LA Times: "Why do Asian students generally get higher marks than Latinos?"

Hector Becerra of the LA Times visits a high school near downtown LA that has basically no whites or blacks, and asks students and teachers "Why do Asian students generally get higher marks than Latinos?"

Lincoln Heights is mostly a working-class Mexican American area, but it's also a first stop for Asian immigrants, many of them ethnic Chinese who fled Vietnam.

With about 2,500 students, Lincoln High draws from parts of Boyle Heights, El Sereno and Chinatown.

Both the neighborhood and student body are about 15% Asian. And yet Asians make up 50% of students taking Advanced Placement classes. Staffers can't remember the last time a Latino was valedictorian.

"A lot of my friends say the achievement gap is directly attributable to the socioeconomic status of students, and that is not completely accurate," O'Connell said. "It is more than that."

But what is it? O'Connell called a summit in Sacramento that drew 4,000 educators, policymakers and experts to tackle the issue. Some teachers stomped out in frustration and anger.

No Lincoln students stomped out of their discussion. Neither did any teachers in a similar Lincoln meeting. But the observations were frank, and they clearly made some uncomfortable.

To begin with, the eight students agreed on a few generalities: Latino and Asian students came mostly from poor and working-class families.

According to a study of census data, 84% of the Asian and Latino families in the neighborhoods around Lincoln High have median annual household incomes below $50,000. And yet the Science Bowl team is 90% Asian, as is the Academic Decathlon team. ...

Asian parents are more likely to pressure their children to excel academically, the students agreed. ...

The journalist winds up with the usual George W. Bush-style postmodernist explanation -- the soft bigotry of low expectations. If only everybody would just assume the two groups are equal, then they would be.

Try and falsify that proposition!

Of course, the long article doesn't mention the two dread letters, but, on the other hand, there is a lot of evidence that Chinese tend to overachieve and Mexican-Americans tend to underachieve relative to their IQs. Family expectations and pressure are certainly a plausible explanation for over vs. underachievement.

The subtler question that I want to focus on, though, is whether it's better, all else being equal, for Hispanics to be in a school that's 85% Hispanic and 15% Chinese or in a school that is 100% Hispanic?

That's a tough problem for social science to crack since all else is never equal. If the school was really bad, it wouldn't be 15% Asian -- the Chinese parents would get their kids out. So you can assume that Lincoln isn't a really awful, dangerous school like, say, Jefferson, where there were brown vs. black race riots a few years ago. Not a lot of Chinese at Jefferson. (Here's Roger D. McGrath's 2005 American Conservative article on Jefferson High. By the way, I don't think there are many high schools that are perpetually 85% black and 15% Asian -- it sounds unstable -- but I could be wrong.)

I don't have much of a hunch what a good study would find. I could see it going either way. Having 15% Asians around might help the smart, nerdy Hispanics find friends, and might keep better teachers around the school. (Good teachers like to teach -- i.e., to impart learning -- so good teachers gravitate toward schools with good students -- i.e., those more able and willing to be taught.) Being 15% Asian means there are enough advanced students around to justify advanced classes.

On the other hand, having an "academic-dominant minority" of Asians in a high school may well further racialize attitudes toward studying. If your name ends in Z and you are a student at Lincoln, what's the point of setting out in 9th grade to be valedictorian? No Hispanic has been valedictorian at Lincoln H.S. since the mind of man runs not to the contrary. To study hard is to act Asian, to betray La Raza. If Mexican students tried to beat the Chinese at their own game, and failed, well, that would just prove the Chinese are smarter. So it's better for Mexican racial self-esteem to make sure nobody even tries, to proclaim that studying is just something Asians high school students do because they're, uh, no good at tagging and getting pregnant.

That's basically what the most respected institutions in our society -- the LA Times, the State Superintendent of Schools, etc. -- tell them to think, right? That there can't possibly be an innate intelligence gap between the Mexicans and the Chinese, because if there were, it would be the worst thing in the history of the world. It would mean that Hitler was right, that Nazis should rule America. So, to prevent a Nazi takeover, the Hispanic students will do their part by screwing off instead of studying. (It's not hard to persuade teens not to study.)

