Immigration to Britain

In recent years, a strong effort has been made to rewrite the history of Britain to make the current massive immigration appear to be as traditionally British as crumpets. For example, Wikipedia's article on "Immigration to the United Kingdom" begins:

The United Kingdom has had a long history of immigration, from the Beaker people of the 3rd millennium BC, to the waves of invasions by the Roman Empire, the Anglo-Saxons and Normans, to the settlement of people arriving from the Colonies in the 19th and 20th centuries and finally to modern immigration.

The history of immigration to the United Kingdom is, essentially, the history of the development of the United Kingdom itself, making it what it is today. It is fair to say that the ancestors of most people living in the United Kingdom today were immigrants at one time or another throughout history.

In reality, it now appears that until the last 50 years, there was remarkably little immigration into Britain since the immediate post-Ice Age period:

British Have Changed Little Since Ice Age, Gene Study Says
James Owen for National Geographic News

July 19, 2005 Despite invasions by Saxons, Romans, Vikings, Normans, and others, the genetic makeup of today's white Britons is much the same as it was 12,000 ago, a new book claims.

In The Tribes of Britain, archaeologist David Miles says around 80 percent of the genetic characteristics of most white Britons have been passed down from a few thousand Ice Age hunters.

Miles, research fellow at the Institute of Archaeology in Oxford, England, says recent genetic and archaeological evidence puts a new perspective on the history of the British people.

"There's been a lot of arguing over the last ten years, but it's now more or less agreed that about 80 percent of Britons' genes come from hunter-gatherers who came in immediately after the Ice Age," Miles said.

These nomadic tribespeople followed herds of reindeer and wild horses northward to Britain as the climate warmed. "Numbers were probably quite small—just a few thousand people," Miles added. These earliest settlers were later cut off as rising sea levels isolated Britain from mainland Europe.

New evidence for the genetic ancestry of modern Britons comes from analysis of blood groups, oxygen traces in teeth, and DNA samples taken from skeletal remains.

Ice Age hunter-gathers also colonized the rest of northwest Europe, spreading through what are now the Netherlands, Germany, and France. But Miles said differences between populations can be detected in random genetic mutations, which occurred over time.

The most visible British genetic marker is red hair, he added. The writer Tacitus noted the Romans' surprise at how common it was when they arrived 2,000 years ago.

"It's something that foreign observers have often commented on," Miles said. "Recent studies have shown that there is more red hair in Scotland and Wales than anywhere else in the world. It's a mutation that probably occurred between 8,000 and 10,000 years ago."

Britain's population in the late Stone Age may have much been larger than historians once supposed. For instance, scientists have calculated that it would have taken around 30 million hours to create Stonehenge.

"By the time Stonehenge was built you'd had about a thousand years of farming," Miles said. "The population's expanding, and people are getting together to form big labor forces to put up these big public buildings."

Population estimates based on the size and density of settlements put Britain's population at about 3.5 million by the time Romans invaded in A.D. 43.

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

"The Left's War on Britishness"

"The Left's War on Britishness" by Anthony Browne in the Telegraph.

One of the stranger scenes in Bridget Jones Diary is the entry for May 8th, 1995, when Bridget, whose heart is usually in the right place, tries to get her trendy friends to help her put together a party to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Victory-Europe day. But when she wants to decorate with Union Jacks, her friends think she's gone fascist, and the party never comes off.

Browne writes:

No, the real answer to why Britain spawned people fuelled with maniacal hate for their country is that Britain hates itself. In hating Britain, these British suicide bombers were as British as a police warning for flying the union flag.

Britain’s self-loathing is deep, pervasive and lethally dangerous. We get bombed, and we say it’s all our own fault. Schools refuse to teach history that risks making pupils proud, and use it instead as a means of instilling liberal guilt. The government and the BBC gush over ‘the other’, but recoil at the merest hint of British culture. The only thing we are licensed to be proud of is London’s internationalism — in other words, that there is little British left about it...

But self-loathing in a nation, like self-loathing in an individual, is alienating. Someone who despises himself inspires greater contempt than affection, and a country that hates itself cannot expect its newcomers to want to belong.

Only in the last few years has it dawned on the government how dangerous the Left’s war on Britishness really is. Labour ministers now queue up to declare that we need a new sense of British identity. But the ability to learn a few sentences in English and a knowledge of how to claim benefits do not create a national allegiance.

What is needed is something to make the people who live in these islands feel good about being British, but the war on Britishness has imposed a nationwide amnesia about our national story.

The historian Simon Schama wrote that ‘to collude in the minimisation of British history on the grounds of its imagined irrelevance to our rebranded national future, or from a suspicion that it does no more than recycle patriotic pieties unsuited to a global marketplace, would be an act of appallingly self-inflicted collective memory loss’. And as the American philosopher George Santayana warned, ‘A country without a memory is a country of madmen.’

Britain is one of the few countries where it is a source of pride to despise your country. We are all repeatedly taught the things to be ashamed of about Britain, but what about the things to be proud of?

The truth is that Britain’s self-loathing is as unique as it is unwarranted. Britain really is great. These small rainswept isles off the western end of the vast Eurasian landmass have contributed far more to the well-being of the rest of humanity than any other country, bar none.

Well, duh.

If I may interject ...

This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England. . .

Thank you. I just wanted to get that off my chest. Browne continues:

Sometimes it takes a foreigner to open your eyes. A Norwegian diplomat told me long ago that he was taught at school, as British kids aren’t, that Britain gave the world industrialisation, democracy and football — its economic system, its political system and its fun.

