Malta less of a pushover than America

From the New York Times:

Give Malta Your Tired and Huddled, and Rich 

By DAN BILEFSKY   JAN. 31, 2014 

PARIS — Having been besieged by the Ottomans, and ruled over the centuries by foreign invaders from the Greeks to the Romans to Napoleon, the tiny Mediterranean island nation of Malta has seen plenty of unwelcome interlopers. 

But now, it seems, these foreigners are quite welcome — if they are willing to hand over 1.15 million euros, or $1.55 million, to buy a Maltese passport. 

Motivated in part by economic stress, and in part by what some call crass opportunism, the idyllic island 50 miles south of Sicily is selling citizenship for $880,000 in cash and $677,000 in property and investments to applicants 18 or older willing to pay the price. ...

Being a citizen of Malta, which is part of the European Union’s passport-free zone, will confer the right to travel among the union’s 27 other member states without border formalities. A newly minted Maltese citizen will also be able to live and work in another European Union country, and will gain the right to visa-free travel to 69 non-European Union countries, including the United States. 

Critics accuse the government of pawning the national birthright. So far, those said to be interested in the passports include a former Formula 1 champion, a Chinese billionaire, an international pop star, a member of a prominent Persian Gulf royal family, an American press magnate and a South American soccer player, according to The Times of Malta, a daily newspaper. 

While all European Union countries have the right to peddle citizenship to whomever they want, the practice is relatively rare and the union’s justice commissioner, Viviane Reding, expressed dismay last month, telling the Maltese that European citizenship “must not be up for sale.” 

Others fear that the proud and picturesque island — with 411,277 citizens, one of the world’s most densely populated countries — risks following in the footsteps of fellow European Union member Cyprus, which has come under criticism for attracting tycoons looking for a convenient place, preferably one with sun and sand, to protect their assets from tax collectors. 

Under pressure from European Union officials in Brussels, Malta this week agreed to require foreigners seeking to buy Maltese passports to be residents for at least one year. It has also vowed to carefully vet applicants. Yet initial plans to limit to 1,800 the number of passports granted have been scrapped. 

For all the fuss and red-faced reprimands of Brussels bureaucrats, Malta is just one of several countries seeking to woo rich foreigners by offering residency or citizenship. 

Cyprus recently slashed the amount of investment required to be eligible for citizenship, to $4.06 million from $13.5 million. ...

In contrast, the United States hands out EB-5 visas to investors who pay zilch to the government, and just invest $500,000 (in "targeted" areas) or $1,000,000 anywhere in businesses, typically construction projects. While Maltese taxpayers get $880,000, American taxpayers get nothing.
 

A President Rubio could put an end to all this divisiveness by just ordering a drone strike on John Tanton

For years, the Southern Poverty Law Center has been arguing that the only reason anybody in America has the slightest doubts about immigration is because of the malign influence of one man, a Michigan ophthalmologist named John Tanton. 

Now, Sen. Marco Rubio is spreading the SPLC's line.

From the Washington Post:

Effort to change immigration law sparks internal battle within GOP 

By Peter Wallsten, Published: February 13 

A new battle has flared inside the Republican Party in recent days as supporters of more-liberal immigration laws wage a behind-the-scenes campaign to discredit the influential advocacy groups that have long powered the GOP’s hard-line stance on the issue. 

The campaign, largely waged in closed-door meetings with lawmakers and privately circulated documents, is another sign of how seriously many establishment Republicans are pursuing an immigration overhaul in the wake of last year’s elections, in which the GOP lost Hispanic voters by an overwhelming margin to President Obama. 

Much of the party’s sharp language on immigration during the election campaign, which Republican strategists blamed for alienating Hispanics, was drawn from the research and rhetoric of the advocacy groups. 

Now, Republicans pushing the party to rethink its approach to the issue are accusing those groups — Numbers USA, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) – of masquerading as conservative. Critics say the groups and some of their supporters are pressing an un­or­tho­dox agenda of strict population control that also has included backing for abortion, sterilization, and other policies at odds with conservative ideology. 

“If these groups can be unmasked, then the bulk of the opposition to immigration reform on the conservative side will wither away,” said Alfonso Aguilar, executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles and a leading organizer of the effort. 

Officials from the groups say they are the victims of a smear campaign that unfairly characterizes their mission. They acknowledge that some key figures in their past held a wide range of views on population growth and abortion, as do some current members, but the groups accuse their critics of pushing guilt-by-association arguments to distract from the merits of the case for restricting immigration. 

The groups have provided the intellectual framework and grass-roots muscle for opposing legislation that would legalize millions of illegal immigrants. 

Well-funded and politically savvy, the groups produce research papers, testify at congressional hearings and appear frequently in the media to push for reducing immigration. Numbers USA reports that its members have inundated the office of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) with 100,000 faxes this year warning him that his central role in pursuing changes in immigration laws could damage his future political prospects. ...

Conservatives who are taking on the groups, including Rubio, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and officials of the Catholic Church, argue that the three organizations are motivated by far different philosophies than many of their Republican allies realize. Among those views: that population growth from increased migration threatens the environment. 

The Republicans orchestrating the campaign against the groups have long rejected their views on immigration, and liberal immigration advocates have long made a practice of attacking the organizations. Now, with such GOP leaders as House Speaker John A. Boehner (Ohio) saying immigration legislation is a priority, some Republicans see an opportunity to loosen what they say has been the groups’ stranglehold on party orthodoxy.

Uh ... George W. Bush? Karl Rove? Grover Norquist? John McCain?

I'm fascinated by how impervious the world is to doing simple reality checks on assertions, such as by thinking briefly about the immigration views of recent Republican Presidents/nominees.

How exactly do Roy Beck and Mark Krikorian have a "stranglehold on party orthodoxy" compared to those guys who have all pushed more immigration? We immigration reductionists have managed to block disastrous initiatives by Bush and McCain by having better facts and logic, not by any stranglehold.

Rubio’s aides last week brought one of the organizers of the effort to undermine the groups, Mario H. Lopez, a party strategist on Hispanic politics, to a regular meeting of GOP Senate staffers, where Lopez distributed literature about the groups’ backgrounds and connections. Rubio also raised concerns about the groups’ leanings during a recent conference call on immigration with conservative activists. 

Rubio’s spokesman, Alex Conant, said the senator “has argued that some groups that oppose legal immigration should not be considered part of the conservative coalition,” adding that the “vast majority of Republicans strongly support legal immigration.” 

Kevin Appleby, director of immigration policy for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said in an e-mail to The Post that “pro-life legislators should think twice about working with these groups, as their underlying goals are inconsistent with a pro-life agenda.” ...

The critics, however, argue that the three groups have misled conservatives. These critics point to reports on the FAIR and Numbers USA Web sites, for instance, that warn of environmental devastation from unchecked population growth, and they are circulating a 1993 report by CIS researchers sympathetic to contraception and the RU-486 abortion pill. 

In the latest issue of an anti-abortion journal, The Human Life Review, the Hispanic GOP strategist Lopez accuses the groups of “hijacking” the immigration debate for their own purposes. He argues that population-control advocates “have built, operated, and funded much of the anti-immigration movement in the United States.” 

“Those who seek to advance the pro-life cause should not allow themselves to be fooled by those whose work is ultimately diametrically opposed to the right to life,” Lopez writes. 

