Immigration has put Texas in the lead on the downward slope for medical insurance coverage.
Oct. 9, 2008 - About one in six people living in the U.S. under the age of 65 had no health insurance in 2005, but closer to 1 in 3 Hispanics were uninsured, newly released data from the U.S. Census Bureau confirms.
Roughly one in four people living in Florida, Texas, and New Mexico lacked health insurance, while only one in 10 of those living in Minnesota and Hawaii were without coverage.
The demographics of Texas represent the future of America. Those demographics tell a bad story about health insurance coverage.
In Texas, 40.5% of Hispanics under age 65 had no health insurance, compared with 24.3% of blacks and 15.8% of whites.
Bring in tens of millions of a group that performs poorly on average in school and in the workplace and the outcome is lower medical insurance coverage for that group in any state they find themselves.
Almost 40% of Hispanics living in Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Oklahoma, Oregon, and South Carolina also had no health insurance.
Many libertarians favor open borders and free migration across national borders. But such a policy expands the welfare state and weighs heavily upon the higher skilled and higher productivity workers.
For more on immigration and its effects on medical costs see Illegal Immigration Drives Up Number Of Medically Uninsured and Immigration And Heavy Burden Of Medically Uninsured.
For more on America's grim demographic future see Grim Demographics Of Texas And California, Texas Has Lowest High School Graduation Rates, and Ron Guhname On Starr County Texas Demographics.
The Inductivist finds a county in Texas that shows us a slice of America's demographic future.
Starr County, Texas: America's future: I’m in the process of putting together a U.S. county-level data set, and I ran across the most Hispanic county I’ve ever seen. Starr county, on the U.S-Mexico border in southern Texas, is 97.4% Hispanic. Looking at the county website, Starr looks like a nice enough place.
But there’s two little problems. The Census says that 90.7% speak Spanish at home. Sounds something like Mexico to me. And only 6.9% of Starr’s residents have a bachelor’s degree. I don’t know the number, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see if Mexico’s graduation rate is in the same ballpark.
To understand what this portends for the future see my posts: Texas Has Lowest High School Graduation Rates, Immigrants Do Not Improve Academically In Later Generations, Grim Demographics Of Texas And California, Perfect Storm In Demographics To Shrink American Middle Class, and Whites Become Minority In America In 2042.
What we are leaving behind: Smarter States More Livable Places.
We need to learn how to live in the Third World. Any thoughts?
Update: Half Sigma says smart people are more libertarian. So the dumbing down of America will further marginalize the libertarians. We will become less free as a result.
In a previous blog post, I analyzed data from the General Social Survey, and discovered that smarter people are more libertarian on all issues, both economic and social.
It’s the less intelligent people who are more easily swayed by the notion that if there’s a problem, than something needs to be done about it. The idea that nothing needs to be done about a problem is a more abstract idea which requires higher intelligence.
John O'Sullivan thinks conservatives will be in worse shape in the long run if John McCain wins the US presidency and I'm inclined to agree.
Many conservatives believe that the key question in this election is: Are there to be two multiculturalist open-borders parties or one? If McCain’s election were to make the GOP fundamentally similar to the Democrats on immigration, bilingualism, racial preferences, and all the National Question issues, that would be a resounding historical defeat for conservatives.
The willingness of a President McCain to cooperate with the Democrats would give such issues as an immigration amnesty a better chance of passage than under a President Hillary or Obama even against strong GOP resistance in Congress. Opponents of such policies, despite enjoying majority support among the voters, would find themselves politically marginalized. On the other hand, a united Republican opposition might well stop a Democratic White House from passing these measures because its party would be nervous of finding itself on the wrong side of a popular issue in the next midterm elections.
And there is another factor this time. Any bill similar to the senator’s “comprehensive” immigration reform would accelerate the GOP’s relative demographic decline by creating new voters overwhelmingly likely to vote Democrat in a quicker time scale. This dominant Democratic majority would emerge fully only after a hypothetical President McCain left office, but its approach would cloud the future of every other Republican incumbent.
Hillary will stimulate more right wing opposition than McCain will. So she'll be more constrained in terms of what damage she'll even try to cause.
But what if our choices are Obama versus McCain? Who would cause more damage?
The French might want to have an argument or perhaps complain. But right now "It's being-hit-on-the-head lessons in here."
VILLIERS-LE-BEL, France, Nov. 27 — Dodging rocks and projectiles, the police lined the streets of this tense suburb Tuesday where angry youths have vowed to seek revenge for the deaths of two teenagers who died in a weekend collision with a police car.
Police union officials warned that the violence was escalating into urban guerrilla warfare, with shotguns aimed at officers — a rare sight in the last major outbreak of suburban unrest, in 2005.
More than 80 have been injured so far — four of them as a result of gunfire — and the rage was still simmering Tuesday afternoon. Inside the city hall of Villiers-le-Bel, a group of visiting mayors appealed for calm while police officers dodged rocks outside.
But will the natives of France learn from this lesson?
The Muslim kids have turned to rifles as weapons.
Officials in Paris last night warned that rioters in the suburb of Villiers-le-Bel were armed with hunting rifles and air rifles as clashes with police continued to escalate.
More than 70 police officers were injured on Monday night, three of them seriously, in clashes with rioters armed with molotov cocktails and firecrackers. One officer was shot in the shoulder with an air rifle.
The government's initial response to the riots was deliberately restrained for fear of fanning the unrest in the suburbs, which have an ethnically diverse population. However, the reaction appeared to change after the violence intensified on Monday night.
The French fear the riots will spread to many other French cities.
Despite the apparent lull, fears remained high that the riots might erupt once again and spread to other poor and troubled suburbs of French cities, just as they did in November 2005. There were car burnings in several cities last night and an attempted arson attack on a library in a poor district of Toulouse, in south-west France. President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was returning from a visit to China last night, will hold an emergency security meeting today.
Last time around Nicolas Sarkozy called the violent males "gangrene" but since then has failed to cure the disease.
The 2005 unrest, also sparked by the deaths of two youths, spread from a nearby suburb of Paris to other cities and continued for three weeks, during which more than 10,000 cars were set ablaze and 300 buildings firebombed.
Mr Sarkozy was heavily criticised at the time after he called for crime-ridden neighbourhoods to be "cleaned with a power hose" and described violent elements as "gangrene" and "rabble".
The demographic situation in France spells eventual disaster.
Six Socialist mayors, including the mayor of Villiers-le-Bel, launched an appeal for calm, asking for parents to keep their children indoors after dark. But they gave warning that the violence could spread.
Forty per cent of Villiers-le-Bel's population of 27,000 are under 25 and 40 per cent of them are unemployed.
The Fairfax County school system for the first time failed to meet academic goals under the No Child Left Behind Act, largely because many students with limited English skills struggled on reading tests that were given in response to a federal order, according to school officials and scores released yesterday.
Several other well-regarded Northern Virginia systems, including those in Alexandria and in Loudoun, Prince William and Arlington counties, also fell short of target scores on last spring's Standards of Learning tests. The number of Northern Virginia schools that did not make the grade nearly doubled, rising from 76 in 2006 to 146 this year.
The immigrant population growth has been substantial as whites head toward minority status.
Fueled by an explosion of jobs attracting immigrants to the nation's suburbs, the percentage of minorities has dramatically increased in six local counties -- including Prince William, where the share of minorities grew from 35 percent in 2000 to 48 percent in 2006, according to census estimates to be released today.
Virginia counties have begun passing laws to deny public services to illegals.
Resolutions to deny a potentially wide range of public services to illegal immigrants have thrust two northern Virginia counties into America's immigration debate. The measures passed in July in Prince William and Loudoun counties join a flurry of recent efforts by local governments across the United States that believe the federal government has not done enough to stop illegal immigration.