That is just the start of it...

The problem for Britain is not that it has too little to be proud of, but too much.

Indeed.

That's a general problem today ... over the last 500 years, the levels of human accomplishment have been so radically uneven -- Caucasians over all others, Europeans over non-European Caucasians, Western Europeans over Eastern Europeans, and, more arguably, Brits over Continental Western Europeans -- that it seems pointless for living people to take pride in their ancestors' accomplishments because it would be like a man taking pride in men inventing 99% of the stuff worth inventing.

It makes sense these days to celebrate the fact that a woman invented Wite-Out (the mother of Michael Nesmith of the Monkees, to be precise) but it doesn't make much sense to celebrate that a man invented Post-It notes, because men invented, more or less, everything. Likewise, it seems not just in bad taste, but pointless, to celebrate Western Europeans for all they've accomplished because they've accomplished so much.

The downside, though, is that when you downplay traditions of greatness, and when you license envy and tell the most creative to be ashamed of their forebears for making everybody else in the world feel small, you tend to get less greatness in return. Culturally, we seem to be lacking in the confidence that produces greatness.

The tragic irony is that no matter how many multiculti festivals the British government pays for and how much it denigrates its own past, the Pakistanis know that they come from an inferior culture, and it enrages them. On the other hand, these assaults on the pride of the natives has a corrosive effect on their will to create, and they sink into drunken slothfulness.

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

"Comprehensive Review"

Before 1996's Proposition 209 outlawed the use of racial quotas in U. of California admissions decisions, picking applicants was simple: they just ranked the member's of each official ethnic group on test scores and GPA adjusted for class difficulty and selected from the top down until they filled each group's quota.

Now that it's unconstitutional to use racial preferences, the bureaucrats have instituted "comprehensive review" of applicants in order to reinstitute quotas surreptitiously by making the application process so complicated that nobody can figure out how they made their decisions. (The Latino Caucus in the state legislature demanded they get more Latinos into the UC schools than a colorblind system would produce.) One element of obfuscation is that each applicant must now submit an essay about how they have "overcome adversity." The purpose is for minorities to write about how they've been discriminated against so that the admissions committees can figure out if applicant named "John Jones" is black or white. Of course, it just encourages adolescents to dwell on their victimization, which adolescents love to do anyway.

This leaves the white and Asian kids with a problem: what adversity to write about? Well, if you've watched the Olympics on TV, you can probably guess: according to a UCLA professor, one out of three essays overall (and thus probably close to half of the white and Asian kids' essays) are about the death of a grandparent!

"Everybody called my grandfather an angry old coot, and his neighbors got a restraining order against him after he kept throwing poisoned steaks to their barking dogs that woke him from his afternoon nap, and I hadn't actually seen him since I was eleven, but when he died at 86 on that golf course in Florida, the shock was so great that that's why I got that mediocre 2.75 GPA my second semester sophomore year, and I think if I hadn't been so traumatized I would have gotten better than that 540 on my European History SAT Subject Test."

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

Richard Lynn objects to my Jodie Foster example

The co-author of IQ and the Wealth of Nations writes:

I think you have overestimated the effect of "regression toward the mean." The effects are quite small, as shown empirically in the Terman study of genius in which the IQs of the children were only about 5 points lower than those of the parents(133 vs 138, respectively). Theoretically, IQ is believed to be mostly determined by additive genes. If it were entirely determined by additive genes the average IQ of the children would be the same as that of the average of the parents. Thus Jodie Foster with her IQ of say 100 mated with a sperm donor with an IQ of 160 should have children with an average IQ of 130. Jodie Foster with her IQ of say 100 mated with Mr Average with an IQ of 100 should have children with an average IQ of 100. Regression occurs through non additive genes and environmental effects.

But wasn't the Terman study restricted to students who scored 130 and higher? William Shockley and another Nobel Prize winner famously missed the cut by a couple of points. Or perhaps I'm misinterpreting the point? Anyway, think of it this way, if your brother is 7 feet tall, how tall do you expect to be? Not 7 feet.

UPDATE: Greg Cochran fills in some details on the Terman study of highly intelligent children that began back before WWII. The average IQ of children in the study (the "Termites") was 151. The average IQ of their eventual spouses was 126. Thus, the average of the married couples was 138. The average IQ of their children was 133. This would suggest, crudely, a narrow sense heritability (parent to child) of 33/38 or 0.86, which would be fairly high even for a broad sense heritability (between identical twins). Other estimates of narrow sense heritability I've seen have been between 0.34 and 0.5, which would bring about more regression toward the mean.

Anybody have other studies on narrow-sense heritability?

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

Tom Wolfe: Diversity = Dispersity on Campus

From Wolfe's novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, in which Charlotte's friend Laurie describes diversity at North Carolina State:

Mr. Thom said there was certainly a lot written about multiculturalism and diversity in colleges these days. How did they manifest themselves in everyday life at Dupont?

"I don't know," said Charlotte. I just hear about them in speeches and things."