The article has created a stir in conservative circles. It ascribes the vision behind the groups to John Tanton, a controversial Michigan-based leader in the “zero population growth” movement, who co-founded FAIR in 1979 and later helped start Numbers USA and CIS. 

In a 2001 letter by Tanton being circulated as part of the current campaign, he laid out his idea to “move the battle lines on the immigration question in our favor” by convincing Republican lawmakers that “massive immigration imperils their political future.” The goal, he wrote, was to “change Republicans’ perception of immigration so that when they encounter the word ‘immigrant,’ their reaction is ‘Democrat.’ ” Organizers of the campaign against the groups found the letter at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library, which houses Tanton’s papers.

And, boy, was Tanton ever wrong! Oh, wait ...

An aide to Tanton, now 78, said Tanton was unable to speak. But the aide, K.C. McAlpin, said Tanton was an “ardent conservationist” who was being targeted in a “sort of McCarthyism game that the far left has been playing and is now being played by some people who call themselves conservatives.” 

I've never met the man, but if the SPLC/Rubio line is right about his influence, we ought to add Dr. Tanton's face to Mount Rushmore.

The dispute has prompted some tense encounters in recent days. 

When word spread, for instance, that Rubio’s staff was bringing Lopez to the Senate aides meeting last week, other Senate offices contacted the three groups, each of which sent a representative. 

“It was awkward,” said one staffer, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private meeting. The staffer described the critics’ tactics as “over the top,” saying the groups have been a “great resource” for data, research and expert testimony. 

Another testy moment occurred recently at the weekly conservative strategy session hosted by Norquist when Lopez stood to present his arguments. Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration who now works at the conservative Heritage Foundation, spoke up to defend the credibility of the Center for Immigration Studies. 

“I haven’t heard folks take on the substantive arguments CIS is making and saying why they’re wrong,” said von Spakovsky, who declined to discuss details of what happened in the off-the-record meeting. “Instead you just get these scurrilous attacks.”

Dept. of Not Getting Moynihan's Joke about the Canadian Border

From The New Republic, an elaborate article that doesn't seem to notice how literal its titular metaphor actually is:

Blue States are from Scandinavia, Red States are from Guatemala 

A theory of a divided nation. 

Jonathan Cohn October 5, 2012 | 12:00 am 

... We’ve come to think of “blue” and “red” states as political and cultural categories. The rift, though, goes much deeper than partisan differences of opinion. The borders of the United States contain two different forms of government, based on two different visions of the social contract. In blue America, state government costs more—and it spends more to ensure that everybody can pay for basic necessities such as food, housing, and health care. It invests more heavily in the long-term welfare of its population, with better-funded public schools, subsidized day care, and support for people with disabilities. In some cases, in fact, state lawmakers have decided that the social contract provided by the federal government is not generous enough. It was a blue state that first established universal health insurance and, today, it is a handful of blue states that offer paid family and medical leave. 

In the red states, government is cheaper, which means the people who live there pay lower taxes. But they also get a lot less in return. The unemployment checks run out more quickly and the schools generally aren’t as good. 

Assistance with health care, child care, and housing is skimpier, if it exists at all. The result of this divergence is that one half of the country looks more and more like Scandinavia, while the other increasingly resembles a social Darwinist’s paradise. 

Americans have been arguing over which system is morally and economically superior since the beginning of the republic. But every now and then, the worldviews have clashed and forced a reckoning. The 2012 election is one of those moments. ...

THE QUINTESSENTIAL blue state is, of course, Massachusetts. There, health care is available to almost everybody, regardless of income or preexisting medical conditions. Welfare benefits are among the most generous in the country, and the state spends hundreds of millions on public housing each year. These programs don’t always lift people out of poverty or protect them from financial catastrophe. Still, Massachusetts’s residents get a lot more help from their state government than people who live elsewhere in the United States. It is reliably at the forefront of efforts at the state level to do what the federal government will not.  

In colonial times, during their fabled town meetings, New Englanders established America’s first public schools and worked to look after those who had fallen on hard times, even though it meant higher taxes. In Albion’s Seed, a history of colonial settlement patterns, David Hackett Fischer writes that efforts to care for the vulnerable “went beyond the minimum.” 

As Fischer pointed out, New England Puritans tended to be, literally, "from Scandinavia:" their English-born ancestors were concentrated in the Danelaw region of a thousand years ago in eastern England. Isaac Newton, for instance, a classic eastern English Puritan, looked rather like Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap.

About a century later, a wave of immigrants from central, southern, and eastern Europe arrived in the Northeast and upper Midwest, grafting Catholic notions of social justice and Jewish notions of social responsibility onto the old Yankee sense of mutual obligation.

... The South was slower to industrialize and slower to take measures to protect the vulnerable. By the time of the Great Depression, most Southern state governments did not provide any form of cash assistance to people in poverty. 

One likely reason was the region’s own equally distinctive colonial ancestry. Appalachia had attracted fiercely individualistic immigrants from the Scottish and Irish woodlands. Virginia’s founders, meanwhile, were a group of well-educated elites who, unlike the Puritans, wanted to recreate the society they left behind, including its class divisions. ... 

But something else had soured the South on social welfare: race. Programs to help poor people were, inevitably, programs to help African Americans. Southern whites wanted nothing to do with helping former slaves get an equal footing in society. They did embrace the New Deal, in part because Franklin Roosevelt and his allies went out of their way to accommodate their racial sensibilities: Social Security, for example, initially exempted agricultural and domestic workers. By the 1950s, however, the South was once more under attack for its denial of civil rights to African Americans. Later, it came to see the anti-poverty programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society as yet another effort to redistribute money to blacks (even though, like the New Deal, it also helped many whites). 

... The biggest victory for these counterrevolutionaries came in 1996, when Republicans passed a bill, signed by Bill Clinton, to “end welfare as we know it.” The legislation gave states wide leeway over how to manage benefits and, over time, gave them less money to spend.

... This was fitting, because, just as Massachusetts is the model for the blue state, Texas is the model for the red. 

Today, Texas doesn’t even try to provide the kind of protection for its vulnerable residents that Massachusetts does. ... 

THIS PATTERN generally holds for the red states and the blue states overall. ... “The story is pretty clear,” Meyers says. “If you are poor, you want to live in a blue state.”  

By nearly every measure, people who live in the blue states are healthier, wealthier, and generally better off than people in the red states It’s impossible to prove that this is the direct result of government spending. But the correlation is hard to dismiss. The four states with the highest poverty rates are all red: Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Texas. (The fifth is New Mexico, which has turned blue.) And the five states with the lowest poverty rates are all blue: New Hampshire, New Jersey, Vermont, Minnesota, and Hawaii. The numbers on infant mortality, life expectancy, teen pregnancy, and obesity break down in similar ways. A recent study by researchers at the American Institute for Physics evaluated how well-prepared high schoolers were for careers in math and science. Massachusetts was best, followed closely by Minnesota and New Jersey. Mississippi was worst, along with Louisiana and West Virginia. In fact, it is difficult to find any indicator of well-being in which red states consistently do better than blue states.

Or, perhaps, the causality of the correlation works in the opposite direction: that wealthier states, having fewer poor people, can afford to be more generous to their poor?

