Tag: immigration

The consequences of democratization

It is itself indicative of an educational failure that the inevitable consequence of democratizing anything leads inevitably to mediocrity should prove surprising:

Years ago, school was not for everyone. Classrooms were places for discipline, study. Teachers were respected figures. Parents actually gave them permission to punish their children by slapping them or tugging their ears. But at least in those days, schools aimed to offer a more dignified life.

Nowadays more children attend school than ever before, but they learn much less. They learn almost nothing. The proportion of the Mexican population that is literate is going up, but in absolute numbers, there are more illiterate people in Mexico now than there were 12 years ago. Even if baseline literacy, the ability to read a street sign or news bulletin, is rising, the practice of reading an actual book is not. Once a reasonably well-educated country, Mexico took the penultimate spot, out of 108 countries, in a Unesco assessment of reading habits a few years ago.

One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?”

The concept of group schooling is fundamentally flawed from the start.  But throw in the expansion of the number of students attending as well as the elements of entrenched, self-interested administrative and teaching bureaucracies, and you have a perfect recipe for teaching absolutely nothing of import, regardless of whether you are considering American college students or Mexican elementary schoolers.  It should be readily apparent that the more children attend school, the more mediocre the education that ALL of those children will receive.

It’s not exactly a zero-sum game, but it might as well be.  The more resources that are committed to education, the more the parasite class is drawn to it and the more resources will be diverted away from its primary purpose.

Now lets contemplate the consequences of importing tens of millions of these uneducated quasi-illiterates with zero familiarity knowledge of the Western political tradition and giving them citizenship and the right to vote.  On what planet does anyone possibly think this is going to lead to any sort of improvement in the national well-being?  What is the case for believing this is going to do anything but hasten the decline and fall of the United States?

People sometimes wonder how I can be an open and avowed anti-equalitarian elitist.  To which my response is: precisely how mediocre do you believe yourself to be that you are not?

Rubio will kill the Republican Party

If, that is, he manages to convert enough of the rank-and-file to buy into the Bush strategy based on the conservative Latino voter and support his pro-immigration policies.  A veteran GOP operative explains why Marco Rubio is not the Great Brown Hope for the Republican Party:

“Let me tell you something. The Hispanic voters in Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico don’t give a damn about Marco Rubio, the Tea Party Cuban-American from Florida. You know what? We won the Cuban vote! And it’s because younger Cubans are behaving differently than their parents. It’s probably my favorite stat of the whole campaign. So this notion that Marco Rubio is going to heal their problems — it’s not even sophomoric; it’s juvenile! And by the way: the bigger problem they’ve got with Latinos isn’t immigration. It’s their economic policies and health care. The group that supported the president’s health care bill the most? Latinos.”

However, it is absolutely absurd to think that it is only the GOP’s economic policies that are the primary problem, although they are not popular.  Immigration is destroying it because the USA has been invaded by millions of people who vote to the left side of the political spectrum.  The Republican Party isn’t competitive in Detroit or Los Angeles, and it isn’t going to be competitive anywhere that follows the demographic lead of those two cities.

Which, in this case, happens to be the entire nation.

Rubio isn’t going to save the Republican Party.  He is much more likely to finish it off for good with the help of Barack Obama.

The Left’s reluctant racists

A bien-pensant progressive reluctantly admits that vibrant multiculturalism and immigration has made a reluctant racist of her:

In the Nineties, when I arrived, this part of Acton was a traditional working-class area. Now there is no trace of any kind of community – that word so cherished by the Left. Instead it has been transformed into a giant transit camp and is home to no one. The scale of immigration over recent years has created communities throughout London that never need to – or want to – interact with outsiders.

It wasn’t always the case: since the 1890s thousands of Jewish, Irish, Afro-Caribbean, Asian and Chinese workers, among others, have arrived in the capital, often displacing the indigenous population. Yes, there was hateful overt racism and discrimination, I’m not denying that. But, over time, I believe we settled down into a happy mix of incorporation and shared aspiration, with disparate peoples walking the same pavements but returning to very different homes – something the Americans call “sundown segregation”.

But now, despite the wishful thinking of multiculturalists, wilful segregation by immigrants is increasingly echoed by the white population – the rate of white flight from our cities is soaring….  I, too, have decided to leave my area, following in the footsteps of so many of my neighbours. I don’t really want to go. I worked long and hard to get to London, to find a good job and buy a home and I’d like to stay here. But I’m a stranger on these streets and all the “good” areas, with safe streets, nice housing and pleasant cafés, are beyond my reach. I see London turning into a place almost exclusively for poor immigrants and the very rich.

