Tag: immigration

Pro-Replacement Republicans

The professional Republican politicians are still absolutely determined to betray the remnants of the American people:

House Republicans are preparing to unveil their own broad template for overhauling the nation’s immigration system this week, potentially offering a small opening for President Obama and congressional Democrats to pass bipartisan legislation before the end of the year.

Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio and other Republican leaders are expected to release a one-page statement of immigration principles this week at their annual retreat in Cambridge, Md., according to aides with knowledge of the plan. The document is expected to call for border security and enforcement measures, as well as providing a path to legal status — but not citizenship — for many of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country, the aides said.

The Republican effort comes as Mr. Obama is expected to push once again for an overhaul of the immigration system in his State of the Union address Tuesday, and as lawmakers from both parties describe immigration as one of the few potential areas for bipartisan compromise before the end of the current Congress.

It should be abundantly clear, at this point, that Republicans have no interest whatsoever in American survival. From banks to new electorates, literally everything they do is to the detriment of the American people. Not that the Democrats are any better, but it is absurd to think that electing more Republicans is going to solve anything. They are part of the problem, not the solution.

Enjoy the decline.

The 10 blocks of immigration

Paul Collier has an excellent article in the New Statesman summarizing what should be the beginning point for any rational discussion on immigration. And you will note that NONE of the points of evidence are in harmony with the assumptions that are taken for granted by most pro-immigrationists, whereas many of them are in-line with anti-immigration policies.

Block 1 Around 40 per cent of the population of
poor countries say that they would emigrate if they could. There is
evidence that suggests this figure is not a wild exaggeration of how
people would behave. If migration happened on anything approaching this
scale, the host societies would suffer substantial reductions in living
standards. Hence, in attractive countries, immigration controls are
essential.

Block 2 Diasporas accelerate migration. By
“diasporas”, I mean those immigrants and their descendants who have
retained strong links with their home societies, rather than cutting
loose and integrating into their host societies. These links cut the
costs of migration and so fuel it. As a result, while diasporas are
growing, migration is accelerating. Diasporas continue to increase until
immigration is matched by the rate at which immigrants and their
offspring are absorbed into the general population. A crucial
implication of this interconnection is that the policies for migration
and diasporas must be compatible.

Block 3 Most immigrants prefer to retain their own
culture and hence to cluster together. This reduces the speed at which
diasporas are absorbed into the general population. The slower the rate
at which they are absorbed, the lower the rate of immigration that is
compatible with stable diasporas and migration. By design, absorption is
slower with multicultural policies than with assimilative policies.

Block 4 Migration from poor countries to rich ones
is driven by the wide gap in income between them. This gap is the moral
horror story of our times. The difference in incomes is ultimately due
to differences in political and social structures: poor countries have
political and social systems that are less functional than those in rich
ones. Their dysfunctional systems persist in part because they are
embedded in the identities and narratives of local cultures. Migrants
are escaping the consequences of their systems but usually bring their
culture with them.

Block 5 In economic terms, migrants are the
principal beneficiaries of migration but many suffer a wrenching
psychological shock. As far as can be judged from the net effect on
happiness, the economic gains and psychological costs broadly offset
each other, although the evidence on this is currently sketchy.

Block 6 Because migration is costly, migrants are
not among the poorest people in their home countries. The effect on
those left behind depends ultimately on whether emigrants speed
political and social change back home or slow it down. A modest rate of
emigration, as experienced by China and India, helps, especially if many
migrants return home. However, an exodus of the young and skilled – as
suffered by Haiti, for example – causes a haemorrhage that traps the
society in poverty.

Block 7 In high-income societies, the effect of
immigration on the average incomes of the indigenous population is
trivial. Economies are not damaged by immigration; nor do they need it.
The distributional effects can be more substantial but they depend on
the composition of immigration. In Australia, which permits only the immigration of the skilled, the
working classes probably gain from having more skilled people to work
with. In Europe, which attracts many low-skilled migrants, the
indigenous poor probably lose out through competition for social
housing, welfare, training and work. The clearest effect on the jobs
market is that new migrants compete with existing migrants, who would
consequently be substantial beneficiaries of tighter controls.

