Tag: immigration

Road Warrior, California-style

VDH continues to chronicle the decline and fall of the Golden State:

Sometimes, and in some places, in California I think we have nearly descended into Miller’s dark vision — especially the juxtaposition of occasional high technology with premodern notions of law and security. The state deficit is at $16 billion. Stockton went bankrupt; Fresno is rumored to be next. Unemployment stays over 10% and in the Central Valley is more like 15%. Seven out of the last eleven new Californians went on Medicaid, which is about broke. A third of the nation’s welfare recipients are in California. In many areas, 40% of Central Valley high school students do not graduate — and do not work, if the latest crisis in finding $10 an hour agricultural workers is any indication. And so on.

Our culprit out here was not the Bomb (and remember, Hiroshima looks a lot better today than does Detroit, despite the inverse in 1945). The condition is instead brought on by a perfect storm of events that have shred the veneer of sophisticated civilization. Add up the causes. One was the destruction of the California rural middle class. Manufacturing jobs, small family farms, and new businesses disappeared due to globalization, high taxes, and new regulations. A pyramidal society followed of a few absentee land barons and corporate grandees, and a mass of those on entitlements or working for government or employed at low-skilled service jobs. The guy with a viable 60 acres of almonds ceased to exist.

Illegal immigration did its share. No society can successfully absorb some 6-7 million illegal aliens, in less than two decades, the vast majority without English, legality, or education from the poorer provinces of Mexico, the arrivals subsidized by state entitlements while sending billions in remittances back to Mexico — all in a politicized climate where dissent is demonized as racism. This state of affairs is especially true when the host has given up on assimilation, integration, the melting pot, and basic requirements of lawful citizenship.

I find it amazing that even still, those who are generally cognizant of the dangers of immigration still cling to the notion that there is any meaningful difference between legal and illegal immigration. I note that a simple amnesty would render all that illegal immigration legal at a single stroke; would VDH or any other legal immigration supporter genuinely imagine that legalization would make all the problems he observes go away?

To be clear, I am not intrinsically opposed to all immigration in all circumstances. But history indicates that once a single immigrant population exceeds around 1-2 percent of the total population, they begin to present a long-term societal problem.

The outdated myth of integration

There is a fundamental logical error being displayed in the assumption that because Italian, German, and Swedish-speakers learned English and integrated substantially – although not wholly – into American culture, other ethnic groups will necessarily do so, particularly given the way in which technology reduces any need to do so:

They were born in the UK, but many second and third generation immigrants speak or understand hardly any English, it was revealed today. Their poor understanding of the language means they are unable to take notes or understand basic instructions on training courses ranging from engineering to electronics. Experts warn that low standards of English in some minority groups have been blamed for widening ethnic divisions and creating communities where it is the second language.

There are several reasons why immigrants are no longer integrating much, if at all, into the larger cultures. The first reason is that they come from different ethnic groups. It is a mistake to assume that all cultures and national identities are equally willing to submit themselves to another one. Italy, for example, wasn’t even a singular nation until 1870 and the Irish hadn’t been independent for centuries, so it should come as no surprise that they did not cling to national identities that many of them did not even possess in the first place.

The second reason is demographic. To what culture and social mores is a new Guatemalan immigrant to southern California going to integrate when most of the people surrounding him in his new place of residence are Spanish-speaking Mexicans? Once immigration is permitted beyond certain highly restricted levels, the possibility of integration is necessarily reduced, if not eliminated entirely. And the third reason is technological. With Skype and satellite entertainment systems, it is entirely possible to live in a foreign country without any actual contact with the local populace and culture beyond the occasional visit to the grocery store. I’ve known English-speakers living in Italy who after 15 years of living there still don’t speak twenty words of Italian; they have no intention or need to integrate.

So much for integration

But I’m sure the Univision viewers are deeply and intimately attached to some words on paper written by dead white Englishmen more than two centuries ago:

Univision was the No. 1 television network in America among the coveted adults 18-49 and adults 18-43 demos last week — just the third time that has happened. From July 2-8, the Spanish-language net beat CBS by 42%, ABC by 15%, NBC by 7% and Fox by 1% in 18-49. Among 18-34 the spread was more pronounced, with Univision outdelivering CBS by 150%, NBC by 60%, ABC by 57% and Fox by 16%.

