Tag: immigration

Mailvox: A European perspective

A Spanish reader weighs in concerning my comments on the different challenges faced by Western civilization in Europe and North America:

I have been following your posts for several years and, although I never had an interest in fantasy, I just started reading The Wardog’s Coin. (I figured that since I enjoy so much your thoughts on economics, politics, and gender issues, I should also check the fiction.)

After reading you post titled “Why there is hope for Europe” I would like to share some thoughts with you about the differences between the situations on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps I should begin this by mentioning that I am European, Spanish to be precise.

In your article, you enumerate these three differences:

1.    Parliamentary systems
2.    Trans-ideological nationalism
3.    No popular pro-immigrant mythology

I agree with the first, not so much with the other two. But, most importantly, I would add two that I consider crucial.

1.    America’s immigration problem is with Spanish-speaking (mostly) Christians, whereas Europe’s is with (mostly) Muslims. I am really surprised that you did not include this one among your three differences.

The Americans’ memory of the Mexican War or the Spanish-American War is nothing compared to the Europeans’ memory of centuries fighting against Islam (almost 800 years in the case of Spain). Not to sound patronizing, but can an American wrap his head around the idea of a national identity forged in a conflict that triples the age of the United States of America (711 A.D. to 1492 vs. 1776 to 2013)? Some things are so big that they are routinely overlooked.

An American notices a South American moving into his neighborhood and he may have some very valid concerns, if nothing else, as a taxpayer. But he never really fears that Juan Garcia is going to show up one day in a subway station and blow himself up killing dozens of innocents. Our American John Doe has never witnessed Juan Garcia peeing in broad daylight on the façade of an American church. John might fear that his baby girl will marry Juan and then he’d have to attend a Catholic wedding, he does not fear that his baby girl will spend the rest of her life in a burka. He may fear that his grandchildren will play soccer rather than American football, he does not fear that they will learn how to behead infidels (like John himself).

In Europe, you find croissants, which were created in the image of a crescent to be eaten in defiance of the Muslim invaders centuries ago. You find Spanish families named Matamoros, literally ‘Moor-slayer’. And so on. In Europe, a nationalist party has plenty of symbolism to use against immigrants. There is absolutely nothing in the American culture against South Americans even remotely resembling that deeply rooted pathos. The closest thing being what? The ballad of El Álamo?

Plus, a South American is not going to tell our John Doe to stop eating burgers, but a Muslim cannot tolerate jamón, and to a Spaniard jamón is several orders of magnitude more important than the national flag, the national anthem, and the King, combined.

Worse still, after two devastating world wars and a traumatic cold war dividing the continent, Europeans happily (hippily?) embraced this kumbayah idea that if you don’t annoy others then they will leave you in peace. This was not meant only between France and Germany or between the metropolis and the former colonies, but in a vaguely general universal sense. So it is now particularly vexing to receive so much animosity from some immigrants (while the official politically correct tune goes on unaltered). America has not at all gone through such an emotional roller-coaster; you see, it happened over there.

So John Doe is not that concerned; certainly not as concerned as his European counterparts.

2.    If I am not very mistaken, immigration in the US is very concentrated in the Sunbelt. Whereas In Europe, immigration in Scandinavia, Britain, and Germany is as much an issue as it is in Spain and Italy. This would be equivalent to Alaska, the Dakotas, and Vermont having as much an issue with immigrants as Texas and California. Clearly, they don’t. (Again, this is not to overlook the federal fiscal implications.)

Plus, European towns are typically much more densely populated and geographically contiguous, so much so that you can actually walk from one neighborhood to another, so when a neighborhood suffers it is much more evident to all and so it is easier to genuinely worry, to empathize (even if the media tries to ignore it). But urban sprawl in the US, I suspect, has had a detrimental effect on what Ibn Khaldun called Asabiyyah, the nation’s social cohesion, by creating some sort of watertight compartments. An American neighborhood goes to hell and the people over the county border do not even notice because, to begin with, they’d need to drive there to notice but they never go (and the media dutifully ignores it). By the way, I think this phenomenon also helps explain why American Conservatives in the last presidential election where so mistaken about their real chances, they have lost sight of the nation by living inside a monochromatic bubble (Dems too, but their aggregated Blue State bubbles are demographically larger, it seems).

I think these two points are much more powerful than the pro-immigrant mythology. Indeed, it was, in part, because of the strength of this mythology all across Europe that so many nations made it so easy for immigrants to move in.

