November 20, 2011
November 20, 2011
Alien Nation by Peter Brimelow 
Recent News
Import Teachers Who Can’t Speak English—Alienate Reagan Democrats
Last week, the Washington Post ran an amusing story on a new public school teacher in suburban Maryland's Prince George's County who can't speak English very well.
Sixth-grade teacher David Colon, who was recently recruited from Puerto Rico, admitted:
“'My mother, her English: excellent. My father, excellent,' Colon said. 'Pero me, eh, regular.'
"A friend helped him translate this point: 'I try to tell the kids that my English is limited, so I hope you don’t judge me. In this class, we don’t judge each other—we help each other.’'"
[With Hispanic students on the rise, Hispanic teachers in short supply, by Robert Samuels, November 15, 2011]
It's important to note that Señor Colon's struggles with English aren't a mistake—they're a triumph of government policy.
Why hire teachers who are bad role models for speaking English? According to the Washington Post’s Samuels:
"This month, the left-leaning Center for American Progress reported that almost every state—including Maryland and Virginia—has a large need for more minority teachers.
According to this report, 41 percent of public school students are non-white, but
Shikha Dalmia Gives Reason’s Game Away: Leftism Before Libertarianism!
Mass immigration has become the decisive issue that distinguishes Right from Left. Progressive insiders have clearly decided that workers’ rights, wage levels, women’s liberation, the environment, unemployment, and all their other putative causes must be sacrificed to the paramount cause: the dispossession of the historic American nation. That’s why the 99 Percent Declaration, supposedly the foundation document of the “Occupy” movement, calls in its Point 11 for
“Immediate passage of the Dream Act and comprehensive immigration and border security reform including offering visas, lawful permanent resident status and citizenship to the world’s brightest People to stay and work in our industries and schools after they obtain their education and training in the United States”. [VDARE.com links added].
—all policies that, paradoxically, would enrich the “one percent” and immiserate the “99 Percent” that the movement purports to represent.
In a significant development, the left-libertarian Reason magazine has now joined its progressive friends, declaring that its ostensible libertarian goal of limiting government power is secondary to making sure that policy-driven demographic transformation continues—whatever the cost,
Indian immigrant Shikha Dalmia (email her) makes these priorities clear with her distinctly unReasonably titled column, Alabama’s War on Immigrants (November 15, 2011).
Dalmia presents a hysterical picture: she says the state of Alabama has launched an “all-out jihad” designed to “strike terror” in Hispanic communities. The “draconian” Alabama illegal immigration law is a product of “blatant inhumanity,” a product of a “restrictionist fury” sweeping across Middle America.
Of course, somehow, amidst the thunder of the reconstituted panzers rolling along the Auburn plains in service to the war effort, illegals are also self-righteously parading in front of Alabama police, chanting “Undocumented, unafraid!”, to the applause of the Mainstream Media and the studied inaction of the Obama Justice Department. They are also being supported by Democratic state representative Alvin Holmes, who last appeared in Reason magazine for opposing craft beers because “Yo, what’s wrong with the beer we got? It drink pretty good.” Apparently, Reason believes this eloquent statesman is now a hero of limited government, channeling the spirit of Bastiat in the midst of Alabama’s Totaler Krieg.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, Alabama is being sued by the government of Mexico and ten other Latin American countries, who recognize that enforcing America’s immigration laws could jeopardize their efforts to dump their lumpenproletariat on the U.S. taxpayer.
And of course the “American” federal government is also acting predictably. Eric “My People” Holder, presumably another of Reason’s free market heroes, found time from shipping weapons to Mexican drug cartels to kill Border Patrol Agents to sue the state of Alabama for daring to enforce the law.
(Needless to say, Vermont’s overt declaration that it is now a sanctuary state has drawn only benign indifference from the Feds.)
In fact, far from being the vanguard of the “restrictionist fury,” Alabama is one of a number of U.S. states fighting a desperate rearguard action against a ruling class committed to “electing a new people”.
While the Obama Administration makes false claims about deporting “record numbers” of illegals, its end run around Congress continues, implementing
The Fulford File | So Why Doesn’t The “Broken Windows” Theory Apply To Illegal Aliens?