But while other jurisdictions have focused largely on landlords and employers who knowingly rent to and hire illegal immigrants, the Virginia resolutions take a more direct approach. The National Association of Counties says the two counties are the first it knows of to pass measures aimed at denying services.efforts.
When the people of California passed an initiative to do this a liberal-packed federal court threw out the will of the people and told them they have to be good sheeple victims. So the white flight out of California accelerated.
A delegate from Prince William County said this week that he will introduce a bill that would cut off state funding to local governments that fail to check the immigration status of residents who get public assistance.
Del. Jeffrey M. Frederick (R) said the legislation would toughen a 2005 Virginia law that forbids local governments to provide some social services to illegal immigrants. He plans to call for every county, city and town to prove its compliance with the law by adopting policies similar to those proposed in Prince William and Loudoun County, which voted this summer to deny services to illegal immigrants and step up law enforcement efforts against them.
Anne Arundel County is also making anti-illegal moves.
Anne Arundel County, the latest Washington area jurisdiction to take a new and public position against illegal immigration, has announced that businesses with county contracts will be required to sign affidavits attesting that they do not employ workers who are in the country illegally.
Spotsylvania County and other Virginia counties are looking to follow suit.
SPOTSYLVANIA -- Officials in this booming county voted unanimously yesterday to find out how many people here are illegal immigrants and determine what services can be denied to undocumented residents.
"We should find out exactly what is going on in our county," said Spotsylvania County Board of Supervisors Chairman Chris Yakabouski, who proposed the action.
Counties all over the United States are going to copy the actions of these Virginia counties. State and local government actions against illegal aliens boost the pressures on the Congress and the Executive branch to deport illegals and to stop more from entering illegally.
This seems like a good time to develop labor-saving devices for jobs done by low skilled manual laborers. The supply of low skilled labor is at least going to grow more slowly and might even shrink for a while.
Update: The most effective and fastest way to round up all the illegal aliens would be to get local police involved. Toward that end, attempts to get the Virginia state police to enter a federal program to be able to catch illegals for deportation could make a big difference.
An anti-illegal immigrant group is circulating a petition aimed at pressuring Virginia agencies, including the state police, to enter a controversial program with federal authorities to speed the deportation of illegal immigrants. Under the program, called 287(g), the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, trains local law enforcement to initiate deportation proceedings for criminal illegal aliens.
State and local police ought to be able to pick up illegals and turn them over to ICE for deportation.
Lawrence Auster argues if opposition to illegal immigration is seen by Hispanics as anti-Hispanic then they are putting their loyalty to their group ahead of loyalty to the United States. (my bold emphasis added)
The pro-legalization Republicans keep saying that if the Republican party doesn't support the legalization of illegals, Hispanics will take that as an insult to Hispanics and never vote Republican again, dooming the GOP. The pro-legalization Republicans don't realize what they are saying. They are saying that the U.S. Hispanics (meaning legal Hispanic immigrants and their descendants) are people who demand the legalization of Hispanic lawbreakers as a condition of giving a party their political support--they are saying that U.S. Hispanics are people who regard as "anti-Hispanic" any failure by the U.S. political system to support the illegal immigration of Hispanics and the resulting destruction of our laws and sovereignty.
In short, the strongest supporters of large-scale Hispanic immigration, including Hispanics themselves, are saying that Hispanics are a deeply ethnocentric group that is hostile to the laws and sovereignty of the United States. That being the case, why should we admit any more Hispanic immigrants into this country?
Why should we put them ahead of our own interests? This is the part I do not get. Why should I sacrifice the interests of citizens for the interests of an ethnic group many of whose members put the interests of their ethnicity ahead of the interests of the rest of us?
Commencement weekend is hard to plan at the University of California, Los Angeles. The university now has so many separate identity-group graduations that scheduling them not to conflict with one another is a challenge. The women’s studies graduation and the Chicana/Chicano studies graduation are both set for 10 AM Saturday. The broader Hispanic graduation, “Raza,” is in near-conflict with the black graduation, which starts just an hour later.
Planning was easier before a new crop of ethnic groups pushed for inclusion. Students of Asian heritage were once content with the Asian–Pacific Islanders ceremony. But now there are separate Filipino and Vietnamese commencements, and some talk of a Cambodian one in the future. Years ago, UCLA sponsored an Iranian graduation, but the school’s commencement office couldn’t tell me if the event was still around. The entire Middle East may yet be a fertile source for UCLA commencements.
I've had enough Balkanization already. I say build a really big wall on the US border with Mexico, deport all the illegal aliens, way scale back legal immigration, and wait a few generations for assimilation. If assimilation still doesn't happen then pay the unassimilated to leave.
Heather Mac Donald argues that Republicans who think they can convert Hispanics into Republicans are deluding themselves - and Heather is absolutely correct.
George Bush’s political strategists have long promoted amnesty for illegal aliens as a device for increasing the Republican vote among Hispanics. They also warn that denying rights to illegal aliens will hurt the GOP. A Hispanic backlash in California after Proposition 187 (the 1994 voter initiative that denied illegal aliens many publicly funded services) turned the state from red to blue, they claim; a similar rout awaits the party if it does not embrace liberal immigration policies.
There is scant evidence for either of these ideas. The 1986 amnesty signed by President Reagan did not trigger a Latino surge into the Republican Party. And California’s Hispanics leaned as strongly Democratic before Prop. 187 as after it. Hispanic voting patterns in California have held steady since 1988—they vote approximately two-to-one for Democratic presidential candidates. California’s shift from red to blue would have happened with or without Prop. 187, as defense-industry whites left the state, replaced by liberal high-tech professionals, and as the Hispanic portion of the electorate tripled from 7 percent to 21 percent.
Hispanics have about twice the illegitimacy rate of whites. They do poorly in school and earn much lower salaries on average. Therefore they make great supporters and users of the welfare state.
This attitude of entitlement—not only among illegal aliens but also among legal Hispanic immigrants and their children—extends to the full array of welfare programs. In fact, welfare use actually increases between the second and third generation of Mexican-Americans—to 31 percent of all third-generation Mexican-American households.
If you want your taxes to go up, your neighborhood to become less safe. your school's quality to decay, and your government to become more corrupt then support the immigration amnesty that Bush and the US Senate want to foist on you. If you are a masochist who doesn't think you deserve what you have then mass immigration of low IQ Third Worlders can deliver lots of lowered quality of life.
A new report from the Center for Immigration Studies finds immigration is making America's problem with illegitimate births worse.
*Births to unmarried women have increased dramatically. From 13 percent in 1980 for immigrant mothers (legal and illegal) to 32 percent in 2003, and from 19 to 35 percent for native-born mothers.
Note that the native-born illegitimacy rate above is boosted by second and third generation descendants of immigrants. Whites have lower rates than blacks and Hispanics. But whites are a rapidly shrinking fraction of the US population. Immigration is raising the fraction of the population that has illegitimate kids.
Of course people who have kids out of wedlock are more likely to need taxpayer-funded medical care, food stamps, and other subsidies to pay for the raising of their kids. The rest of us pay for all this. We also pay for more crime and a lower quality of life.
* The rate for immigrants is higher than for natives in Arizona, New Jersey, New York, and North Carolina.
* The modest nationwide difference disappears when teenagers, who have the highest illegitimacy rates, are excluded. There are relatively few immigrant teenagers because immigrants tend to arrive older. Without teenagers, the rate is about 30 percent for both immigrants and natives.
Hispanics have seen a huge increase in illegitimacy.
* Hispanic immigrants have seen the largest increase in illegitimacy – from 19 percent in 1980 to 42 percent in 2003. This matters because 59 percent of all births to immigrants are to Hispanics.
Asian and white immigrants have the lowest rates of illegitimacy.