Finally, all this relates to perceptions, not necessarily actual threats, and to how easily and how much political parties can gain from that fear and what they do with that. Almost every Muslim I have personally met in Europe is too busy making a living to spoil it by going radical. And since they often live in several European countries before they settle down it is quite normal for many of them to speak several European languages. And let’s not forget that it was not them who drafted or even voted for all the idiotic legislation that’s gotten us into this mess (ditto for South Americans in the US). Obviously if it was all bad news then all the continent would be soaked in blood once again. But the really amusing twist (and isn’t History rich in amusing twists?) is that these growing nationalist parties have much more in common with what most adult Muslims have seen in their own homelands than with the political parties that have dominated Europe since 1945. Perhaps they will feel more at home? It’s not a cruel cheap joke. After all, General Franco, won the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) with the help of the African volunteers, his beloved Moorish Guards. Perhaps the key to real multicultural understanding was not to be found in kumbayah Social-democracy but in something better time-tested.

He’s entirely correct to call me to account on my failure to mention the demographic differences concerning the two invasions, especially since I’ve written about them in the past. Most Americans are astonished to learn that Muslims make up less than 5 percent of the European population, whereas Hispanics make up around 20 percent of the U.S. population.

As one American friend was surprised to observe, she saw more Muslims on her last visit to Minneapolis than she did in Rome.  Londonistan and Amstarabia no more indicate the Muslim occupation of Europe than New York City proves that most Americans are Jews.

That being said, our Spanish friend is incorrect about the invasion of the U.S. being primarily concentrated in the Sunbelt. It is certainly most severe in the four Sand States, but when Somalis are being elected in St. Paul and entire neighborhoods are being renamed to reflect who is now controlling them, the idea that the problem is localized is clearly incorrect. To put it in the proper perspective, there are only about 4x more Muslims in Europe per capita than there are Somalis in Minnesota. 

The nonexistent magic of geographical relocation

Republicans are beginning to wake up to the fact that Karl Rove was an inobservant fool and George Bush the Younger’s “Hispanics are natural conservatives” strategy was political suicide from the start:

Most of the millions of immigrants we have welcomed came from countries
where the only government they knew was one that made all decisions
about economic and social policy. The current level of legal immigration
to America adds thousands of people every day whose views and
experience are contrary to the conservative value of limited government.

The influx of these new voters will reduce or eliminate Republicans’
ability to offer an alternative to big government, increased government
spending, and favorite liberal policies such as Obamacare and gun
control. New voters will lean on our hard-pressed health care system and
overcrowded public schools to demand more government services….

An enormous body of survey research shows that large majorities of
recent immigrants, who are mostly Hispanic and Asian, hold liberal views
on most policy issues and therefore vote Democratic two-to-one.

Considering that the German, Scandinavian, Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants have never quite managed to master the historically unusual concepts of limited government and the sovereign rights of Englishmen, I’ve never understood the idea that Hispanics, Asians, and Africans, whose political traditions are even further from the American revolutionary concepts, could reasonably be expected to adopt them faithfully en masse.

When one considers that two of the three major political parties in Mexico are both members of the Socialist International, can it really be surprising to anyone that the 30 million+ Mexicans in the USA tend to lean left? Geographical location does not tend to change either ideology or political identities.

The lesson of p. punctatus

Immigration advocates never seem to take into account that the putative benefits of immigration depend entirely upon the characteristics of those entering the society en masse.

In a recently published paper in PNAS Early Edition, Dobata and Kazuki Tsuji demonstrate what they believe is the first observed public goods dilemma observed in a non-human and non-microbial system.

By using the social ant Pristomyrmex punctatus, they were able to show the fitness consequences to the colony and track the shifting genetic make-up as cheaters invaded and took hold. Researchers have recently evaluated these questions in systems involving viruses and cells (where cells may secrete protective substances, or self-destruct to form a spore-dispersing stalk) but not in multicellular organisms before. Yet the results are so similar, write Dobata and Tsuji, that they believe universal principles are at play.

P. punctatus is a curious species. The queen caste, morphologically and functionally distinct in most social insects, has been secondarily lost. All workers are involved in both reproduction and cooperative tasks like foraging. There is still a division of labor, among age groups. Young workers take care of inside-nest tasks, which include asexual (thelytokous) reproduction. Older workers ease out of reproduction and shift to tasks outside the nest, like foraging.

But there is a third kind of P. punctatus. A group of cheaters, made of a single intraspecific lineage in the field, that engage in very few tasks, save for reproduction.