And what makes states healthier, wealthier, and wiser? As Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out: proximity to the Canadian border -- i.e., being whiter. For example, Massachusetts is only 18% Non-Asian Minority, while Texas is 51% NAM (which, of course raises the metaphysical question, when Non-Asian Minorities are no longer a minority, what are they?)

So, TNR's lesson is that if Democrats want the whole country to be more like Massachusetts, Democrats should back an immigration policy of letting in more Scandinavians and fewer Guatemalans, right?

By the way, when speaking about Massachusetts, it's important to keep in mind that a major reason it doesn't have many blacks and that its blacks aren't as big of a problem as elsewhere is because it has an abundance of violent, tribalist, anti-black Irish to keep the blacks down. Boston is the only place I've seen in the U.S. where blacks appeared to be afraid of white civilians walking down the street. Having a lot of scary Irish around makes theorizing at Harvard a lot more pleasant.

In contrast, poor Milwaukee, a nice German social-democratic town (as Alice Cooper points out in Wayne's World, Socialist candidates were elected mayor of Milwaukee three times in the 1920s), had high welfare and a direct rail line from the Mississippi Delta, and it just got the worst of Southern blacks.

As immigration becomes more of a sacred civil right for foreigners, free speech becomes less of a one for Americans

From the NYT, a column that won't be terribly novel to iSteve readers, but it's good to see this kind of sensible analysis getting out there more broadly:

The Mystery of Benghazi 

By ROSS DOUTHAT 

TWENTY-FOUR hours after the American compound in Benghazi was attacked and our ambassador murdered, the tragedy seemed more likely to help President Obama’s re-election campaign than to damage it. 

... What happened instead was very strange. Having first repudiated the embassy’s apology to Muslims offended by a movie impugning their prophet, the Obama administration decided to embrace that apology’s premise, and insist that the movie was the crucial ingredient in the Sept. 11 anniversary violence. 

For days after the attack, as it became clearer that the Benghazi violence was a Qaeda operation rather than a protest, White House officials continued to stress the importance of the “hateful” and “disgusting” video, and its supposed role as a catalyst for what Susan Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, insisted was a spontaneous attack. 

This narrative was pushed on Sunday morning programs, on late-night talk shows and at news conferences, by everyone from Rice to Hillary Clinton to the president himself. When Obama spoke at the United Nations shortly after the attacks, the video was referenced six times in the text; Al Qaeda was referenced only once. 

... What explains this self-defeating strategy? ... 

Perhaps, then, the real explanation for the White House’s anxiety about calling the embassy attack an act of terror has less to do with the “who” than with the “where.” This wasn’t Al Qaeda striking just anywhere: it was Al Qaeda striking in Libya, a country where the Obama White House launched a not-precisely-constitutional military intervention with a not-precisely-clear connection to the national interest. 

In a long profile of President Obama published last month by Vanity Fair, Michael Lewis suggested that the president feared the consequences of even a single casualty during the Libyan incursion, lest it create a narrative about how “a president elected to extract us from a war in one Arab country got Americans killed in another.” 

How much more, then, might the president fear a narrative about how our Libyan intervention helped create a power vacuum in which terrorists groups can operate with impunity? That’s clearly happened in nearby Mali, where the ripple effects from Muammar el-Qaddafi’s overthrow have helped empower a Qaeda affiliate. In this context, it’s easy to see why the administration would hope that the Benghazi attack were just spontaneous mob violence rather than a sign of Al Qaeda’s growing presence in postintervention Libya as well. The only good news for Obama in this mess is the fact that Romney, always intent on projecting toughness, hasn’t attacked the original decision to go to war in Libya, or tied the intervention itself to Al Qaeda’s North African advances. 

If the Republican nominee were less reflexively hawkish, the White House might be facing the more comprehensive critique that it deserves — and the story wouldn’t be about just the specifics of Benghazi, but also the possibility that Obama’s entire policy in the region has put American interests and lives at risk.

The Grand Strategy of the Obama Administration isn't much different from that of the Bush Administration: Invite the World, Invade the World, In Hock to the World. But, you won't hear that from Romney and Ryan.

I would add one more explanation. The Obama Administration is reflexively pro-multicultural and therefore anti-free speech in the advanced European and Canadian fashion. They see the First Amendment as all very fine for pornography, but, to be frank, more substantive free speech is outdated in a multi-ethnic age of empire when the government has to keep hot-under-the-collar newcomers, such as Muslims, and old grievance groups, such as blacks, from burning down cities over perceived slights. 

For example, the guy who posted this video on Youtube is an immigrant career criminal. Making a video is one of the few legal things he's done in recent years. But you don't hear anybody saying, "I disagree with what you say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it, but not your right to live in my country, you crook."

So, now he's back in jail. Nominally, he's back inside for all the illegal stuff he has been doing, but we're not supposed to pay that much attention to immigrant conmen as long as they stay nonviolent. But we all know that he's really in jail for exercising his First Amendment right to wage his homeland's ethnic struggles on the Internet. 

Of course, nobody is talking about: Why is that crook in the United States? That's because immigration is increasingly become a sacred civil right for foreigners, which, in turn, means that freedom of speech is increasingly undermined for Americans.

Speaking of supporting free speech, have I mentioned lately that speech isn't free? It turns out to be expensive to keep your family going. So, if you'd like to help support my work:

First: You can send me money via Amazon (not tax-deductible). Click here and then click on the button for the amount you want to pay. It's especially quick if you already have an Amazon account, but any major credit card will work fine. (I want to thank all the generous folks who helped me work out the kinks in this method, using their own real money.)

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Thanks.

NYT: Paying immigrant dishwashers less is "friendly to immigrants"

From the New York Times:

A Republican Platform Line Friendly to Immigrants 

By JULIA PRESTON 

It was no surprise that the Republicans declared their intention to strictly crack down on illegal immigration in their platform, which was released last week. 

But one line was added to the text that went counter to the calls for strict employee verification and expanded action by states: It called for “a legal and reliable source of foreign labor where needed through a new guest worker program.” 

And Brad Bailey, a Texas Republican who owns two seafood restaurants in suburbs of Houston, was satisfied to see it there.

Obviously, bringing in new guestworkers to hammer down the dishwashing wages of the current set of immigrants washing dishes in this guy's Houston restaurants isn't very friendly to immigrants now in the U.S., but who cares about them? The point of being "Friendly to Immigrants" is:

- To line the pockets of the Brad Bailey Republicans in the short run;
- To demographically transform the United States for the benefit of Democrats in the long run.

It's a win-win proposition!

Also, the old bracero program that was shut down in the early 1960s after Edward R. Murrow's "Harvest of Shame" documentary was at least close to all-male. Modern coed guest worker programs and the anchor baby interpretation of the 14th Amendment don't mix, to say the least. But nobody ever thinks about the possibility that guest workers might have sex, which, according to science, has been known to sometimes lead to babies.

No sex, please, we're the New York Times and the GOP Platform Committee.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Open Borders test case

For many years, the Wall Street Journal editorialized in favor of a five word Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "There shall be open borders." So, I've long been interested in trying to estimate just how many people would move to the U.S. if this highly respectable policy recommendation were ever actually implemented. 