* In addition to the 42 percent rate for Hispanic immigrants, 39 percent of births among black immigrants are to unmarried women, 11 percent among Asian/Pacific Islander immigrants, and 12 percent among white immigrants.
Native born Hispanics have double the illegitimacy rate of native born whites.
* There is no indication of improvement over the generations. The illegitimacy rate among the native-born is 50 percent for Hispanics; 30 percent for Asian/Pacific Islanders, and 24 percent for whites.
* 2003 is the first time that the absolute number of illegitimate births to Hispanic women (immigrant and native) outnumbered illegitimate births to black women (immigrant and native).
* Out-of-wedlock births are highest for those with the least education; among immigrant mothers who lack a high school diploma, 45 percent of births are illegitimate.
* The country is currently debating whether to legalize illegal aliens or, alternatively, to enforce the law and cause them to return home. Since 60 percent of illegals lack a high school diploma and 80 percent are Hispanic, legalization would likely contribute to the illegitimacy problem by enabling illegal aliens to remain in the United States.
We should stop the immigration of groups that have high rates of illegitimacy and low rates of educational achievement. Better yet, we should stop immigration altogether.
The Inductivist Ron Guhname, who writes a lot of posts pouring over social science data, comments on the growing Hispanic gang problem.
The gang nightmare: VDare.com just posted a piece by Steve Sailer on the growing Hispanic gang problem. Among many items, he describes how California has been exporting gangs to the rest of country. A few months ago I was talking to a professor who had participated in a study of gangs in Denver. Now, Denver would not be the first city to come to mind as a gang capital. Chicago, yes, but when I think of Denver, hip ski bums come to mind. According to the study, FIFTY PERCENT of adolescent male Hispanics belong to a gang. Folks, gangbanging is becoming NORMATIVE behavior for these kids. Estimates put gang members nationwide at close to 1 million, and more than half of that is Latino. Their latest strategy is to spread their crews to Indian reservations. In the past, gangs were basically limited to big cities, but now they've even made it to the reservation--a place most whites can't find with a map. This is a tidal wave, I'm telling you.
Think about the term "gang". The guys who join them want power and a sense of belonging from membership in a violent group. They do not get a sense of belonging and high enough feelings of status and power from what they can hope to attain in school and work. That they belong to gangs in such large numbers is a measure of just how unsatisfied they are for their basic biological needs for status and power.
There's an obvious lesson here for anyone who will allow themselves to see it: Do not let in immigrants who lack the intellectual capacity and other qualities to do well enough that they do not feel the need to join ethnic gangs.
California is not the only state being demographically reshaped for the worse by immigration.
SPRINGDALE -- The face of Springdale has been changing for years and that includes Springdale High School where nearly half the students are minority and poor, Superintendent Jim Rollins said Tuesday.
The poverty rate, as measured by the number of students who qualify for free and reduced price meals, has risen from 29 percent in 2003 to the current 45 percent.
During the same four years, the ethnicity of the school has changed from 67 percent Caucasian and 33 percent minority to 53 percent Caucasian and 47 percent minority.
Low skilled immigrants are poorer than more skilled. natives. But keep in mind that low skilled immigration raises the poverty rate of those natives who work in industries which lower wages in response to cheap immigrant labor. Both black and white workers in plants and on construction sites in Arkansas get paid less due to illegal immigration. Conversely, removal of illegal aliens drives up wages of native blue collar workers.
Just who are these poor people? Foreigners. Likely Hispanics.
Just over one-third of the district's 15,000-plus students are English language learners. Rollins said the district received about $1 million in state aid for English language programs, but the district spent $3.5 million on those program last year.
Amazingly the article does not make any mention of who the "minorities" are. Note that whites became the minority but in liberal-speak whites are never a "minority".
One of the comments on the article points us in the direction of what is causing this change: The desire for cheap labor to process chicken in factories is a cause of the decline of northwest Arkansas.
"Tyson needs to cough up the doe to support local schools. Springdale and Rogers are turning into a crime infested slums thanks to corrupt companies like Tyson and they should be made to pay. Just wait, within 20 years NWA will become like LA, one gigantic cess pool of human misery and a complete extintion of the middle class. "
Another reader points to Hispanics as the cause of school decline.
These numbers say otherwise: Check out http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/homeland.php?id=551525 45% of all non-Mexicans have a post HS degree · 5.4% of first generation Mexicans have a post HS degree · 9.3% of second generation Mexicans have such degrees · 8.5% of third generation Mexicans have such degrees · 9.6% of fourth generation Mexicans have such degrees So even in the fourth generation - after at least fifty to sixty years of "assimilation," it appears that the descendents of Mexican immigrants display scant interest in higher education. This is a stunning finding.
America is a wealthy first world nation. It can not remain that way if the average IQ continues to decline due to immigration and higher rates of reproduction by lower IQ folks. Most of elite debate about America's future is at beast irrelevant and at worse destructive because the elites enforce a taboo against facts about human nature that offend their secular religion.
George W. Bush trumpets democracy in the Middle East and family values in the United States. Just as his foreign policy in the Middle East is a disaster so are his domestic values that impact family formation in the United States. Open Borders advocate George W. Bush is helping to fuel the further breakdown of the married couple as the basis for family formation because he's in favor of large scale Hispanic immigration. Heather Mac Donald reports Hispanics have the highest rate of unmarried fertility of any ethnic group in the United States.
Unless the life chances of children raised by single mothers suddenly improve, the explosive growth of the U.S. Hispanic population over the next couple of decades does not bode well for American social stability. Hispanic immigrants bring near–Third World levels of fertility to America, coupled with what were once thought to be First World levels of illegitimacy. (In fact, family breakdown is higher in many Hispanic countries than here.) Nearly half of the children born to Hispanic mothers in the U.S. are born out of wedlock, a proportion that has been increasing rapidly with no signs of slowing down. Given what psychologists and sociologists now know about the much higher likelihood of social pathology among those who grow up in single-mother households, the Hispanic baby boom is certain to produce more juvenile delinquents, more school failure, more welfare use, and more teen pregnancy in the future.
The government social-services sector has already latched onto this new client base; as the Hispanic population expands, so will the demands for a larger welfare state. Since conservative open-borders advocates have yet to acknowledge the facts of Hispanic family breakdown, there is no way to know what their solution to it is. But they had better come up with one quickly, because the problem is here—and growing.
The dimensions of the Hispanic baby boom are startling. The Hispanic birthrate is twice as high as that of the rest of the American population. That high fertility rate—even more than unbounded levels of immigration—will fuel the rapid Hispanic population boom in the coming decades. By 2050, the Latino population will have tripled, the Census Bureau projects. One in four Americans will be Hispanic by mid-century, twice the current ratio. In states such as California and Texas, Hispanics will be in the clear majority. Nationally, whites will drop from near 70 percent of the total population in 2000 to just half by 2050. Hispanics will account for 46 percent of the nation’s added population over the next two decades, the Pew Hispanic Center reports.
We are going to get large numbers of illegitimate Hispanics. That means higher rates of school drop-outs, higher rates of criminality, higher usage of taxpayer-funded welfare services, and all the rest of a decaying society.
While a higher percentage of black births occur outside of marriage the fertility rate of Hispanics is much higher and so the Hispanics produce a much larger number of illegitimate babies with all the social pathology that we can expect from children growing up in mother-only families.
But it’s the fertility surge among unwed Hispanics that should worry policymakers. Hispanic women have the highest unmarried birthrate in the country—over three times that of whites and Asians, and nearly one and a half times that of black women, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Every 1,000 unmarried Hispanic women bore 92 children in 2003 (the latest year for which data exist), compared with 28 children for every 1,000 unmarried white women, 22 for every 1,000 unmarried Asian women, and 66 for every 1,000 unmarried black women. Forty-five percent of all Hispanic births occur outside of marriage, compared with 24 percent of white births and 15 percent of Asian births. Only the percentage of black out-of-wedlock births—68 percent—exceeds the Hispanic rate. But the black population is not going to triple over the next few decades.