Laurie piped up again. "At State, everybody calls diversity dispersity. What happens is, everybody has their own clubs, their own signs, their own sections where they all sit in the dining hall -- all the African Americans are over there? ... and all the Asians sit over't these other tables? -- except for the Koreans? -- because they don't get along with the Japanese, so they sit way over there? Everybody's dispersed into their own little groups -- and everybody's told to distrust everybody else? Everybody's told that everybody else is trying to screw them over -- oops!" Laurie pulled a face and put her fingertip over her lips -- "I'm sorry!" She rolled eyes and smiled. "Anyway, the idea is, every other group is like prejudiced against your group, and no matter what they say, they're only out to take advantage of you, and you should have nothing to do with them -- unless you're white, in which case all the others are not prejudiced against you, they're like totally right, because you really are racist and everything, even if you don't know it? Everybody ends up dispersed into their own like turtle shells, suspicious of everybody else and being careful not to fraternize with them."

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

Bye-Bye Bandar

After 22 years as the Saudi ambassador to America, Prince Bandar is headed home. The Prince was bad for the U.S., using his extraordinary amiability and infinite supply of ready cash to exploit moral weaknesses in Washington higher-ups. That's why I'd been calling for him to be sent home for several years. (I would, however, love to read his memoirs someday. I suspect, though, that many important people in our nation's capital would not look forward to the publication of Bandar's autobiography.)

On the other hand, he was a tremendously talented ambassador, and his country was terribly lucky to have him. On the human level, his story is admirable: he is the son of a slave-girl (he's about as black-looking as Colin Powell).

A former State Dept. official emails:

The Saudis have outlawed slavery [although not until 1962, during the American civil rights era], but it still exists not only for black Africans, but also for Filipino housekeepers who are effectively abducted for long periods after arriving in Saudi with a work permit. As Christians, the Filipinos have no civil rights whatsoever.

He reminisces about his contacts with Bandar:

One trip in the mid-1970s, I was told I would do well to meet a young Prince Bandar bin Sultan, son of the Defense Minister and the fighter pilot/squadron leader of the Saudi Air Force’s crack attack wing. We met for several hours in his office and he told me that the Saudi military considered Iraq the biggest military threat in that bad neighborhood [the US Embassy was under the impression that the Shah of Iran was more dangerous than Saddam Hussein, so this was a surprise to me].

The very dark and athletic Bandar invited me to dinner at his home that evening, a rare event for a foreign diplomat who usually only saw Saudi royal family types from afar. That evening, over liquorless orange juice, Bandar and I spent hours discussing Saudi domestic policy and US-Saudi diplomatic relations. He told me the fascinating story of how he rose from the lowly lineage of a Sudanese slave mother and Minister of Defense father Prince Sultan to a position of some eminence----his shiftless full-blooded royal brothers were all playboys and had sinecure government positions. He explained that since Bandar had been shunned by his half-brothers as a child, he had hung around the alpha-male type adults in the household and overheard their political discussions until he had figured out a lot of the Saudi backstairs political scene through his native street smarts and curious mind.

Sent to military school, he was the only senior prince who flew advanced jet fighters ‘"The plane does not know I am a prince.”

Although in a moment of exuberance that night Bandar told me that he wanted to be king, he actually did better. His longtime service as Saudi Ambassador in DC and his affable intelligence gave him access to several presidents of the USA [Reagan, the two Bushes & Clinton] which he used to become actual friends with all of them except Reagan. As the son of a slave mother, Bandar could never come into the line of succession to become king, but his marriage to the daughter of former King Faisal assured him of a senior position in the Royal Family.

Perhaps an anecdote related to me by XXX, sheds light on just how important Bandar became over the twenty-plus years he was Saudi Ambassador in DC. The story is that in 1990, after Saddam invaded Kuwait in the summer, there was a major problem in convincing the Saudis that the US military should be allowed to be positioned in the Islamic Holy Land [subsequent events in the mid-90s bore out the controversial implications of stationing ’infidels’ in Saudi].

Prez George HW Bush asked Bandar, who was totally committed to sending a US force to Saudi, how to get King Fahd, buffeted by senior royal princes distrustful of the US and also skeptical that the US would even honor Carter and Reagan’s promises to defend Saudi against an attack from anywhere, to agree to invite the Americans. Bandar asked GHWB to send Defense Secretary Dick Cheney [who brought along Colin Powell] with him to Riyadh for a meeting with the King. Bandar asked Cheney to bring along reconnaissance photos of jets parked on a military airfield---it didn’t matter from where.

Bandar told Cheney and Powell that they should let him do the talking. XXX told me that Bandar had Cheney show the King the photos and that Bandar said that the airfield was in North Yemen and that the jets were Iraqi planes sent by Saddam to encircle Saudi Arabia.

Bear in mind that the Saudis had seized a huge chunk of Yemen early in the 20th century and that about one Saudi out of four was of Yemeni heritage. North Yemen had defeated Egypt in a war in the ‘60s and the Yemenis were renowned as the fiercest fighters in the Arab world. Yemen also had made no secret that it wanted the territory back that the Saudis had ripped off fifty-some years before.

When Fahd was shown the photo and told that the Iraqi planes were in Yemen, his immediate reaction was to invite the American military into Saudi Arabia.

Of course, Saddam was quickly defeated by Schwartzkopf’s brilliant plan, but the American military remained long after the Gulf War was successfully concluded. Osama bin Ladin and the Saudi mujahideen who had fought in Afghanistan regarded US presence in the Islamic Holy Land as an abomination worse than the Crusaders’ long stay in the Levant. Of the fifteen Saudis in the suicide attacks of 9/11, eleven were of Yemeni heritage, as of course is Osama bin Ladin. And of course, Prince Bandar’s success in convincing King Fahd to allow US troops into Saudi Arabia in the Cheney meeting that day had unintended consequences which will last for a long time.

Bandar's replacement as ambassador to Washington, Prince Turki Faisal was fired two days before 9/11 and doubts remain as to his knowledge of what was going to happen and when it was going to happen. The best explanation for the extremely rare occurrence of a senior royal official being fired is that Prince Turki had been paying off major terrorist organizations to prevent an attack on the Saudis. It turned out that one or more of the huge payoffs, reportedly amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, were complete scams. Another version is that the terrorists took the money and then committed hits against the Saudis anyway. No one has successfully demonstrated that Prince Turki had any advance knowledge of 9/11.

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

"Hustle & Flow"

"Hustle & Flow" -- The much anticipated Sundance hit will be out Friday. From my review in the upcoming American Conservative:

Hip hop first hit the Top 40 way back in 1979 with the amusing "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugarhill Gang. At the time I thought, "What a cute novelty record -- I bet that style will be around for a year, maybe even two!" Little did I anticipate that decades of stylistic innovation by African-Americans were coming to an end, and that rap would turn out to be the black hole that entrapped black talent for, apparently, all eternity.

Hip-hop kept its goofy aura through the mid-80s (when the biggest selling rap record was "The Super Bowl Shuffle" by the Chicago Bears NFL team).

Then, gangsta rap emerged from Los Angeles and New York. By promoting the drug dealer's code of what a boy had to do to be a man, it helped spread the crack wars across the country. By 1993-94, the murder rate had quadrupled among black 14-17 year-old-youths born in the late 70s (which was after Roe v. Wade, as economist Steven D. Levitt conveniently forgot to mention while pushing his abortion-cut-crime theory in the bestseller Freakonomics).

Fortunately, the generation born in the 80s started to grasp that they could listen to gangsta rap without living it, but the damage had been done. In New York City today, there are 36 percent more black women than black men alive.

It says much about contemporary values that the Audience Award at the Sundance film festival was won by the indie crowd-pleaser "Hustle & Flow," the purportedly uplifting story -- "Everybody gotta have a dream" -- of a pimp striving to find redemption by becoming a gangsta rapper.

Perhaps we will next be treated to a heartwarming movie about a Gestapo agent aspiring to qualify for the Death's Head SS. If, as the hype claims, "Hustle & Flow" is the new "Rocky," well, then "Jeff Gannon" should be pitching Hollywood on his rise, such as it was, from militaristic manwhore to Bush Administration shill.

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

Levitt's state-by-state abortion-crime correlations

Something that hasn't been mentioned is what an uncertain reed the Freakonomics abortion-cut-crime theory is largely based upon: correlations between the abortion rates by state in the 1970s and the crime rates by state in the 1990s. Beyond all the other problems I've noted (such as the correlations only work for the decline in crime in the mid-1990s, and instead are reversed during the huge crime increase in the late 1980s and early 1990s), a massive weakness in his analysis is that people move. After two decades, a large fraction of the population is living in a different state. Even worse for Levitt's assumption, the odds that a grown child will be living in a different state than his mother was living in when she was pregnant with him are even higher.

Now, if all this movement was purely random, utterly unrelated to crime and abortion laws, then that would simply make any connection between abortion in the 1970s and crime in the 1990s harder to detect. But, we have good reason to assume that interstate migration is driven in part precisely by crime rates and by the general moral climate (of which the abortion rate is symbolic).

This is an enormously complicated subject, but let me give one example. Consider New York and California, which Levitt repeatedly points to as states that legalized abortion early (in 1970) and had crime fall-offs earlier in the 1990s. If you look at white people, you'll see that NY and California continued to attract affluent whites who could afford to insulate their kids from crime and moral decay, while they shed large numbers of less well-to-do whites who were worried that they couldn't afford to provide their kids with a good upbringing.

So, comparing the white populations of NY and California in the 1970s versus the 1990s is a classic apples and oranges comparison, and within each state, too. Among whites, the populations became increasingly affluent, older, and the family sizes shrunk. In contrast, the white populations of socially conservative (and thus low abortion) states became relatively younger and less affluent and thus more crime prone.

But that's just one dynamic. When you throw in the significant differences in the racial makeup of states over time, it all gets extremely complicated. But the key point is that there is no reason to assume that you can make safe apples to apples comparisons of the populations in states in the 1970s versus 1990s, as Levitt assumes you can.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

National Geographic on IQ Evolution

Did Discrimination Enhance Intelligence of Jews?
James Owen for National Geographic News
July 18, 2005

Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Leonard Bernstein, Saul Bellow, to name a few, all shared European Jewish ancestry.

Known as Ashkenazim, this ethnic group is blessed with more than its fair share of talented minds.

But they are also prone to a number of serious genetic diseases.

Researchers now suggest that intelligence is closely linked to such illnesses in Ashkenazi Jews, and that the diseases are the result of natural selection.

The Ashkenazim are descended from the Jewish communities of Germany, Austria, Poland, and Eastern Europe that date back to the 10th century. Today they make up around 80 percent of the world's Jews.

Ashkenazim have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group, scoring 12 to 15 points above the European average. They are also strongly represented in fields and occupations requiring high cognitive ability. For instance, European-origin Jews account for 27 percent of U.S. Nobel science prize winners but make up only about 3 percent of the U.S. population.

But the group is also associated with neurological disorders, including Tay-Sachs, Gaucher's, and Niemann-Pick. Tay-Sachs is a fatal inherited disease of the central nervous system. Sufferers lack an enzyme needed to break down fatty substances in the brain and nerve cells. Gauchers and Niemann-Pick are similar, often fatal diseases.

Researchers at the University of Utah's anthropology department investigated a possible link between these genetic illnesses and above-average intelligence in Ashkenazi Jews. They suggest both are the result of natural selection for enhanced brainpower.

Because Jews were discriminated against in medieval Europe, they were often driven into professions such as moneylending and banking which were looked down upon or forbidden to Christians...

So if natural selection is responsible for above-average intelligence in Ashkenazi Jews, could the same apply to other ethnic groups?

Co-author Gregory Cochran said, "The logical place to look for something similar—an occupationally specialized, reproductively isolated group that might have been shaped by recent natural selection—would be India. In particular, the Parsis."

Parsis are descendents of the Zoroastrians who emigrated from Persia to India in the 8th century. As in medieval Jewish communities in Europe, Parsis marry almost wholly within their own group. They are also economically successful with a long history as traders and businessmen.

Parsis are also especially vulnerable to diseases not seen in their neighbors, including Parkinson's disease, breast cancer, and tremor disorders.

Modern-day Ashkenazim are now far more likely to marry outside their ethnic group. Cochran says he would expect that both a tendency for higher IQ and associated genetic disorders to become less marked over time.

The idea that some ethnic groups are inherently more intelligent than others is controversial, and researchers are divided on the issue.

The Human Genome Project, completed in 2000, suggested that humans are 99.9 percent genetically identical across all races. At the time, the project's findings were hailed as evidence that the human genome is color-blind.

But the journal Psychology, Public Policy and Law recently published a study that reviewed research into the differences in average IQ between Asians, whites, and blacks.

J. Philippe Rushton, from the University of Western Ontario, and Arthur Jensen, an educational psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, concluded these differences are 50 percent genetic in origin.

"Race differences show up by three years of age, even after matching on maternal education and other variables," Rushton said. "Therefore they cannot be due to poor education since this has not yet begun to exert an effect."

Writing in response to their findings, University of Michigan psychologist Richard E. Nesbitt said that "there is not a shred of evidence" in the research to suggest the IQ gap between races has a genetic basis. [More]

***

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

Assimilation

A reader writes:

1. The cause of assimilation is further damaged by the fact that the host society refuses to take any kind of serious pride in itself. If you were a Turk would you want to assimilate to a German identity that's become synonymous with evil itself over the past few decades? Likewise, why would any Mexican want to identify with a white culture that's been tarred with every pejorative? It's become more socially prestigious to remain a hyphenated American.

2. A real cause for worry when it comes to Mexican immigration is the recent Native Hawaiian bill that's in the Senate now. If it passes, you can bet more than a few Mexican Civil Rights groups will be looking to get their own "Native rights" bill passed on the premise that they were displaced in 1845 in the same way the Hawaiian were in the 1890s. Of course, their claims will have even less merit, but what does that matter when it comes to grievance legislation?

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

Muslim immigration vs. Hispanic immigration

In the wake of the London bombings, lots of Americans are patting themselves on the back because, unlike those suicidal Europeans who let in tens of millions of Muslims, we sensible, hard-headed Americans lets in tens of millions of Latin Americans. Everybody knows that Muslims are maniacal hotheads while Latinos are happy-go-lucky little people who will be perfectly content to wash our cars for minimum wage for all eternity, right?

What is overlooked is that back when Europeans were letting in lots of Muslims as guest workers, it seemed like a good idea at the time. The Muslim immigrants appeared dutiful and submissive. Indeed, Britain's first generation of Pakistanis were easy to push around because they were physically small. But now their grandsons are strapping big louts who don't take no crap from nobody.

The point is: The future is unwritten. But there are certain patterns in history. They aren't sure things, but we ought to take them into consideration. One is that peoples change over time. Their expectations change. Just as African-Americans were considered such naturally content servants up through about 1960 that two major consumer packaged goods brands were named after black cooks (Uncle Ben's rice and Aunt Jemima's syrup), a people can get tired of being on the bottom of the pecking order, and their young men can lash out violently. As I wrote in "The Wind from the South" in June, a wave of anti-white populist activism is sweeping South America and headed for Mexico. Eventually, it will probably arrive in the U.S.

A reader writes:

It often seems to happen that second-generation immigrants, or rather, the homegrown children of immigrants, are more frustrated and angry than their parents. I can think of two reasons for that:

1- They have more identity problems. The immigrants themselves may have adaptation difficulties, but they know who they are. For instance, a Turk who settles in Germany knows that he is not German but Turkish. His son may not know what he is, Turkish or German. Such ambivalence can be frustrating and frustration can easily lead to anger.

2- The father may be poor but he is more likely to compare his economic situation with what he had in the old country. The son compares his situation with that of the other people in the new country, and if he is poorer than most, he may resent it. American blacks don't compare themselves with sub-Saharan Africans or Haitians but with other Americans.

The problem with stopping the inflow of Muslim immigrants is that it will be perceived as discriminatory by the Muslims that already in the country. For instance, if the Netherlands were to forbid the entry of new Muslim immigrants into the country, but not the entry of non-Muslim immigrants, then the 1 million Muslims who already are in the Netherlands will feel that as a slap in the face and argue that they are treated as second-class citizens and victims of religious discrimination. In light of this, it is preferable to drastically reduce all immigration, or else use criteria which cannot be construed as discriminatory, such as geographic proximity or linguistic similarity.

I doubt if such steps would assuage Muslim anger. They'll see right through such stratagems. And, anyway, they're angry right now.

I suspect that the key is to show strength. Trying to assuage them just arouses their contempt.

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

Israel on Birthright Citizenship for Illegal Aliens

John Podhoretz was highly offended when John Derbyshire questioned the reigning interpretation of the 14th Amendment that insists that the children of illegal aliens are automatically born U.S. citizens. I then asked whether Israel offered birthright citizenship to illegal aliens. A reader replies:

No, Israel does not offer birthright citizenship to the offspring of illegal aliens - or even to the offspring of legal resident aliens. Israel's citizenship laws are not dissimilar to those of much of central Europe - Germany, Hungary and other countries with large diaspora populations have citizenship rules that strongly favor members of such populations who choose to "return" to the mother country, and are otherwise quite restrictive.

Germany, for example, lhas ong offered an open door to "Volga Germans" whose ancestors had migrated from Germany to Russia at the invitation of Catherine the Great.

I have an amusing anecdote to relate in regard of Israeli notions of *American* immigration rules. I attended a presentation by an Israeli cabinet minister (from the Labor party) and one of the other attendees asked a question about immigration and residency - to make a long story short, her Israeli father was being cared for by a Filipino alien resident in Israel who, because of the restrictions of Israeli law, could not bring his wife over to join him, and she was questioning the justice of this decision. He replied in part by pointing out that Israeli law is much more generous than American law, as America promptly evicts anyone caught here illegally without so much as a hearing. I went up to him afterwords and asked him how his impression of America could be correct given that there are approximately 10 million aliens illegally resident in America. He simply didn't believe the figure.

I can certainly sympathize with the Israeli minister. If you had never heard the facts about America and illegal immigration, would you believe them when you were first told them?

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

The First of Many?

A friend has been predicting for a year or so that more than a few members of the current political class will wind up hot-footing it to Israel when the heat gets too intense. Today comes word from The Hill that a couple of small fish in one of the many burgeoning scandals have gotten out of the kitchen:

Two former associates of Jack Abramoff, the embattled lobbyist, left the country Monday night en route to a new life in Israel. The relocation comes as a Justice Department taskforce presses forward with an investigation into potential criminal wrongdoing stemming from Abramoff’s business dealings.

Sam Hook and his wife Shana Tesler both worked with Abramoff at the law firm, Greenberg Traurig. Hook served as the registered agent for Grassroots Interactive, a lobbying venture tied to Abramoff that has reportedly been subpoenaed by the Justice Department taskforce.

Tesler, a lawyer, worked with Abramoff at Greenberg Traurig and then followed him to the lobbying firm, Cassidy & Associates, after he was ousted from Greenberg following news reports of his questionable dealings with Indian gaming tribes.

Abramoff and public affairs consultant Michael Scanlon are the target of the Justice Department probe and two Senate investigations into allegations that they bilked tribes out of more than $60 million. A federal grand jury has been convened to consider possible criminal charges in the matter.

Like Abramoff, Hook and Tesler are both Orthodox Jews. They have been planning for some time to move their family to Israel, said their attorney Alyza Lewin at Lewin & Lewin.

“Pursuant to longstanding plans that predate any investigation, Shana Tesler and Sam Hook have relocated to Israel…One thing had nothing to do with the other,” Lewin said.

Former White House counsel Lanny Davis said that the pair’s relocation could hamper the Justice Department investigation because it would be harder to enforce subpoenas abroad.

“Whether you are able to enforce a subpoena in a foreign country depends upon specific treaty commitments,” Davis said, “but in general the answer is no… Even if you could try to enforce it through a treaty, it would be extremely difficult.” [More]

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

La Griffe du Lion on what Larry Summers should have said

The Zorro of statisticians is back with a detailed explanation of "Sex Differences in Mathematical Aptitude." Here is his abstract:

Mathematics is a man's game. A gender gap appears early in life, blossoms with the onset of puberty and reaches full bloom by mid-adolescence. It indelibly shapes women's prospects for doing significant mathematics. In this account of cognitive sex differences, Prodigy shows how sex-differentiated ability in 15 year-olds accounts for the exiguous female representation at the highest levels of mathematical research. A female Fields Medalist is predicted to surface once every 103 years.

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

Invade-the-World-Invite-the-World not working in UK

London bombings show Bush-Blair's Invade the World / Invite the World strategy not working out: On a purely logical level, it doesn't make much sense for Bush and Blair to believe in invading Arab countries while welcoming Arabs. Trying one or the other probably won't work terribly well, but doing both at once seems guaranteed to fail.

The French tried it during the Algerian War -- they sent 500,000 Frenchmen to fight in Algeria ... and to alleviate the subsequent labor shortage, greatly increased their intake of Algerian laborers. Unsurprisingly, these immigrant cousins of the Algerians the French Army was torturing to stop the terror-bombing campaign in Algiers have not proved the basis of a happy, well assimilated class of new Frenchmen.

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

"Weekend of slaughter propels Iraq towards all-out civil war"

writes James Hider in Baghdad for The Times of London:

IRAQ is slipping into all-out civil war, a Shia leader declared yesterday, as a devastating onslaught of suicide bombers slaughtered more than 150 people, most of them Shias, around the capital at the weekend.

One bomber killed almost 100 people when he blew up a fuel tanker south of Baghdad, an attack aimed at snapping Shia patience and triggering the full-blown sectarian war that al-Qaeda has been trying to foment for almost two years.

If they are going to hold a civil war, does that mean we get to go home?

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

Why Foucault shouldn't be lumped with Derrida:

My man in Istanbul has been thinking about why Darwin is not as popular in France and why Foucault is misinterpreted by both the Left and the Right in the Anglosphere:

Anglos, in contrast to the French, have managed to create globe-spanning empires and commonwealths. This put their [natural, as it is for all tribes] chauvinism to test: how do I get the Bantu to do my bidding in the British way?

The French very quickly gave up on their imperial ambitions. And even today, when they discuss "humanity" or "history", their main reference is at most the West continental Europe, but more often than not solely France - i.e. Netherlands of Belgium. That is, for them, humanity = the French.

Now, when an Anglo studies "humanity", he, more often than not, includes the Bantu, the Maya, the Afghani, the Eskimo, etc. under that heading. In that case, the biology of differences is relevant.

However, when we're studying, as Foucault, the punitive systems and incarceration between the 16th and 20th centuries, mostly in France, Germany, and Holland, what part of biology shall we include? They're all white, more or less from the same genetic/tribal ancestry, and of the same I.Q. points. This leaves only "nurture".

Residents of Anglosphere - I'm afraid yourself included - tend to misinterpret this. For example, I know Foucault quite well, and in none of his works has he ever claimed that he had set on a journey to explain "human behavior". He made it very specific: what has changed from a system in which a monarchical rule reigned to one which involved the modern nation-state, with an anonymous and dispersed power network, in which we saw the emergence of institutions like the military, the school, the hospital, etc.

If you believe one day you'll be able to explain the development of the Napoleonic army in genetic terms, well, good luck and be my guest, because you have a very, VERY long way to go - to developl a whole paradigm of genetic reductionism in which every human endevaour is foreordained in the genetic code; a type of biological fatalism. I humbly believe that explaining the differences in civilization between the Afghanis and the Netherlanders is a more realistic goal for that perspective.

But this fails to deal with one problem.

The underlying model for many social sciences - including bio-sociology - is still historicistic and uses, unknowingly, some Hegelian notions of organic development, the primary one being that of a human baby or a flower: the idea that a seed contains all the information for growth, and its development is only the realization of that blueprint. We can call this the "organic determinism" model.

(Marxist "historical determinism" uses the same model.)

If we accept that, given the same genetic profile, people will achieve not only more or less similar "levels of complexity" in civilization building, but they should all fatalistically follow the same paths. According to this, we should have not only a German Beethoven but also French, Dutch, Spanish, Belgian, etc. Beethovens. Or, similarly, by now we should have had not only a British America, but a French, Spanish, Dutch, etc. one.

I'm sure there is at least one fool - probably more - out there trying to prove this absurdity, but I'll beg to differ. I believe biological regularities govern how we are formed in our mothers' wombs, or how our brains uses glucose, but it cannot possibly shape the process through which one composes a piano concerto (other than only providing the genetical infrastructure for the talents required for that).

This means the work of historians - such as Foucault, who was a historian of systems of thought - is still valid. (Remember: Darwinian biology is also historicistic; it explains how change takes places and causes evolution among species.)

History - or sociology -, too, has to work ceteris paribus. If we're studying Bantu and Scotts for historical insight, there's a methodological problem. The only way to do that is to study groups with the same genetic profile (i.e. "fix" that "other" factor), to see which processes are specifically historical - i.e. what the nature of "temporally bound" developments are.

This is also what underlies the confusion in America regarding people like Foucault. He doesn't claim, or even try, to explain anything other than a historical process that is peculiar to France, and part of continental Europe. But almost everyone in America, including both progressive doofuses and conservatives, lumps him with irrelevant fools like Derrida - even Lacan - under the label "deconstructionist" (just to give you an idea, this is like grouping Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, and George Frazier together, calling them "Brits", and then labelling their works under a heading like "pro-analyzers") and claims that "Foucault and Derrida claimed that all reality is a passing idea on society's mind" or some other sophomoric crap.

(Note: Almost all of Foucault work is EMPIRICAL, based on actual historical records and data. None - repeat none - of it is speculative nonsense. He has actually demonstrated everything he claimed factually. FYI.)

Every discipline has to define a proper object of study for itself. If you say, like Derb did in a recent article, "dump sociology, pick biology" (I just don't know what kind of an adrenaline rush this gives to him), with all due respect, I cannot take you seriously.

To understand what biology does, we must isolate those phenomena that remain constant regardless of species, societal structure, received education, etc.

To understand whether there are specifically sociological parameters that shape our lives, we must observe only those with the exact same biological profiles, but cross-historically - that is, ignoring historical specificities so that we can generalize that the social network will produce certian effects regardless of temporal change. This may require a solid knowledge of biology of humans - to separate what is biologically governed - and psychology (the evolutionary school to understand how that psychology is shaped, and the cognitive school to see how the mind works regardless of social and historical setting.)

To understand how history operates and whether being temporally-bound has any impact on the social (I'd be very surprised if it didn't), we must study a given society from a given racial pool, and contrast at least three different periods in their social entities and relations throughout. A "multivariate" study may strengthen our observations if we pick another society from the same racial stock and observe, again, at least three peroids of it. Mixing it with biology will only confound our observational design, make it needlessly complicated, and may even distort the picture.