The researchers found when these genetic cheaters infect a colony they have better individual fitness than the workers, both in terms of survival and brood production. They reduce worker survival and reproduction, as more young workers shift to tasks outside the nest to effectively pick up the slack. Eventually, the cheater hordes take over. The authors call the cheaters a kind of  ”transmissible social cancer.”

In cheater-only colonies, more eggs are initially produced, compared to worker colonies, but they are neglected. Eggs begin to rot and the nest becomes a dirty, unhygienic place. Eventually, the nest dies. For a group, cheating is an evolutionary dead end.

Compare the global North to the global South. Then consider whether the immigrant communities of today more closely resemble meticulous productive ant nests or dirty, unhygienic places. Ants might not be able to anticipate the idiocratic consequences of allow a “transmissible social cancer” to take root in their colonies, but one would have thought that human beings could do better.

When a society’s social policy is a scientifically predictable evolutionary dead end, it should invite rethink. Instead, questioning it is deemed akin to blasphemy. This is not the hallmark of a society destined for survival.

Immigration: a temporal comparison

Steve Sailer draws attention to a failed social experiment in mass immigration.

Spain 2007: Imagine what would happen if a prosperous Western nation threw open its borders, allowing immigrants to flood in virtually unchecked. Soaring unemployment, overstretched social services, rising crime, even rioting in the streets? Not in Spain…. Over the past decade, the traditionally homogeneous country has become a sort of open-door laboratory on immigration. Spain has absorbed more than 3 million foreigners from places as diverse as Romania, Morocco, and South America. More than 11% of the country’s 44 million residents are now foreign-born, one of the highest proportions in Europe. With hundreds of thousands more arriving each year, Spain could soon reach the U.S. rate of 12.9%. And it doesn’t seem to have hurt much. Spain is Europe’s best-performing major economy, with growth averaging 3.1% over the past five years.
– Spain: Immigrants Welcome, May 20, 2007

Spain 2013: A strong tourist season helped the unemployment rate dip to 26.3
percent from 27.2 percent in the first quarter, the National Statistics
Institute said on Thursday. That left 5.98 million people out of work – a far greater proportion
of the population that every other euro zone country bar Greece.
–  Spain’s Unemployment Rate Falls, July 25, 2013

That should suffice to explode the myth that “Immigration is good for the economy”.  That is worse unemployment than Spain suffered during the Great Depression of the 1930s; for that matter, it is worse than the USA experienced during the Great Depression.

But there is more to it than just the problem of excess immigration. As I have pointed out, the free trade in labor has increasingly driven Spain’s native population out of the country.

“One interpretation of this finding is thus.  Given the quality of its institutions, Spain is due
for a lower wage structure, with lower quality jobs, as they might be
perceived by the workers themselves.  To some extent, Spain will achieve
this new equilibrium by population adjustment and exchange.  Spanish
engineers will move to southern Germany and Ecuadorans will move to
Spain.”

Free trade is incompatible with national sovereignty and national identity. It is, intrinsically and quite literally, anti-American, anti-semitic, and anti-everything except big corporations and even bigger governments.  Never forget that Karl Marx was a free trader for precisely that reason. You cannot claim to support either the U.S. Constitution or the American nation and also support free trade.

Free trade results in “equilibrium by population adjustment and exchange”.  In practical terms, that means 50 percent of your children will have to live in another country.

Racism in Israel

Thoughts on an attack by a Jewish mob:

I went to a demonstration led by MK Michael Ben-Ari two
days ago (Tuesday), and was joined by my girlfriend, Galina. Ben-Ari, a
Kahanist, was inciting the crowd against the African refugees in a
distinctly anti-Semitic manner, peppering his talk with incessant
references to excrement and urine. At some point, Galina couldn’t take
it any longer, and shouted something back.

Within minutes we were surrounded by an angry mob of about
20 people, composed mostly of women, who hurled curses at her. Someone
pulled out a tear gas canister and waved it at her face.

Racist and sexual slurs filled the air repeatedly. Time and time again,
people expressed the wish she would be raped by Sudanese, and asked her
if she was bedding them. A boy, between 10 and 11 years old, screamed at
her point blank that what she needs is a “nigger’s cock.” David Sheen videotaped much of it….

We tried to get out of the market. The mob was screaming with glee that
she was being arrested. More spitting and curses. A woman aimed a kick
at Galina’s head from behind her, I blocked the kick with a snarl. She
was smiling. On the way to the train station we were attacked,
physically, by a hoodlum, and as I was trying to get in between him and
Galina after he hit me in the back, I decided that if he attacks me
again, I’d take the metal part of the camera and smash it into his jaw,
and take my chances with the police later.