George Borjas pointed out that about 1/4th of all Puerto Ricans moved to the U.S. mainland after open borders started. The flow was only slowed by granting immense tax breaks to American companies who set up shop in Puerto Rico.

Even without open borders, over one-fifth of all Mexicans in the world live in the U.S.

And, as I pointed out in VDARE in 2005, about five billion people live in countries with lower average per capita GDPs than Mexico. 

So, open borders advocates ought to at least provide us with an estimate of what fraction of that five billion they would expect to immigrate here (assuming, for the sake of argument, that the effects of open borders wouldn't diminish the appeal of the United States to immigrants, which it no doubt would).

An article in the New York Times provides another test case of how many people would leave even a far distant country to move to the U.S. under a system of open borders: the Marshall Islands of the Pacific:

... the number of Marshallese [in the U.S.] is likely to grow. The islands and the United States have been intertwined since World War II. The United States has detonated at least 67 nuclear bombs in its 750,000-square-mile territory. The radioactive fallout rendered some islands uninhabitable. And United States military operations there are powered by American processed food, beloved by locals but blamed for the explosion in diabetes. 

A 1986 compact gave the United States continued military access, while the Marshallese got the right to work and live in the United States indefinitely without visas. More than a third of the Marshallese — about 20,000 — have seized the opportunity. 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

A Scots-Irish Perspective

From the BBC:

The EU should "do its best to undermine" the "homogeneity" of its member states, the UN's special representative for migration has said. 

Peter Sutherland told peers the future prosperity of many EU states depended on them becoming multicultural. 

He also suggested the UK government's immigration policy had no basis in international law. 

He was being quizzed by the Lords EU home affairs sub-committee which is investigating global migration. 

Mr Sutherland, who is non-executive chairman of Goldman Sachs International and a former chairman of oil giant BP, heads the Global Forum on Migration and Development, which brings together representatives of 160 nations to share policy ideas. 

He told the House of Lords committee migration was a "crucial dynamic for economic growth" in some EU nations "however difficult it may be to explain this to the citizens of those states".

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Meanwhile in Britain ...

The left is moving in the opposite direction on immigration. From the London Evening Standard:

Ed Miliband 

Labour leader [i.e., Shadow Prime Minister of Britain]

22 June 2012 

I am the son of immigrants and proud of it. My father arrived here as a boy to escape the Nazis. My mother came to this country just after the war as another Jewish refugee. In London, they found each other, a place to work and a home. 

I would not be here now if it was not for Britain’s historic role in welcoming people from overseas. 

And the London I love and where I grew up is a more brilliant, vibrant place because people from every single country have come here to live, work and play. Our food, arts, sport, music and business are all massively enriched by it. And because we are a global multi-ethnic city we have earned the right to stage the Olympics next month.
So I am going to be true to my family’s story and to that of our country by recognising that Britain has benefited from immigration — economically, socially and culturally.

But I also have to be true to the many people I have met who worry about immigration and feel let down by politics on this issue. So we need a grown-up debate which begins with an honest assessment of what has happened. 

For too long we assumed those who worried about immigration were stuck in the past — unrealistic about how things could be different, even prejudiced. 

Britain was experiencing the largest peacetime migration in recent history partly because of global factors like the lower cost of travel but also because the last Labour government severely underestimated the numbers who would come here when the EU expanded. 

We were too dazzled by globalisation’s impact on growth and too sanguine about its price. We lost sight of who was benefiting and the people being squeezed in the middle who were losing out. And, to them, Labour was too quick to say: “Like it or lump it.” 

But they were ahead of us in seeing some of the costs of migration as a whole. Rapid changes in population led to pressures on scarce resources such as housing and schools. Some areas were not equipped to cope in the short-term and it brought to the fore questions about entitlements. 

There were also problems with the pace of change in some communities. 

Ties of solidarity and community are not built overnight, and sometimes migration ran faster than the time it took to build them. These are vital questions because they are about how we choose to live together. Labour’s policy review will learn from what has happened because proper controls over who comes into our country and fair rules on entitlements are essential. 

But an effective immigration policy must also reform how our economy works so that it works for all working people in Britain. Although immigration has benefited our economy overall, there have been costs as well as benefits. And where those costs and benefits fall is related to class. 

Those people getting a conservatory built for their home were probably better off because of immigration. But many working in food-processing, hospitality or construction — maybe even building conservatories — were probably worse off because of immigration. ...  

There is nothing wrong with employing a Polish builder, a Swedish child-minder or a French chef. Nor is there anything wrong with people from other countries coming here to work legally. 

Large-scale immigration has collided, however, with a labour market that is too often nasty, brutish and short term. I have heard stories like that from my Doncaster constituency where East European migrants arrived to work in a local chicken factory for long hours at less than the minimum wage while sleeping 19 or 20 to a house. 

That is not good either for the migrants or for the people who used to do these jobs. ...

If there are wonderful examples in our country of firms who invest in training their local workforce, it is also the case that the ready supply of temporary, low-wage migrant labour has pushed too many other businesses further into taking a short-term, low-skill approach. 

There are even recruitment agencies serving them that are effectively open solely to migrants: boasting their workers are Polish, denigrating the talents of people already living and working here, locking local talent out of opportunity.  

We need a new approach that acknowledges that immigration always has costs, as well as benefits, and understands that we cannot solve concerns about it unless we change our economy. 

For too long we have had a phoney debate about immigration which has ignored how our economy works, ignored the costs and sometimes ignored the benefits. And we have ignored the real concerns of working people. 

Too often politicians only speak about this issue to close the conversation down. 

Today I am setting out a new direction for my party on immigration. It will be only the start of a much longer conversation with the British people.

All the examples in the speech are about white immigrants from Europe, whereas the respectable mainstream approach in America is to always racialize the discussion of immigration into totally Who? Whom? terms about the Vibrant v. the Racist, so that helps the British Labour leader make this speech, but still ...

I wrote about the rapid rise and quicker fall of an earlier Miliband ideas man, Lord Glasman, back in 2011.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Where will the Sub-Saharans go?

Michael Barone writes:

But the next big immigration source, I think, will be sub-Saharan Africa. We may end up with prominent politicians who actually were born in Kenya. ... 

America is getting to look a lot more like Texas, and that’s one trend that I hope continues.

Since "African-American" is already taken, we need a term for people such as Akeem Olajuwon: Sub-Saharan Americans? Houston, where Olajuwon played in college and the NBA, appears to be the capital of Sub-Saharan America, due to the oil industry's connections to Nigeria, climate, Houston's Lagos-style city planning regulations, and, maybe, Olajuwon himself. 

So far, the U.S. has mostly been skimming the cream off black Africa, so immigration from sub-Saharan Africa hasn't proved to be a huge problem, yet. Still, regression toward the mean in the next generations is always problem, especially when regression is turbocharged by the most attractive set of bad examples in the world to a 13-year-old boy: the rap-industrial complex.

Worse, there isn't much cream in that coffee.

While fertility is low in much of the world, it remains extraordinarily high in Sub-Saharan African. Where all those people will end up is one of the major questions of the 21st Century.

One possibility is that Sub-Saharans will conjure up another new disease to go along with AIDS. A Chinese scholar writing five years before Malthus pointed out that the four horsemen of the apocalypse tend to arrive late but in a hurry: population swells slowly, then falls quickly.

