 Kevin Systrom, Co-Founder of Instagram
 $345,000,000 Chad Hurley, Co-founder and CEO of AVOS
 $300,000,000 Max Levchin, Co-founder of PayPal, Chmn of Yelp 
 $230,000,000 Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo!
 $200,000,000 Andrew Mason, Co-founder of Groupon
 $100,000,000 Josh James, Founder and CEO of Domo
 ? Aditya Agarwal, Vice President of Engineering at Dropbox
 ? Chamath Palihapitiya, Founder of The Social+Capital Partnership
 ? Ruchi Sanghvi, Vice President of Operations at Dropbox 
 ? Brian Chesky, CEO and Co-founder of Airbnb
 ? Chris Cox, Vice President of Product at Facebook
 ? Paul Graham, Co-founder of Y Combinator
 ? Joe Lonsdale, Partner at Formation 8
 ? Mary Meeker, General Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
 ? Dave Morin, Co-founder and CEO of Path
 ? Hadi Partovi, Co-Founder and President of Code.org
 ? Alison Pincus, One Kings Lane Co-Founder
 ? Keith Rabois, Partner at Khosla Ventures
 ? Hosain Rahman, CEO and Founder of Jawbone
 ? David Sacks, Founder, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Yammer
 ? Brad Smith, General Counsel of Microsoft
 ? Padmasree Warrior, Chief Technology & Strategy Officer at Cisco

(I'm not promising that these are the best and most up to the minute net worth estimates, but they're what I came up with quickly.)

It just doesn't pay to be a billionaire anymore.

I mean, if America's tech billionaires and mere centimillionaires (hectomillionaires?) can't lower programmers' salaries immediately, what possible economic incentive will they have to continue to be rich? It's Econ 101, people!

Please take a moment to thank the Friends of Mark Zuckerberg for somehow carrying on despite having to pay their employees such exorbitant wages that they are forced to bribe Gang of Eight senators with free campaign commercials just to get more H-1B visas. Just think how much richer these poor billionaires would be if the U.S. didn't exist and they didn't have to therefore share so much of their wealth with their employees because the border keeps them from fully utilizing the global reserve army of the unemployed to grind down their workers' pay.

Mark Zuckerberg becoming face of the Immigration Bill

Why is Mark Zuckerberg spending so much time and money pushing the Gang of Eight's immigration bill? 

Because the 28-year-old Facebook founder needs the money. He needs to hammer down his American programmers' salaries with more H-1B visa foreigners to keep his net worth up. For a terrifying moment last year, Zuckerberg's wealth dropped from 11-figures to only 10-figures. Remember, money is how these guys keep score. Zuckerberg had to endure the humiliation of showing up on the 2012 Forbes 400 list with a net worth of only $9.4 billion. There are a lot of people with 10-figure net worths (1,426 according to Forbes in 2012).

Fortunately, the Zuck is back over the $10 billion mark lately, so he can hold his head up when he walks down the street, but you have to feel for the poor guy.

Actually, you don't. In fact, a lot of people find Zuckerberg annoying. And that's why it's critical that Mark Zuckerberg replace Marco Rubio as The Face of the Immigration Bill.

Rubio has been promoted relentlessly by the media because he's non-threateningly cute, a boy band singer-dancer (the subliminally ethnic one) in a suit. He doesn't look cunning, so it's easy to still like him when he gets caught telling a another lie about what's in the bill. How can you expect a nice boy like Rubio to keep track of all those details? He means well. You can tell just by looking at his symmetrical features.

Personally, I kind of like Zuckerberg, but my approval is a pretty good contra-indicator. (I should have started the world's simplest marketing research company: just show me two new products or two new ads, and whichever one I prefer, you should junk it, immediately.)

I think Zuckerberg is, by the standards of software nerds, a good looking guy, but he increasingly strikes a lot of folks as a green-eyed, fair-skinned jerk. It doesn't help his image that it seems likely that, deep down, he's probably a Republican (he hosted a Chris Christie fundraiser). And a lot of people are growing sick of Facebook. Oh, and, yeah, there's an entire movie already about what a monster he is.

Mark Zuckerberg's GOP and Dem sock puppet sites

Mark Zuckerberg's Republican site
Mark Zuckerberg's Democratic site
Eventually, Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg's new immigration group lobbying for lower salaries for American tech workers, FWD.us, might get around to giving a facelift to one of the websites it set up for its twin Republican and Democratic sockpuppet subsidiaries. When that happens, the naked contempt with which Zuckerberg and his fellow billionaires view the American two party system won't be quite so blatant. But, in the meantime, enjoy Zuck's view of the profound struggle between Team Red-Blue versus Team Blue-Red.

As FWD.us spokesdroid Kate Hansen explained, "Maintaining two separate entities, Americans for a Conservative Direction and the Council for American Job Growth, to support elected officials across the political spectrum -- separately -- means that we can more effectively communicate with targeted audiences of their constituents."

The red-blue website features a commercial of Marco Rubio making a pitch for the Gang of Eight and an ad Zuckerberg is running for Lindsey Graham about what a conservative tough guy Lindsey is, which doesn't mention immigration. The idea is to persuade conservative voters in South Carolina that Lindsey, in general, has "our back," which would imply that they should support his Gang of Eight efforts because he knows best.

The blue-red website features a Lindsey-like ad for Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) that serves as a quid pro quo for Begich supporting the Gang of Eight in return for Zuckerberg running this ad in Alaska to convince blue collar Alaskan voters that he wouldn't stab them in the back, so they can trust him when he votes for the Gang of Eight's plan.

Are Libyans culturally enriching Italy?

Christopher Caldwell writes in the Financial Times:
Much commentary about immigration to Europe is written as if no reasonable person could possibly care who, specifically, a country’s residents are and where, specifically, they come from. In an age of debt this indifference is not reasonable. No matter Italy’s demographic make-up decades from now, it would be quite natural for the “new generation” of multi-ethnic Italians to ask why they should pay for a decadent “old generation” that carried out its fiscal misdeeds before they (or their parents) were even in the country. 
Another problem is that Italy is the land of Dante’s The Divine Comedy and the Sistine Chapel. It might be possible to convince an American or an Australian to believe (or to say) that a big arrival of migrants will be a cultural “enrichment”. It is a harder case to make in Italy, even in the 21st century. Immigration may enrich Italy in many ways, but is unlikely to do so culturally. It is just as unlikely to do so fiscally

When I did the Backpack Tour of Europe in 1980, I came to the same conclusion as just about all those young aristocrats who did the Grand Tour of Europe in the 18th Century: Italy is the best country to visit as a tourist.

And, it's less the old stuff (although some of it, like The David and the Pantheon, is as great as advertised). It's the Italians. I don't think I'd want to live there, but Italy is a great place to visit.

As for the notion that the world will be better off when Italy is filled up with Libyans ...