It’s sad that I am moving not for a positive reason, but to escape something. I wonder whether I’ll tell the truth, if I’m asked. I can’t pretend that I’m worried about local schools, so perhaps I’ll say it’s for the chance of a conversation over the garden fence. But really I no longer need an excuse: mass immigration is making reluctant racists of us all.

It’s not an accident that the loudest liberal voices still preaching the glories of immigration and multiculturalism live in safely lily-white enclaves.  The vocal anti-racist McRapey lives in Bradford, Ohio, which the 2010 Census describes as “98.9% White, 0.2% African American, 0.1% Native American, 0.2% Asian, 0.1% Pacific Islander, 0.3% from other races, and 0.3% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 0.9% of the population.”

Meanwhile, tends of thousands of progressive and pro-affirmative action liberals with children who can’t afford to live in an elite, heavy-security White Zone are fleeing their increasingly vibrant communities for the very communities that their kind have spent the last fifty years decrying.  Their actions speak much, much louder than their words.  And their actions are far more intrinsically racist and segregationist than the words of George Wallace or Enoch Powell ever were.

Immigration in very small numbers tends to strengthen a society.  Mass immigration, on the other hand, is simple invasion and it destroys a society through occupation, disruption, and displacement.

Spengler and the geography myth

In Form and Actuality, Spengler also appears to have anticipated my expressed doubts about the ability of non-Anglo Saxons to correctly grasp, let alone uphold and sustain, the Common Law-based Rights of Englishmen, on the basis of changes in their geographic locations:

“Today we think in continents, and it is only our philosophers and historians who have not realized that we do so. Of what significance to us, then, are conceptions and purviews that they put before us as universally valid, when in truth their furthest horizon does not extend beyond the intellectual atmosphere of Western Man?

“Examine, from this point of view, our best books. When Plato speaks of humanity, he means the Hellenes in contrast to the barbarians, which is entirely consonant with the ahistoric mode of the Classical life and thought, and his premisses take him to conclusions that for Greeks were complete and significant. When, however, Kant philosophizes, say on ethical ideas, he maintains the validity of his theses for men of all times and places. He does not say this in so many words, for, for himself and his readers, it is something that goes without saying. In his aesthetics he formulates the principles, not of Phidias’s art, or Rembrandt’s art, but of Art generally. But what he poses as necessary forms of thought are in reality only necessary forms of Western thought, though a glance at Aristotle and his essentially different conclusions should have sufficed to show that Aristotle’s intellect, not less penetrating than his own, was of different structure from it. The categories of the Westerner are just as alien to Russian thought as those of the Chinaman or the ancient Greek are to him. For us, the effective and complete comprehension of Classical root-words is just as impossible as that of Russian and Indian, and for the modern Chinese or Arab, with their utterly different intellectual constitutions, “philosophy from Bacon to Kant” has only a curiosity value.

“It is this that is lacking to the Western thinker, the very thinker in whom we might have expected to find it — insight into the historically relative character of his data, which are expressions of one specific existence and one only; knowledge of the necessary limits of their validity; the conviction that his “unshakable” truths and “eternal” views are simply true for him and eternal for his world-view; the duty of looking beyond them to find out what the men of other Cultures have with equal certainty evolved out of themselves. That and nothing else will impart completeness to the philosophy of the future, and only through an understanding of the living world shall we understand the symbolism of history. Here there is nothing constant, nothing universal. We must cease to speak of the forms of “Thought,” the principles of “Tragedy,” the mission of “The State.” Universal validity involves always the fallacy of arguing from particular to particular.”

It would be a mistake to confuse Spengler’s historical relativism with modern moral relativism.  Anyone who speaks more than one language is familiar with the phenomenon of the untranslatable word; how much more untranslatable are the concepts that cross temporal, genetic, and cultural boundaries as well as mere linguistic ones? What the Ancient Greeks meant by the term we translate as “barbarian” is very different than our concept of the word, while even words as seemingly simple and straightforward as “African” and “infringed” are today interpreted very differently by people living at the same time within the same political boundaries.

