The American Conservative

Gordon Brown may have torpedoed his last chance to be prime minister in his own right when, in the privacy of his limo, he called 66-year-old Gillian Duffy that “bigoted woman.”

What had widow Duffy done to deserve the slur?

After taking the Labor Party leader to task for several minutes, Mrs. Duffy raised the immigration issue — “These Eastern Europeans, where are they all flocking from?”

Brown responded that a million East Europeans had entered Britain, but a million Britons had emigrated to the continent.

The exchange over, Duffy was pleased with having been televised with the prime minister and said she would vote for Brown. Until, that is, she was told that Brown, overheard on a microphone he was wearing but forgot about, called her that “bigoted woman.”

The shock on Mrs. Duffy’s face showed genuine pain.

That the episode was disastrous for Brown even he agrees. But it raises a larger question. Who is the real bigot here?

Assume Duffy is upset that millions of East Europeans strangers and Third World peoples have moved into her country and neighborhood, and she wishes she had back the Britain she grew up in.

Is that bigotry? And, if so, why? Read More…

Major demonstrations are to be held in 70 cities on May 1 to protest the new Arizona law to cope with an army of half a million illegal aliens now living there.

Since Gov. Jan Brewer signed that law a week ago, Arizona has been subjected to savage attack as the modern embodiment of Jim Crow, apartheid and Nazism. Few have risen in her defense.

In San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., moves are afoot to boycott Arizona and cancel conventions to break the state, as it was broken when Arizona declined to set aside a holiday for Martin Luther King.

Republican leaders like Jeb Bush, Karl Rove and even the rising Marco Rubio of Florida have declared themselves “troubled” or “concerned” and washed their hands of Arizona, which suggests they have not read the law — or the party remains captive to country-club political correctness.

In a particularly offensive smear, Mexican President Felipe Calderon charged Arizona with opening the door “to intolerance, hate, discrimination and abuse in law enforcement.”

And what was the reaction of the Great Apologist to this slander of an American state by the leader of a neighboring nation?

None. One wonders if Barack Obama will ever stand up to foreign leaders’ abusing the nation that awarded him its highest honor. Or has he been marinated since birth in the “Blame America First” mindset of the San Francisco Democrats who sneer at the real America? Read More…

If you think the heap of abuse being piled on Arizona is unique to America’s ethnically fractured politics, you should take a look at England.  British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who is running for reelection, encountered yesterday a 66 year old woman who asked him why so many immigrants from Eastern Europe were receiving government benefits when so many Brits experiencing difficulties were unable to receive any assistance at all.  She also asked why there were so many foreigners attending British universities, making it difficult for children like her own grandchildren to attend. 

I don’t know the extent to which EU residents can claim British benefits when unemployed, but certainly the woman’s first question was a reasonable one, without any racial overtones about immigrants, and the comment about foreigners at taxpayer supported universities would also seem to be within the realm of polite discourse.  Brown apparently did not agree.  Not knowing that his microphone was still on, he muttered about how the woman was a “bigot” as he returned to his car.

For me the problem is one of government accountability.  No one in government has ever asked the British people whether they want large scale immigration any more than anyone in Washington has ever posed that question to Americans about our 8 to 22 million illegals.  Every major political party in both countries reflects the elite consensus view that immigration and “diversity” are good.  Opinion polls reveal, however, that the elite view is far from popular, with up to 80% of the indigenous population in both countries opposed to large numbers of immigrants.  For the average Brit as for the average American there is, unfortunately, no recourse.  If you vote for one of the candidates who is actually likely to win in an election his position on immigration will likely be identical to that of his opponent. 

In the essentially two party system prevailing in Britain and America, even when you vote the bum out you are just as likely to get another bum.  If you voted for a Democrat or a Republican (or Conservative or Labour)  in 2002 you still got a war with Iraq in the following year just as everyone’s vote will be irrelevant if America’s elites decide to go to war with Iran and the British poodle goes along for the ride.

With the support of 70 percent of its citizens, Arizona has ordered sheriffs and police to secure the border and remove illegal aliens, half a million of whom now reside there.

Arizona acted because the U.S. government has abdicated its constitutional duty to protect the states from invasion and refuses to enforce America’s immigration laws.

“We in Arizona have been more than patient waiting for Washington to act,” said Gov. Jan Brewer. “But decades of inaction and misguided policy have created an unacceptable situation.”

We have a crisis in Arizona because we have a failed state in Washington.

What is the response of Barack Obama, who took an oath to see to it that federal laws are faithfully executed?

He is siding with the law-breakers. He is pandering to the ethnic lobbies. He is not berating a Mexican regime that aids and abets this invasion of the country of which he is commander in chief. Instead, he attacks the government of Arizona for trying to fill a gaping hole in law enforcement left by his own dereliction of duty.