As if the unmarried Hispanic birthrate weren’t worrisome enough, it is increasing faster than among other groups. It jumped 5 percent from 2002 to 2003, whereas the rate for other unmarried women remained flat. Couple the high and increasing illegitimacy rate of Hispanics with their higher overall fertility rate, and you have a recipe for unstoppable family breakdown.
The disastrous President Jorge Bush is now going to turn his attention once again to the passage of a massive amnesty and guest worker program. Bush is a pox on the nation. His Iraq debacle has ushered in Democratic Party rule in both houses of Congress and the House Democrats are far more supportive of Open Borders than the House Republicans. While a minority of old style Democrats see Hispanics as cheap labor that drives down the living standards of the lower classes most elected Democrats see Hispanics as reliably left-leaning voters and also as cheap labor for maid, nanny, gardening, and home upgrade services.
America's elites are rotten to the core. The Republic can not survive without virtue but virtue is in shrinking supply in Washington DC.
Steven Malanga points out that the benefits of low skilled immigration are outweighed by the costs.
Meanwhile, the benefits of so much low-wage immigration to our economy are minimal and increasingly outweighed by the costs. Low-skilled immigrant workers have crowded into service jobs that do little to make America more competitive internationally or more productive: they deliver our pizzas, cut our lawns, wash our cars. True, these immigrants push down prices of services for middle-class Americans, but they also depress the wages of low-skilled native-born workers, according to Borjas and Katz, and recent studies show that they probably raise the unemployment levels of native-born blacks and Hispanics. Not surprisingly, a 1997 study by economists for the National Academy of Sciences estimated the net benefits of immigration at only $10 billion in our $8 trillion economy, while the next year an NAS study of the social costs of immigration reported that in California each native-born family paid nearly $1,200 more in taxes to support government services that went to immigrants. Those costs will only grow as the number of immigrants in America increases. The Heritage Institute’s Robert Rector has estimated that each immigrant high school dropout will cost U.S. taxpayers $85,000 over his lifetime. Enacting amnesty for illegals already here, as well as creating a new guest-worker program, Rector calculates, would eventually add some $46 billion a year in social costs—including welfare—to the federal government.
When robots start taking over household, restaurant, construction, and other remaining manual labor tasks what do the Open Borders advocates think we are supposed to do with tens of millions of low skilled, poorly educated, and barely educatable people?
A new study led by a University of California, Irvine economist debunks a popular argument against urban sprawl -- that living farther from neighbors decreases social interaction. In fact, the data shows that suburban living is better for one's social life.
Using data from 15,000 Americans living in various places across the country, researchers found that residents of sprawling suburban spaces actually have more friends, more contact with neighbors and greater involvement in community organizations than citydwellers who live in very close proximity to each other.
"Our findings suggest the old proverb may be true: good fences make good neighbors," said Jan Brueckner, professor of economics at UCI and lead author of the paper. "This contradicts one of the common social and economic arguments against urban sprawl."
Among their specific findings were that for every 10-percent decrease in density, the likelihood of residents talking to their neighbors at least once a week jumps by 10 percent. And involvement in hobby-oriented clubs increases even more significantly -- by 15 percent for every 10 percent decline in density. To measure these and other social interactions, researchers used data from the Social Capital Benchmark Survey and controlled for other factors such as income, education and marital status.
People didn't evolve in high population density conditions. They are not adapted to city life. I do not find these results the least bit surprising.
Opponents of urban sprawl -- most famously "Bowling Alone" author Robert Putnam -- have argued that America's spreading development is detrimental to society, causing increased traffic congestion, loss of valuable open space and a decline in social relationships. To combat these perceived problems, some cities like Portland, Ore., have enacted urban growth boundaries to limit sprawl.
This is an argument against immigration-driven increases in population density.
Bad news about the big immigrant groups in America.
While the vast majority of young adult children of immigrants experience upward economic and social mobility, a new study finds that a significant minority are suffering from lower levels of education, lower incomes, higher birth rates and higher levels of incarceration. Furthermore, it is the U.S.-born children of Mexican, Haitian and West Indian immigrants who experience these problems in the largest proportions.
The study, led by sociologists Rubén G. Rumbaut of UC Irvine and Alejandro Portes of Princeton University, appears online this week in the Migration Information Source. The largest and longest-running study of children of immigrants yet conducted, the study also confirms the critical importance of education.
“The greatest educational disadvantage is found among children of Mexican immigrants and Laotian and Cambodian refugees in our sample – close to 40 percent of whom did not go beyond a high school diploma,” said Rumbaut. “Education is the key to successful upward mobility among children of immigrants, so the discrepancies that emerge in educational achievement among immigrant groups tend to persist in trends for income, employment and incarceration.”
We should stop letting in Laotian, Cambodian, and Mexican immigrants.
Note the use 'of "undocumented" rather than "illegal". Sure they have documents. They have fraudulent Social Security cards which they used to acquire real drivers licenses. They have documents. They just are here illegally.
The researchers also point to the influence of human capital (the skills and education of immigrant parents) as well as family structure, racial prejudice and government policies toward certain immigrant groups – particularly the undocumented – that influence this “downward assimilation” process.
The researchers found that children of Laotian and Cambodian Americans as well as Haitian Americans had the lowest median annual household income at just over $25,000. They were followed closely by Mexican American families, which had a median annual household income of about $30,000. On the other end of the spectrum, children of upper-middle-class Cuban exiles in Southern Florida reported a household income of more than $70,000, and Filipino Americans in Southern California had more than $64,000, followed by Chinese immigrants.
Smarter upper middle class Spaniards do well in the United States. Lower class Amerinds do poorly. This is all very predictable. Ditto the other results.
Their next finding is nothing new. It brings to mind the Harvey Danger Flag Pole Sitta song "Been around the world and found, That only stupid people are breeding, The cretins cloning and feeding".
Furthermore, the study found that the most educationally and economically disadvantaged children of immigrants were most likely to have children of their own at a young age, compounding their difficulties at pursuing higher education. When surveyed at the average age of 24, none of the Chinese Americans had children, while in contrast 25 percent of Haitians, West Indians, Laotians and Cambodians did, as did 41 percent of Mexican American young adults.
Natural selection is happening in the human population. The refusal of our elites to talk about it does not make it go away.
I like the "while only 10 percent" had been incarcerated. Only? Only? Are they kidding? 1 in 10 is bad.
Differences in arrest and incarceration rates are also noteworthy, particularly among second-generation, U.S.-born, males. While only 10 percent of second-generation immigrant males in the survey had been incarcerated, that figure jumped to 20 percent among West Indian and Mexican American youths.
Sociologists think that results like these mean we have to try harder to do things that'll prevent our peasant immigrants from becoming high school drop-out criminals. In the minds of Leftists it is our responsibility. Sociologists think we are all blank slates, a product of our environments and if our immigrants come out failures who are threats to the rest of us and parasites on the welfare state then we have failed to provide them with the correct nurturing environment. The sociologists are fools.
If sociologists want to understand their own data they should look real hard at IQ and the wealth of nations. Also see here for more on the relationship between IQ and national wealth. Until they more realistically model humans as biological beings their work will continue to yield little of practical use and much of destructive use.
NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico - For all the beefed-up enforcement along the border, the militialike group of drug cartel enforcers known as the Zetas appears stronger than ever, a result of better training, successful recruiting in Central America and continued desertions from the Mexican military, U.S. intelligence officials say.
The Zetas have again become entrenched in Nuevo Laredo, and they practically control the movement of people through an intricate web of spies, checkpoints and skillful use of technology, provoking an extraordinary cross-border human exodus, U.S. and Mexican authorities say.