In contrast, at a 100% Hispanic school like Garfield or Roosevelt (nearby East LA schools that don't include Chinatown -- Jaime Escalante taught AP Calculus at Garfield), well, somebody Hispanic has to be valedictorian each year. So, trying to be valedictorian there, while nerdy and uncool, is likely to be less racially fraught than at an integrated school.

As I said, I don't really know which way it would go. People have similarly argued over this type of question concerning Historically Black Colleges for a long time -- is a black kid with an 1100 SAT score better off at Howard where he'd quite competitive academically or at Georgetown, where he'd feel like Michelle Obama did at Princeton and Harvard Law School?

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

Spanish language radio stations hit hard by drying up of zero down mortgages

The same days as the news of proposed government bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Washington Post runs a revealing article on how the drying up of subprime mortgages has badly hurt the advertising revenue of Spanish language radio stations in the DC area:

But these days the subprime mortgage meltdown has hit many Spanish-language radio stations hard. Real estate companies that targeted the Hispanic community have closed their doors or cut back on advertising and sponsorships. Aragon has lost most of the real estate agents who once advertised with him…

As the housing market took off, Spanish-language radio and real estate companies -- two businesses that are highly locally focused -- became increasingly intertwined. Jose Luis Semidey, a real estate agent who catered to the Hispanic community, ran Radio Latina at 950 AM in Potomac and 810 AM in Annapolis. He's no longer an agent, and he ceased operating the stations in 2006. The realty firm Vilchez & Associates was a principal sponsor of Radio Universal in Manassas at 1460 AM, which no longer exists. It was shut down last year to be reopened this year as La Kaliente, with a new format and a new owner.

Peruvian native Ronald Gordon, whose Arlington-based ZGS Communications operates 11 Telemundo television station affiliates and three radio stations, including VIVA 900 AM in Laurel, said the housing bust has hit Spanish-language radio in the area, much like it has hit the whole Hispanic community.

"I think in terms of the mortgage and real estate industry, we were over-indexed in terms of advertising," Gordon said.

With a pair of headphones over his brushed-back black hair, his lips never far from a suspended microphone, Aragon can be found weekday mornings in his studio, pumping out a steady diet of Spanish-language news, talk, and Mexican and Central American tunes on his show "Buenos Dias Washington."

Aragon began renting his station's signal from JMK Communications of Los Angeles in 2002, changing its format from country to Mexican regional. Those days, the housing boom was just getting underway and an influx of Hispanics that would change the county's demographic mix had begun.

The station began throwing an annual Fiesta Hispana in its parking lot. It promoted Mexican and Central American bands. And when the latest immigration debate heated up, the station served as a place for information about demonstrations and meetings.

At the height of the housing boom, Aragon had as many as 15 real estate agents advertising with him, he said. He got his own Realtor's license three years ago and began advertising his services on his show -- which he still does today. Only one other real estate agent remains as an advertiser.

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

Why doesn't Univision put English subtitles on American movies?

Many European readers have commented over the years on how watching television with subtitles helped them learn English.

Univision is the giant of Spanish-language broadcasting in the U.S. In 2006 it was sold by Republican Italian-American billionaire Jerry Perenchio to a consortium headed by Democratic Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban for $13.7 billion. Perenchio was the chief donor in 1998 to the campaign against Ron Unz's Proposition 227 restricting bilingual education in California schools. The more Mexican immigrants who learn English, the worse it is for business. (Unz won easily, nonetheless).

Not surprisingly, according to Wikipedia, "Univision's major programming is closed-captioned in Spanish, but unlike main competitor Telemundo, it almost never provides English subtitles." This refusal to run subtitles in English costs Univision a slight amount of ratings -- I recall stumbling upon "Repo Man" dubbed into Spanish on Univision and watching about 40 minutes because I know much of the dialogue by heart. But, to Univision, the principle of keeping Spanish-only residents of America Spanish-only comes ahead of short-term profits. If they started putting "Repo man is always intense" in English under Harry Dean Stanton's mug while some guy says it in Spanish, who knows, somebody somewhere might someday learn enough English to watch a different station.

There are numerous campaigns against corporations for anti-social practices, but I've never heard any criticism of Univision for refusing to subtitle English-language movies in English. Criticizing Perenchio and/or Saban for holding back the spread of English in the interests of higher profits would be racist, so it's just not done.