Block 8 The social effects of immigration outweigh
the economic, so they should be the main criteria for policy. These
effects come from diversity. Diversity increases variety and this
widening of choices and horizons is a social gain. Yet diversity also potentially jeopardises co-operation and
generosity. Co-operation rests on co-ordination games that support both
the provision of public goods and myriad socially enforced conventions.
Generosity rests on a widespread sense of mutual regard that supports
welfare systems. Both public goods and welfare systems benefit the
indigenous poor, which means they are the group most at risk of loss. As
diversity increases, the additional benefits of variety get smaller,
whereas the risks to co-operation and generosity get greater. Each host
society has an ideal level of diversity and hence an ideal size of
diasporas.

Block 9 The control of immigration is a human
right. The group instinct to defend territory is common throughout the
animal kingdom; it is likely to be even more fundamental than the
individual right to property. The right to control immigration is
asserted by all societies. You do not have the automatic right to move
to Kuwait; nor do the Chinese have the automatic right to move to
Angola, although millions would if they could. Nor do Bangladeshis have
the automatic right to move to Britain and claim a share of its social
and economic capital. It sometimes makes sense to grant the right to migrate on a
reciprocal basis. Thousands of French people want to live in Britain,
while thousands of Britons want to live in France. Yet if flows become
too unbalanced, rights derived from mutual advantage can be withdrawn:
Australia, for instance, withdrew them from Britain. The expansion of
the EU has created these unbalanced situations and the original
reciprocal right may therefore need modification.

Block 10 Migration is not an inevitable consequence
of globalisation. The vast expansion in trade and capital flows among
developed countries has coincided with a decline in migration between
them.

Block 8 is partially incorrect, and even that quasi-error is mitigated by the fact that Collier points out that while the “widening of choices and horizons is a social gain”, diversity itself is not. Block 7, of course, is completely wrong, as evidenced by American post-1973 wage stagnation.

The biggest falsehood concerning immigration is that it is good for the economy. I’ll address this in a future post, but the TL;DR version can be understood by simply comparing GDP and immigration rates from 1900 to 2010.

France rises again

It is interesting to see that even the globalist expats are observing precisely the same nationalist phenomenon growing that I have observed across Europe. The key difference, of course, being that they disapprove of it whereas I wholeheartedly approve of this eminently predictable development:

PARIS — It is difficult to go more than a day in France without hearing
someone express the conviction that the greatest problem in the country
is its ethnic minorities, that the presence of immigrants compromises
the identity of France itself. This conviction is typically expressed
without any acknowledgment of the country’s historical responsibility as
a colonial power for the presence of former colonial subjects in
metropolitan France, nor with any willingness to recognize that France
will be ethnically diverse from here on out, and that it’s the
responsibility of the French as much as of the immigrants to make this
work.

In the past year I have witnessed incessant stop-and-frisk of young
black men in the Gare du Nord; in contrast with New York, here in Paris
this practice is scarcely debated. I was told by a taxi driver as we
passed through a black neighborhood: “I hope you got your shots. You
don’t need to go to Africa anymore to get a tropical disease.” On
numerous occasions, French strangers have offered up the observation to
me, in reference to ethnic minorities going about their lives in the
capital: “This is no longer France. France is over.” There is a
constant, droning presupposition in virtually all social interactions
that a clear and meaningful division can be made between the people who
make up the real France and the impostors….

Equality is of course one of the virtues on which the French Republic
was founded, yet critics of the Enlightenment philosophy behind the
Revolution have long noticed a double standard: when equality is
invoked, these critics note, it is understood that this is equality among equals.
Political and social inequality is allowed to go on as before, as long
as it is presumed that this is rooted in a natural inequality….

The American approach to immigration is plainly rooted in historical
exigencies connected to the appropriation of a continent, and it is this
same history of appropriation that continues to induce shame in most
Euro-Americans who might otherwise be tempted to describe themselves as
natives. America has to recognize its hybrid and constructed identity,
since the only people who can plausibly lay claim to native status are
the very ones this new identity was conjured to displace. But in Europe
no similar displacement plays a role in historical memory: Europeans can
more easily imagine themselves to be their own natives, and so can
imagine any demographic impact on the continent from the extra-European
world as the harbinger of an eventual total displacement.