Don’t worry. When the NFL and MLB start leading off their broadcasts in Spanish, I’m sure there will be some sort of red button that you can press to let you listen to the English commentary.

Israel and Immigration II

Chelm continues to insist that Vox is Wrong in Comparing Israel’s African Immigrant Problem and the Medieval Jewish Expulsions:

This post is going to be dedicated to Vox’s assertion that Israel’s deportation of African Immigrants would provide and ex post facto justification of the medieval deportations of Jews and the Arab expulsions in the 1950s. This is of course, laughable, but before I start, I want to point out a few places where Vox has conceded my arguments in his last post on the subject. Vox wrote:

I do agree that Americans are largely unprepared for European openness about matters of race in general and Jews in particular. I would simply assert that I am using primarily American language on the blog, though I suppose it’s entirely possible that I’m not always as conscious of the distinctions anymore given how long it has been since I left.

In this paragraph Vox has conceded the following points:

He did not dispute that there is a correlation between the frequency anti-semitic speech and actual violence against Jews.
He did not dispute that an increase in anti-semitic speech often proceeds actual violence against Jews.
And that his writing regarding Jews can reasonably be viewed as a change in discourse for the subject of Jews in America… so can be reasonably be classified as dangerous.

…which was the the whole point of my original post, that the alt-right philosophy is dangerous. So, thank you Vox for conceding the point.

I found this to be more than a little amusing, because Chelm has confused a failure to dispute something with a concession. In that paragraph, I also failed to dispute the Moon landings, the historical legitimacy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the superiority of the Green Bay Packers, and the Palestinian right of return. But I did not concede any of those things, any more than I conceded the four points that Chelm has tried to claim that I conceded. In his eagerness to score a point and claim a concession, Chelm has done nothing more than attack his own credibility.

But since this is a teachable moment, I will not use this minor debacle as an excuse to blow off the rest of his argument, but will proceed to read through it.

First, I would like to remind Vox that I believe that a mass deportation of the 60,000 African immigrants in Israel is not likely to happen. The government of Israel has willingly taken them into the country (if unlawfully) and now bears some responsibility for their welfare. Even the proposals of deportation floated by the Israeli government envisions giving the immigrants a stipend after deporting them.

While I’m sure we are all interested in Chelm’s ability to prognosticate, it would appear events have already overtaken his stated opinion, as Netanyahu has ordered the deportation of 25,000 of the 60,000 undocumented workers, or as the Israelis describe them, illegal infiltrators. “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered his ministers to accelerate efforts to deport citizens of South Sudan, the Ivory Coast, Ghana and Ethiopia who are living in Israel illegally on Sunday.” Moreover, the other 35,000 are going to be installed in desert holding facilities, as Netanyahu “ordered a substantial expansion of the Saharonim lockup in the Negev.” For all that the Jews never seem to stop complaining about the Jewish ghettos of Europe, they can’t honestly say that they spent the entire Middle Ages jailed in the desert.

I take issue with his characterization of the deportations as non-violent. All deportation actions are by their very nature violent, in that the threat of violence is required to compel compliance with the deportation order. I assume he is using non-violent vs. violent as a proxy for the government exercising legitimate vs illegitimate authority… and that he believes that the massacres were illegitimate, while deportations were a legitimate exercise of the authority of state. If that is the case, he should have said so, because to characterize the deportations as non-violent fits a rhetorical pattern Vox has of minimizing and trivializing the impact of European persecution of the Jews and reveals to some extent his bias against them.

This is a red herring. First, the threat of violence is not the use of violence. Second, if all deportations are intrinsically violent, then obviously the Israeli deportations of the Africans are violent as well and there is no point in getting into the issue as it proves my assertion of equivalence. The reason that I was pointing out the non-violent nature of the historical Jewish deportations is because I was being careful to distinguish between them and the pogroms which were often very violent in nature. But Chelm is correct and I believe that the massacres were illegitimate – note that many of them were even illegal at the time, and some of them, such as the worst one in English history, brought down the wrath of the king on those who committed them – whereas the deportations were a legitimate exercise of the relevant authority then as now.