Speaking of Univision's lack of subtitles and learning another language, Bert Limbec explains "I Bet I Can Speak Spanish:"

Hello, amigos! El soy quando agunto! Ella balloona balunga espanyo!

Did that sound Spanish to you? I bet that means something. And guess what? I've never had one lesson. It's just that I have a natural gift for Spanish. I was able to pick it up all by myself, "outside the system," if you will.

When I was a kid, I thought a foreign language would take a long time to learn. That's what society tells you, probably because of the anti-foreign attitude in America. They're trying to discourage people from going foreign, I guess...

I remember how, in high school, Spanish was taught by Mr. Gomez, and you could spend years learning every single word. Forget that! I'm sure I've got the gist of it. I don't need any classes or books, because I can speak Spanish without all that. I mean, ¡Balunga el baguayo con blinko! Don't tell me that didn't sound Spanish! And it sure didn't take three years of high school to learn. Forget that, I've got a life! ...

But another important link in the chain of me speaking Spanish is that I've been watching tons of Univision lately, and I completely understand what's going on. Just yesterday, there was this soap opera on, called Ellabungo Juanita or something Spanish like that, and I was completely following it! This girl and this guy were in bed together, and this guy came in and was mad. Just from listening, I could tell that the girl in the bed was cheating on the guy who just walked in. There were no subtitles, I just figured it out! You folks reading this might have needed Spanish lessons to understand what was going on, but I'm on the fast track, Charlie!

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

Competitive States in 2008 Electoral College

When McCain and Obama were Hispandering recently, Audacious Epigone got sick of hearing from the innumerate media about how important immigrant ethnic groups are in key swing states in the Presidential election. So, he sat down and crunched the numbers from the Obama v. McCain polls summarized at the CNN election center website. It turns out that 2008 is shaping up just like 2004 and 2000: the battleground states are white and black, while Hispanics and Asians are concentrated in uncompetitive states like California and Texas.

	White	Hispanic	Black	Asian	Other
Competitive	73.7	8.8	13.2	2.8	1.5
Uncompetitive	59.6	20.2	12.6	5.9	1.7

Keep in mind that these percentages are for residents, not voters. Hispanic and Asian residents vote at much lower rates than white and black residents. The actual percentages of voters by ethnicity will be significantly skewed more toward whites and blacks. So, the Electoral College results will be determined overwhelmingly by whites and blacks.

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

Guess who's leading among Hispanic voters?

Over on the VDARE.com blog, I have a post up on the new Gallup poll results of whom Latino voters favor in November.

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

"Is Brown the New Black?"

My full length article comparing Hispanics to blacks is now up at American Conservative:

Is Brown the New Black:
Assimilating Hispanics into the Politics of Victimhood

One reason the black-Hispanic relationship is poorly understood is that class intersects with ethnicity in complex ways. At the bottom of society, among prison and street gangs, race rules. In the Los Angeles County jail, which is 60 percent Hispanic and 30 percent black, the two groups fought murderous battles in 2006. Last October, federal prosecutors accused the Florencia 13 street gang of trying to ethnically cleanse blacks from its unincorporated neighborhood in LA County. (The political impact of this violence shouldn’t be exaggerated, though. The respectable folk who do most of the voting don’t approve of gangbangers feuding.)

In poorer neighborhoods, black residents feel uneasy about men speaking Spanish around them. Not being able to understand what is being said robs them of their street smarts. Are the two men next to you at the bus stop talking in Spanish about soccer or are they plotting to mug you? Who knows?

At the top of the power structure, in the House of Representatives and state legislatures, blacks and Latinos get along quite well, united by party (92 percent of elected Hispanics are Democrats) and a mutual desire to keep the affirmative action gravy train chugging along. Ward Connerly, a black opponent of ethnic quotas, has noted that when he was a regent of the University of California, the heaviest pressure on the regents to cheat on the anti-preference language written into the state constitution by Prop. 209 came not from the Black Caucus in the legislature but from the larger Latino Caucus. They threatened to cut UC’s budget unless more Hispanic applicants were admitted.