The writer is an idiot multiculturalist, of course, but he does correctly identify the fundamental difference between European attitude towards mass migration and the American attitude. Where he is completely wrong is in forgetting that Europeans don’t have to “imagine themselves to be their own natives”, as they are quite literally the indigenous people of Europe, they have the same rights to protection in Europe that are afforded to indigenous peoples elsewhere, and they cannot permit any displacement there because they have literally nowhere else to go.

Israel for the Jews. Japan for the Japanese. Europe for the various nations of Europe. And France for the French. Nationalism is not a difficult or dangerous concept, it is a moral imperative and a divine decree. The globalist, multicultural dogma is not merely impractical, it is immoral and overtly anti-Biblical, being Babel writ large.

Race, crime, and (r)

From Explorable:

Statistical correlation is measured by what is called coefficient of correlation (r). Its numerical value ranges from +1.0 to -1.0. It gives us an indication of the strength of relationship.


In general, r > 0 indicates positive relationship, r < 0
indicates negative relationship while r = 0 indicates no relationship
(or that the variables are independent and not related). Here r = +1.0
describes a perfect positive correlation and r = -1.0 describes a
perfect negative correlation.
Closer the coefficients are to +1.0 and -1.0, greater is the strength of the relationship between the variables.


As a rule of thumb, the following guidelines on strength of
relationship are often useful (though many experts would somewhat
disagree on the choice of boundaries).

Value of rStrength of relationship
-1.0 to -0.5 or 1.0 to 0.5Strong
-0.5 to -0.3 or 0.3 to 0.5Moderate
-0.3 to -0.1 or 0.1 to 0.3Weak
-0.1 to 0.1None or very weak

From Ron Unz:

[O]ver the last twenty-five years the weighted correlations for each of
the crime categories against the percentages of whites, Hispanics, and
“immigrants” (i.e. Hispanics-plus-Asians) have fluctuated in the general
range of -0.20 to -0.60. Interestingly enough, for most of the last
decade the presence of Hispanics and immigrants has become noticeably
less associated with crime than the presence of whites, although that
latter category obviously exhibits large regional heterogeneity.
Meanwhile, in the case of blacks, the weighted crime correlations have
steadily risen from 0.60 to around 0.80 or above, almost always now
falling within between 0.75 and 0.85.

That’s not the interesting part, however. At this point, only a complete idiot or the willfully blind will deny the relative African predilection for crime. What is interesting is his conclusions regarding how the supposedly anti-racist liberals are addressing this very strong correlation and how immigration factors into it:

America’s ruling financial, media, and political elites are largely
concentrated in three major urban centers—New York City, Los Angeles,
and Washington, D.C.—and all three have contained large black
populations, including a violent underclass. During the early 1990s,
many observers feared New York City was headed for urban collapse due to
its enormously high crime rates, Los Angeles experienced the massive
and deadly Rodney King Riots, and Washington often vied for the title of
American homicide capital. In each city, the violence and crime were
overwhelmingly committed by black males, and although white elites were
rarely the victims, their fears were quite palpable.

One obvious reaction to these concerns was strong political support
for a massive national crackdown on crime, and the prison incarceration
of black men increased by almost 500% during the two decades after 1980.
But even after such enormous rates of imprisonment, official FBI
statistics indicate that blacks today are still over 600% as likely to
commit homicide than non-blacks and their robbery rate is over 700%
larger; these disparities seem just as high with respect to Hispanic or
Asian immigrants as they are for whites. Thus, replacing a city’s
blacks with immigrants would tend to lower local crime rates by as much
as 90%, and during the 1990s American elites may have become
increasingly aware of this important fact, together with the obvious
implications for their quality of urban life and housing values.

According to Census data, between 1990 and 2010 the number of
Hispanics and Asians increased by one-third in Los Angeles, by nearly
50% in New York City, and by over 70% in Washington, D.C. The
inevitable result was to squeeze out much of the local black population,
which declined, often substantially, in each location. And all three
cities experienced enormous drops in local crime, with homicide rates
falling by 73%, 79%, and 72% respectively, perhaps partly as a result of
these underlying demographic changes. Meanwhile, the white population
increasingly shifted toward the affluent, who were best able to afford
the sharp rise in housing prices. It is an undeniable fact that
American elites, conservative and liberal alike, are today almost
universally in favor of very high levels of immigration, and their
possible recognition of the direct demographic impact upon their own
urban circumstances may be an important but unspoken factor in shaping
their views.

