Tag: immigration

Silver lining in the vibrant cloud

Imagine there’s no FBI, it’s easy if you try:

In a stunning development, President-elect Enrique Peña and his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), who won control of Mexico’s government on July 1st, moved to dissolve the Agencia Federal de Investigación (AFI).

Modeled after the United States FBI, the AFI was founded in 2001 to crack down on Mexico’s pervasive government corruption and drug trafficking. With rival drug cartels murdering between 47,500 to 67,000 Mexicans over the last six years, the move by the PRI represents the total surrender of Mexico’s sovereignty back to the money and violence of Mexico’s two main drug cartels, the Sinaloa Federation and Los Zetas. 

I find it amusing that the pro-drug war writer of this article fails to recognize the connection between the founding of the AFI, the Mexican drug war, and the subsequent increase in the drug-related violence in Mexico.  If the drug violence falls considerably with the dissolution of the AFI and the eventual legalization of drugs in Mexico, no doubt he’ll also fail to draw the obvious conclusion there as well.

There haven’t been a lot of observable societal benefits to the influx of 50 million Mexicans, but getting rid of the FBI, the DEA, and the drug war would certainly be a major one.

Idiocracy through immigration

We are watching the intellectual and human capital decline of the USA in real time:

President Obama has bragged about his supposed revolution in education over and over during this election cycle. He says he’s interested in upping standards while simultaneously appeasing teachers unions. But the performance of American students continues to sink to all-time lows.

2012’s high school seniors have the worst SAT reading score since 1972; they scored 486 on reading, out of a possible 800. In writing, students also dropped dramatically, down to 488. That’s a nine-point drop since 2006.

The tendency from leftists is to challenge the efficacy of the SAT in measuring performance – but it’s a standardized test with great care taken for consistency. Instead, the Washington Post’s Emma Brown suggests that more and more minority students are taking the SATs. “More than 1.66 million graduating seniors last year took the test, the highest number in history. Nearly half were minorities and about a quarter reported that English was not exclusively their first language.

The problematic thing about this is that the SAT has been dumbed-down considerably since 1972; it is now an achievement test rather than an aptitude test.  And yet, the supposed demographic saviors, despite trillions in spending, the best education that the public schools can provide, and the huge increase in college attendance, have repeatedly demonstrated that they are simply not as capable as the Americans they have been brought in to replace.

It is more than a little ironic that the very people who preached the need for a more intelligent and better educated 21st century labor force have, with their blind enthusiasm for replacing the native population, ensured that the 21st century USA will possess a dumber, less educated, less capable labor force with which to compete.  Look at what Southern California is like these days.  That’s what life in your town is going to be like within the next 20 years.

Macchiavelli on immigration

One of the great benefits of reading history is that one often learns that one’s thoughts are neither new nor original. Consider how the implications of Machiavelli’s observations concerning how Fabius Maximus earned his agnomen relate to present US demographics:

From the readiness wherewith the Romans conferred the right of citizenship on foreigners, there came to be so many new citizens in Rome, and possessed of so large a share of the suffrage, that the government itself began to alter, forsaking those courses which it was accustomed to follow, and growing estranged from the men to whom it had before looked for guidance. Which being observed by Quintius Fabius when censor, he caused all those new citizens to be classed in four Tribes, that being reduced within this narrow limit they might not have it in their power to corrupt the entire State. And this was a wisely contrived measure, for, without introducing any violent change, it supplied a convenient remedy, and one so acceptable to the republic as to gain for Fabius the well-deserved name of Maximus.
– CHAPTER XLIX, Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius

The Romans segregated four tribes out of thirty-five in order to prevent the corruption and collapse of their republic. The Hispanic influx into the USA is roughly equivalent to the percentage of the Roman population that belonged to the four urban tribes, but because their vote has not been limited in a similar fashion, the political corruption they brought with them has not been limited. It is not an accident that the worst abuses of the housing bubble took place in the Hispanic-heavy states of the Southwest. Since the USA did not follow the Roman lead, we can reasonably conclude that the US political system will collapse in considerably less time than the 233 years it took for the Roman system to be rendered moot by Julius Caesar.

As I have repeatedly said, I expect it to take place within 21 years, by 2033.