Another possibility is emigration.

The advanced economy most conveniently located by land for many black African emigrants is Israel. Israelis, however, are increasingly aware of this fact, and are, shall we say, less sentimental about immigration than are their American cousins. 

Europe is next closest, but the political mood appears to be unwelcoming there, although not as much as in Israel.

In the U.S., however, sentimentality is increasingly militant, so Barone may be right.

The most extraordinary prediction, however, is Peter Frost's: that the country that will be overrun by surplus sub-Saharans is ... China.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Thilo Sarrazin's new book

Thilo Sarrazin, the former Social Democratic central banker with a doctorate in economics whose previous book on immigration policy has sold 1,100,000 copies in Germany, has a written a new book, Europe Doesn't Need the Euro. In the Atlantic, Miss Heather Horn finds herself disturbed by Sarrazin's sinister reasonableness:

The Controversial German Book Linking the Euro to Holocaust Guilt 

It's hard to think of a good American equivalent to Germany's Thilo Sarrazin, the politician turned best-selling author. The closest one could be Pat Buchanan: in some circles, he and his writings are considered entirely legitimate. In others, they're considered shocking and revolting to the point of scandal. ... 

Now, Sarrazin is addressing the euro crisis. Tuesday, his new book Europe Doesn't Need the Euro, hit the shelves. If you're just paging through idly, it doesn't seem to be as provocative, and, on balance, it really isn't: you'd expect as seasoned a provocateur as Sarrazin, especially with his leanings towards ideas of ethnic and educational superiority, at least to say some obnoxious and offensive things about Greek people or their ability with a balance sheet. He doesn't do that. The book, nevertheless, has immediately drawn fire -- and with good reason.  

I can tell how old I am because I can remember a day long ago when journalists would describe a book as "provocative" and "controversial" to whet readers' interest in the book. Today, the words "provocative" and "controversial" have become code for Move Along, Nothing to See Here.

... Many of the paragraphs are entirely reasonable ... Nevertheless, this is a little bit, like an American treading awfully close to a racial stereotype while prefacing his statement with "now, I don't want to be called a racist." Why? Because what Sarrazin is really saying is that Germans are hostage to their sense of not wanting to be responsible for Europe's failure. Germans are hostage to their sense of historical guilt. To use Der Spiegel's translation for one of the pre-publication excerpts, pro-euro Germans "are driven by that very German reflex, that we can only finally atone for the Holocaust and World War II when we have put all our interests and money into European hands." ...

What we're left with is a book that has some superficial similarities to Günter Grass's controversial poem about Israel and Iran back in April, though Sarrazin's economic credentials are significantly better than the poet's foreign policy credentials. It's not that the arguments themselves don't have merit. It's that the author doesn't seem all that concerned with complexity. Toss in a casual suggestion that Germans are suppressing their natural reactions due to Holocaust guilt, and the whole thing starts to look offensive ... 

The really provocative and revealing part of Sarrazin's book isn't the oft-repeated quote about Holocaust guilt, it's sentences like, "It's certainly very complicated, but on the other hand not as complicated as many want to make it!" or "Everyone who has an opinion on the euro also has either consciously or unconsciously an opinion on Europe." ...

... Outside of Sarrazin's head, it is possible to have an opinion on the euro and have no idea whether Greeks are fundamentally culturally and ethnically similar to Frenchmen. ...

To "have an opinion" on policy while simultaneously to "have no idea" about the facts the policy confronts appears to be the perfect summation of the kind of intellectual discourse that is considered appropriate in the 21st Century. The role model for contemporary thinkers is Sgt. Schultz from Hogan's Heroes: "I know nuffink!"

And it's possible for uneducated immigrants to produce the next generation's engineers and poets -- and, even if they don't, to be no more or less morally deserving than ethnic Germans with a university degree. Thilo Sarrazin's two books, when you get down to mechanics, aren't all that different.

I am shocked, SHOCKED to hear that one of the world's most experienced technocrats has written an extremely well-documented book arguing that the Euro is not a good idea. Well, I never ...  If Germans don't pile all copies of Sarrazin's new book up in their town squares and burn them tonight, somebody might get the idea to translate his 2010 bestseller on immigration into English and publish it in America. And we can't have that, now can we?

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Why Lorenzo Pagina and Sergio Brino had to found Google in Mexico

From the New York Times on how Romney should attract the Hispanic vote:

What Romney Should Do About Immigration 

By C. STEWART VERDERY, JR. 

... But after those strategic attacks, which included Romney’s awkward “self-deportation” plan for illegal aliens, Romney must execute a creative pivot to the middle to attract moderate voters, especially Hispanic moderates.  ... 

High-skilled immigration: Romney has already endorsed proposals that would allow more highly skilled scientists to enter the United States under temporary visas and to allow foreign students educated here to receive green cards to allow them to stay here and work. However, these proposals have been blocked in Congress by proponents of a broad amnesty that is a non-starter with most Congressional Republicans. Romney should demand passage of the high-skilled agenda before the graduation of the class of 2013 next spring produces another crop of international leaders, educated here in America, needlessly forced to return home to compete against us. If you graduate with an engineering degree from Stanford, we should staple a green card to your diploma.

Like when Lorenzo Pagina and Sergio Brino graduated from Stanford and were about to found Google, but then they got deported back to Mexico. Happens all the time. That why Monterrey is now the technology start-up capital of the Western Hemisphere: because of all the Mexican tech geniuses who got deported from Silicon Valley.

Seriously, how exactly is endorsing more "high-skilled immigration" going to please Mexican-American voters? This proposal would mostly strike Mexican-American voters as pandering to Asians.

Think about it. What's in it for Mexican-descended citizens of the United States? They are already in the U.S. legally. There aren't many high-skilled scientists and engineers in Mexico, and most of those few are happy to stay in Mexico, where life is good for the elite. And, finally, very few Mexican-American citizens have close relatives in Mexico who are highly-skilled, because most Mexican-Americans come from the unskilled classes of Mexico. 

How many East Coast commentators even know any Mexican-American voters?

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

PISA scores for immigrants

Anatoly Karlin, who is making himself the go-to guy on analyzing the investment implications of international school test scores (a potentially lucrative niche), has a long, fascinating write-up of PISA scores adjusted by immigration status:

One thing that immediately leaps out from above is that just as US scores leap upwards (from 496 to about 525, in line with Australia and Canada) once only whites are considered, so do scores in many European states when only natives are considered (e.g. Germany from 510 to 533; Switzerland from 517 to 542; the Netherlands from 519 to 533). In fact, the Germanic nations equalize with Japan’s 529, Taiwan’s 534, and South Korea’s 541 (the natives of these developed East Asian societies also score a lot higher than their immigrants, but the overall effect on the national average is modest because migrant children are such a small percentage of their school-age populations). In other words, in the worst affected European countries, immigrants are lowering the mean national IQ (converted from PISA scores) by as much as 3 points. 

This might not seem like much, but it is highly significant when bearing in mind the extremely close correlation between national IQ and prosperity. Furthermore, since immigrant population tend to be highly variant – for instance, Britain has a lot of Poles, who are essentially equal to the natives in cognitive capacity (maybe even superior, once you adjust for the fact that it is better-educated Poles who tend to emigrate), and a lot of Pakistanis, who are far below them. This is a good explanation for the general sense of dereliction one sees (and the crime one is likely to experience) when entering Pakistani ghettos in the UK. 