Spengler’s observation underlies the problematic nature of mass immigration in general as well as the total madness of permitting mass immigration from non-European nations in a quasi-democracy in particular.  To expect any respect for the totemic foundations of Western civilization from those whose very structural worldviews are, quite literally, alien, is to defy both logic as well as millennia of recorded observations through history.  And even the modern fear of addressing the consequences of this madness beautifully illustrates Spengler’s point; would the highly civilized Athenians who brutally butchered the Melians for the crime of remaining neutral in the Peloponnesian War, hesitate to act in seeing their agoras overrun by aliens?  Would the Romans, who went to war with their own socii rather than permit them to claim Roman citizenship? Would the Chinese, past or present?

47 years late and 55 trillion short

Larry Auster points out that conservatives never manage to conserve anything, not even the nation they supposedly love so dearly:

As long as there was a chance to stop the immigration and the resulting dispossession of Anglo-European America, the topic was forbidden.
But now that it’s happened, and there’s a sense that nothing can be
done about it, and therefore the identification of the fact that mass
nonwhite immigration is leading to the radical cultural and political
transformation of America does not logically require a call for restricting
that immigration, it’s become safe for Mark Steyn and all the other
despicable conservative cowards to come out from the shadows and say
bold-sounding things like, “Demographics is Destiny.” In the minds of
Steyn and the others, they are not issuing a warning against that transformation, as such a warning would make them racists; they are announcing the victory
of that transformation, combined with impotent little grumblings about
some of its negative effects. After all, what—other than impotent
grumbling—is conservatism about? 

Of course, just because it’s too late to do anything about it easily or peacefully doesn’t mean it’s actually too late for anything to be done about it.  And that is the real tragedy.

Language signals

Dr. Helen notes an interesting point made by the author of a newly published book:

Only in America does the word “frontier” mean freedom, open space and
opportunity. In every other language, the word “frontier” means the
opposite– border, boundary, and fear of the dangers that lurk in in the
strange and the new. 

That’s not insignificant, but potentially more significant is the fact that America is also one of the very few societies foolish enough to forget that the primary difference between “immigrant” and “invader” is one of quantity.  One of the reasons that the historical Greek, Roman, Chinese, and Japanese cultures remained distinct and significant for so long is that their words for foreigner translate to “barbarian”, “barbarian”, “barbarian”, and “round-eyed, red-haired, butter-stinking devil”.

The menace of hope

The NYT smells Republican blood in the water and goes for the kill:

 Funny how quickly some principles collapse when given the right kind of shove. One day, the Republican Party is rock-ribbed restrictionist, dedicated to the proposition that unauthorized immigrants are an invading army of job stealers, welfare moochers and criminals whose only acceptable destiny is to be caught and deported — the border fence forever, “amnesty” never. The next day: never mind. The party suddenly discovers the merits of a working immigration system. Senators like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who once bravely supported bipartisan reform but slunk away late in the last Bush administration, are scratching at the door again, as if the last five years never happened.

All it took was an election in which millions of Latino voters — many of them the wives and husbands, sons, daughters, grandchildren, cousins, co-workers and friends of those despised “illegals” — overwhelmingly chose President Obama over the man who promised to be deporter in chief. They rejected Mitt Romney by 3 to 1, according to exit polls. Asian-Americans did, too. Republicans looked at a changing America, saw a future of decline and irrelevance for the party, and concluded that immigrants weren’t so bad after all.

One more amnesty and we’ll establish the permanent left-liberal majority!  You can almost feel them desperately trying to conceal their glee.  What is remarkable is that they can’t seem to understand that the current travails of Illinois and California are what happens when left-liberals get what they want.  It’s like letting a five year old kid child drive.  There’s going to be a crash, it’s going to be bloody, and everyone is going to blame those who weren’t behind the wheel.

This is much more A Phantom Menace than A New Hope.