Free trade and the undermining of nations

I understand that many, if not most, of you were skeptical when I pointed out that if free trade were to be implemented on the same scale on the international level that it is on the domestic level, it would necessitate the destruction of the USA as a sovereign nation and the expatriation of nearly 50 percent of its native workers under the age of 35. However, you may be a little less dubious once you understand that I am not the only one who has done the math.

The EU should “do its best to undermine” the “homogeneity” of its member states, the UN’s special representative for migration has said. Peter Sutherland told peers the future prosperity of many EU states depended on them becoming multicultural….

Mr Sutherland, who is non-executive chairman of Goldman Sachs International and a former chairman of oil giant BP, heads the Global Forum on Migration and Development, which brings together representatives of 160 nations to share policy ideas. He told the House of Lords committee migration was a “crucial dynamic for economic growth” in some EU nations “however difficult it may be to explain this to the citizens of those states”.

As hard as it may be to accept, free trade, mass immigration, multiculturalism, globalism, climate change, and centralized government are all different facets of the same globalist vision of Ein Welt, Ein Volk, Ein Reich. This isn’t some outlandish figment of my imagination, it’s all right there in front of you. The problem is that few have the ability to comprehend the scope of it all, and even fewer have the capacity for putting the various pieces together to see the whole.

Integration, Olympic style

A distance runner lets the cat out of the bag:

Leo Manzano, a Mexican immigrant who became the first American man to win a medal in the metric mile since 1968, draped himself in the flags of both his countries after his race at Olympic Stadium. That decision earned some cheers, but mostly jeers from Mexican-Americans…. A poll on the CBS Atlanta website showed that 83 percent of respondents think Manzano shouldn’t have carried the Mexican flag.

Only 83 percent… I would have expected that the Mexican-American community would be more upset that he carried an American flag.. It seems to me that there have been numerous events, from the May Day parades to the US home soccer games and the various California public school policies, where many “Mexican-Americans” have made it perfectly clear where their true loyalties lie.

Immigrants and the economy

It is becoming increasingly clear that immigrants are not good for the economy, except in the pure Keynesian sense of requiring an increase in G:

Immigrants lag behind native-born Americans on most measures of economic well-being — even those who have been in the U.S. the longest, according to a report from the Center for Immigration Studies, which argues that full assimilation is a more complex task than overcoming language or cultural differences.

The study, which covers all immigrants, legal and illegal, and their U.S.-born children younger than 18, found that immigrants tend to make economic progress by most measures the longer they live in the U.S. but lag well behind native-born Americans on factors such as poverty, health insurance coverage and homeownership.

The study, based on 2010 and 2011 census data, found that 43 percent of immigrants who have been in the U.S. at least 20 years were using welfare benefits, a rate that is nearly twice as high as native-born Americans and nearly 50 percent higher than recent immigrants.

The report was released at a time when both major presidential candidates have backed policies that would make it easier to immigrate legally and would boost the numbers of people coming to the U.S.

The same pattern has been seen in Europe. Second generation immigrants are actually less inclined to work and more inclined to be radical about their home countries and cultures than the first-generation ones. While there is nothing about it in the linked article, they are also much more likely to commit criminal acts. Notice that the conclusion is something I have been pointing out for some time now: “full assimilation is a more complex task than overcoming language or cultural differences”.

It is, in fact, close to impossible even over three or four generations. As I have also previously noted, it takes hundreds of years to civilize an uncivilized people; this is why blacks are still behaving in social patterns that are clearly distinct from both native whites and immigrant whites, and if history is a reliable guide, they will for at least another 800 years even if there are no absolute genetic bars to it.

Most non-Anglo Americans have a very retarded and romantic attitude about immigration because their grandparents or great-grandparents were immigrants. First, they don’t understand how those nineteenth and early twentieth waves of immigration harmed the USA for the obvious reason that they don’t understand the Constitution or the English Common Law any better than their immigrant forebears from Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Scandinavia did. They may have the emotional attachment to the flag and the pledge of allegiance – the latter only created in 1892 – but they are not genuine Americans in the sense of having been born in a tradition of sovereign rebellion.

Second, they fail to understand the qualitative differences between the various waves of immigration. Immigrants from civilized European cultures were always going to be fundamentally different than those from semi-civilized and uncivilized societies.

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.”