June 1, 2007

That's reassuring!

From an op-ed in the NYT entitled "What Mexico Wants" by former Mexican foreign minister Jorge G. Castaneda:

Fortunately, most of the [Kennedy-Bush] reform proposals represent a very good deal for Mexico, however questionable they might appear to the Latino community in the United States. The current Senate package greatly resembles what President Vicente Fox and I proposed back in 2001, in meetings with President Bush and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. ...

There are three Mexican objections to the bill as it stands.

First, it has unduly harsh enforcement provisions at the border and the workplace, which will undoubtedly generate abuses and mistreatment. Still, if every Mexican in the United States who arrived before Jan. 1, 2007, is legalized, enforcement inside the United States, including discriminatory raids, will become redundant. And if nearly everyone who wants to go north can obtain a guest-worker visa, there will be no need to cross illegally and face rough treatment at the border.

A second objectionable feature is the steep fines and fees in the Senate bill: up to $5,000. While this is not cheap, it’s also not much more than the “coyote” charges to smuggle a migrant across the border.

The last objection is more substantive; it is, in fact, a potential deal breaker.

Uh, Mr. Castaneda, I was under the impression that the bill was under consideration by the United States Senate. Under the Constitution, Mexico is not represented in America's Congress, so it's not a party to the "deal." On the other hand, maybe you know something about whose interests are actually represented in my Congress that I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if you do.

The Senate voted last week to cut the number of guest worker slots to 200,000 from 400,000. The earlier figure would have allowed roughly the same number of workers who now cross illegally to obtain guest status. But if the final law has too few slots, it will not end illegal immigration, but simply perpetuate the status quo.

What’s good for Mexico is probably good, in the long term, for the United States as well; on this one, at least, Mexican and American interests coincide.

What's good for Mexico is good for the America. Yup, that's reassuring.

By the way, here are three more interesting things about Castañeda that I only learned last year from Fredo Arias-King even though I read almost everything about Castaneda published in English back in 2000-2001, when he became Vicente Fox's foreign minister.

1. He is known in Mexican newspapers "as 'El Guero' ('the Blond One') for his fair complexion."

2. His Soviet mother was an employee of Stalin's government when his father met her.

In 2002, Bianca Vazquez Toness wrote in the Princeton alumni magazine:

"His father, PRI member Jorge Castañeda de la Rosa, was once foreign minister. His mother, a Russian Jew and naturalized Mexican, met her husband while working as a translator at the U.N. in New York. Young Jorge’s pedigree gave him advantages unavailable to most Mexicans: He grew up a polyglot between New York and Geneva, perfecting his English and his French, while his father served as Mexican ambassador to the U.N. He enrolled at Princeton in 1970...

His doctorate gave him clout upon returning to Mexico at age 25, but his family connections opened the door to the political elite. Castañeda, a political science professor at the national university, called himself a Communist, but that didn’t stop him from moonlighting for his father, who was appointed foreign minister in 1979. The son convinced his father to abandon Mexico’s historically anti-interventionist policy. Calling on contacts made during his school days in France, the younger Castañeda helped negotiate a joint recognition with France of rebel forces in El Salvador, much to the dismay of the U.S., which supported the government in the civil war against the Marxist guerrillas.


3. Castaneda's chief advisor while he was Foreign Minister was his Soviet-born older half-brother, Ambassador-at-Large Andres Rozental, who is his mother's son by a previous marriage. Rozental personally advised Mexico's immigration negotiators with the Bush administration.

Isn't it remarkable how little the American press tells us about the men who have run Mexico?


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

24 comments:

Anonymous said...

Let's be sure to emphasize that Castenada is Jewish. Just when we have prominent American Jews (Samuelson, Krauthammer, Krugman, Kaus, etc.) opposing this immigration bill, let's drive a wedge between these patriotic Jews and the rest of the restrictionist movement.

cheerful iconoclast said...

What struck me most about the Op-Ed was how arrogant it was. When I read your post, I assumed there was something more to his argument than a list of demands. Then I clicked on the link and -- nope.

It's just a list of things they want. What arrogant presumption!

Anonymous said...

It's also remarkable how the rather bad comparative demographic profile of Hispanics is not discussed at all either. Arguments against amnesty tend to be the law and order type, completely ignoring the fact that even if all those Hispanics came legally they would still not be desirable as future permanent additions to the US.

Anonymous said...

I just started reading your stuff. Very refreshing. Anyway, why do the Mexicans think they're going to get the guest visas? It's hard to believe they're going to get a monopoly on guest visas. Wouldn't the guest visas go to the truly poor and desperate, like Indians or Indonesians?

Anonymous said...