In Alabama, where the Treason Lobby is very active these days, there was a protest this week by a bunch of illegal Dream Act kids, all of whom were arrested—and none of whom are being deported:
"Racial Ratio" Shifting Against Slavery Tax—But GOP Silent Anyway
I came of age during the Reagan years, when welfare was a major wedge issue. Back then, the GOP was not always afraid to campaign on allegedly racially-tinged issues and the Gipper himself railed against “welfare
Alabama GOP Slaughters Their Own Immigration Hero
Alabama State Senator Scott Beason is the hero of the immigration battle in his state. He was the prime mover of HB56 in the Senate; it was eventually passed by both houses and signed into law by the governor this past June. Whites in the legislature voted 88-to-1 for the bill, blacks 27-to-5 against. Of course, together with Arizona’s similar bill, it has been the subject of much denunciation.
Like Russell Pearce in Arizona, Beason instantly became the focus of immigration enthusiast ire, and they set out to get him. Now we learn from a story in The Huntsville [AL] Times that they have succeeded.
How? I doubt that you need more than one guess. They effectively employed their arsenal of “racist” allegations. But, as in Arizona, they would not have succeeded without the connivance of Beason’s own Republican colleagues.
You see, Scott Beason is twice a hero in Alabama. In addition to the immigration issue, he has assiduously applied himself in fighting the corrupt gamblers who infest the state. He wore a wire for the FBI, gathered incriminating evidence, and testified for days in court. A re-trial is in the offing, and certainly he will be involved again. It is a detail of this scandal, completely unrelated to immigration, that was used to attack Beason. And it is all based on a single word.
Here is the way The Huntsville Times put it:
“Beason’s now infamous remark came to light during the summer’s bingo vote-buying trial. Beason wore a wire for the FBI agents in the case. But Beason also recorded himself and other Republicans talking about Greenetrack [a local gambling enterprise] and economic development in predominately black Greene County.
‘’ ‘That’s y’alls Indians,’’ said then-Rep. Benjamin Lewis of Dothan.
“ ‘They’re aborigines, but they’re not Indians,’’ Beason retorted.”
Bill's sponsor booted from leadership post | Removal related to calling black casino patrons ‘aborigines’, By Kim Chandler, Huntsville Times, November 16, 2011 [Not online. Some more is quoted here.]
So there it is, you see—the use of that awful word “aborigine.”
A storm ensued, fueled by blacks, liberals, and all those
Higher Education: The Impossibility Of Reform
Peter Brimelow writes: Roger Devlin, whose most recent article for us was a review of Tatu Vanhanen’s book The Limits of Democratization: Climate, Intelligence, and Resource Distribution, delivered this address at the November 4-5 fourth annual meeting of the H.L. Mencken Club. It doesn’t directly deal with VDARE.com’s central interest, immigration policy, but we’re posting it because it’s a searing account of how the historic American nation has been, in effect, decapitated—its higher education facilities are now entirely in the hands of hostile forces.
That’s why, for example, when years ago I asked the prominent educator Diane Ravitch whether there was research on immigration's impact of American school children, she was able to reply unhesitatingly: “Not only is no research being done, but no research is going to be done on that question because nobody wants to know the answer." That is to say, the academic-political complex doesn’t want to know the answer.
(Oddly, labor economists are one exception that proves the rule. Their consensus that the post-1965 mass immigration has been of no significant aggregate economic benefit to native-born Americans, which I reported in Alien Nation in 1995 and which the National Research Council confirmed in 1997, is still intact. But it is also still almost totally unknown in public debate, probably not coincidentally. And it should be noted that the Cuban-born Harvard economist George J. Borjas, responsible more than anyone else for this professional consensus, told me in 2007 that he discouraged his students from specializing in immigration “I don't think it would do them much good. “)
I addressed the HLM conference on “The William F. Buckley myth”. Because, unlike Devlin, I am never well-organized enough to write in advance, I spoke extemporaneously and will have to look at the transcript/ video to decide if we should post on VDARE.com; much of my argument can be found here and here.
But one point I made presaged Devlin’s remark about the “sizeable class of academically trained non-leftists for whom there is essentially no place in the contemporary academy.” I noted the anomaly that Buckley chose to bestow two important pieces of literary patronage that were in his gift—the authorized biographies of Whitaker Chambers and, not yet published, of Buckley himself—to Sam Tanenhaus, [Send him mail] a card-carrying member of the New York liberal literary establishment, now editor of the New York Times Book Review. (Tanenhaus hasn’t yet called me, or—much stranger—John O’Sullivan, fired after nine years as NR editor at least in part because of my immigration writing, alas. But, hey, Tanenhaus is said to be a slow worker.)
I have no doubt that Buckley thought he was earning useful brownie points. But, because of his short-sighted selfishness, some conservative PhD is now pumping gas for a living.