I will address the rest of his post tomorrow. However, Chelm may wish to note that his attempt to deny the historical parallels is being made increasingly difficult by the actions of the people in Israel.

“An apartment housing 10 Eritreans has been firebombed in Jerusalem, against the backdrop of rising anti-migrant sentiment in Israel. Four of the occupants were taken to hospital suffering burns and smoke inhalation. Graffiti sprayed on the walls of the building said: “Get out of the neighbourhood.” During a tour of the fence on Sunday, a member of the Israeli parliament said that troops should fire on anyone attempting to cross the border illegally. “Anyone that penetrates Israel’s border should be shot, a Swedish tourist, Sudanese from Eritrea, Eritreans from Sudan, Asians from Sinai. Whoever touches Israel’s border – shot,” said Aryeh Eldad.”

Don’t they know diversity is strength?

It should be fascinating to see how the “conservative” Jewish columnists who have long advocated open borders in America react to this immigration-related news out of Israel:

Illegal infiltrators threaten Israel’s character as a Jewish and democratic country, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said at the beginning of the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday. Calling the issue “very grave” and a threat to the “social fabric,” Netanyahu said, “If we do not stop the entry, the problem, there are now 60,000 illegal infiltrators; could easily grow to 600,000 illegal infiltrators. This would inundate the state and, to a considerable degree, cancel out its image as a Jewish and democratic state.”

The prime minister spoke of the importance of finishing construction of the Egyptian border fence and working to send away “those [illegal migrants] who are already inside.”

Netanyahu said the latter will be done in part by punishing employers who hire illegal migrants….

Also on Sunday, Interior Minister Eli Yishai (Shas) repeated his call to jail illegal African migrants, most of whom he said were involved in crime. “I repeat what I said – we must jail all of them or deport them with a stipend. The moment they are put in jail – others won’t want to come here anymore,” Yishai said, in an interview with Army Radio.

Now, I support Netanyahu’s position, and Yishai’s as well. I support it for Israel, I support it for the USA, and I also support it for the nations of Eastern and Western Europe. And for every other nation on the planet as well. Multiculturalism is not merely a failure, but a lie. So I should be very interested to hear how avid immigration advocates such as Jon Podhoretz, whose advocacy of open immigration is overtly and explicitly based on his Jewishness, explain the dichotomy between Netanyahu’s position and their own. Podhoretz once said: “[A]s a Jew, I have great difficulty supporting a blanket policy of immigration restriction because of what happened to the Jewish people after 1924 and the unwillingness of the United States to take Jews in.”

But why should the United States not have been any more unwilling to take Jews in than the Jews are to take in Africans? Given that some Jews are still more than willing to whine about having been deported from Spain more than 500 freaking years ago, it seems more than a little ironic that the current leaders of the Jewish state should now claim the right to deport non-Jews from their own country. If the Jewish people want to claim some sort of human right to immigrate into every country in the world, then they have absolutely no grounds for deporting 60,000 African immigrants, or 600,000, for that matter. I already know how at least one of our resident Israelis will answer, since we are of the same opinion on this issue, but I’m interested to hear what Chelm and other Jewish readers have to say about these statements by the Israeli government. Do they believe Netanyahu and Yishai are wrong, do they believe the historical expellers of the Jews were justified to expel them, or do they believe in one law for themselves and another for non-Jews?

It seems to me that if Israel is justified in deporting these African immigrants, that action will provide a powerful ex post facto justification for the many non-violent historical deportations of the Jewish people from European countries during the medieval period. I am, of course, distinguishing these non-violent deportations from the historical massacres that took place from time to time during the same historical epoch, especially in Germany and Russia, which cannot be justified regardless of what the current Israeli government ends up doing. It will also offer similar ex post facto justification for the more recent expulsion of Jews from the Arab nations. One also wonders how an excess of Africans can be said to threaten Israel’s existence as a democratic state.