Also note from the graph that there is typically a very high degree of overlap between 1st and 2nd generation immigrant children. The 2nd generation children DO typically perform better, presumably because 1st generation immigrants may frequently have language difficulties and problems with adjusting to a new culture. But the degree of convergence of 2nd generation children to the native mean is modest, despite their transferal to typically far more advanced educational environments. Convergence is almost inconsequential in most European countries like Germany, France, Benelux, Norway, and actually negative in the US (i.e. American 2nd generation immigrant children do worse than the 1st generation).

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Another theory of corporate lust for immigration

Jack Strocchi offers another theory of why corporate elites favor immigration besides keeping labor costs down and labor unions weak:

There is no doubt something to the theory that the New Right wanted to Open Borders to crush wages. On the flip ideological side It's clear that the New Left supported Open Borders to "elect a new people" and pad welfare rolls.  

But the most pressing reason to Open Borders is to boost retail turnover, particularly in household formation goods (including houses), particularly in the era of declining birth rates. The easiest way to turn a profit and amortize the cost of capital is to increase turnover, extra sales go right onto the bottom line.

Say you are the head of the American division of a big, fairly capital intensive toilet paper company with major operations in the U.S. You want sales to grow so you can run your already-built factories closer to full capacity. But demand per capita for toilet paper is flat. So, your best hope for growth is to add some capitas in the U.S. to buy more of your product: e.g., via immigration.

Now, the downside of immigration from your perspective would be if some of the immigrants started their own big toilet paper companies to increase competition against you. But, there are a lot of industries where this isn't that big of a threat. 

Moreover, there are a lot of sources of immigrants where this isn't that big of a threat. For example, importing into America the fraction of ambitious Swedes who are fed up with Sweden's restrictions on their entrepreneurial energies could be a problem for established American corporate interests in the long run. On the other hand, importing unambitious Mexicans is not likely to produce much additional competition for the Fortune 500.

So, what's not to like about immigration from the point of view of the Toilet Paper Barons?

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The growth of class taboos

From my new essay at VDARE on the hardening of class taboos:

In recent months, the Left has begun congratulating itself on rediscovering class with its Occupy Wall Street protests. Yet, a glance at the original poster in Adbusters that kicked off the movement should raise doubts. The irony is that this Photoshopped image of a ballerina surmounting sculptor Arthur Di Modica’s iconic symbol of Wall Street, Charging Bull, struck very few protestors as ironic. Ballet is perhaps the most expensive and aristocratic of all performing arts, having attained classical perfection under the patronage of the Czars. Ballet would wither without the rich. 

But that’s the point of much Leftism in the 21st Century: to assert one’s expensive cultural refinement over the hicks.

Read the whole thing there.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Is the white-black cognitive / achievement gap smaller in the U.K.?

Probably. 

Chuck at Occidentalist assembles a bunch of test reports, here and here. It's not as well-studied of a subject as it is in the U.S., so it's hard to make sense of all the data, but most point toward the white-black gap in the U.K. being well under a standard deviation.

I haven't seen a good meta-analyses by a British researcher who knows the ins and outs of all these acronyms like GCSE. (For example, a few years ago a British researcher slipped up on writing about regional differences in performance on the SAT in the U.S. because he didn't know that only the most ambitious students in the Midwest take the SAT instead of the ACT -- so what pitfalls await American kibbitzers among British test scores?) But most of the data seems to suggest a smaller cognitive and/or achievement gap in the U.K. than in the U.S.

It has been apparent for some time now (see this post at Racial Reality) that in Britain, the lads are not all right. In the U.S., we've become familiar with gender gaps on school achievement tests favoring black and Hispanic girls over their brothers, but we see less of this among whites and Asians. This is among the better evidence that culture -- fear of being put down by your co-ethnics for Acting White, etc. -- is depressing NAM performance. 

On a lot of tests, in Britain, there's even a bigger gender gap favoring the distaff side, but it seems to go across all ethnicities, even Chinese. We see weird things like girls whose parents are from Africa outscoring white boys and maybe even East Asian boys on some tests. 

As I pointed out in a couple of articles in 2005, class is the big divide in Britain rather than race. "Class" is a 1500-year-long project to civilize the Conan the Barbarian warlords who inundated the Roman Empire to act like "gentlemen." By the late 20th Century, all that politeness, all that studying, all that self-discipline, was striking young males of the lower classes as pretty gay. Thus, chavism. 

In contrast, there isn't all that much of an oppositional culture among blacks in Britain, since assimilating into the white working class isn't terribly hard: You like 'aving a pint while watching footie on the telly, too? The proportion of mixed race children appears much larger than in the U.S. As historian David Starkey pointed out during the English looting last summer, that blacks were in the lead, but whites were right behind in the looting -- something you don't see in the U.S much at all.

Moreover, blacks in Britain are of immigrant origin: West Indian and African, with the Africans doing better on tests, typically. Some not insignificant fraction of Africans in Britain were brain-drained from Anglophone ex-colonies to work in National Health as nurses and doctors. In the U.S., West Indians and African immigrants tend to outperform native blacks. The Bell Curve found that in the NLSY79 longitudinal study, blacks who were immigrants or the children of immigrants outscored native African-Americans by an average of 5 IQ points. 

But, those are just a few speculations. It's an interesting question that, as far as I know, hasn't been studied terribly systematically.

Update: lots of good stuff in the comments from people who know more about what they are talking about when it comes to Britain than I know.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Rick Perry's Texas Miracle (Americans need not apply)

Steve Camarota has done a very useful piece of research for the Center for Immigration Studies:

Governor Rick Perry (R-Texas) has pointed to job growth in Texas during the current economic downturn as one of his main accomplishments. But analysis of Current Population Survey (CPS) data collected by the Census Bureau show that immigrants (legal and illegal) have been the primary beneficiaries of this growth since 2007, not native-born workers. This is true even though the native-born accounted for the vast majority of growth in the working-age population (age 16 to 65) in Texas. Thus, they should have received the lion’s share of the increase in employment. As a result, the share of working-age natives in Texas holding a job has declined in a manner very similar to the nation as a whole. 

Among the findings: 

Of jobs created in Texas since 2007, 81 percent were taken by newly arrived immigrant workers (legal and illegal).  

In terms of numbers, between the second quarter of 2007, right before the recession began, and the second quarter of 2011, total employment in Texas increased by 279,000. Of this, 225,000 jobs went to immigrants (legal and illegal) who arrived in the United States in 2007 or later.  

Of newly arrived immigrants who took a job in Texas, 93 percent were not U.S. citizens. Thus government data show that more than three-fourths of net job growth in Texas were taken by newly arrived non-citizens (legal and illegal).  

The large share of job growth that went to immigrants is surprising because the native-born accounted for 69 percent of the growth in Texas’ working-age population (16 to 65). Thus, even though natives made up most of the growth in potential workers, most of the job growth went to immigrants.  

The share of working-age natives holding a job in Texas declined significantly, from 71 percent in 2007 to 67 percent in 2011. This decline is very similar to the decline for natives in the United States as a whole and is an indication that the situation for native-born workers in Texas is very similar to the overall situation in the country despite the state’s job growth. 