Just because many imperialist, one world order, war mongering, small-country-destabilizing-for the-benefit-of-the-imperial-power neocons happen to be jewish doesn't mean that fighting their influence in our national affairs is anti-semitic.

Let's look at some neocon thoughts on war, etc.

Michael Ledeen's credo
"Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad."

Jonah Goldberg promoting destabilization
"The United States needs to go to war with Iraq because it needs to go to war with someone in the region and Iraq makes the most sense."

Bush II's ideological imperialism
"Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place"

Krauthammer, proudly, on our empire building
"Even Rome is no model for what America is today."

Not to mention the Iraqi civilian body count which should speak for itself.

Just because a few of the neocons are willing to pander by pretending to be appalled at the Kennedy-Bush amnesty, doesn't mean they would actually enforce our immigration laws if given power.

BTW, did you hear Yaweh mentioned once?

-fifi

Anonymous said...

For most Jews being "patriotic" means being pro-Israel. Just look at the Neocons who got us into the Iraq war because they thought it would help Israel.

Anonymous said...

Let's be sure to emphasize that Castenada is Jewish. Just when we have prominent American Jews (Samuelson, Krauthammer, Krugman, Kaus, etc.) opposing this immigration bill, let's drive a wedge between these patriotic Jews and the rest of the restrictionist movement.

Steve was merely quoting a source that happened to mention that.

Meanwhile, a less than patriotic Jewish lobby is cheering the bill on.

Steve Sailer said...

BJDouble:

Right. The most likely thing is that guest worker viasa would go to Asians -- as one guest worker importing agency pointed out they have "a lower runaway rate" while Mexicans would still be encouraged to sneak into the country.

I explained it here http://www.vdare.com/Sailer/060522_bush.htm

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the heads-up Steve. If it wasn't the NYT, I'd think it was a parody piece.

I for one have used it as an opportunity to (again) register my disgust of the bill with both my Senators.

Some of what I wrote:
"... his contempt for the American citizen is outrageous: "Fortunately, most of the reform proposals represent a very good deal for Mexico" and "What’s good for Mexico is probably good, in the long term, for the United States as well" But at least he is being honest regarding who is his constituency: Mexican citizens. I ask you Senator, are you honestly representing the best interests of your constituency? Or are you acting beholden to Latin foreign policy, US big business, and foreign nationals illegally in the US? Let me humbly remind you that is I, the American Citizen, who votes. Those other interests most certainly do not."

I know, I know... how do I know they don't vote.

Anonymous said...

The anti-semites really come out to play here Steve. It's pathetic.

Castenada's background is important, not the least of which is his statist and anti-capitalist thought. Soviet Marxism is not that far off from French Monarchical Mercantilism, both emphasize a hereditary monarch and nobility below monopolizing power and economic opportunity.

And it's worked out horribly.

THAT has nothing do to with Jews. Who though very fractured politically (want five opinions? Ask three Jews) on balance prefer American economic dynamism through relatively open opportunities.

Fifi -- Ledeen's comments are both wise and instructive. "Stability" got us the 1993 WTC bombing (worse luck and the one tower WOULD have toppled onto the other killing 50K), the Beirut and Khobar Towers and Embassy bombings, the Cole, and 9/11 which could not go unanswered.

Weakness invites aggression, even a seven year old knows that.

Creative Destruction is what has made America great. It's Econ 101: get rid of the buggy makers for Car Manufacturers. Replace Walkmen with Ipods. Ignorance is not becoming.

Goldberg was also wise: someone needed to be made an example of, unless you think hard men like the Saudi and Gulf princes who climbed over the bodies of relatives are amenable to chit-chat to dial down AQ support. Much less the Iranian Mullahs who settle their differences by killing each other.

Bush is an idiot, I'll grant you. Though he at least tried something different than the old game of propping up dictators, or wiping out nations (which is where we are headed after we lose a few cities, inevitably).

Krauthammer is also wise: Rome sought direct military rule, to transform as much of the world as possible into Romans. The early Bush policy sought to leverage Saddam's overthrow into cultural changes to a globalized, Westernized, liberalized pseudo-democratic system to bring ME nations into the global system ala China and the other Asian Tigers. Hence the support for the Cedar Revolution, and democracy liberalization in Egypt and other places early on.

It failed, but the payoff if it had worked was large it was worth the gamble.

The Iraqi body count is, if you believe the Leftist NGOs before the war, far less than the dead due to sanctions. Or Saddam's periodic orgies of mass-killing. Most of the stats coming out of the Lancet and other groups is bunk: they admitted they phonied up their data and made bs projections. There are not enough graves to put all the dead that the Lancet studies suggest inside Iraq.