Now, it seems likely that Chelm will consider this post to be “dangerous”, in the sense that he describes in his post entitled The Dangerous Nature of the Alternative Right. That’s his call, of course, but I find his assertion that doing nothing more than pointing out incontrovertible facts and asking the questions they obviously raise is tantamount to “attempting to put together an intellectually, socially palatable basis for a more modern brand of anti-semitism” to be more than a little dubious.

After all, if it’s so easy to put together a sound and popular basis for a new anti-semitism, doesn’t that tend to suggest that any such anti-semitism must be based on grounds much more solid and justifiable than irrational hatred? What Chelm can’t seem to understand is that if one can “undermine Israel” by simply observing what Israel is undeniably doing, it isn’t the observer who is doing the undermining. Nor does he appear to grasp that when a person insists genuinely neutral people are not only lying about their lack of interest in him, but are in fact his secret enemy, his paranoid assertion is likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy over time. You can only attack people for so long before they get tired of your antics and start to find you irritating. And this is as true of groups as it is of individuals.

As I have previously noted, some Jews appear to be determined to create enemies where none previously existed. And while it’s certainly a profitable strategy for the likes of Abe Foxman and the Southern Poverty Law Center, I would suggest that it is a ludicrously suboptimal survival strategy for a group that currently represents around 0.3 percent of the global population.

As to Chelm’s defense of referring to various non-Jews as Amalekites, I note the following from Wikipedia: “Of the 613 mitzvot (commandments) followed by Orthodox Jews, three refer to the Amalek: to remember what the Amalekites did to Jews, to not forget what the Amalekites did to Jews, and to destroy the Amalekites utterly. The rabbis derived these from Deuteronomy 25:17-18, Exodus 17:14 and 1 Sam. 15:3.” Now, perhaps he’s not an Orthodox Jew and was simply using the term as colorful rhetoric, but it is simply ridiculous to attempt to somehow turn this around and claim that I am engaging in any sort of psychological projection by noting that the label, at the very least, potentially implies violence.

The consequence of quality

Pat Buchanan notes that immigrants have proven to be no adequate substitution for the native stock:

Since Roe v. Wade, abortions have carried off 53 million of the generations that were to replace the boomers. While those 53 million lost have been partially replaced by 40 million immigrants, legal and illegal, our recent immigrants have not exhibited the same income- or tax-producing capacity as boomers.

Perhaps a better name for Generation X would be Generation M, for murdered. Now, the idea that one group of people can be expected to adequately fill in for another is hardly new. Military historians trace the evolution of the Roman legions from nearly pure Italian stock to mostly barbarian over the course of the Republic and Empire, and it is hardly surprising that the barbarian generals showed themselves to be much more inclined to march on Rome and declare themselves Emperor than the Romans brought up in the patrician traditions did, Gaius Julius Caesar being the obvious exception. In his book on Stalingrad, Anthony Beevor notes the way in which the Soviets particularly targeted the Nazi’s Third and Fourth Romanian armies in the massive counteroffensive known as Operation Uranus and were thus able to encircle and destroy the German Sixth Army. Had the Red Army been facing 600,000 German soldiers rather than 250,000 Germans, 150,000 Romanians, and 220,000 Italians, it is very unlikely that their attack would have succeeded.

It is impossible to deny that the United States would not merely look very different, it would be very different if, instead of 40 million non-Americans bringing their genetic traits, societal behavioral patterns, and cultural traditions into the country – we can no longer reasonably describe it as a nation – there were 40 million more black and white Americans raised within the American tradition. It is not necessary to declare if change is for the better or for the worse to note that it has taken place. And with regards to the question of whether it is for the better or not, it should be readily apparent that the direction of the migrational pattern shows which society is deemed superior by everyone except those charged with protecting the more desirable one.