Of newly arrived immigrants who took jobs in Texas since 2007, we estimate that 50 percent (113,000) were illegal immigrants. Thus, about 40 percent of all the job growth in Texas since 2007 went to newly arrived illegal immigrants and 40 percent went to newly arrived legal immigrants.

A commenter in the one newspaper that has covered this study argues:

In reading the study, they came up with 2 sets of findings depending on how they compared the data: gross vs net showed 29% immigrant growth taking 81% of the new jobs and a net vs net comparison showed 31% immigrant growth taking 54% of the new jobs. The second finding is the more valid comparison (as noted above) but only the first is being reported in most of the media reports and headlines. 

An interesting part of their conclusion: 

"This analysis shows that job growth was significant in Texas. But, depending on how one calculates the impact of immigration, between 2007, before the recession began, and 2011 more than three-quarters or more than half of that growth went to immigrants. This is the case even though the native-born accounted for more than two-thirds of the growth in the working-age population. Some may argue that it was because so many immigrants arrived in Texas that there was job growth in the state. But if immigration does stimulate job growth for natives, the numbers in Texas would be expected to look very different. The unemployment rate and the employment rate show a dramatic deterioration in the Texas for the native-born that was similar to the rest of the country. Moreover, if immigration does stimulate job growth for natives, why have states that received so many new immigrants done so poorly in recent years? (See Table 2.) For example, unemployment in the top-10 immigrant-receiving states in 2011 averaged 8.7 percent, compared to 8.1 percent in the other 40 states. Moreover, unemployment is 7.2 percent on average in the 10 states where the fewest immigrants arrived since 2007. These figures do not settle the debate over the economics of immigration. What they do show is that high immigration can go hand in hand with very negative labor market outcomes for the native-born. And conversely the native-born can do relatively well in areas of lower immigration."

So, I'm going to suggest caution in quoting that 81% figure. You can read the report here and make up your own mind.

In a 2006 VDARE.com article, I explained why the then-current boom in Las Vegas wasn't doing American workers much good:

What [economist David] Card doesn't grasp is that illegal immigration is denying Americans the traditional wage premium for undergoing the pain of moving to a boomtown.{NYT writer Roger] Lowenstein can't see it either, as he writes: "Immigrants do help the economy; they are fuel for growth cities like Las Vegas …"

Imagine you are an American blue-collar worker in Cleveland, making $10 per hour. You know the local economy is stagnant, so you're thinking about relocating to fast-growing Las Vegas. But your mom would miss you; and you're not a teenager anymore so you don't make new friends as fast as you once did; and you really like the wooded Ohio countryside you grew up around and the fall colors and the deer hunting; and there's this girl that maybe you could get serious about, but her whole family is in Cleveland and she'd never leave. 

So, you decide, you'll leave home behind if you can make 50 percent more in Las Vegas, adjusted for cost of living. That seems fair. 

But, then you look through the Las Vegas want ads and discover you'd be lucky to make 10 or 20 percent more because the town is full of illegal aliens. They're moving from another country, so it's not much skin off their nose to move to Las Vegas rather than some place slower-growing. 

Well, forget that, you say. I'll stay in Cleveland. 

Unfortunately, too many economists forget that too. They can't—or won't—put themselves in other people's shoes and see how the world really works. 

That doesn't seem to hurt them professionally. But it can hurt America.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

J-1 visas: Not doing jobs Americans would do

Jennifer Gordon writes in an op-ed in the NYT about that amusing strike at the Hershey factory by foreign students who thought they were signing up for fun in the sun and got stuck lifting cases of candy on the late shift in Nowheresville, PA:

The J-1 visa, also known as the exchange visitor visa, has its roots in the cold war. In 1961, Congress created a program for international students and professionals to travel here, with the goal of building good will for the United States in the fight against Communism. The program, which became the J-1 visa, thrives today — but not as Congress intended. 

Instead, it has become the country’s largest guest worker program. Its “summer work travel” component recruits well over 100,000 international students a year to do menial jobs at dairy farms, resorts and factories — a privilege for which the Hershey’s students shelled out between $3,000 and $6,000. They received $8 an hour, but after fees and deductions, including overpriced rent for crowded housing, they netted between $1 and $3.50 an hour. Hershey’s once had its own unionized workers packing its candy bars, starting at $18 to $30 an hour. Now the company outsources distribution to a non-union company that hires most of its workers from the J-1 program. 

The Pennsylvania workers are not alone. Recent exposés by journalists and advocates have found similar abuse of J-1 visa holders at fast food restaurants, amusement parks and even strip clubs. 

Though the number of J-1 visa holders admitted to the United States swelled from 28,000 in the program’s first year to more than 350,000 in 2010, and the government made minor changes to the program earlier this year, the State Department has never established a sufficient oversight system. Instead, it hands that responsibility to organizations it designates as sponsors, who profit from the arrangement and so have no incentive to report abuses.

Why, after three years of high unemployment with no end in sight, hasn't this program been suspended for the duration of the slump? 

There are a whole bunch of unemployed American citizens with two-digit IQs who wouldn't mind these jobs (although not at $1.00 to $3.50 per hour), but Two Digit Americans are almost completely unrepresented by anybody in modern American life. When I hear sophisticated folk go on and on about how they are "cosmopolitan" and thus don't care about invisible lines on the ground or how, as Bill Clinton said on 9/10/2001: "the world will be a better place if all borders are eliminated," by this point I realize that, in practice, what all that high talk comes down to is somebody who is good with an Excel spreadsheet getting the better of a bunch of their fellow citizens who aren't.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Jobs that foreigners just won't do

From the New York Times:

Foreign Students in Work Visa Program Stage Walkout at Plant 

By JULIA PRESTON 

PALMYRA, Pa. — Hundreds of foreign students, waving their fists and shouting defiantly in many languages, walked off their jobs on Wednesday at a plant here that packs Hershey’s chocolates, saying a summer program that was supposed to be a cultural exchange had instead turned them into underpaid labor. 

The students, from countries including China, Nigeria, Romania and Ukraine, came to the United States through a long-established State Department summer visa program that allows them to work for two months and then travel. They said they were expecting to practice their English, make some money and learn what life is like in the United States. 

In a way, they did. About 400 foreign students were put to work lifting heavy boxes and packing Reese’s candies, Kit-Kats and Almond Joys on a fast-moving production line, many of them on a night shift. After paycheck deductions for fees associated with the program and for their rent, students said at a rally in front of the huge packing plant that many of them were not earning nearly enough to recover what they had spent in their home countries to obtain their visas. ...

Like many other students, Ms. Ozer said she invested about $3,500, which included the program costs, to obtain the J-1 visa and travel to the United States. Several Chinese students, including Ms. Zhao, said they had paid more than $6,000 in the process of securing visas. ...

Ms. Ozer and other students said they were paid $8.35 an hour. After fees are deducted from her paychecks as well as $400 a month for rent, she said, she often takes home less than $200 a week. “We are supposed to be here for cultural exchange and education, but we are just cheap laborers,” Ms. Ozer said.

Welcome to the new, improved USA, 21st Century Edition! Didn't you get the word that America's traditionally high wages and low housing costs were what made America weak for all those centuries? The future belongs to the country with the cheapest labor and the most expensive land.