At any rate, Saddam was a mortal man. He couldn't keep Iraq together under his bloody leadership any more than Tito could Yugoslavia. Instead of waiting around and letting others drive the action, we intervened.

Iraq is a net plus for us. Most of the soldiers there who take the casualties think so. Because they see who they are fighting, and what they are learning: the enemy, who he is, how he fights, learning his language, his funding methods, who will turn on him if pressed, the fault lines between tribal authority and trans-tribal Islamists, and so on. All btw institutional stuff learned only in the military, not by State or CIA which remain bureaucracies staffed by cubicle dwellers.

Is that on balance worth the thousands of soldiers we lost? The guys in Iraq think so. Given that they bear the price directly it's hard for me to argue that they're wrong.

Don't let Bush's idiocies on Amnesty and Latinization of American political structure blind anyone to the real threat that AQ presents. Or repeat the mistake of 1930's Pacifists.

Anonymous said...

Let's be sure to emphasize that Castenada is Jewish. Just when we have prominent American Jews (Samuelson, Krauthammer, Krugman, Kaus, etc.) opposing this immigration bill, let's drive a wedge between these patriotic Jews and the rest of the restrictionist movement.

This line of thinking is wrongheaded. Patriotic Jews should not feel alienated because of criticism of Jewish community activism to open the borders. All patriotic Jews should denounce organized Jewry's disrespect of national borders. Exactly as Catholics should denounce the Church's disrespect of national orders. Exactly as mainline Protestants should denounce Episcopalian radicalism. And the same goes for Muslims etc. That is the righteous path.

Anonymous said...

Creative Destruction is what has made America great. It's Econ 101: get rid of the buggy makers for Car Manufacturers. Replace Walkmen with Ipods.

Disgusting mendacity. The Creative Destruction tenet of the neoconservative school doesn't have a damn thing to do with widgets but everything to do with culture and nationhood.

Anonymous said...

anon 1:57 "Don't let Bush's idiocies on Amnesty and Latinization of American political structure blind anyone to the real threat that AQ presents. Or repeat the mistake of 1930's Pacifists."

AQ is an ideology that transcends borders and ethnicities. There are options other than ignoring the threat and blitzkriegs on countries where surprise, surprise, some of the muslims might be AQ.

Getting control of immigration was always the first stage. The fact that Bush failed to address illegal immigration before launching an attack on Afghanistan or Iraq reveals volumes about his motives.

Plenty of Muslims poured into the US in the 90s who have no allegiance to the US, no respect for our laws or our citizens. You wouldn't believe how blatant they were about violating our immigration laws. Why should they respect us or our laws?

The morality of our cause and how we go about making the decision to go to war means everything. It defines us as a people. I would rather have been struck again than to have been committed to violent action on the basis of falsified or manipulated evidence.

I don't like either kind of cynicism, trick the American people into doing something they would refuse to do having all the information or prop up tyrants because they are pro-American.

-fifi

Anonymous said...

want five opinions? Ask three Jews

Jew #1: Open borders are great!
Jew #2: Open borders are great!
Jew #3: Open borders are great! Open borders are great! Open borders are great!

And that's not so far from the truth: ask Larry Auster:

If America had known when admitting Jewish immigrants between 1880 and 1920 that the descendants of those immigrants would oppose America’s right to have any future control over immigration, would America have admitted those immigrants in the first place?

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/005744.html

Meanwhile, a José Alberto Diaz pops up in Sweden to conduct a poll with some interesting results:

There were also fewer respondents who strongly disagreed that ‘Jews have too much influence in Sweden’, down from 67 percent last year to 64 percent in 2007.

http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2007/06/swedish_attitud.php

Anonymous said...

Steve,

Right. The most likely thing is that guest worker viasa would go to Asians -- as one guest worker importing agency pointed out they have "a lower runaway rate" while Mexicans would still be encouraged to sneak into the country.

I wouldn't be surprised if many of those Asians are south or southeast Asian Muslims. Wouldn't that be an ironic legacy for Bush? The man who brought us mass Muslim immigration in the wake of 9/11. Not that Bush would be bothered by that, given his record on Saudi student visas.

anonymous,

THAT has nothing do to with Jews. Who though very fractured politically (want five opinions? Ask three Jews) on balance prefer American economic dynamism through relatively open opportunities.

Perhaps nowadays and perhaps always among the balance of American Jews, but historically and internationally Jews have been well represented in Communist movements.

togo said...

Iraq is a net plus for us

was that last anonymous comment posted from a lunatic asylum?

Anonymous said...

The comments sections is dominated by pro-Israel trolls. How do they know when and where to strike?