Last year, U.S. and Mexican authorities reported that the number of Zetas was falling rapidly, the result of both government pressure and ongoing warfare with rival cartels. But the shadowy group of elite former military officers, soldiers and others has now grown to more than 500 nationwide, with hundreds more in a support network throughout the country, U.S. officials said. Some of those networks are deepening their ties to Texas cities, including Houston and Dallas, with the help of Texas gang members.
The fighting in Iraq - er, I mean Mexico - is going great. We'll have those insurgents - um, I mean drug lords - defeated in no time at all.
One recent battle in Nuevo Laredo featured a bazooka!
NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico — A wild, 30-minute shootout reportedly involving bazookas and a grenade invaded the streets of an upscale neighborhood here, though details were few.
Mexican and U.S. sources familiar with the incident Friday night said three people were killed and four injured, but neither local nor federal officials would give an official version of events.
No newspaper in Nuevo Laredo printed an article about the incident, which according to sources involved a bazooka, a grenade and assault rifles.
What gives? Surely the Sinoloa and Gulf cartels can afford RPGs. The Zetas work for the Gulf cartel. So the Zetas can afford the best.
The drug cartels are killing officials who were previously immune.
The historic level of drug violence not only threatens Mexican judges and politicians, who once were immune, but also American tourists and U.S. investors, as the cartels move into vacation corridors such as Acapulco-Zihuatanejo on the Pacific Coast, and Morelia-Uruapan in the central state of Michoacan.
A Dallas businessman recently pulled out of a $40 million project near the Zihuatanejo resort.
"We didn't think this was the right moment," said Carol Davenport, a real estate agent from Arlington, Texas, now working in Mexico, who represented the businessman. "The dire situation didn't exactly inspire investor confidence," she added, referring to a rash of killings in the area.
The bloody turf war in Nuevo Laredo is being waged to gain control of the market, because it is considered a key transportation node in the drug-trafficking business. Guzman has moved in big for that reason, and his organization is allegedly responsible for the murders of numerous Mexican law enforcers who are on the payroll of the Cardenas organization, according to U.S. law enforcement sources.
"Always look on the bright side of life".
The US military doesn't need to send troops to Mexico. We can just send military trainers. Help the Mexican government stand on their own two feet so they can put down the insurgent drug lord fighters. Yeah, that's the ticket.
You might be asking: Why is it important to have the US military train the Mexican military to fight the drug cartels? Fair question. Easy answer: The Mexican military has to fight the Los Zetas and the Zetas are such a menace because many are former Mexican special forces who were trained at Fort Benning Georgia. We need to make the current Mexican military competent enough to fight the former Mexican military that we trained. It seems only fair. Make sense?
You object? Oh come on. Yes, if we train more Mexicans to fight well then more will leave the Mexican military to fight for the cartels which probably pay much better. But there's an easy solution to that problem which any Bush Administration civilian military strategist will see: Just train the Mexican military faster than they desert. Look at how well this policy works in Iraq.
The Iraqi - oh sorry, I keep getting confused - Mexican elected officials won't stand up to the insurgent drug fighters because they derive key support from the drug insurgencies.
Jorge Fernandez Menendez, co-author of the new book, "From the Maras to the Zetas: the Secrets of Drug Trafficking from Colombia to Chicago," said politicians who control 90 percent of the country's police are more reluctant than ever to take on the cartels.
"There are local and state politicians whose intention is not to participate in the drug fight either because they are complicit, in some cases, or they are scared, or because they simply don't want trouble," Fernandez said.
"If the state and local governments don't get involved, the situation is going to become very complicated ... and destabilizing."
How far down will Mexico go?
The killing of al-Zarqawi was supposed to be a key turning point for the US fight against insurgents in Iraq. But maybe someone forgot which way to turn since now the place is going to hell. Similarly, capture of a drug lord in Tijuana has not brought any peace.
TIJUANA – A string of killings is plaguing Tijuana a month after U.S. authorities detained suspected drug kingpin Francisco Javier Arellano Félix, and some authorities are taking the violence so seriously that they have called on the Mexican army to help restore order.
The latest victim was a city police assistant chief, Arturo Rivas Vaca, who was in his patrol car when he was gunned down about 8 a.m. yesterday. Jorge Eduardo Ledezma Magallon, a police officer who was Rivas' bodyguard, and Luis Francisco de Santiago Ferrer, a bystander, were injured in the attack, according to Luis Javier Algorri Franco, the city's secretary of public security.
Looking at the worsening mess in Mexico and the dangers it creates for Americans we can learn from Israel. Faced with violence coming from the West Bank the response of Israel was to build a barrier wall and fence along the entire Israel-West Bank border. This cut suicide bombings down to a rare trickle. America can build a barrier and improve air space control as well as improve Coast Guard defenses to insulate ourselves from the worsening security situation south of the border. It is clear that NAFTA and immigration law non-enforcement have not brought us border peace or political stability in Mexico. We need to take more drastic steps.
We need to physically isolate ourselves from Mexico and the Middle East. In the case of Mexico great border control systems will also cut down on the drug flow northward and therefore will reduce the amount of money the drug lords have to buy politicians and run private armies.
MEXICO CITY - To send a chilling message to their underworld rivals, Mexican drug cartels are adopting a method of intimidation made notorious by Middle Eastern terrorist groups.
At least 26 people have been decapitated in Mexico this year, with heads stuck on fences, dumped in trash piles and -- most recently -- tossed onto a nightclub dance floor.
Mexico's political system is failing. We need to build a barrier along the entire US-Mexican border and stop immigration from Mexico. We need to deport all illegals and take legal residency and citizenship away from Mexican and Central American immgrants who are involved in Los Zetas, MS-13, and other organized crime gangs.
Think I'm exaggerating? The President-elect of Mexico says governments in Mexico are overwhelmed by the drug lords.
Felipe Calderon said the wave of bloodshed knows no politics; it is ravaging state governments controlled by each of Mexico's three major parties. He singled out Mexico City, the northern states of Sinaloa and Tamaulipas, the southern state of Guerrero and his home state of Michoacan, as being especially hard-hit.
"It seems to me that drug violence has overwhelmed the governments of the PAN, the PRI and the PRD," Calderon said in a radio interview.
This is a country on the US border.
LOS ANGELES, June 26 -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger reversed a decade of California policy on Monday, calling for the construction of at least two more prisons and the addition of thousands of beds in existing facilities to deal with what he called "dangerously overcrowded" prisons.
As California's Hispanic population continues to grow California will hit limits in its ability to finance prison expansion. Crime rates will rise as higher crime rate Hispanics grow as a percentage of the population. Races that commit crime at lower rates and that earn more and pay more in taxes will flee the state and California will lose them as tax revenue sources.
California's prisons are overcrowded.
California houses more than 171,000 inmates, including, Schwarzenegger said, 16,300 placed in prison gyms and day rooms, making it the most overcrowded prison system in the nation.
...
The governor noted that California's recidivism rate is 70 percent, the highest in the nation.
People who commit crimes again at such high rates should not get released from prisons.
California has about 36 million people. So the state prison system incarcerates about 475 people per 100,000. Note that the local prisons probably aren't counted in that number and Californians in federal prisons are also not counted.
More than 10% of California's prisoners are illegal aliens.
In addition to building more prisons, California is considering paying other states to house the thousands of illegal immigrants in its prisons, according to a statement from the governor's office. More than 10 percent of California's prison population is in the United States illegally.
If the United States built a wall on the entire US-Mexico border and started serious internal enforcement of immigration laws in the United States the Californa prison population would shrink and the crime rate would go down. Check out Steve Sailer's color-coded maps on crime rates by race across the United States.