Seriously, isn't it weird how the entire concept of putting cheap foreign labor programs like this on hiatus until the unemployment rate among Americans drops just never even occurs to anyone in positions of power or influence? To question the continuance of this program during an economic slump would be to question Diversity, and Diversity is unquestionable. Also, it would be bad for corporate profits. So, what are you, some kind of racist communist?

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Enoch Powell's speech

Here are a few extracts from Enoch Powell's infinitely demonized April 20, 1968 speech, delivered two weeks after the Martin Luther King riots in northern American cities.

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.

In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature. One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: At each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future. Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: “if only”, they love to think, “if only people wouldn't talk about it, it probably wouldn't happen”. Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical.

At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it, deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after. ... 

In fifteen or twenty years, on present trends, there will be in this country 3 1/2 million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. That is not my figure. That is the official figure given to Parliament by the spokesman of the Registrar General's office. There is no comparable official figure for the year 2000, but it must be in the region of 5-7 million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London.
Of course, it will not be evenly distributed from Margate to Aberystwyth and from Penzance to Aberdeen. Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by different sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population. 

... Nothing is more misleading than comparison between the Commonwealth immigrant in Britain and the American Negro. The Negro population of the United states, which was already in existence before the United States became a nation, started literally as slaves and were later given the franchise and other rights of citizenship, to the exercise of which they have only gradually and still incompletely come. The Commonwealth immigrant came to Britain as a full citizen, to a country which knows no discrimination between one citizen and another, and he entered instantly into the possession of the rights of every citizen, from the vote to free treatment under the National Health Service. Whatever drawbacks attended the immigrants—and they were drawbacks which did not, and do not, make admission into Britain by hook or by crook appear less than desirable—arose not from the law or from public policy or from administration but from those personal circumstances and accidents which cause, and always will cause, the fortunes and experience of one man to be different for another's. ...

For these dangerous and divisive elements the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organize to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. 

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman [i.e., , I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”. 

That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. 

Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. 

Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know.
All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.

Now, it's not clear from this speech (although perhaps it is from others) that Powell feared what historian David Starkey called a couple of nights ago "intercommunal violence" of the Bombay-Hindus-whomp-on-Muslims type seen in the opening of Slumdog Millionaire. Powell's focus was evidently the black American riots of 1965-1968, which weren't all that intercommunal, although there was some animus against Jewish and other nonblack shopkeepers. They were more "political shopping," with Civil Rights as an excuse for looting sprees, much like this week's riots.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Self-parody?

I must confess that when I read articles from the mainstream media in Europe denouncing immigration restrictionists with angry rhetoric but little substance, I sometimes wonder if my leg is being pulled. For example, is this April 29, 2011 article from Spiegel on Denmark's decade-long success in implementing a more rational immigration policy a self-parody? Perhaps the reporter secretly wanted to laud the Danish government as thoughtfully reformist, but had to lather it in spiteful PC rhetoric to get it published  ... I don't know. (I particularly like the chosen photo, with the fat lout trying to look surly in the front and the youth with the "Soldier of Allah" sweatshirt.)

Immigrants in Copenhagen: The government has calculated their supposed cost to the country. 

Putting a Price on Foreigners 

Strict Immigration Laws 'Save Denmark Billions' 

By Anna Reimann 

Denmark's strict immigration laws have saved the country 6.7 billion euros, a government report has claimed. Even though Denmark already has some of the toughest immigration laws in Europe, right-wing populist politicians are now trying to make them even more restrictive.

Denmark's strict immigration laws have saved the country billions in benefits, a government report has claimed. The Integration Ministry report has now led to calls among right-wing populists to clamp down further on immigrants to increase the savings. 

The extremely strict laws have dramatically reduced the flow of people into Denmark in recent years, and many government figures are delighted with the outcome. "Now that we can see that it does matter who comes into the country, I have no scruples in further restricting those who one can suspect will be a burden on Denmark," the center-right liberal integration minister, Søren Pind, told the Jyllands Posten newspaper. 

Pind was talking after the ministry's report -- initiated by the right-wing populist Danish People's Party (DPP) -- came to the conclusion that by tightening immigration laws, Denmark has saved €6.7 billion ($10 billion) over the last 10 years, money which otherwise would supposedly have been spent on social benefits or housing. According to the figures, migrants from non-Western countries who did manage to come to Denmark have cost the state €2.3 billion, while those from the West have actually contributed €295 million to government coffers. 

'Restrictions Pay Off' 

The report has led to jubilation among right-wing politicians: "We now have it in black and white that restrictions (on immigrants) pay off," said DPP finance spokesman Kristian Thulesen Dahl. The DPP will almost certainly exploit the figures in future negotiations over the Danish economy. 

But the report has sparked outrage from opposition parties like the centrist Social Liberal Party, which dismissed it as undignified and discriminatory. The party's integration spokeswoman, Marianne Jelved, said: "A certain group of people is being denounced and being blamed for our deficit, being made into whipping boys." She added: "We cannot classify people depending on their value to the economy. That is degrading in a democracy that has a basic value of equality." 

Still, the announcement has not come as surprise. The right-wing populist DPP, which has been working with the ruling center-right coalition government of Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen since 2001, has in the past made its aims very clear: a complete halt to immigration into Denmark from non-Western countries. "A Somali who is no good for anything, that is simply not acceptable," said DPP leader Pia Kjærsgaard. Similarly, center-right liberal Prime Minister Rasmussen has also said anyone who would be a burden on Denmark is not welcome in the country. 

... The small Scandinavian country already has the strictest immigration and asylum laws in Europe. For example, foreign couples are only allowed to marry if both partners are at least 24 years old. The number of asylum seekers and relatives of immigrants seeking entry into Denmark dropped by more than two-thirds within nine years as a result of the tough laws.

A Decisive Issue in Denmark 

But things may soon get pushed even further. Elections are due to be held this fall, and the ruling parties apparently want to put forward even stricter rules, driven by the xenophobic rhetoric of the right-wing populists. In polls, the approval ratings of more liberal politicians have fallen, and the opposition center-left Social Democrats have promised not to change current immigration laws if they win the election. Immigration will always be a big issue in Denmark -- almost 10 percent of Denmark's 5.5 million people are migrants -- and the issue was a decisive one in the last election, in 2007. 

In November, the government agreed to stricter laws and made the entry of immigrants' spouses more difficult. Only those who collect enough "points" may come to Denmark in the future -- with points being determined by factors such as academic qualifications and proof of language proficiency. In addition, the equivalent of €13,000 must be deposited with the state in the form of a bank guarantee to cover any future public assistance. Socially deprived areas with a disproportionately high number of immigrants will be subject in future to a so-called "ghetto strategy" designed to prevent high concentrations of foreigners in public housing areas. Migrants will be assigned housing, and three-year-old children who do not speak Danish well enough will be required to attend state child care. 

Some immigrants have already turned their back on Denmark voluntarily. Increasing numbers of Somalis are moving away, especially to the UK, the Jyllands Posten reported on Thursday, because of discrimination.

In other words, leaving aside all the hate words used by Spiegel to spice it up, Danish immigration restrictionists have been thoroughly vindicated, with their opponents left with nothing but platitudes, while promising not to undo their reforms if they get elected.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer