From my new VDARE column:
It’s funny how, in the woozy minds of America’s elite, celebrating Independence Day has turned into celebrating Immigration Day. For a particularly ripe example of Ellis Island kitsch, let’s review this July 3, 2010 Washington Post op-ed by former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam:“A better welcome for our nation's immigrants
“On our national birthday, and amid an angry debate about immigration, Americans should reflect on the lessons of our shared immigrant past.”
By the way, have you noticed how the word “angry” has come to mean “The state of mind of any person who is winning a debate with an immigration enthusiast?”
Putnam and Bush then add a topical Independence Day note:“We must recall that the challenges facing our nation today were felt as far back as the Founders' time. … Today's immigrants are, on average, assimilating socially even more rapidly than earlier waves.”
Why haven’t more recent immigrant groups assimilated enough not to default on their mortgages? Well, what kind of angry person even notices hatefacts?“One important difference, however, that separates immigration then and now: We native-born Americans are doing less than our great-grandparents did to welcome immigrants.”
See? It’s all your fault.
Who are Jeb Bush and Robert D. Putnam and why are they saying these foolish things? In the past, Putnam and Bush have both made themselves conspicuous over immigration to a comical degree. So let’s review their history.
Read the whole thing there. I also outline Benjamin Franklin's grand strategy in response to the usual immigrationist attack on Franklin.
Robert Putnam's (unwanted) finding about how diversity leads to loss of community cohesion, to atomisation etc, has been the subject of a number of more recent studies - to see how sturdy the finding is (is it repeatable etc?).
ReplyDeleteGoogle Scholar enables you to find most of them, I think - and nowadaya shows you if a free PDF is available of each article (vital if you're not in academia).
The responses of researchers who've gone through the evidence, or done their own similar studies, has been mixed... I think.
Indeed, has anyone looked at all these studies responding to Putnam, to see whether they amount to refutation, or validation?
(I'm afraid I just haven't had time, even though I've got the various journal articles).
I sounds as if some of the purported refutations of Putnam's findings about the damaging effect of diversity were – misleadingly – done using national-level data for diversity, rather than more local, and so rather missed what has been going on.
...why are they saying these foolish things?
ReplyDeleteBecause it's politically correct to do so. Because a big majority of immigrants today are non-white.
Putnam personally probably feels he has to atone for his earlier report that 'diversity' leads to social alienation and less cohesive communities.
See, it's really our fault: we're just not doing enough to help recent immigrants. Don't you know.
Why haven’t more recent immigrant groups assimilated enough not to default on their mortgages?
For the same reason of course: in addition to providing mortgages -- even to people here illegally -- we should have also made the payments.
It is a very strange misunderstanding of history to claim that we are "less welcoming" of immigrants now.
ReplyDeleteThe reverse is the actual truth: back in the bad old days, immigrants faced a lot of hostility from the natives, and were expected to conform to and assimilate to native white American culture.
Now we are much more "welcoming" and provide all kinds of goodies to immigrants, and it is the native white inhabitants who are forced to pay for this while being constantly insulted as "racists" and "nativists" and so on.
But no, if only we would shut up about immigration, suddenly everything would work out perfectly.
Make an IQ test mandatory for all immigrants (with a 110 minimum score for entry into this country) and immigration would raise the average IQ of the US rather than lower it.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that most (not all) of Steve's readers would be satisfied with such an arrangement.
A key question is, who is angry about immigration, and who isn't. Open immigration, like a lot of other policies (free trade, inflation) acts partly as a mechanism to transfer wealth within the US. It's quite possible that immigration is good for the economy as a whole, but rotten for people on the bottom. (Indeed, that's how I'd read the evidence.)
ReplyDeleteAs far as mortgage defaults go, that looks like assimilation, to me. Lots and lots of immigrants jumped into the same housing bubble as the natives, with the same conviction that housing prices could only go up and that home ownership was the path to wealth as all the natives had. And getting in over your head in debt is as American as apple pie.
A country with 10%+ unemployment and an economy in long-term decline doesn't need immigrants no matter their IQ or provenance.
ReplyDeleteIt's quite possible that immigration is good for the economy as a whole, but rotten for people on the bottom. (Indeed, that's how I'd read the evidence.)