Locusts don’t vote ant party

The Right Wing News surveys the right wing blogs concerning the presidential election:

1) If you had to pick one reason why Mitt Romney lost, which of the following would it be?
D) He wasn’t aggressive enough in attacking Obama and/or his campaign
was too passive in defending against attacks. 48.5% (32 votes)
E) He didn’t inspire voters to turn out for him and/or his get-out-the-vote operation was poor 43.9% (29 votes)
B) He was too moderate overall. 7.6% (5 votes)
A) He was too conservative overall. 0.0% (0 votes)
C) His campaign was too socially conservative. 0.0% (0 votes)

2) Was Mitt Romney your first choice in the Republican primaries or was there another candidate you preferred?
B) There was another candidate that I preferred. 81.8% (54 votes)
A) He was my first choice. 18.2% (12 votes)

Even in the post-election analysis, the illusion remains strong within Republicans.  This is why they are in the process of rapidly going the way of the Whig Party.  Republicans still think that pandering to the Left will pull people to the Right rather than moving the party to the Left.  And they still fail to understand that people who prefer big government in their native lands are always going to prefer big government in the lands they’ve invaded.  This is as true of Californians moving to Texas and Massachusetts residents moving to New Hampshire as it is of Malaysians and Mexicans moving to the USA.  Very few people are abstract or long-term thinkers.  Most people want the wealth produced by a society with limited  government distributed to them more generously by bigger government.

The fact that this happens to be a contradiction when viewed from a long term perspective is totally irrelevant.  The locust doesn’t stop to think about the consequences of stripping the field bare, especially when all the other locusts are busily devouring everything in sight.  He’ll worry about next year when it arrives.  America always had its share of native locusts, but they were always outnumbered by the ants and they were not capable of rendering the fields barren.  Now, their numbers have been significantly boosted by immigration, but the Republican Party cannot hope to retain its viability by reaching out to the new locusts and attempting to convincing them that they are ants.

Romney lost for two reasons.  He was too moderate for his white traditional base and there are too many new big government voters in the electorate.  Republicans might complain that libertarians and conservatives staying home cost them a number of elections in 2012, including the presidential one, but then, that’s exactly what increasing numbers of libertarians and conservatives have warned they would do ever since George W. Bush revealed himself to be a fake conservative.

675,000 secessionists

That’s a lot more Americans than fought the original Revolutionary War.  Of course, it’s easy to sign a digital petition and rather less easy to spend a hungry winter at Valley Forge, but the size and speed of the response does indicate how Americans feel about Obama’s “America”:

Less than a week after a New Orleans suburbanite petitioned the White House to allow Louisiana to secede from the United States, petitions from seven states have collected enough signatures to trigger a promised review from the Obama administration.

By 6:00 a.m. EST Wednesday, more than 675,000 digital signatures appeared on 69 separate secession petitions covering all 50 states, according to a Daily Caller analysis of requests lodged with the White House’s “We the People” online petition system.

Nothing will come of these PR-stunt petitions.  But they are an early sign of the secessionist struggles to come over the next two decades until the final dissolution in the 2033 timeframe.  Americans don’t want to live in Mexico, Asia, or the Middle East, nor do they want to live in a post-America under Mexican, Asian, and Middle Eastern government.  Nor should they, as evidenced by the millions of immigrants who are, ironically but predictably, attempting to turn their new country into the same sort of place they left in the first place.

This is just what immigrants do if they are allowed to invade in sufficient numbers.  One Muslim immigrates, he eventually integrates, converts, and joins a church.  One hundred Muslims immigrate, they build a mosque and their own Muslim community that grows over time.  The Melting Pot isn’t merely a myth, it is a idealistic fantasy about as relevant to historic human behavioral patterns as Star Trek.

I am a little surprised, however, as I expected the first serious secession talk to come out of the Aztecs of Aztlan.  The reaction to the election is remarkable because, as we all know, Romney wasn’t going to govern much differently than Obama.  But it appears the symbolism of white Americans being deprived of their choice of president by an alliance of aliens has finally forced millions of Americans to realize that if things don’t change drastically, they will eventually find themselves living in Detroit writ large.

I wonder if the United Nations will be as interested in helping those seeking the right to self-determination in Texas and Louisiana as they are in so many other countries around the world?  It will also be interesting to see if the Obama administration will continue to argue that Libyan and Syrian separatists need to be armed even as it wonders if it dares try to disarm American separatists.

Breakdown

This chart of the electorate fairly clearly illustrates the growing difference between historical America and third world America.

We already knew the “conservative Catholic Hispanic” vote upon which Karl Rove and George W. Bush were going to build their permanent Republican majority doesn’t exist.  But the theory of the conservative Asian voter appears to be even more of a myth.  Of course, why immigrants from cultures with zero tradition of limited government would ever be expected to respect the concept has never been explained to my satisfaction.  And where would they learn to appreciate it in modern America?  The public schools?  At university?