Steve Sailer reports California 8th graders only beat Mississippi kids in their science knowledge.
The Future Looks Dumberer: The 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress scores are now out for eighth grade Science, and the cutting edge state of California, home of Silicon Valley and Cal Tech but also of millions of illegal aliens, ranks second worst out of the 44 states measured, ahead of only Mississippi. In California, only 18% of eighth graders scored at the Proficient or Advanced levels, versus 27% nationwide.
Hawaii was third worst, and then came Alabama, New Mexico, Nevada, Louisiana, Arizona, Florida, and Texas.
The highest scoring state was North Dakota (with 43% scoring Proficient or Advanced), followed by Montana, Vermont, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Massachusetts, Wyoming, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
The very white states score quite high. But eventually the Hispanic deluge will drive down scores on those states. Liberals and many neoconservatives will be so happy to see the states become more equal even if that means becoming more equally stupid. Besides, as stupidity becomes more widespread the human tendency to judge oneself relative to those around one will allow smarter people to feel like they have higher status.
Whites also do poorly in California.
The NAEP also reports the scores broken down by ethnicity. California's non-Hispanic whites don't do terribly well either, coming in 8th worst out of 44 states. The bottom of the white barrel is West Virginia, followed by Nevada, Mississippi, Hawaii, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, and California.
The top scoring whites are found in Massachusetts, Colorado, North Dakota, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, South Dakota, Virginia, and Wisconsin.
Lower white scores in California could be due to several causes:
We really need a big study where the same kids in several states would be given both NAEP tests and IQ tests. Then we could find out which circumstances cause kids to not learn up to their potential. But our corrupt and damaging liberal elites would probably prevent funding of such a study. It'd produce all sorts of answers that they do not want us or them to know.
Audacious Epigone has done an analysis on national average IQ data which strongly suggests that declining average IQ portends a rise in corruption is in store in America's future.
Lynn and Vanhanen spotlighted the relationship between IQ and the purchasing power parity of nations. It was a groundbreaking new way of understanding prosperity in the world. But PPP's relationship with IQ (contemporary correlation of .60) is actually weak in comparison to IQ's relationship to a host of other quantifiables (Economic transparency/corruption index: .68, Distance from the equator: .67, Births per woman: -.81, Life expectancy: .85). When economic transparency/corruption is taken into account, the effect of IQ on PPP completely disappears, while controlling for a host of variables (IQ, distance from the equator, births per woman, net migration rate, life expectancy, and economic freedom) only mildly moderates the effect of economic transparency/corruption while rendering all the other variables statistically insignificant except for the migration rate (positive net migration being correlated with higher PPP).
We should be seriously worried about a rise in corruption due to immigration. But Europe faces an even bigger problem on that score due to the tendency for consanguineous (cousin) marriage among Muslim immigrants. Steve Sailer found a report in the British Guardian which got hold of a police report that claims Muslim police officers are 10 times more likely to be corrupt than white officers.
A secret high-level Metropolitan police report has concluded that Muslim officers are more likely to become corrupt than white officers because of their cultural and family backgrounds. The document, which has been seen by the Guardian, has caused outrage among ethnic minorities within the force, who have labelled it racist and proof that there is a gulf in understanding between the police force and the wider Muslim community. The document was written as an attempt to investigate why complaints of misconduct and corruption against Asian officers are 10 times higher than against their white colleagues.
The main conclusions of the study, commissioned by the Directorate of Professional Standards and written by an Asian detective chief inspector, stated: "Asian officers and in particular Pakistani Muslim officers are under greater pressure from the family, the extended family ... and their community against that of their white colleagues to engage in activity that might lead to misconduct or criminality."
Just who lives in a society greatly matters. Libertarian economists might want you to believe that all we have to do is lower barriers to the free market and all will be well. But that is nonsense. For a great starting point in reading posts about consanguineous marriage and how extended family bonds weaken larger community bonds see my post John Tierney On Cousin Marriage As Reform Obstacle In Iraq and click back and read all links.
La Griffe du Lion responded to some inquiries I made about the NAEP results with the following in email:
Certainly food for thought. Here are some facts that need to be thrown into the mix:
1. The NAEP data apply to public schools. Bright white students in CA may be hiding in private schools. California mean SAT's, for example, are about the same as the national means.
2. If we disaggregate NAEP 8th grade math scores by race/ethnicity, additional facts emerge:
a. For whites only, California ranks 33/50 among the states and Mississippi 43/50 -- neither distinguished but nevertheless a clear difference.
b. CA blacks rank 31/40 and Mississippi blacks 33/40 (10 states with not enough blacks to establish significant means).
c. Perhaps most interesting is that CA Hispanics rank next to last among Hispanics nationally (36/37). Only Hispanics in Rhode Island fared worse on the 8th grade math test. CA Hispanics are among the least able Hispanics in the nation -- a sure bet to have economic impact down the road if immigration goes unchecked.
3. Despite CA's undistinguished NAEP performance, the fundamental law of sociology remains intact in CA as in the nation. According to my estimates the CA white - black mean difference for 8th grade math is 1.01 SD; nationally it is 0.99 SD. The national white - Hispanic mean difference is 0.81 SD in more-or-less aggreement with the recent finding of Hartmann, Kruuse and Nyborg. The CA white - Hispanic difference is 0.85 SD.
Griffe has explained a great deal about racial differences using his standard deviations approach. The standard deviations differences show up across a large range of measures with very similar standard deviations.
Britain has a problem with slave labour.
Children as young as six are being brought to Britain in their hundreds every year to be used as "slave labour" in sweatshops, private homes and cannabis factories.
Importing children to work in cannabis factories?
What sort of people want to use African children as domestic servant slaves?
Children from China, Vietnam and Malaysia, have been found in sweatshops, restaurants and suburban cannabis factories. African children are often put into domestic servitude, working long hours for little or no reward.
Eastern European children tend to be used to beg and steal - and many more are likely to arrive next year when Romania and Bulgaria are expected to join the European Union.
Charities and police believe most trafficked children are used for slave labour rather than prostitution, but the report says they are "sexually exploited in informal locations, such as private flats, where they are expected to have sex with groups of men".
Not all people believe in the idea of individual rights.
The problem in Britain is small compared to Saudi Arabia.
Statistics from the Supreme Motherhood Council 2002 Report, state that Sana’a alone contained about 29,000 street children. According to some sources, the number of children involved in the market place reached nearly 2 million.
The US State Department has just released the sixth annual 2006 Trafficking in Persons Report which provides a number of insights into the purposes of human trafficking. One of the reasons children are shipped into some Arab countries is to serve as child camel jockeys.
“For victims not located in Islamabad, the government provided victim assistance in 276 temporary shelters where victims received medical treatment, limited legal representation and vocational training.”
In Lahore, it adds, the Child Protection Welfare Bureau assisted in the repatriation and reintegration of 325 child camel jockeys.
Fraudulent marriages are used to get women into Taiwan for prostitution.
The annual "Trafficking in Persons" (TIP) report examines trafficking problems in 150 countries. The report is focused on raising public awareness of the global trafficking problem and encouraging governments to combat the problem. This year's TIP Report includes more coverage of labor slavery, especially internal labor trafficking, forced labor, and involuntary servitude. Regarding Vietnam, the TIP report states “Women from Vietnam are trafficked to Taiwan through fraudulent marriages for sexual exploitation and labor.” It also states that “the government of Vietnam does not comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking” and that “Vietnam has not made sufficient efforts to combat trafficking.”
Guess which country is not in the US State Department's report on human trafficking? Iraq. How come? Iraq does have a serfdom/slavery problem with imported workers after all.
Oh, and the United States does not rate itself on human trafficking either. Makes sense. We make so little effort to control illegal entries that human traffickers have an easy time bringing people in. But a negative report by the State Department would lead to demands that the US Senate go in the opposite direction than they want to go.