He has denounced Arizona as “misguided.” He has called on the Justice Department to ensure that Arizona’s sheriffs and police do not violate anyone’s civil rights. But he has said nothing about the rights of the people of Arizona who must deal with the costs of having hundreds of thousands of lawbreakers in their midst.

How’s that for Andrew Jackson-style leadership?

Obama has done everything but his duty to enforce the law. Read More…

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.”

From A Tale of Two Cities, Sydney Carton’s words, as he rode the tumbrel to the guillotine, came to mind on reading the latest statistics on what open borders has done to a Republican Party that altruistically embraced it.

The Center for Immigration Studies reports that, since 1980, some 25.2 million immigrants have entered legally and been granted permanent status with “green cards” to work and become citizens.

“Immigration, Political Realignment and the Demise of Republican Political Prospects” is the title of the CIS report, which understates the crisis. Bottom line: The more immigrants in an electoral district, the more grim the GOP prospects. Consider a few of the largest counties in the nation.

Between 1980 and 2008, Los Angeles, No. 1, grew by 2.5 million to 10 million people. The immigrant share went from 22 percent to 41 percent. Over those decades, the GOP share of the presidential vote fell from 52 percent in Ronald Reagan’s rout of Jimmy Carter to 29 percent for John McCain Read More…

I’m afraid that Jason Richwine’s latest posting in the Great Hispanic Crime Debate makes a very silly claim. He seemingly comes close to accusing me of intellectual dishonesty for pointing out that the PPIC Hispanic incarceration data for California is within 10% of my own California figures for the 15-44 age range, arguing that I was virtually pulling a rabbit out of my hat since I’d only presented the lower 18-29 age range figure in my original article.

This is complete nonsense, as anyone who has actually read my article surely knows. From the very beginning, I’d emphasized the methodological uncertainties of my (crude) age-normalization process, and therefore stated that I was repeating all my calculations for the three different ranges 18-29, 15-34, and 15-44 in order to minimize these problems. Read More…

Kudos to Jason Richwine for his fine shoe-leather work in contacting the PPIC staff and determining that the ethnic incarceration figures provided in their 2006 report Who’s in Prison? were already age-adjusted, which he mentioned in a weekend blog item, The Great Hispanic Crime Debate. I do think that anyone reading the explicit text on pp. 4-5 specifying the ethnic incarceration rates per 100,000 for each ethnicity group would certainly not have gotten that impression. Just as in the case of the BJS reports, we see that professional demographers and statisticians are sometimes a little obscure in their expository language. However, the apparent age-adjustment already embedded in the PPIC California data hardly diminishes the conclusions I was claiming to draw from this very useful report.

As I had repeatedly emphasized in my original article and subsequent analyses, I was seeking an age-adjusted ratio of Hispanic/white incarceration rates across different states based on the limited data provided by the BJS reports, especially Table 2005-14. Since the state-by-state numbers provided in BJS Table 2005-14 were not stratified by age, I was forced to adopt the admittedly crude methodology of normalizing these totals to the relevant high-crime age male population, choosing to explore the different results for age cohorts 18-29, 15-34, and 15-44 in order to provide a range of rough estimates. The resulting age-adjusted national incarceration ratios for Hispanics/whites ranged from 1.13 to 1.31 depending upon the age cohort used, with the ratios in California being very similar.

Now my critics, including Richwine, had claimed that these results were wildly inaccurate, arguing that the official data I’d used from BSJ Table 2005-14 was highly erroneous (since it seemingly conflicted with national aggregated figures in a different BJS table). Therefore, I suggested we examine the PPIC California data, probably our most solid nugget of hard evidence, and compare it with the BJS numbers I had used for California. If the results were similar, this would tend to validate the accuracy of the BJS Table 2005-14 numbers and also support my own (crude) age-adjustment methodology. Read More…

Internal migration has long been the overlooked factor leading some to believe that immigration does not significantly affect, or even increases, wages for native-born American workers. Not accounting for those leaving one region for another in search of higher wages and lower living costs some economists have postulated that the slack market for low-skilled labor created by large migratory inflows somehow does not impact on wages. Harvard professor George Borjas corrected this oversight by accounting for internal migration and discovered that, contra the Voodoo Theory of Labor Markets, a greater supply of labor decreases its cost.

But it isn’t merely the search for higher wages and lower housing costs (for our immigration non-policy’s part in the real estate bust see Steve Sailer ) that contribute to internal migration, it’s also the search for community lost to rapid demographic change–and if you’ve yet to shed the retrograde view that the economy should serve society rather than the reverse, this is the greater concern. No longer just the recourse of “racist” whites unenthusiastic about being assaulted on their home streets and sending their children to increasingly dangerous and chaotic schools, the practice of departing neighborhoods in which one no longer feels welcome is now a multi-racial phenomenon. Call it Blight Flight.