Black politicians tend to view Hispanics today much as Irish politicos once saw their fellow Catholic Poles: silent partners in their coalition who should be grateful for their natural leaders’ experience and charm. Not surprisingly, Hispanics don’t agree. In some of the formerly all-black slum municipalities just south of Los Angeles, where Hispanics now make up the great majority of residents but only half of voters, ethnic politics has gotten nasty. But overall, Hispanic politicians know that time is on their side, so they can be patient about the arrogance of black colleagues.

In the middle levels of society, blacks and Latinos do compete. Relations aren’t warm, but African-American men have tended to cede blue-collar jobs to immigrants without putting up massive resistance. Moreover, the swelling numbers and various dysfunctions of illegal immigrants generate numerous jobs for civil servants (who are typically required to be citizens). Therefore, many blacks are paid by taxpayers to teach, police, guard, administer, and otherwise deal with illegal aliens. It doesn’t make for trans-ethnic amity, but it’s a living. [More]

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

Is Brown the New Black?

Here's an excerpt from my new article in The American Conservative on relations between blacks and Hispanics:

The slugfest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, in which only the most painstaking analyst can discern any disagreement over policy, highlights the ancient yet growing importance of ethnic identity in politics.

The race didn't start out that way. The 2007 polls showed that blacks favored Senator Clinton, the wife of "America's first black President," over Senator Obama, the preppie from paradise. Yet, when the crunch came, four-fifths of black Democratic primary voters rallied to the yuppie technocrat's banner.

Shaken by the defection of an ethnicity Hillary had assumed was hereditarily hers, the Clinton campaign then pointed to the Latino vote as their "firewall." And in the important California primary, Hispanics did vote 67 percent to 32 percent for the former First Lady. Elsewhere, however, the vaunted Hispanic bloc once again didn't quite live up to the hype. Indeed, Hillary responded to her post-Super Tuesday woes by firing her Hispanic campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, and replacing her with Maggie Williams, who is black. As I write, Mrs. Clinton is left hoping that Latinos will bail her out in the upcoming Texas primary.

The multiracialization of American politics has barely begun. When it comes to identity politics, numbers count. And a new population projection from the Pew Research Center estimates that Hispanics will grow from 42 million in 2005 to a jaw-dropping 128 million in 2050. Meanwhile, African-Americans will increase from 38 million to 57 million (while Caucasians will barely creep over the 200 million mark, presumably on the strength of Middle Eastern immigration).

The relationship between blacks and Latinos will become increasingly central to American life. It's a murky phenomenon, poorly understood by the white-dominated press. …

Americans just don't pay much attention to Latinos, period. In American public discourse, Hispanics, especially Mexican-Americans (who now number about 30 million), remain what interstellar "dark matter" is to astrophysicists -- a quantitatively significant, yet mysteriously featureless aspect of the universe.

This is not for a lack of motivation on the part of America's corporate and political elites. Consultants have been trumpeting the growing numbers of Hispanics for a generation. Marketers have been lusting for the emergence of more Mexican-American celebrities to plug their products at least since Nancy Lopez's record-setting 1978 LPGA rookie season made her the most popular lady golfer ever among advertisers.

Although the media constantly try to drum up interest in Hispanics by extolling them as "swing voters" living in "vibrant neighborhoods" and so forth and so on, the tedious reality is that the single word that best sums up Latino America is inertia. Things just sort of keep on keeping on in the general direction that they were already moving.

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

Unfortunate Sons

USA Today reports:

The U.S. population will soar to 438 million by 2050 and the Hispanic population will triple, according to projections released Monday by the Pew Research Center. The latest projections by the non-partisan research group are higher than government estimates to date and paint a portrait of an America dramatically different from today's.

The projected growth in the U.S. population — 303 million today — will be driven primarily by immigration among all groups except the elderly.

"We're assuming that the rate of immigration will stay roughly constant," says Jeffrey Passel, co-author of the report.

Even if immigration is limited, Hispanics' share of the population will increase because they have higher birth rates than the overall population. That's largely because Hispanic immigrants are younger than the nation's aging baby boom population. By 2030, all 79 million boomers will be at least 65 and the elderly will grow faster than any other age group.

The projections show that by 2050:

•Nearly one in five Americans will have been born outside the USA vs. one in eight in 2005. Sometime between 2020 and 2025, the percentage of foreign-born will surpass the historic peak reached a century ago during the last big immigration wave. New immigrants and their children and grandchildren born in the USA will account for 82% of the population increase from 2005 to 2050.