The Inductivist blogger Ron Guhname digs through the results of the National Opinion Research Center General Social Surveys (GSS) and finds facts about groups that go against the conventional wisdom. He's been digging for info in the last couple of months about Mexicans compared to other immigrants and has dug up a lot of facts that do not support immigration myths widely promoted by the "Open Borders" crowd. I've collected up many of his posts on this topic and excerpted them below.
Some happy talkers argue that Mexicans come to the United States for freedom. I think they come to make more money. If they come for freedom you'd expect they'd be keen on becoming American citizens. Nope. Most Mexican immigrants do not place much value on American citizenship.
Mexican immigrants do not value American citizenship: An iSteve.com reader wrote that illegals don't want to be citizens, but "Mexicans with benefits." What do the data say? GSS respondents were asked how important is it to them to be an American citizen. Only one-third of Mexican immigrants said this was important. Almost twice as many immigrants from all the other countries felt this way (60%). Eighty percent of native-born Americans value their citizenship.
They don't come here for freedom. If they did they'd want to become citizens. They come here to make more money.
Mexicans are most race conscious after blacks.
Mexicans are the most race conscious, after blacks: The General Social Survey asks which social identity is most important to the respondent, then lists the following: current occupation, race/ethnicity, gender, age, religion, political party, nationality, family or marital status, social class, and region of the country. I was interested in how many Mexicans consider ethnicity to be their most important identity compared with other groups. Fifteen percent of blacks list this as being most important. For whites, it is 2 percent. For Mexican immigrants, it is 12%, and for native-borns of Mexican ancestry, it is 8%. Except for blacks, no ethnic group has numbers that high, whether we are looking at immigrants or those born in this country.
Another post provides a more detailed numeric breakdown on ethnocentricity by ethnic group.
In America, which ethnic group is most ethnocentric? The General Social Survey asked respondents if they think about social and political issues as Americans or as members of an ethnic group. The obvious choice is blacks, right? Well yeah, there's no news there. Listed below are the percent who answered ethnic group:
1. Blacks 43.5%
2. Mexicans 21.9
3. Jews 15.8
4. Italians 12.0
5. American Indians 7.8
6. Irish 5.1
7. Scots 4.8
8. English/Welsh 2.5
9. Germans .9With massive Mexican illegal immigration, we might be creating yet another nation within a nation. It surprises me that Jews and Italians are more ethnocentric than American Indians! But for most white groups, just about all sense of ethnicity has vanished.
Whites will eventually become more ethnocentric in response. Do the advocates of large scale immigration want to make Americans less individualistic? Or are they just indifferent on this question?
Says Steve Sailer in the comments:
What's funny is that this list is in almost perfect inverse order from how the media stereotypically portrays these groups in terms of ethnocentricity and bias: the Germans want to conquer the world, the WASPs are super snooty and exclusive, etc. etc.
Truant 4+ days last semester
White 10%
Black 12
Mexican 19...
Ever tried cocaine
White 5
Black 4
Mexican 10Ever carry weapon
White 8
Black 12
Mexican 14
Hey there white liberals: Mexicans are worse that blacks by some measures. Take note.
Respect for free speech is not equal among all groups.
For American political values, I looked for a free speech question. Respondents were asked if they agreed that a racist should have the right to give a speech in their community. The numbers (just for immigrants this time):
1. Filipinos 66.7%
2. English/Welsh 66.3
3. Germans 60.7
4. Africans 58.4
5. Italians 56.9
6. Chinese 50.7
7. Indians 50.0
8. Spain 43.9
9. Mexicans 40.8
My guess is that economic libertarians will attach little importance to these results because they attach more importance to the free movement of labor than to free speech.
Some of you may have noticed from events over in Iraq (among other places) that not all people support basic human rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion. If you are keen to have such rights then you ought to support immigration policies designed to keep out people who attach less importance to basic rights.
Liberals are making a mistake by supporting mass Hispanic immigration. Hispanics vote for the Democrats because the Democrats are more inclined to deliver government spending for the benefit of Hispanics. But on some other matters dear to the hearts of liberals Mexicans oppose Democratic Party positions and as Mexicans become a larger fraction of the Democratic Party's base they will push the party away from positions that white liberals hold dear. Not surprisingly, lower income Mexicans are less supportive of spending on the environment. Environmentalism is an upper class cause. People who have satisfied their basic needs are more inclined to want to clean up the environment. Poorer people just want more money.
35% of Mexican descent males born in the United Sates have been arrested.
Mexicans are not assimilating: My friends tell me to not worry about illegal immigration because, while we see certain problems now, they are temporary because America has always successfully assimilated new people. Well, one good indicator of assimilation is less and less involvement in crime. But the General Social Survey tells us that recent cohorts of immigrants from Mexico have been differentiating away from mainstream America. Eleven percent of first generation male immigrants admitted that they had been arrested before. Fine, that rate is not high. (They may be underreporting for fear of being deported). But the percent of men of Mexican descent born in this country who say they have been arrested is 35 percent--a huge increase! Studies put the country's number of Hispanic gang members at close to half a million, and most of them were born here.
I never used to see graffiti in my neighborhood. Now I see lots of it. I bet economic models on the effects of immigration do not have graffiti included on the cost side. Nor do I suspect those models include the costs of private schooling and driving costs for taking kids to private schools for those who pull their kids out of schools which are more dangerous and less conducive to learning due to increasing numbers of Hispanic kids in the schools.
To a libertarian predisposed for ideological reasons to see no problem with Mexican immigration my guess is this evidence can pretty easily be ignored. But those who are more empirically minded should consider the empirical evidence on immigration.
Mexican Americans are for big government.
Very strongly agree that government should reduce income differences
Blacks 33%
MA 24%
All Americans 18%...
Very strongly agree that government should help pay for medical care
Blacks 47%
MA 34%
All Americans 29%
You might think that economic libertarians or the Wall Street Journal Open Borders crowd would be disturbed by these results. But, again, I think they can rationalize away all of this.
The immigration debate is between restrictionsts who marshal large amounts of evidence and large scale immigration advocates who offer myths and unrealistic models.
Dennis Dale, author of the Untethered blog, reacts to a recent David Brooks column where Brooks tried to argue that multiculturalism is dead. Dale says that identity politics is alive and well and the neoconservatives use the language of the leftists.
To be conservative is to seek the conservation of one’s civilization. It was once a given that this meant preserving morality, language, and customs while placing a high value on citizenship; the antithesis of multiculturalism. Conservatives, long ago grown weary of playing the heavy, have by now so completely absorbed the language of the opposition, trying to out-empathize the left, that they no longer recognize a challenge to civil society when they see it; indeed, in their zeal to prove their anti-racist bona fides they now join in its dismantling. The immigrants are more virtuous than the rest of us argument so gracelessly and naively offered by conservatives of Mr. Brooks' type is no less a refutation of American society than the codified cultural self-loathing of the shrillest leftist. Multiculturalism dead? I’d say it’s arrived.
Indeed, Brooks and a shocking number of his fellow “conservatives” are exhibiting many of the same zombie-like symptoms of the insensate left: imperviousness to reason, incommunicability, and inability to sense pain (inflicted on others that is; their own, well). They are gleefully joining the surging mass of walking dead as they besiege the isolated farmhouse of reason that you and I, my friend, are frantically boarding up. Duck for a moment would you? Got him. As I was saying.
He writes very well and his whole essay is worth a read.
Dennis notes the open borders Republicans use a lot of the same language that the left uses to attack those who wish to defend their country from the Hispanic onslaught.