ReplyDeleteThen you aren't familiar with the work of Robert Rector [and his colleagues] at the Heritage Institute.
In fact, discussion of this topic begins and ends with Rector's data [and some knowledge of our horrible demographic situation]:
The Fiscal Cost of Low-Skill Immigrants to the U.S. Taxpayer
by Robert Rector and Christine Kim
May 21, 2007
heritage.org
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: ...A household's net fiscal deficit equals the cost of benefits and services received minus taxes paid. When the costs of direct and means-tested benefits, education, and population-based services are counted, the average low-skill household had a fiscal deficit of $19,588 (expenditures of $30,160 minus $10,573 in taxes)....
The Fiscal Cost of Low-Skill Households to the U.S. Taxpayer
April 4, 2007
by Robert Rector, Christine Kim and Shanea Watkins, Ph.D.
heritage.org
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: ...A household’s net fiscal deficit equals the cost of benefits and services received minus taxes paid. If the costs of direct and means-tested benefits, education, and population-based services alone are counted, the average low-skill household had a fiscal deficit of $22,449 (expenditures of $32,138 minus $9,689 in taxes)...
Note how the financial burdens imposed on us by the Mexican, El Salvadoran, and Guatemalan Indians actually INCREASES, from $19,588 per family per year, to $22,449 per family per year, as those Aboriginals move out of the shadow economy, and are mainstreamed into the welfare state.
Now couple that fact - more than $20,000 per family per year - with the observation that White babies will very soon become a minority of all births in this country [either in 2010, or 2011], and then fast forward to the 2020s, and the 2030s.
At that point, when every young white person comes of age, and enters the job force, in addition to the unsustainable demands of the White Baby Boomers on Social Security and Medicare [White Baby Boomers who failed to breed at replacement-level fertility rates, back in the 1970s and the 1980s, when they still had the chance] - in addition to paying for all of those aging White Baby Boomers, each young adult white couple will ALSO have to come up with more than $20,000 per year in taxes to pay for a counterpart Negro or Aboriginal family on welfare.
And the numbers just don't add up - young people can't start out their lives with a $20,000 per year millstone about their necks [and that's forgetting about trying to support their Boomer parents & grandparents] - the system will necessarily collapse, the nation will necessarily implode, and something new [or several different new things] will have to arise to take its place.
And this will happen - we are on a collision course with disaster - a sane, rational, positive, productive outcome to this fiasco is mathematically impossible.
So given that you know that our day of reckoning is approaching, you need to start making preparations for it.
NOW.
.
If Jeb Bush hopes to be president someday, or hopes his son will, he has to change that last name to something that will resound more favorably with the voters. I suggest "Nixon."
ReplyDeleteBush and Putnam say, "We native-born Americans are doing less than our great-grandparents did to welcome immigrants.”
They have that all wrong! The key to successful assimilation of immigrants is not tolerance, but intolerance. What motive do immigrants have to learn our language, imitate our social conventions, aspire to our work ethic, and soft-pedal their alien religions if everyone here is knocking themselves out to tolerate them? In fact, we do more than tolerate them, we praise and reward them for their differences. No longer do immigrants aspire to "The Way of the WASP," as Richard Brookhiser put it in his 1992 book.
(Funny: Brookhiser was a Bush speechwriter and when he wrote his book he proposed that Bush was the very man to reinvigorate America with his solid WASP values. Oh, the irony.)
Yes, yes... its all so "absurd", isn't it?
ReplyDeleteThe fate of the earth is in the hands of fools.
Now what?
“One important difference, however, that separates immigration then and now: We native-born Americans are doing less than our great-grandparents did to welcome immigrants.”
ReplyDeleteMost of the immigrants of our great-grandparents' day came here with intention of becoming dyed in the wool Americans. Somehow, they managed to do this and still retain a cultural link to the "old country".
Immigrants these days just want the handouts that come with living here.
"Today, immigrants face long waiting lists for English classes, even ones they pay for."
ReplyDeleteReally, Putnam and Bush? San Antonio College (public 2-year institution) is offering 100 hours of ESL instruction (10 weeks * 10 hrs/wk) for $266.00.