•Whites who are not Hispanic, now two-thirds of the population, will become a minority when their share drops to 47%. They made up 85% of the population in 1960.

•Hispanics, already the largest minority group, will more than double their share of the population to 29%.

•Blacks will remain 13% of the population. Asians will go to 9% from 5%.

Nobody ever, never, ever thinks about this, but how is affirmative action going to work when the beneficiaries outnumber the benefactors? It's exactly like the social security problems down the road as the retiree to worker ratio rises, but we've all seen millions of words about that and practically nothing about the analogous affirmative action problem.

As John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater sang in "Fortunate Son:"

And when you ask them, how much should we give?
Ooh, they only answer more! more! more!

P.S. Well, I've thought about it -- here's one of my articles crunching the numbers. And here's another that explains why black leaders almost never criticize affirmative action privileges for brand new immigrants who just got off the plane.

The crazy thing is that everybody just wants to argue -- pro or con -- over affirmative action for blacks. Critics of quotas want to attack preferences exactly where the argument in favor of them is strongest -- that America owes something to the descendants of slaves. In contrast, nobody would claim with a straight face that we owe anything to Argentineans who have just got off the jumbo jet from Buenos Aires, and yet they benefit from quotas too! But the future will be dominated numerically by quota-eligible Hispanics, not by quota-eligible blacks.

It's also worth pondering what proportion of those 438 million people in 2050 will have been born to unmarried women. Just from 2005 to 2006, the number of babies born to married white women fell 0.4% while the number of babies born to unmarried Latinas grew 9.6%! The Hispanic illegitimacy rate is now up to 50%. What will it be in 2050? What does this portend for law-abidingness, education, social capital, technological innovation and a host of other good things that are correlated with intact families?

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

The Wind from the South

The Washington Post reports on the latest Latin American trend from El Alto, a poor suburb of 650,000 at 13,300 feet, well above Bolivia's capital, the whimsically named La Paz.

But first, I can't resist digressing on La Paz's social topography. In contrast to many cities, such as Los Angeles, where the rich live in the hills above the plains, the rich in La Paz live at the bottom of a deep canyon, with the wealthiest neighborhoods down at 10,200 feet. In Bolivia's capital, social climbers try to claw their way to the bottom. WikiTravel writes:

"La Paz' geography (in particular, altitude) reflects society: the lower you go, the more affluent. While many middle-class paceños live in high-rise condos near the center, the really rich houses are located in the lower neighborhoods southwest of the Prado. The reason for this division is that the lower you go in the city, the more oxygen there is in the air and the milder the weather is. And looking up from the center, the surrounding hills are plastered with makeshift brick houses of those struggling in the hope of one day reaching the bottom."

The fundamental reason for this is that white women miscarry frequently at very high altitudes -- a problem that is seen in a few places in Colorado as well, such as Leadville. Indian women are more likely to carry to term the higher about 10,000 feet you go.

This underlies the recent threat of the lowlying Bolivian lands north of Paraguay to secede. Their inhabitants tend to be white and mestizo, while the Altiplano is Indian and mestizo. The low country has the main natural resource, natural gas, but the Indians of the high plains have recently finally seized control of the government after 400+ years, and are trying to seize the natural gas wealth.

Anyway, lots of vibrant stuff is happening in Bolivia, which we ought to keep an eye on because these "principles, cultural values, norms and procedures" are slowly migrating here:

EL ALTO, Bolivia -- Tattered dummies look down on this city from street poles in barren squares, like scarecrows for anyone with bad intentions.

The dummies are meant to warn would-be thieves that if they try to rob anyone here, they could be hanged. Or lashed to a pulp. Or set on fire. Or buried alive.

"If there are cases in which people are caught in the act, why can't we take justice into our own hands?" asked El¿as Gomes, a community leader in an El Alto neighborhood where two accused thieves were burned alive by an angry crowd of residents in November. "We want the people of the neighborhood to be the ones to judge the crimes. Beyond the question of whether lynchings are good or bad, we want to be the ones to judge."

Determining who gets to judge criminals is a matter of national debate in Bolivia, where a draft constitution that has already won preliminary approval would make punishments doled out by indigenous leaders and tribal communities as legitimate as sentences handed down by the country's courts.