The open-borders Republicans long ago adopted the insinuations and invective of the Left. A popular conservative blog, one that specializes in quoting articles at length and appending a sentence or paragraph of affirmation or ridicule, so regularly mingles the epithets of the left, racist, islamophobe, etc., with the neo/theo-conservatives' own curious inventions, nativist, realist, hyper-rationalist, that if it wasn’t for their pathological to-the-death defense of the slowly unfolding catastrophe that is the Bush Presidency a visitor might think he had wandered into the blog of an earnest young campus radical.
One reason the liberals have a hard time mounting effective critiques of Bush's Iraq debacle is that Bush uses very liberal-left language to defend it. He claims anyone who would argue that the Iraqis don't have what it takes to be Jeffersonian democrats are being racists. He uses the same language when arguing for open borders.
Lots of conservatives who are afraid of being called racist (and I'm clearly not in their ranks) shrink from making an empirical rational argument against this sort of nonsense. My argument to them: If you put your patriotism ahead of your fears you will challenge their assumptions about human nature and use real evidence about human differences to fight against the idiocy of Bush, the neocons, and the Open Borders libertarians. Nothing less than the truth can win the battle.
Hispanics are fighting for the power to become privileged minorities eligible for the same racial preferences blacks get. Every amnestied illegal and every child born in this country to an illegal is a future claimant on racial preferences for jobs, university admissions, and other slots.
Multiculturalism has in fact achieved a great deal; now one need not even be a citizen to feel that he, by virtue of his sense of racial solidarity, is entitled to not only the same rights as a citizen but to special considerations above and beyond that. As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, under current affirmative action policy an illegal immigrant amnestied by something like the Kennedy/McCain Bill will instantly become eligible for preferential treatment as an assumed victim of white American discrimination and its “legacy.” How’s that for dead, Mr. Brooks?
Racial conflict will rise as whites become another one of Amy Chua's "market dominant minorities". Declining living standards and racial conflict are in America's future unless we build a wall, deport the illegals, and cut way back on legal immigration as well.
In an earlier post Dennis quoted from Francis Fukuyama's break with the neoconservatives.
"The End of History," in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.
Think about that. One neocon splits from the movement because while he finds his own Marxist style of analysis acceptable he thinks his fellow travellers are Leninists and that embracing Leninist modes of thinking amounts to a bridge too far. This has what to do with Burkean conservatism? The mind boggles. On the bright side Fukuyama draws needed attention to the leftist roots of neocon thought.
I think the current neocons deceive and use conventional conservatives for their own purposes. The Democrats have become too anti-militaristic for neocon purposes. Hence the embrace of the Republicans who are much more fond of guns and soldiers. Don't be their tools. Reject these guys.
The latest bad news report from the Center for Immigration Studies:
• Looking first at all workers shows that between March 2000 and March 2005 only 9 percent of the net increase in jobs for adults (18 to 64) went to natives. This is striking because natives accounted for 61 percent of the net increase in the overall size of the 18 to 64 year old population.
• As for the less-educated, between March of 2000 and 2005 the number of adult immigrants (legal and illegal) with only a high school degree or less in the labor force increased by 1.6 million.
• At the same time, unemployment among less-educated adult natives increased by nearly one million, and the number of natives who left the labor force altogether increased by 1.5 million. Persons not in the labor force are neither working nor looking for work.
• In total, there are 11.6 million less-educated adult immigrants in the labor force, nearly half of whom are estimated to be illegal aliens.
• Of perhaps greatest concern, the percentage of adult natives without a high school degree who are in the labor force fell from 59 to 56 percent between March 2000 and 2005, and for adult natives with only a high school degree participation in the labor force fell from 78 to 75 percent.
• Had labor force participation remained the same, there would have been an additional 450,000 adult native dropouts and 1.4 million adult natives with only a high school degree in the labor force.
• Data collected since Hurricane Katrina, in January 2006, show no improvement in labor force participation for less-educated natives. It shows a modest improvement in unemployment only for adult native dropouts, but not for natives with only a high school degree.
• The decline in less-educated adult natives (18 to 64) in the labor market does not seem to be the result of more parents staying home with young children, increased college enrollment, or early retirement.
• There is some direct evidence that immigration has harmed less-educated natives; states with the largest increase in immigrants also saw larger declines in natives working; and in occupational categories that received the most new immigrants, native unemployment averages 10 percent.
• While most natives are more educated, and don’t face competition from less-educated immigrants, detailed analysis of 473 separate occupations shows that 17 million less-educated adult natives work in occupations with a high concentrations of immigrants.
• Some of the occupations most impacted by immigration include maids, construction laborers, dishwashers, janitors, painters, cabbies, grounds keepers, and meat/poultry workers. The overwhelming majority of workers in these occupations are native-born.
• The workers themselves are not the only thing to consider; nearly half of American children (under 18) are dependent on a less-educated worker, and 71 percent of children of the native-born working poor depend on a worker with a high school degree or less.
• Native-born teenagers (15 to 17) also saw their labor force participation fall — from 30 percent in 2000 to 24 percent in 2005.
• Wage data show little evidence of a labor shortage. Wage growth for less-educated natives has generally lagged behind wage increases for more educated workers.
Automation has reduced the demand for manual laborers and manual labor wages have declined as a result. International trade with countries which have very low wages has also decreased demand at the bottom. Given that the native workers with lower levels of intelligence and fewer skills already are taking it in the chin from these factors why pile on them and make their lives even harder by importing millions of low skilled laborers?
Some argue there are jobs Americans just won't do. But in the dwindling number of areas of America not yet hit by the Hispanic immigrant deluge Americans do collect trash, wash dishes, clean hotel rooms, dig ditches, and all the other jobs at the bottom. They already earn very low salaries. Why drive their salaries even lower?
Immigrants from relatively poorer countries find low US manual labor wages a step up from what they were paid in Mexico, Central America, and other less developed countries. But their children who grow up here will see US wages from a vantage point more like that of natives. So if they do not achieve at the level of American whites they are likely to feel some resentment and some sense that the system is not fair.
Some Open Borders advocates point at negative attitudes toward work found in some lower class Americans and justify use of immigrants as a way to avoid dealing with bad attitudes in America's lower classes. But the Open Borders advocates ought to ask themselves whether it is reasonable to expect the children and grandchildren of current immigrants to be immune to the influences which have shaped the descendants of previous generations of immigrants. Given that our current wave of immigrants is expanding the lower classes more rapidly than it expands the middle and upper classes we aren't just demoralizing the lower classes. We are making them a bigger fraction of society.
United States counties that share a border with Mexico continue to struggle with educational achievement, poverty, access to health care and federal crimes, according to a new study by the University of Texas at El Paso's Institute for Policy and Economic Development.
The study, "At the Cross Roads: U.S./Mexico Border Counties in Transition," was prepared for the U.S./Mexico Border Counties Coalition. The two-year study takes a unique approach by grouping the 24 counties along the border of Mexico as a "51st state" and comparing it to the rest of the country.
The coalition announced the results of the study at an event at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. this week.
Among the findings:
- Border counties would rank No. 1 in federal crime as a 51st state, primarily because of drug and immigration arrests.
- If San Diego County is not included, border counties would rank last in per capita income. With San Diego County, border counties would rank 39th.
- If considered a 51st state, the border counties would rank 50th in percent of residents above the age of 25 who have completed high school.
- As a 51st state, border counties would rank last in the number of health care professionals available for residents.
Coalition officials will use the study to illustrate the problems facing the border when they meet with members of Congress in coming weeks.
To view the complete study visit http://www.bordercounties.org or http://www.iped.utep.edu .
The jerks in the US Senate want to deliver even more of this deterioration of American society. America has a lousy elite. Americans need to get a lot more angry at the failure of Washington DC to obey the popular will on immigration. Time to build a wall. Time to deport all the illegal aliens and stop the influx of low IQ legal immigrants as well.