As an anecdotal example, consider the case of Matthew Yglesias, a
prominent young liberal blogger living in Washington, DC. A couple of
years ago he recounted on his blogsite
how he was suddenly attacked from behind and seriously beaten by two
young men while walking home one evening from a dinner party. At first
he was quite cagey about identifying his attackers, but he eventually
admitted they were blacks, possibly engaged in the growing racial
practice of urban “polar bear hunting” so widely publicized by the
Drudge Report and other rightwing websites.

Few matters are more likely to trouble the minds of our
Harvard-educated intellectual elite than fear of suffering random
violent assaults while they walk the streets of their own city. Yet no
respectable progressive would possibly focus on the racial character of
such an attack, let alone advocate the removal of local blacks as a
precautionary measure. Instead Yglesias suggested that housing-density
issues might have been responsible and that better urban planning would
reduce crime.

But consider that support for very high levels of foreign immigration
is an impeccably liberal cause, and such policies inevitably displace
and remove huge numbers of urban blacks; it is easy to imagine that
Yglesias quietly redoubled his pro-immigration zeal in the wake of the
incident. Multiply this personal example a thousand-fold, and perhaps
an important strand of the tremendous pro-immigration ideological
framework of American elites becomes apparent. The more
conspiratorially-minded racialists, bitterly hostile to immigration,
sometimes speculate that there is a diabolical plot by our ruling power
structure to “race-replace” America’s traditional white population.
Perhaps a hidden motive along these lines does indeed help explain some
support for heavy immigration, but I suspect that the race being
targeted for replacement is not the white one.

Indeed. One might reach the same conclusion when looking closely at the consequences of liberal policies on welfare and abortion. Never look at the selling points, look at the consequences. If the course is not subsequently changed in light of a divergence between the two, it is safe to assume that the consequences were planned from the start.

Remember, extrapolating current trends to predict the future is reliably a failure. In 1900, it was widely believed that the black race was inevitably headed for extinction. 100 years later, it looks like the whites are on the way out. But it’s not hard to imagine ethnic cleansing in Europe combined with ethnic strife in the Americas and ruthless Chinese colonization in Africa leading to the revival of concerns for the black race in 2100.

“Send the lot back”

An English UKIP politician is attacked for saying what most English people now fervently believe:

A high-profile UKIP politician is facing a racism storm after being caught on camera saying all immigrants to Britain should be sent back home. Victoria Ayling, who made headlines when she defected from the Tories in March, made the inflammatory comments in a 20-minute video seen by The Mail on Sunday. On the subject of immigration she talks about restricting the numbers of foreigners entering the UK, but then adds: ‘I just want to send the lot back, but I can’t say that.’

Of course, she and UKIP are making a huge mistake by backing down and trying to hide behind the “illegal immigrant” fig leaf.  But the problem with mass immigration is not whether the immigrants are legal or not, it is that there are simply far too many of them.

No nation can survive an immigrant population, including second and third generations, of more than five percent without seeing its legal and cultural traditions significantly transformed.  That transformation is precisely why anti-American forces have been pushing mass immigration since 1965. And it is why the EU elite has been forcing it on the European nations as well. But the tide is rapidly turning, as the Labour party leaders have learned:

Mr Morris, a former No 10 adviser to Tony Blair at the time of the ‘open-door’ policy, used the social-networking website Twitter to announce on Monday evening: ‘Recipe for a miserable evening:  off to do focus groups on immigration.’

And afterwards, he wrote, in a line dripping with sarcasm: ‘Tonight’s focus groups as progressive as  I hoped,’ adding: ‘Their plan: end migration and fill jobs with Brits who have to take job.’ He declared that it had left him ‘depressed, as you might imagine’. The liberal views on immigration of many of Labour’s frontbenchers are not shared by most voters.

In a recent opinion poll, 72 per cent of respondents favoured slamming the door on unskilled immigrants, while 59 per cent thought we should allow fewer relatives of people already living in Britain into the country to join them.

Multiculturalism and mass immigration are already mortally wounded, even as the Obama administration tries to figure out how to ram immigration amnesty through Congress. Legal immigrants are now being openly attacked across continental Europe, from Hungary to Greece. Saudi Arabia has announced plans to deport 2 million immigrants, which represents nearly 7 percent of its total population, and has already deported over 100,000.

