January 16, 2008

The New Face of LA

I've been having a hard time getting across the idea that the Hispanic surge of immigration into Los Angeles is so 20th Century. It's just too expensive now, so the Mexicans are heading to places like Kentucky. Here in LA, the new guys in town are ... well, it's hard to describe exactly who they are since we don't have any generic terms for them: they're East European / West Asian and ready to deal. One way to get an idea is too look at this picture of the two men in Britney Spears's life these days, boyfriend / papparazi Adnan Ghalib (in white shirt) and vaguely-defined hanger-on Sam Lufti (in blue shirt), riding an outdoor escalator on Ventura Blvd. with Britney, who is wearing what appears to be her wedding dress.

Apparently, Adnan was born in Afghanistan, while Sam was born in LA. I have no idea what each one's ethnicity is, but they are pretty representative of who you see on Ventura Blvd.

In LA, the New People aren't generally generic Muslims -- I seldom see women in burkhas or similar. Instead, they are often from exotic mercantile minorities in Muslim lands so they are culturally prepared to hit the ground hustling.

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

29 comments:

Anonymous said...

Let's hope Britney has children with one or both of them...

Anonymous said...

"...it's hard to describe exactly who they are since we don't have any generic terms for them.."

Sure we do. I've got two: lounge lizard, and greaseball.

(Apologies in advance if this comes through several times. I seem to be having a problem posting.)

Anonymous said...

Adnan Ghalib sounds like a generic Muslim name one would find in the South Asian subcontinent. Sam Lufti sounds a little more exotic and he looks the 'whiter' of the two as well

Anonymous said...

Was that at the Good Guys?

I used to live in the neighborhood, and have the same sort of impression of the current denizens of Ventura Blvd.

Do you know what sorts of work this demographic does (not including the Britney Spears guys)? They outwardly seem to have plenty of cash, but I'm not sure where it comes from.

Anonymous said...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/showbiz/showbiznews.html?in_article_id=508640&in_page_id=1773

Adnan is in fact from a middle class British/Afghan family in Birmingham, England.
He moved to England when he was five and is now part of an unattractive trend from the point of view.
That is to say, he has rejected the prospect of dull but real job as a doctor or lawyer.
Instead he has opted for a flaky lifestyle non-job as a international paparezzo. He is now 35 and has been separated from his wife from a year, according to this article.

J said...

In Israel we do have a collective apellative for these crowd: ארסים
that is, "ar-sim". I dont know the etymology of the word, but describes street/vulgar people, lovers of heavy gold chains and shiny cars. It is difficult to pin down their geographic procedence, as they are a human type occupying the large stretch of land between Afganistan and Morocco.

Anonymous said...

Yes indeed. My Sherman Oaks block has two cheaply built Mediterranean villas built by men like this. They are the new thing. In my experience the SFV varietal is either Armenian or Israeli.

Anonymous said...

AMerica is too multiethnic for them to assimilate - the anglo protestant core is broken -and so will go the country and our silly notions of individual liberty. Corruption will be the norm.

In a lot of ways this is the ADL's dream - a big bazaar where hustlers, obnoxiousness and gaudy taste are not out of place. They will probably snicker at those silly wasps who built public parks and dream up ways to turn them into strip malls.

agnostic said...

The important task is to get them to integrate, and we do that by stealing away and marrying their beautiful women. (To make it a fair trade, they can take some of our dowdier blonde women -- a blonde Anglo per se being a trophy to them.)

If they're South Asian, that won't be impossible, but will be tough. If they're Persian or Armenian, however, which is quite likely if they're in LA, it'll be easy. Those girls are much more open to dating and marrying outside their group.

The same groups are settling in the DC area too -- they were there before, but now there are a LOT of upper-middle class Persians. It makes for wonderful people-watching.

Anonymous said...

in vegas i knew a guy from lebanon named adnan eldor.

as i said in a previous post, they have somehow become "white" to the US federal government, so i'm sure all of the 9/11 terrorists where white guys. afghanistan and iraq are probably "white" nations now, and all central asian and middle east countries send "white" immigrants to the US, making the census way less accurate than in decades past.

mestizos, arabs, and central asians are now all "white" in government statistics. contrary to the census, i'm pretty sure the US is already close to being just 50% european.

Anonymous said...

Why do NAMs often seem to adopt an ugly look or style? As a primitive means of intimidation ("in your face")? I've heard of landing strips on women, but to see one on a man...

Anonymous said...

Sam Lufti sounds exotic if you disregard that his real name is Osama Lufti (or some variation thereof, according to www.wwtdd.com). Then it becomes just another generic muslim name.

Anonymous said...

"...Instead, they are often from exotic mercantile minorities in Muslim lands so they are culturally prepared to hit the ground hustling."

Would not the increase in entrepreneurial types bode well for the future of SoCal? I should think so. I would rather the immigrants be "market minorities" rather than "sons of the soil" type, to use Amy Chua's terminology.

Perhaps the problem with California is not the immigrants, but the rich white limousine liberals who keep making endless regulation and continue destroying economic opportunity in the golden state.