Well, they have special pro-Israel trolling software. Seriously, pro-Israel trolling software:
http://giyus.org/

Anonymous said...

The anti-semites really come out to play here Steve. It's pathetic.

Do they? Could the 'anti-semitism' you refer to be analogous to the 'they have a bad comparative demographic profile' argument made against mass Hispanic immigration? Is that line of argument really 'racist' after all then? Go back and take a look at how many Jewish senators voted for 'comprehensive immigration reform' last time. (All of them.) How many will do so this time? From what I've seen, Jewish organizations are overwhelmingly in favor of 'comprehensive immigration reform'; in fact, they often complain that the worst nation-destroying aspects of that effort do not go far enough.

If people who oppose both current immigration patterns and 'reform' insist that the demographic argument isn't 'racist', just logical (rightly so, IMO), then they ought to be able to bring up this overwhelming support of 'reform' by Jews without being labeled as "anti-semites", right?

eh

Anonymous said...

"historically and internationally Jews have been well represented in Communist movements."

Jews have been well represented in capitalism too. From intellectuals like David Ricardo and Milton Friedman, to hands-on capitalists like Goldman, Sutro and many others.

In any case, this Jew-obsession among some paleos is a pointless distraction with this immigration bill pending -- it's like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Focus people. Write your Senators. Send letters to the editor. Ask your friends to do the same.

Anonymous said...

Well, I'm strongly against the ridiculous Bush-Kennedy Immigration bill, though I have mixed feelings on immigration issues in general.

But those Jewish activists on the thread who are claiming that American Jews are generally "divided" on immigration are either extremely dishonest or extremely stupid or both.

As near as I can tell, every single one of the very large number of Jews in the House and the Senate supports the bill, as does every major Jewish organization. This has also been the unbroken pattern in American politics for about 100 years.

American Jews are indeed "divided" on immigration. Similarly, American blacks are "divided" on George W. Bush---2% like him and 98% hate him.

Anonymous said...

So what's the paleo reaction? More attacks on Jews qua Jews, more attempts to characterize Jews (not just the lefty pro-Mexican ones) as outsiders, fifth columnists, etc. What effect do you suppose this will have on American Jews? Will it drive more of them to your cause, or away from it out of fear and into the arms of the open-borders crowd (which, you may have noticed, includes many WASPs, Catholics, etc.)?

Because an earnest fear that somebody like Buchanan, Taki, or Sobran will assume the position of Fuhrer of the United States, backed by antisemitic evangelical Christian brownshirts, and launch into the full-scale persecution of American Jewry has been a realistic concern for Jews since at least the mid-60s. Judging by the consistently pro-immigration stance taken by Jewish organizations, it remains a serious concern today.

I wish it were a joke, but I've seen this sort of Jewish paranoia about conservatives and evangelicals expressed by liberal Jews often enough to know otherwise. Even the pro-Israel stance taken by today's Bible-thumping crowd is greeted with a mixture of indifference, skepticism, and disdain by liberal Jews.

Anonymous said...

I think the Jewish paranoia is from the Jews who like Krauthammer think of themselves as superior to the "white trash" evangelicals. Supposedly intellectual, highly educated Jews think they know all there is to know about middle class whites without bothering to do any research.

There are numerous evangelicals and fundamentalists who are zionists. Anyone the least bit familiar with Christianity also knows there are almost as many different theologies as there are churches. But you'll often find that Jews can't get past the social issues such as abortion or gay marriage and will label Christians as anti-semitic because somehow social conservatism is a symptom of racism.

-fifi

Anonymous said...

Sorry, Tommy, misread your "Jewish paranoia".

I definitely think its time we start examining the biases and stereotypes that cause Jews and other ethnic groups to blindly oppose any reforms they consider beneficial to WASPs. Reducing illegal immigration is good for all of us.

-fifi

Anonymous said...

I definitely think its time we start examining the biases and stereotypes that cause Jews and other ethnic groups to blindly oppose any reforms they consider beneficial to WASPs. Reducing illegal immigration is good for all of us.

I guess it depends on how you you define "good for us." If you're talking about a person's direct descendants, then yes it is. But was it Mr. Sailer said that helping two of your siblings, four of your cousins, and so on, because of the percentage of genes that you share, is the same as helping yourself? Something like that, and true.

So a person who is say, Indian, can think: "I can oppose mass immigration because it's bad for my relatively small number of direct descendants, or I can support mass immigration because it will bring millions of Indians here who share my genes."

In the latter case, supporting mass immigration makes perfect sense. What most Americans - white Americans - don't understand is that, consciously or subconsciously, that is exactly how millions of ethnic minorities in this country approach the subject. Would that the 83% of this country that is white or black approached it in the same manner.