Eminently affordable, yet most students are of the upper-middle-class globetrotter sort whose parents sent them here from Argentina, Taiwan, etc.
Then they come up with this great line: "We native-born Americans are doing less than our great-grandparents did to welcome immigrants."
Speak for yourself, elites. Here in flyover country, our great-grandparents were farming modest Dust Bowl plots and just trying to survive.
Meanwhile, today's white rural middle-class is flocking to ESL education careers and shouldering the burden of privilege-by-association that the Bushes of the world try to slough off on us..."you are so fortunate, why can't you help others? You don't want to be a nativist, do you? Be sophisticated, like us!"
The Bushes have dynastic dreams but are reverting to mediocrity. No wonder they are impressed by a Mexico where the elite families succeed in perpetuating their preeminece. What good is achieving success if you can't guarantee it for your heirs?
ReplyDeleteThe Mexican elite is smart in making sure their kids maintain their social status without having to work too hard.
"A country with 10%+ unemployment and an economy in long-term decline doesn't need immigrants no matter their IQ or provenance"
ReplyDeleteAgreed. Enough with immigration.
I read that article last night at about 3:00AM. Ben Franklin continues to impress from the grave. Jeb Bush, if he were imagined as a colonial politician, probably would have been a natural tory, who would have argued for continuing English hegemony over the colonies, with high taxes, securities-based-wealth-for-the-shareholding-elites gleaned from state-backed-public/private entities like a domestic version of the infamous East India Company, and hessian soldiers/black slave labor to suppress native wages if he were around then. I doubt he'd have had the courage to be a Benedict Arnold-like traitor though, so he would have been no threat to the founders.
ReplyDeleteWe do not -ever- need another Bush in the White House. If Jeb runs, we should call him, Jeb-Coat (Red Coat) Bush.
BTW--Peter Brimelow's latest Vdare piece really does highlight a unfortunate possibility concerning a Amnesty-stuck-in-a-budget-"agreement" this summer. Obama is sneaky enough to try that.
Now that suburbs aren't white, we can begin treating them with respect say two completely unbiased academics whose names happen to be Levy and Puentes.
ReplyDelete"“One important difference, however, that separates immigration then and now: We native-born Americans are doing less than our great-grandparents did to welcome immigrants.”"
ReplyDeleteYeah, we're not nearly as welcoming as this guy:
http://superiorsquad.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/butcher.jpg
"Make an IQ test mandatory for all immigrants (with a 110 minimum score for entry into this country) and immigration would raise the average IQ of the US rather than lower it.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that most (not all) of Steve's readers would be satisfied with such an arrangement."
I wouldn't. If the immigrants' children regress to the mean IQ of their populations, even a 110 cutoff could leave the net population dumber with their addition than without.
"Make an IQ test mandatory for all immigrants (with a 110 minimum score for entry into this country) and immigration would raise the average IQ of the US rather than lower it."
ReplyDeleteThat would help. But what would happen if we stopped tolerating dual citizenship and enforced it? What would most immigrants do if the price of American citizenship was a legal break with their home country?
Putnam is an old Yankee Puritan name too, from the Great Migration. They were a fantastically prolific lot until the mid-nineteenth century. Contentious with their neighbors, witch accusers, witch defenders, Revolutionary soldiers, fathers marching with all their sons.
ReplyDeleteHe's probably a distant cousin of mine. Philoprogenitive Putnams scorn him from their graves.
Canada Day (July 1) celebrations are ALL about multicultism. Bhangra dancing, weird foreign food, and so forth. I stay away.
ReplyDeleteAbout "not helping" immigrants to assimilate--I heard an academic being interviewed about honour killings in Canada. She said the reason they occur is because "we" don't give the immigrants enough support. Yup...it is all the fault of bad colonialist white Canadians. Everything bad in the world is our fault apparently.
Very good article. It's very interesting for a not-american person to read such type of commentary about american's history, and it's important for to understand the present situation.
ReplyDeleteUsually, I think nepotism, applicated to a nation, is the best way to protect the omogeneity of her population, but reading about the Bushes I guess this is the case when a too shortly mind nepotism is very dangerous for a nation as a whole.