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

Boris Johnson blames the bombings on ... Enoch Powell

Also in the Daily Telegraph, talented editor / Tory MP / loverboy Boris Johnson writes:

The disaster is that we no longer make any real demands of loyalty upon those who are immigrants or the children of immigrants. There are many culprits, and foremost among them is Enoch Powell. As Bill Deedes has pointed out over the years, the problem was not so much his catastrophic 1968 tirade [you can read Powell's speech for yourself here and see whether it was a "tirade" or not] against immigration, but the way he made it impossible for any serious politician to discuss the consequences of immigration, and how a multiracial society ought to work.

In the wake of Powell's racist foray, no one had the guts to talk about Britishness, or whether it was a good thing to insist - as the Americans do so successfully - on the basic loyalty of immigrants to the country of immigration.

There's nothing that makes people hate you more than being right. Tories like Johnson and Ferguson are still mad at Powell for being right 37 years ago about the current situation. Powell correctly observed in 1968:

"... 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."

***

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

Another Waster of his Talents:

Niall Ferguson, the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, writes in the Daily Telegraph about one of the London Bombers:

He was born in Yorkshire in 1983... He was not poor; his father, an immigrant from Pakistan, had built up a successful takeaway food business, selling fish and chips and driving a Mercedes. He was not uneducated, assuming you regard a degree in sports science from Leeds Metropolitan University as education. Nor, I suspect, would he have failed the "cricket test" famously devised by Lord Tebbit as a test of cultural assimilation. An uncle says he was "proud to be British"...

I am afraid that many people - and not all of them supporters of the British National Party - will also see him as a proof that Enoch Powell was right when he seemed to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood" in his notorious speech of 1968. When, as happened last year, the editor of the impeccably liberal magazine Prospect asks whether open borders pose a threat to an open society, the rehabilitation of Powellism starts to look like a real possibility.

And yet this is to misunderstand what we are up against. For the crisis we face has nothing to do with the kind of innate racial incompatibilities Powell believed in. The saloon bar response - "Send them back and the seal the borders" - is not merely impractical; it completely misses the point.

Well, of course, Powell couldn't possibly have been right, because that would mean that ... all of us respectable folks who ostracized him and his ideas were wrong!

The settlement of Western Europe by Muslims is now an irreversible phenomenon; moreover, it seems bound to continue more or less inexorably, whether legally or illegally.

Except that Finland has very few immigrants. Why not? Because the Finns decided they wouldn't let them in! But in most of the rest of Europe, the prescient people, like Powell, were denounced by the nice people, like Ferguson, and driven out of influence.

The most obvious response to the London Bombings is: "First, do no more harm." Stop letting in more people from Muslim countries. But men like Ferguson will work hard to keep us oblivious to the obvious. As George Orwell said:

"We have now sunk to a depth at which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men."

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

Ignoring the Parable of the Talents

As so often these days, Mark Steyn unleashes his vast skills in the service of obfuscation:

But in the real world there's only one scandal in this whole wretched business -- that the CIA, as part of its institutional obstruction of the administration, set up a pathetic ''fact-finding mission'' that would be considered a joke by any serious intelligence agency and compounded it by sending, at the behest of his wife, a shrill politically motivated poseur who, for the sake of 15 minutes' celebrity on the cable gabfest circuit, misled the nation about what he found.

Uh, Mark, the Niger yellowcake documents were forgeries. The UN's IAEA discovered they were fake with about 15 minutes of Googling -- they found that the Niger officials mentioned in the documents had been been out of power for years.

There are a lot of scandals in this whole wretched business of the Iraq Attaq (and I suspect that Karl Rove's involvement is less culpable than that of some others - history may look kindly upon Rove as a voice of reason who kept the U.S. from also invading Syria right after Saddam's statue came down), but one obvious scandal that hasn't been drawing the attention it deserves is who created these forgeries, which surfaced via Italy's military intelligence service. The obvious usual suspect in any dubious activities involving both Italian intelligence and the Middle East, Michael Ledeen, has denied to me having any involvement in the forgeries, but he broke off the email discussion he initiated when I asked him if he would use his Italian contacts to search for the Real Forgers.

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

More Immigrants, More Booms?

WSJ: "More Immigrants, More Jobs: Keeping America's door open has kept America's economy booming." And besides, immigration has kept London's Underground tube system booming, too!

Sure, there have been "more jobs" for immigrants, but there hasn't been any growth in the number of jobs for American-born citizens during the entire 4.5 years of the Bush Administration, as Edwin S. Rubenstein has been pointing out for years. You call that booming?

Paul Krugman writes in "The Dropout Puzzle:"

Or maybe the figures on unemployment are giving a false signal.

Economists who argue that there's something wrong with the unemployment numbers are buzzing about a new study by Katharine Bradbury, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, which suggests that millions of Americans who should be in the labor force aren't. "The addition of these hypothetical participants," she writes, "would raise the unemployment rate by one to three-plus percentage points." ...

In fact, because older Americans, especially older women, are more likely to work than in the past, labor force participation should have risen, not fallen, over the past four years. As a result, she suggests that there may be "considerable slack in the U.S. labor market": there are at least 1.6 million and possibly as many as 5.1 million people who aren't counted as unemployed but would take jobs if they were available.

Of course, being Krugman, he refuses to mention the I-word as a major contributor.

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