Perhaps someone should alert the Southern Poverty Law Council about this violently racist, anti-semitic hate mob.  I find it telling how differently many Jews feel when it is their own country that is a migratory destination for African refugees than when it is America or other countries in the West that are serving as the migratory destination.

Whatever happened to diversity being Israel’s strength, the importance of multiculturalism, and the manifold ways in which African and Arab immigrants will strengthen and enrich Israel? Whatever happened to the melting pot – a Jewish concept, not an American one, as it happens – to say nothing of the moral imperative of embracing the poor and downtrodden immigrants?

Do not the Sudanese refugees have precisely the same right to live in Israel that Jews do to live in America, Germany, France, England, and every other country into which they have migrated in the past?

Now, being a sovereign nation, Israel has the right to bar non-Jews from residing in their country. However, this necessarily requires that non-Jewish countries have the right to bar Jews from residing in their countries.

Breivik sets the political trend

I believe these election results confirm I won my debate with a certain skeptical Finn concerning the electoral implications of the mass shooting of the Norwegian Labor Party’s larval quislings:

An anti-immigrant populist party laid claim to a major role in oil-rich
Norway’s government for the first time on Tuesday after a center-right
alliance won a landslide general election victory to oust a Labour
administration. The Progress party, which once had among its members Anders Behring
Breivik, who killed 77 people in 2011 in a gun and bomb attack targeting
Labour, came third in Monday’s poll, giving it a kingmaker role in
coalition building.

Breivik wasn’t a madman. He simply put into action on what many Norwegians were thinking and his murderous actions were a warning sign of what was to come if the current program of mass immigration was maintained.

The Norwegian people have turned against mass immigration precisely because they do not want more Breiviks. Nationalist resistance against invasion is inevitable; even the French were moved to it subsequent to their conquest and occupation by Nazi Germany. The only question, the only choice, is if resistance comes within the political process or outside of it.

And when that resistance is deemed out of bounds and forcibly expelled from the political process, it is not eliminated. It simply resorts to more extreme measures. If you want more violence, more Breiviks, even open civil war, then continue to support mass immigration, multiculturalism, and desegregation. If you want ethnic peace, you will have to oppose those things.

Both the Australian and the Norwegian people appear to be moving in the direction of peace. The American people, on the other hand, appear to be doing the precise opposite. As I said not long after the shootings, I will not be in the least bit surprised if Anders Breivik is one day regarded as a national hero in Norway, much like George Washington and William Tell, two men who also offered murderous resistance to their own governments.

Facts about immigration

Zerohedge lists 19 facts about immigration, both legal and illegal.  The emphasis is on the “illegal”, but conservative sensitivities notwithstanding, the problems of immigration do not hinge upon the legal or illegal status of the immigrant.  These are the five I considered most important:

#1 57 percent of all households that are led by an immigrant (legal or illegal) are enrolled in at least one welfare program.

#4 The Department of Homeland Security says that it has lost track of a million people that have entered this country but that appear never to have left.

#9 It is estimated that illegal aliens make up approximately 30 percent
of the population in federal, state and local prisons and that the total
cost of incarcerating them is more than $1.6 billion annually.

#17 According to the Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center, Mexican drug cartels were actively operating in 50 different U.S. cities in 2006.  By 2010, that number had skyrocketed to 1,286.

#19 It is being projected that the Senate immigration bill will bring 33 million more people to the United States over the next decade.

And keep in mind these are only some of the known costs of immigration, while most of the supposed benefits resulting from this free movement of labor are, in fact, also detrimental to the interests of most American citizens. 

Bryan Caplan and the Open Borders movement

I find it remarkable that the image below is what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce thinks passes for a pro-immigration image.
In the meantime, the quasi-libertarian economist Bryan Caplan is demonstrating that he can’t follow the basic logic of domestic free trade or understand the consequences of the free movement of international labor as the Open Borders movement searches for a logo.  Steve Sailer has compiled a number of them that are nearly as bad as the Chamber of Commerce’s entry.

“The Open Borders movement seeks a symbol that embodies the spirit of
free migration. To achieve that goal, we are sponsoring a logo contest.
The winner of this contest will get $200 and their design will become
the official logo of the Open Borders web site.”