The proposal has invigorated communities such as this, where many residents maintain strong links to Aymara and Quechua indigenous traditions and few trust what they call the "ordinary justice" system of police, judges and courtrooms. ...

Valentin Ticona Colque, a vice minister in charge of communal justice in President Evo Morales's government, said such justice is less likely to be corrupt because it is administered by active members of the communities themselves, not by state-supported judges.

"When the community is involved and vigilant, it's difficult to corrupt the system -- almost impossible, in fact," he said.

According to one article of the draft constitution, decisions made under the communal justice system would be immune from challenge by any outside judicial system. The constitution does not spell out how justice should be dispensed but states that indigenous and campesino, or peasant, authorities "will apply their own principles, cultural values, norms and procedures."

Makes you want to book that lama trekking vacation through the Bolivian highlands, doesn't it?

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

In 2006, the Long Predicted Tidal Wave of Angry Hispanic Voters Failed to Materialize Once Again

After the giant illegal alien marches in the spring of 2006, the mainstream media confidently predicted that Hispanics would turn out in vast numbers at the polls last November. Well, the Census Bureau's gold-standard estimate of the Hispanic share of the vote in the last election (based on its survey of 153,000 respondents) is now out, and the Latino fraction fell from 6.0% in 2004 to 5.8% in 2006.

As Peter Brimelow has been pointing out since 1997, simple arithmetic shows that the growth in Latino voters is bad for the GOP. (David Frum echoed Brimelow's point recently, and was called a Ku Klux Klanner for his troubles.)

As I've been pointing out since 2001, however, the widespread belief among Establishment Republicans like Karl Rove that the growth in the Latino vote is so rapid that they already constitute a decisive bloc whose views on illegal immigration can't be disobeyed is innumerate. There's still time when it remains politically feasible to do something about immigration.

For example, GOP pundit Michael Barone wrote that the Hispanic vote would reach 8 or 9 percent in the 2004 election. I publicly offered to bet him $1,000 that the Census survey of 50,000 households right after the voting would find a figure closer to 6.1%. The actual result was 6.0%, but Barone didn't take me up on my offer (which is too bad because I could use the money.)

The Hispanic share typically falls slightly from the more exciting Presidential election to the more ho-hum mid-term elections, because Hispanics aren't as dutiful voters. For instance, it dropped from 5.4% in 2000 to 5.3% in 2002. So, versus the last midterm election, the Hispanic share was up half a percentage point from 2002 to 2006. This continues the long-term trend of the Hispanic share growing 0.012 to 0.016 percentage points per year.

The Pew Hispanic Center points out that the Latino Demographic Tsunami isn't generating a similar Electoral Tsunami, as the graph shows. The Pew folks, who crunched the numbers off a Census Bureau data file, report:

" ... the growth of the Latino vote continued to lag well behind the growth of the Latino population. This widening gap is driven by two key demographic trends: a high percentage of the new Hispanics in the population are either too young to vote or ineligible because they are not citizens.

As a result, while Latinos represented nearly half the total population growth in the U.S. between 2002 and 2006, the Latino share among all new eligible voters was just 20%. By comparison, whites accounted for 24% of the population growth and 47% of all eligible new voters.

About 5.6 million Hispanics voted in the 2006 mid-term election, which historically draws far fewer voters than the quadrennial race for president. Latinos accounted for 5.8% of all votes cast, up from 5.3% in 2002. That increase was largely a function of demographic growth.

Latinos historically lag behind whites and blacks in registration (percent among all eligible voters) and voting (percent of registered voters who actually cast ballots). In 2006, the pro-immigration rallies held in many cities raised expectations that political participation among Latinos would also increase.

Census data shows a marginal increase in registration and participation rates among Latinos between 2002 and 2006. Whites, however, also experienced a slight gain, so Latinos did not close the considerable gap. About 54% of Latino eligible voters registered in 2006, up from 53% in 2002. About 60% of these registered voters said they actually voted in 2006, up from 58% in 2002.

By contrast, 71% of white eligible voters registered in 2006, two percentage points higher than in 2002. About 72% of these registered voters said they voted in last year's mid-term elections, one percentage point higher than in 2002. ...