Thank you, Prof. Roth, and thank you to the Club for inviting me to speak this year. I have been asked to speak on the impossibility of reforming higher education. I am myself an academic manqué, a member of what I would imagine must by now be a sizeable class of academically trained non-leftists for whom there is essentially no place in the contemporary academy. Already in graduate school I got a crash course in the problems facing higher education, and I followed the academic reform movement closely for several years thereafter.
The primary institutional expression of this movement was the National Association of Scholars, which appeared on the scene in the late 1980s. At the time, some of us were hoping it would metastasize and sweep everything before it. “Light is the best disinfectant,” went the slogan. All we needed to do was expose the shenanigans going on to sensible trustees and to the donors and parents who are paying for it all. So the outrages were documented and the exposés were published. Everyone laughed at hearing that a paper called “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” had been solemnly presented at a conference of the Modern Language Association.
And then—not much happened. There were some local successes, some damage containment, and that’s about all. This was twenty years ago. Many of those reformers are now retired, including my co-panelists Profs. [Byron]Roth and [Robert]Weissberg. For the most part, they cannot be replaced by younger scholars on their own level. Such scholars are simply not being produced in sufficient numbers, and where they do crop up, today’s academic departments don’t want them.
So I no longer expect much from the reform movement. One of its weaknesses, I think, is that many professors were working from a superficial diagnosis. They talked about “the Sixties” an awful lot. But most of the problems
Immigrant Assimilation—Or Blind Growth Mania?
I love reading my Wall Street Journal Monday through Saturday. It’s the best newspaper still going in America.
However, while the WSJ presents stories which are often not reported well in other papers, it—like rest of the MSM—is hopeless on the key trend affecting our country: immigration.
Immigration Cartoon Of The Day
This daily cartoon contributed to VDare by Baloo. His site is HERE
Herman Cain And The Limits Of Permissible Republican Ideology
In his November 9th New York Times column cleverly entitled The Cain Scrutiny, Ross Douthat calls attention to the arresting spectacle of white conservatives rising up to defend the honor of Herman Cain and black manhood against allegations by blonde tramps that the Republican Presidential candidate's sexual advances were unwanted:
"We should remember this moment, because it’s a perfect encapsulation of how race’s role in American politics has changed over the last 75 years."
Indeed.
But to say that the role of race has changed is not to say that race doesn't matter. The emergence of Herman Cain in the GOP polls has everything to do with race. The Republicans have no shortage of successful CEOs with track records similar to Cain's. But few get to make a credible run for the nomination.
And Cain's appeal to Republican voters is not just in the obvious we-must-prove-we're-not-racist-way. He is a classic genial, loquacious, egotistical black Big Man, the kind (think basketball commentator Charles Barkley) whom American whites find hugely likable.
Perhaps there’s a sociobiological explanation for this The Big Man personality type is hardly restricted to blacks—note how much Italians enjoyed Silvio Berlusconi. Yet black personalities seem to have been selected more for likability than for functionality. If over the millennia, men in, say, Manchuria or Finland hadn't performed at a high enough level for their wives and children to survive the winter, they wouldn't have many living descendants. Not surprisingly, there aren't a lot of Manchurian or Finnish celebrities.
In contrast, in tropical agricultural environments, women did most of the work (basically, hoeing weeds) to keep the children fed. Hence, the reproductive payoff for being a charismatic Big Man who could attract 10 or 100 wives would be quite high. So, there are more fun, amusingly egomaniacal personalities among blacks than among Manchurians or Finns…or, say, Mormons.
Douthat goes on:
“We are nowhere near the post-racial moment that Barack Obama’s election was supposed to usher in; instead, we seem more obsessed with race than ever, and more attuned to identity politics in all its permutations. But Herman Cain’s candidacy has confirmed what the experience of the Obama era has already suggested: In national politics, race matters, but ideology matters much, much more.”
Ross offers a sophisticated view, but is it quite sophisticated enough?
I would argue, to the contrary, that much of what sounds like ideological debate today is actually the flailing about of white Americans trying to come up with acceptable-sounding rationalizations for their more primal loyalties.
For example, consider this Washington Post article, Two Washingtons: Bitterly divided Georgia town reflects discord in nation’s capital, [By Eli Saslow, November 12, 2011] about the recent mayor's race in the small town of Washington, Georgia, near the South Carolina border. The race turned,
Return of the War Party?
Is a vote for the Republican Party in 2012 a vote for war?