The Los Angeles Times relates the story of San Bernadino’s sole synagogue following its would-be congregants into the sweltering, arid California interior:

Tracking the freeway east, one comes to Redlands and other small neighboring cities. As jobs evaporated and crime worsened in San Bernardino, many professionals, among them many members of the city’s Jewish community, moved east.

The decision by Emanu El’s leaders to break its historic ties to San Bernardino spurred dissent from some congregants, most notably from its prominent rabbi emeritus. But Kohn said the move was unavoidable if the temple was to stop hemorrhaging congregants who were moving away.

He compared the eastward shift to other Jewish migrations, including that of the Jewish community in Los Angeles, which was once based on the Eastside but has since moved west.

“Would you argue that all of the Jews of the Valley, the Westside and Orange County move back to Boyle Heights?” said Kohn, who specialized in Jewish American migration during his rabbinical studies

Boyle Heights, once a racially diverse magnet for various immigrant groups but now 95% Hispanic, is a rough neighborhood east of LA known for its Latino gangs, who are in turn notorious for their hostility toward one another and outsiders in general. This familiar process has replicated itself throughout California, sometimes accompanied by organized racial violence in its late stages with the intent of driving the remaining racial outsiders out of the neighborhood. While the country may be growing more diverse as a whole as a result of immigration, our individual communities may be growing less so, and to the extent that they are diverse it appears they become less cohesive, that is less of a community, as depressingly outlined by Harvard professor Robert Putnam in a recent paper.

San Bernadino’s mayor lamented the loss:

The departure drew the attention of San Bernardino Mayor Pat Morris, who called it a significant loss for the city. The synagogue’s members, he said, have historically been leaders in the community. The mayor said Emanu El’s move was part of a broad migration of upper-middle-income professionals out of the city.

“With the closing of shops, the closing of the Air Force base, a whole series of major blue-collar employers leaving, life changed in this fair city,” Morris said. “More dependence on government resources, higher welfare. It is what it is.”

Congregants at Emanu El say that shift was evident at the synagogue, with car break-ins and tagging nearby and the need for surveillance cameras and for security guards at services.

San Bernardino experienced an influx of foreign-born workers during the recent bubble-borne expansion, many to build homes for those priced out of the more desirable markets nearer the coast.

At last week’s Job Summit, there was talk of a second stimulus package, of tax credits for small businesses that hire new workers, of an Infrastructure Bank to select national priority public works projects like the Hoover Dam and TVA of yesteryear.

But no one, it seems, advanced the one obvious idea that would have the most immediate and dramatic impact — a moratorium on all immigration into the United States.

Unemployment is at 10 percent, near the postwar high of 1983. Fifteen million Americans are out of work. Ten million more have given up looking or are working fewer hours than they would like.

We have been losing jobs every month for two years.

Why, then, are we still bringing immigrants into the United States at a rate of 125,000 a month to take jobs from fellow Americans and compete with our unemployed for the jobs that open up? Read More…

An article in the October 23 Washington Times points to what I think may be the next important evolution in Fourth Generation war. The piece concerns Mexico’s third-largest drug gang, La Familia. La Familia is best known for beheading people it does not like. But according to the article, its real claim to fame may be as a pioneer in seizing the mantle of legitimacy previously worn by the state.

La Familia is based in a poor, remote Mexican province, Michoacan, where the Mexican state has long been little more than another gang. Unlike the state, La Familia actually provides services for the province’s people. According to the Washington Times,

The group has a strong religious background and proclaims it is doing God’s work, passing out money and Bibles to poor people.

A DEA agent…said cartel leader Nazario Moreno Gonzales sees his drug dealing as serving the best interests of the people of Michoacan.

The agent said Mr. Moreno doesn’t want meth users among his people (meth is La Familia’s specialty) and will take users off the street and pay for their rehabilitation…

La Familia has won the loyalty of the people of Michoacan. According to the DEA, the group…now gives some of the proceeds of its drug trafficking to schools and local officials.

All of this has made it very difficult for authorities to go to Michoacan to arrest members of La Familia.

In effect, it appears La Familia has replaced the Mexican state in Michoacan. The gang provides an export-based economy where locals actually receive the profits. It tries to protect the local population from the negative environmental effects of its industry, i.e., addiction. It offers a range of social services.

Importantly, it deploys one of the most powerful claims to legitimacy, religion. The fact that the Mexican state is rigidly secular makes the Christian identity La Familia seeks all the more effective. Very few peasants are agnostics. Read More…