Lacking any graphic talent, I shall refrain from attempting to create one myself, although I would certainly encourage the Dread Ilk to do so if anyone is so inclined.  Instead, I would invite Mr. Caplan to attempt to rebut my argument that an Open Borders regime will force the international emigration of more than 40 percent of Americans before they turn 35.  I should also like to see him address the fact that this forced economic migration is desired by influential statists specifically in order to “undermine the “homogeneity of its member states”.

It is very important to understand that Open Borders movement seeks nothing less than the destruction of the nation-state in the name of the global economy.  This extreme Free Trade doctrine necessarily requires the end of the Jewish state of Israel, the end of the U.S. Constitution, and the demolition of the chief structural obstacle to global dictatorship. Open Borders and the Free Trade argument can be best understood as the European Common Market scheme writ large; it is the economic bait for global political integration.

The current immigration reform bill is the completion of the American national suicide that began with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and was proposed by the grandson of Jewish immigrants, sponsored by the grandson of Irish immigrants, and publicly championed by another grandson of Irish immigrants.  Thus demonstrating that even when they are superficially integrated, second- and third-generation immigrants tend to act against the interests of the nations their parents and grandparents invaded.

Opposing predictions revisited

You may recall that after the mass shooting of dozens of larval Labor politicians in Norway, there was a discussion of whether this would turn the Norwegian electorate to the right or to the left.  Many predicted an anti-nativist backlash that would strengthen the ruling Norwegian Labor party and support its vision of a multicultural, multiethnic Norway. I, on the other hand, predicted that Breivik’s action would eventually be seen as a harbinger of Norway’s belated move towards the ethnic nationalism that is sweeping across most of Europe.

I believe we can safely conclude that the verdict is now in:

Norway will be holding elections for Parliament on September 9, just two weeks before Germany votes. If polls taken over the last year are accurate, the eight-year-old Labor-party government of Jens Stoltenberg is headed for a landslide defeat.

Normally, you would think it would be a shoo-in for reelection. Labor’s social democrats have long thought of themselves as the natural party of government — Labor has been the leading party in Norway for all but 16 of the last 78 years. While much of Europe is wracked by recession, Norway’s economy grew by 3 percent last year, and the unemployment rate is only 3.5 percent. Norway’s GDP per capita is now over $60,000 a year.

But Norwegians appear likely to elect a conservative coalition government for the first time in over a decade. Polls show the Conservative party leading with 32 percent of the vote, which should give it 58 seats in the 169-seat parliament, a dramatic increase from 2005, when it won only 23 seats. The Labor party has about 30 percent of the vote, and its left-wing allied parties are floundering. The Progress party — a populist party that supports low taxes and stricter limits on immigration, and that worries about Muslim extremism – has about 16 percent of the vote, and it and the Conservatives, together with their smaller allies, look to have a clear majority in the new Parliament.

Charles Martel, William Tell, and Winston Churchill are all seen as national heroes for their violent opposition to foreign immigration and occupation, so while some might find it very hard to believe now, it will not be terribly surprising if Anders Breivik is one day revered by Norwegians for his murderous stand against the invaders and quislings of his homeland.

Boehner prepares his latest betrayal

It amazes me that John Boehner is still the head of the House Republicans after single-handedly saving the Obama administration by raising the debt ceiling.  Now it looks as if he is preparing to mortally wound the Republican Party in the short term and permanently segregate the American two-party system in the long term:

While House Speaker John Boehner is keeping a tight lid on his personal position on immigration reform, conservative activists and lawmakers fear the Republican leader may rubber-stamp Democrats’ controversial legislation in a backroom deal with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Boehner declined to answer whether he supports what many on the left have come to term a “pathway to citizenship” for illegal immigrants during his appearance on CBS News’ Face The Nation on Sunday morning. For conservative lawmakers, that does not assuage fears that he and his deputies House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Whip Kevin McCarthy, and Budget Committee chairman Rep. Paul Ryan could be working behind the scenes cut a deal with Reid and President Barack Obama to achieve amnesty for illegal immigrants in America.

“We are scared to death of what we figure is already Boehner’s end game,” a senior congressional GOP aide told Breitbart News. “There are so many forces within the GOP establishment pushing for their interests that it’s hard to conceive that Boehner will not cave to them.”

By adding tens of millions of new Democratic voters who are, for the most part, to the left of the Democratic Party’s center, more whites are going to gravitate towards the Republican Party than has been seen since Nixon first successfully launched his Southern Strategy.

Few “anti-racist” white liberals tend to remain that way once they are surrounded by  vibrant neighbors and find themselves living in the diversity they once supported so enthusiastically from afar.  Remember, “white flight” is mostly an urban liberal phenomenon.