Is a vote for Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich a vote for yet another unfunded war of choice, this time with a nation, Iran, three times as large and populous as Iraq?
National Data, By Edwin S. Rubenstein | October Jobs: Reversion To Trend—Hispanics Displacing Whites AND Blacks
The racial contours of the unemployment crisis are well known. Black unemployment rates are about twice that of whites and nearly 50% above Hispanic rates.
Joe Paterno And The Penn State Rape Scandal: Discrediting The Opiate Of America
[VDARE.com note: Today Penn State's Nittany Lions play the Nebraska Cornhuskers. As you'll see below, both teams have had crime problems that did not cause a national scandal,]
Years from now, when American patriots have restored order to their nation and secured a future for “our posterity”—in the words of the Preamble to the Constitution—historians will look back on the early part of November 2011 and say that State College, Pennsylvania provided a perfect case study of the narcotic that fogged so many Americans’ minds, distracting them from the increasingly urgent implications of the National Question.
Longtime head football coach of Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) Joe Paterno was fired last week for his failure to handle charges of rape and sexual abuse of young men brought against former Penn State defense coordinator Jerry Sandusky back in 2002. Indeed, many within the athletic department and school administration have lost their jobs over this blatant cover-up, and Paterno’s 46-year coaching legacy is now irrevocably besmirched.
Read the gruesome Grand Jury report that details just exactly what
Lamar Smith’s Legal Workforce Act: Far More Than E-Verify—And Worth Fighting FOR, Not OVER
Congressman Lamar Smith's breakthrough bill H.R.2885 is packed with features to expel illegal aliens from our labor force. It’s actually moving in Congress, but the patriotic immigration reform community is internally conflicted and this opportunity may well be missed. At least that's how it looks to me.
I. The Dispute Among Friends
Some of our headliner heroes, especially Congressman Lou Barletta [R-PA], Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, and former Arizona state Senator Russell Pearce, have given thumbs down to H.R.2885 because it will preempt two state enforcement tools against illegal immigration:
- State authorities' workplace raids based upon suspicion of hiring illegal aliens won't be permitted.
- Some of the few states that have mandated E-Verify for private employers, either universally (AL, AZ, MS, SC) or partially (GA, LA, MO, UT), will have to amend and re-pass those laws for compatibility with the new federal law. (See here for a map of E-Verify rules by state. In most cases, states have mandated E-Verify only for government entities and, sometimes, for contractors that want to do business with those entities.)
The critics of the bill includes some of my VDARE.com colleagues (e.g. here and here) and some of the grassroots leaders who generated the pressure that yielded the E-Verify bills on their states' books (e.g. here).
Given the Obama Administration's intransigence against immigration enforcement, and the systematic federal nonfeasance on enforcement going back to the 1986 amnesty (amnesty and subsequent enforcement promised, only amnesty delivered), our compatriots, whose devotion and enormous efforts have delivered critical results, have the right to be suspicious of any hobbling of the states.
But, much as I admire Barletta (to whose campaigns I've donated, including his 2012 re-election effort), Kobach (whom I know and to whose campaigns I've also contributed), Pearce, and all our dissident "local notables", I think they're making the wrong call on H.R.2885.
Considering the old adage "the perfect is the enemy of the pretty darn good," I hope they'll reconsider their opposition to the bill because, while losing those two tools (the second only temporarily), we get so much more in return.
The details follow.
II. The Bill, Its Status, and Its Prospects
On September 12, 2011, 13-term Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX), currently Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a stalwart for the cause of immigration-in-the-national-interest since the early 1990s, introduced H.R.2885 [220-kB PDF], the "Legal Workforce Act." (For a splendid account of our three-decades-and-counting struggle, see historian Otis Graham's book Immigration Reform and America's Unchosen Future. Smith's early involvement is recounted on page 149.)
With Chairman Smith powering it, the Legal Workforce Act was marked up (i.e. amended) by the Judiciary Committee during September and sent on to the House Ways and Means Committee, which must deal with it before it can reach the House floor. The Judiciary Committee's mark-up was not without peril for the bill, and its future is decidedly uncertain—especially if too many of us who understand immigration's existential threat to America blow off our civic duty to coming generations because we're offended by H.R.2885's imperfections.
Rosemary Jenks, head of Government Relations for NumbersUSA, tells me that she's seeing some movement of the bill in Ways and Means but that the House Republican leadership needs to feel massive pressure from the grassroots if the bill is to come before the whole House. She explained:
The Achievements Of Russell Pearce—Arizona’s Patriotic Immigration Reform Champion is Down But Not Out!