Anonymous said...

A profoundly stupid woman,famous for no apparent reason being constantly chased by paparazzi and seems enthralled to men of Arabic/Asian men of Muslim heritage...hmmm-sounds familiar. I can only hope this Spears imbecile ends up like the Spencer imbecile.Except at 26,instead of 36..

Anonymous said...

Hardly the ADL dream. Given that men like that are quite likely to be hostile to Jews and men like say, Huckabee quite friendly.

I can assure you that Steve is looking at a minor demographic blip. In the greater LA area, including Ventura, Orange, San Bernadino, Riverside, as well as LA County, Mexicans provide the vast and overwhelming majority of immigrants legal and illegal.

Anyone in the LA area can check this by walking around: the Torrance Mall, South Coast Plaza (itself a microcosm of various areas staked out by various ethnicities), malls in Oxnard, Riverside, Orange, Santa Ana, Temecula, Chino, San Gabriel, and San Bernadino.

You will find a smattering of Asians (concentrated in San Gabriel Valley and Irvine) with almost entirely Mexican population.

Anonymous said...

who cares where they're from? I don't want them in my country.

Anonymous said...

Since these men can't have sex where they're from without getting married, and since they don't- want/don't-want-to-work-to-be- eligible-for marriage they come to the decedent West.

I believe there's a term from Algeria for such people that roughly translates into 'people who hold up walls'

Anonymous said...

Reminds me of the SouthPark sendup of 300.

Blue carpet and gold curtain rods as far as the eye can see.

Anonymous said...

i agree that this is mainly a blip on the radar. LA is mexico. armenians like system of a down and kim kardashian are not the norm in southern california.

it is interesting however that it only took a hundred thousand of them being in the US to get the democrats interested in yet another sob story, the armenian holocaust.

Anonymous said...

Unless you're a Bill the Butcher-style Anglo-American supremacist, the influx of West Asian swarthy guy cultures into greater L.A. is mostly pretty positive. As Steve points out, they're mostly from mercantile cultures so they're wealth generators, a good chunk of them are Christian, Jewish, or from odd little religious minorities, and aside from gaudy taste in dress and home decoration, their communities are usually pleasant, attractive and safe. Certainly largely Armenian Glendale is a really nice place to live (even if you see a suspicious number of flower shop/ café money laundering fronts) when compared to, say, Van Nuys.

And at least in my observation, their kids pretty much assimilate into being fairly generic white ethnics after a generation or so, not very distinguishable from Greeks or Italians.

Anonymous said...

Steve, if you watch those video clips of the cameramen chasing Britney, it seems that most all of those guys are vaguely Muslim-type paparazzi.At least their voices sound Middle Eastern.

Anonymous said...

"Unless you're a Bill the Butcher-style Anglo-American supremacist, the influx of West Asian swarthy guy cultures into greater L.A. is mostly pretty positive."

Pretty positive compared to what? No immigration or 3rd world poor? The problem with this Asia Minor groups is that they just don't have history. To them Washington is not the same as to my family with a 300 year history. These groups often bring a tremendous in-group bias and are not very honest by comparison to your average middle class Indiana family. I see nothing positive.

Anonymous said...

Who are these guys?

Mainly Iranians, Armenians, Middle Eastern Jews, and Lebanese.....

Anonymous said...

I hate to get all Ellis Island-y, but the Germans, Irish, and southern Europeans didn't have 300 years of English in America culture either and they ended up assimilating pretty well. And West Asian clannishness breaks down pretty quickly in L.A. Their kids abound in the better public schools, and you see them in friendships and romances with whites and Asians all the time-- the guys come across as more masculine than generic whites and the girls (once depiliated) look familiar yet exotically attractive to white guys. Classifying West Asian Caucasians as white ended up doing them a favor-- it really kept ethnic grievance organizations from springing up to help maintain and nurture in-group identity among the younger generations.

Anonymous said...

I dunno, the dude looks a bit like Bruce Springsteen's younger brother to me.

Anonymous said...

Maybe I am stupid or something. I always thought that America is the land of opportunity where anyone who wants to be a "wealth generator" can come and make their dreams a reality and contribute to our technological and economic dynamism.

Maybe I got it wrong. Maybe I got America confused with the L-5 space colony thing. Perhaps the reason for my confusion (other than the 3 rum&cokes I have in me right now) is that I was actually in L-5 when I lived in SoCal (in the late 80's).

Please correct me if I am wrong.

Anonymous said...

Does anyone know whether Lebanese and Syrian Christian immigrants from the turn of the century ended up assimilating and mixing with other Americans or do they still largely keep themselves to themselves?

Anonymous said...

The descendants of the early 20th century Lebanese and Syrian Christian immigrants are very assimilated. For instance, does anyone recognize Marlo Thomas or Doug Flutie as members of a minority, or even know what ethnicity they are?*

Many Maronite Catholics married other Catholics of various European backgrounds. Most Syriac Orthodox (Jacobites) and some Greek Orthodox became Episcopalians.

*Both are Lebanese-Americans from Christian families.

Anonymous said...

Sam Lutfi what a con man.