But what has happened has happened. That world is lost. The 53 million black and white Americans of my generation and the succeeding one are already dead. While Karl Popper argues against “historicity” and that predictions based on historical patterns are no better than soothsaying, I think he is wrong and the eventual consequences are readily apparent. We have always known that the USA would eventually fall, since all kingdoms and empires do in time. But now, we can be reasonably confident that we know why, if not necessary when.

If they can do it why can’t we?

Bermuda boots out its longtime immigrants:

A British family who lived in the colony of Bermuda for 20 years were ordered to leave because its government is clamping down on immigrants from Britain. Stephen and Kirsty Tomlinson and their two children were given barely a month to get off the North Atlantic island after his workplace burned down. Now the couple have swapped sandy beaches and sunshine for concrete and drizzle after returning to Mr Tomlinson’s home town of Hull, east Yorkshire. They were ordered to leave despite their daughter Holly, 12 and son Joseph, six, being born in Bermuda, a British overseas territory in the North Atlantic.

It is ironic indeed that Brits are being kicked out of Commonwealth nations even as millions of Commonwealth citizens are permitted residence in Britain. And it is simply ludicrous that the wealthy Western nations continue to pretend that what other nations are doing to their citizens is either impossible or immoral. Notice that once the British man lost his job, he was given one month to leave despite the fact that they’d been there for 20 years and their children were born there. And furthermore, notice that mere place of birth is not sufficient to provide citizenship.

WND column

Immigration and Unemployment

Long before there was a Republican Party, the idea that free trade and immigration foster economic growth was a staple among many Americans. Even today, there are few on the right side of the political spectrum who have bothered to review this centuries-old logic or examine the considerable amount of empirical evidence that has been gathered from decades of quasi-free trade or 47 years of mass foreign immigration.

Last month’s unemployment report was not good. While the U3 unemployment rate was only 8.1 percent, which is bad but not disastrous, the number of Americans not working was actually much higher than it would appear due to the statistical games being played by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since the unemployment rate is calculated by dividing the number of unemployed people by the total number of people in the labor force, the BLS keeps the rate down by reducing the size of the labor force. For example, in the April unemployment report, it was reported that the size of the civilian labor force shrank from 154.7 million to 154.5 million.

No-Growth Nation

I no longer pay any attention to the headline unemployement rate, which is presently reported at 8.1 percent for U3. But it is relatively meaningless due to the statistical shenanigans that are being played with the labor force participation rate, as various commentators are now noting. For me, the more important and less easily gamed statistic is the EPR, or Employment-Population Ratio, which has remained essentially flat, between 58.5 and 58.2 percent, since October 2009. Needless to say, this is not indicative of a growing economy, since it reflects a ratio not seen in the USA since the recession of the early 1980s. One wonders how low the EPR has to fall before people begin to connect their unemployment to the 60 million population increase since 1990 – more than the entire population of the UK – most of which is the result of the post-1986 immigration wave.

Suffice it to say that the present economic depression will eventually kill the claim that immigration is good for the economy as dead as the 1970s recession killed the Keynesian claim that it was impossible to simultaneously have inflation and unemployment.

Mailvox: the benefits of immigration

In which a historical objection is raised:

I’ve read that the two migrations of Greeks into Italy (the first around Cato the Younger’s time IIRC, and the second after the fall of Constantinople) were beneficial for Italian society because of the Greek learning and culture they brought with them. Are these relevant to your thesis about the negative effect of immigration on receiving societies? As an immigrant to Italy, what is your opinion?

Cato the Younger lived from 95 to 46 BC. Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC. The Roman Republic is considered to have ended in 29 BC. I submit that this specific example is very relevant to my thesis, insofar as decades of civil war followed by a collapse into one-man dictatorship would generally be considered to be a societal negative.

As for the second wave of Greek immigration, those were Greeks in the Byzantine sense, not the Hellenic. Since Byzantium was still somewhat more civilized than thrice-sacked Rome or the oft-invaded Italian peninsula, this is rather like asking if immigration from the United States to some of the more war-torn African societies would be beneficial. And remember, the difference between Byzantium and the Italian peninsula would likely have been even starker were it not for the Venetian conquest and sack of Constantinople in 1204.