[See also Is “Conservatism” Enough? Russell Pearce’s Defeat And The Future Of “The Movement” by James Kirkpatrick ]
There can be no doubt that the defeat of Russell Pearce in the Tuesday’s recall election was a huge blow to the patriotic immigration reform movement. We can point a lot of fingers about who is to blame for his defeat—James Kirkpatrick did a good job of it on VDARE.com yesterday. But it’s important not to get too wound up on the negatives. To pay tribute to this great man, and to keep things in perspective, I think it is also worth reflecting on what Russell Pearce has accomplished.
Apart from Tom Tancredo, no politician has been more effective in promoting the cause of patriotic immigration reform. In fact, Tancredo would likely acknowledge that in some ways Pearce achieved more. In Washington D.C., all patriot victories over the last decade have been defensive—preventing things from getting even worse. Bush’s amnesties were stopped in 2006 and 2007 and Obama’s DREAM Act in 2010. But immigration patriots have completely failed to get more enforcement against illegal immigration and, above all, cuts in legal immigration—let alone a moratorium.
This is why the progress made in Arizona in the last decade has been so inspiring. In 2004, patriotic immigration reform was near its low point. While 9-11 had temporarily halted George W. Bush’s amnesty proposals, most Republicans and conservatives were so loyal to Bush that few would challenge him on immigration. During that year’s presidential election, the Democrats didn’t even need to use euphemisms like “comprehensive immigration reform”. John Kerry frankly described his immigration proposals as amnesty.
But in 2004, State Rep. Russell Pearce spearheaded Protect Arizona Now or Prop 200 in Arizona. The law restricted benefits and voting fraud from illegal aliens.
There would have been absolutely no chance getting it through the legislature. Nor did Pearce find much help from national politicians. With the exception of Rep. Trent Franks, every single national politician in the state, even J.D. Hayworth, opposed the measure. So did the state’s Democratic Governor, and both the state Republican and Democratic parties. But, despite being outspent 3-1, the measure passed with 56% of the vote.
While Republicans talking heads were pushing George Bush’s phony 44% of the Hispanic vote after his reelection, Prop 200 put the political Establishment on notice that, when given the chance, Americans were serious about illegal immigration.
After Prop 200’s success, Pearce, Franks, and Tancredo toured the country to promote border security. This helped create the basis for the national grassroots effort that was ready when Bush promoted amnesty in 2006 and 2007.
In DC, the best immigration patriots could hope for was to stop Bush’s scheme. But in Arizona, Russell Pearce introduced the Legal Arizona Workers Act to mandate E-Verify for all employers. By then, state politicians knew that they would be looking for a new job if they voted against it; and it passed the legislature and Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano reluctantly signed it. Part of the reason: she knew Pearce would lead a push to get an even tougher bill via ballot initiative if she vetoed it.
In 2006 and 2008, Republicans—including newer converts to border security like J.D. Hayworth—lost in Congress. But under Pearce’s leadership, Arizona voters still passed tough ballot initiatives making English the official language, cracking down on human smuggling and denying bail to illegal aliens.
Then, with Obama in the White House, a strong Democratic majority in Congress, and Republican opposition faced solely on economic matters, immigration seemed to fall from the national spotlight again.
But Pearce’s SB 1070 brought immigration back to the forefront of national debate. Obama and Eric Holder’s contempt for the rule of law and democratic process in Arizona provoked a huge backlash across the country, as America rallied around Arizona.
Whereas a few years ago, pretty much every politician shied away from Prop 200, by 2010 Republicans were all fighting to outdo themselves over who supported the legislation the most. John McCain’s defeat of JD Hayworth in the 2010 U.S. Senate primary was disappointing, but the fact that this former La Raza Legislator of the Year winner was now at least pretending to support SB 1070 showed just
The Equality Racket
Our mainstream media have discovered a new issue: inequality in America. The gap between the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of the nation is wide and growing wider.
This, we are told, is intolerable. This is a deformation of American democracy that must be corrected through remedial government action.
What action? The rich must pay ”their fair share.” Though the top 1 percent pay 40 percent of federal income taxes and the bottom 50 percent have, in some years, paid nothing, the rich must be made to pay more.
Is “Conservatism” Enough? Russell Pearce’s Defeat And The Future Of “The Movement”
Conservatives, both Establishment and grassroots, lose because they don’t want to win.
Modern American Conservatism is unique among political movements in that it flinches from actively seeking victory. Partially