And on the Daily Mail site, a considerable portion of the 2300+ comments are strongly in favor of Ms Ayling’s opinion. The top-rated comment on the article, with 11,105 upvotes to 3,751 downvotes, was this: “How 95% of the UK feels but are for some Reason shouldn’t say!”

The age of mass immigration is obviously over. Multiculturalism is a failed and societally destructive concept and it is now eminently clear that large-scale immigration devastates advanced economies. Civilized repatriations must begin and they must begin within the next ten years. If they do not, history strongly suggests that the world will enter into another era of vicious ethnic cleansing and mass killings.

Here is the vital point I hope you will at least try to understand: it doesn’t matter what you think. It doesn’t matter what I think. It doesn’t even matter what Barack Obama or David Cameron think. It doesn’t matter what any of us prefer or believe to be ethically or morally right. The great historical patterns always overwhelm national politics and specific ideologies in the course of time. Just as the various mono-ethnic nations came into being in the first place, they will recreate themselves over and over again, and there is no government or ideology that is capable of standing in the way of the basic human instinct to be surrounded by one’s own kind in periods of uncertainty, economic contraction and international chaos.

Saudi Arabia performs the “impossible”

Isn’t it amazing how other countries routinely appear to be able to do what we are informed is not only impossible, but outright unthinkable?

Teodros Adhanom, the Ethiopian foreign minister, has turned to
Twitter almost every night for the last three weeks to tersely report
the number of his countrymen expelled from Saudi Arabia.“Last night arrivals from Saudi reached 100,620,” he wrote on Friday,
describing a fraction of one of the largest deportations in recent
Middle East history. Riyadh has said it wants to forcibly expel as many as 2m of the foreign workers, including hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians, Somalis, Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, who make up around a third of the country’s 30m population.

At home, the exodus of illegal workers is being seen as the kingdom’s
most radical labour market experiment yet. With one in four young Saudi
males out of work, analysts applaud Riyadh’s determination to tackle the
problem, but doubt the crackdown will achieve its objective, as Saudi
nationals are unlikely to apply for menial jobs.

What a fascinating way to solve the unemployment problem! Get rid of the excess labor supply. Why, the next thing you know, someone will discover that the Law of Supply and Demand applies to the labor market! And if a country with a 30m population can expel 2m illegal workers in a civilized manner, then surely a country with 300m population is capable of expelling 20m of them.  Minnesota could be Somali-free within 15 days if they contracted the job out to the Saudis.

It’s not a coincidence that after importing tens of millions of immigrants, the USA has gone into economic and demographic decline. The same is true of the UK and Western Europe. The facts are in. Mass immigration does not boost mature economies. It only speeds up their decline by reducing wages and forcing native workers to go into debt in order to try to maintain their standard of living until the debt limits are reached.

As for the unwillingness of Saudi nationals to apply for menial jobs, the Saudis might consider raising the wages and eliminating the subsidized unemployment.

More and more diversity

If 50 million Mexican immigrants are good for the economy, imagine how much better 100 million Chinese immigrants would be. We’ll all live like kings!

U.S. immigration officials are considering a proposal from Chinese
investors to create a multibillion-dollar development in New York’s
Catskills called “China City” — raising concerns among critics about
the potential cost to U.S. taxpayers and, according to one analyst, the
possibility it could be a “stalking horse” for the Beijing government.

A spokesman from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services told
FoxNews.com that the proposal for Thompson, N.Y., has not been approved
but is under consideration.

The mysterious proposed development appears to be a step beyond the
types of ethnic enclaves scattered throughout U.S. cities, like the
Chinatown sections of New York City or San Francisco. The 600-acre
“China City of America” is located far outside New York City in upstate
New York’s wetlands and is a meticulously planned project, calling for
family housing, a college and student residences, among other
structures.

I have a better idea. Let’s just give them New York City along with all of its residents, most of whom are avid supporters of mass immigration. Then move all the post-1965 immigrants into New York state.  All of the promised economic benefits with none of the social costs.

How can those who have repeatedly claimed that the magic of geographical relocation transforms serfs and savages into true blue Constitution-loving Americans possibly object to establishing large Chinese cities in their midst? And how could anyone suspect that the new Chinese-Americans would harbor any loyalties to Beijing? They’re here for the opportunity, after all!  They love America!

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.