Hispanics accounted for 5.8% of the votes cast in 2006, up from 5.3% vote in 2002. In absolute numbers, an additional 800,000 Hispanics cast ballots in the 2006 election compared with the 2002 election.

Whites accounted for 81% of the votes in 2006, unchanged from 2002. In absolute numbers, an additional 5.6 million whites cast ballots in the 2006 election compared with the 2002 election. Blacks accounted for 10% of the votes in 2006, down from about 11% in 2002. The black vote increased by 400,000 in 2006.

The 5.6 million votes cast by Hispanics in 2006 represented 13% of the total Hispanic population. The 9.9 million votes cast by black represented 27% of the black population and the 78 million votes cast by whites represented 39% of the white population. [More]

So, non-Hispanic white residents of America voted in 2006 at three times the rate of Hispanic residents.

Overall, whites cast almost 12 ballots for every ballot cast by a Hispanic.

If Washington insiders weren't so clueless about these numbers, they never would have tried to inflict their amnesty bill on us. But, because you aren't supposed to talk about things like this (remember when my first voting analysis article in VDARE in 2000 got me banned for life from Free Republic? Hey, is that website still in business? You never hear about it anymore ...), they were astonished when the citizenry overwhelmingly rose up and rejected the Kennedy-Bush-McCain bill.

Via Audacious Epigone.

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

"You mean there's a NEW Mexico?" - C. Montgomery Burns

Michael Barone and friends like to argue that Hispanics are the new Italians, that Latinos will follow the path into the middle class blazed by Italians Real Soon Now. This might be a more persuasive argument if there hadn't been sizable Hispanic populations in America for 160 years now. While heavily Italian New Jersey continues to ascend into the highest ranks of American states on numerous measures, New Mexico, which has been the most Hispanic state in the country for the last 95 years, remains mired down with Mississippi and Louisiana, struggling to stay out of 50th place on many dimensions.

In an early VDARE.com column, I wrote in 2000:

Near Monument Valley, site of so many John Wayne westerns, the borders of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado come together at Four Corners. These adjoining states all share similar mountains and deserts. Yet the southern tier of Arizona and New Mexico displays practically Latin American levels of income inequality, while the northern tier of Utah and Colorado are almost Scandinavian in their economic egalitarianism.

The seldom-remarked links between economic equality (Liberals Like) and ethnic homogeneity (Liberals No Like) are made clear by the data displayed in a recent study by two left-of-center think tanks, the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. For all 50 states, they divided the average household income of the top 20% of the population to that of the bottom 20%. Utah is the most equal state in the union, with Colorado fifth. In contrast, Arizona and New Mexico are 48th and 49th.

Distance from Mexico appears to be the determining factor. According to Census Bureau projections for the year 2000, Hispanics make up about 29% of the combined population of the two states adjoining Mexico, versus only 12% of the two northern states. (Total minorities make up about 42% of Arizona and New Mexico's population, versus only 19% of Utah and Colorado's.) ...

but to just consider the income of the lowest 20%. Personally, it's fine with me if the rich get richer, but it's the poor getting poorer part I'm not crazy about.

In the Four Corners states, the impact of ethnic diversity is obvious. The poorest poor in the country are in New Mexico, where the average income of the bottom fifth is only $8,700. The quite expensive state of Arizona, spiritual home of the $150 golf greens fee, has the eighth poorest poor people in America at $10,800. (But at least they make more than the bottom rung in immensely costly New York). In contrast, the wealthiest bottom fifth is in Colorado where they average $18,500 per year. Probably even more impressive, however, is the $18,200 average in Utah, since its cost of living is quite low.

Now, it's important to note that the Hispanics of New Mexico are by no means all recent immigrants: the conquistadors founded Santa Fe in 1609. Their descendants have been part of the U.S. since 1848. And these Hispanics have exerted more political power and for longer than Hispanics in any other state. For example, one of the two statues representing New Mexico in the Capitol Rotunda is of a Hispanic grandee who served as U.S. Senator from New Mexico for much of the first half of the 20th century.

Nonetheless, the Hispanics of New Mexico have yet to assimilate well. An Albuquerque rocket scientist asks, "Does this tell us anything about how likely Hispanics in general are to catch up academically and economically with people of North European descent? Yes, indeed. It never has to happen at all, and even if it does, it might take more than 150 years." [More]

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