Franklin: “America is chiefly occupied by Indians, who subsist mostly by hunting. But as the hunter, of all men, requires the greatest quantity of land, the Europeans found America as fully settled as it well could be by hunters. Yet these, having large tracks, were easily prevailed on to part with portions of territory to the newcomers.”
ReplyDeleteThe wife of the hero of John Updike's novel, "Toward the End of Time", commiserating with her husband's embarassment about what we did to the Indians: "Realistically we couldn't let them have the entire country to run around in with their bows and arrows."
Chicago is at the southwest corner of the Great Lakes, of course.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if you know this, but David Kennedy, professor of history at Stanford, is an immigration restrictionist.
ReplyDeleteHe teaches or at least used to teach a popular course 20th century US history.
Well, in this course he outlines the economic arguments for restricting immigration, citing the 10 billion dollars number, and quoting George Borjas.
I remember, he also mentions that previous waves of immigrantion were due to dislocations and disruptions caused by the industrial revolution, and stopped basically after the country in question industrialized.
Off topic
ReplyDeleteSteve, did you notice that the Economist finally decided to inform its readers about Lynn and Vanhanen's IQ estimates?
http://www.economist.com/node/16479286
Of course it's only now that a politically correct explanation has been found 8 years later.
Eppig et al report a strong correlation between infectious disease burden and national IQ, using either Lynn's estimates or Wicherts revised estimates for sub-Saharan Africa.
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/06/29/rspb.2010.0973.full
Eppig et al repeat a number of related analyses to show that infection disease is the strongest, but they decided not to reanalyze the one variable that's stronger than infectious disease: skin color (r = -.92). Their argument for why they can ignore the results of Templer & Arikawa (2006) is an amazing feat of intentional misunderstanding:
"Although Templer & Arikawa (2006) found a positive relationship between IQ and skin darkness, we will not use skin darkness in our analyses for three reasons: (i) although evidence suggests that skin darkness is a measure of historical infectious disease intensity over evolutionary time, it is unclear exactly what kind of infectious diseases it is indicative of (see discussion); (ii) Templer & Arikawa (2006) argued that the relationship between skin darkness and IQ is not causal; and (iii) Templer & Arikawa (2006) did not sufficiently explain why the association between intelligence and skin darkness exists. Without a reasonable theoretical framework for this association, we did not feel it was appropriate to compare it with other variables for which there is a better theoretical rationale."
Obviously the explanation for the relationship between IQ and skin color given by Templer & Arikawa (2006) was a population's evolutionary history of cold climate with adaptation to UV exposure -- a genetic model.
Again, the correlation found by Templer & Arikawa (2006) for IQ and skin color (-.92) exceeds that found for IQ and infectious disease (-.82), but this fact is avoided by Eppig et al and by The Economist.
I think Jeb Bush grew up with both Anglo and Hispanic elites in Texas and has a too rosy view of two peoples living in harmony... Jeb prolly deals with and shakes hands with elite Hispanics who are cosmopolitan, suave, and friendly to work with...
ReplyDeleteYeah, in fairness to the Bushes, I think that this is probably a terrible problem for them - they confuse the Castilian/Hapsburgian Caucasian Hispanics [or even the Lebanese Diaspora Hispanics, like Carlos Slim Helú and Salma Hayek] with the Aboriginal Hispanics [Nahuatl, Yucatec, Mixtec, Zapotec] who are flooding our nation by the tens of millions.
Heck, I can't imagine that any of us HBD geeks and nerds would be all that disappointed with 10 million more Salma Hayeks in the 'hood.
But this problem of self-selecting statistics - "All the Hispanics with whom I hobknob could just as well be Ricardo Montalbán or Desi Arnaz, ergo ALL Hispanics must be Ricardo Montalbán and Desi Arnaz" - this sort of myopia is a terrible problem for people who lead insular lives like the Bushes.
"airtommy said...
ReplyDeleteNow that suburbs aren't white, we can begin treating them with respect say two completely unbiased academics whose names happen to be Levy and Puentes."
Very interesting. Thanks for the link. So now that suburbs are less white they are all of a sudden vibrant and interesting - vibrant and interesting in the sense of "accounting for more police calls".
Huh. Nobody welcomed my immigrant ancestors (arrival dates ranging from the 1730s-1880s). They did for themselves, and in the case of the non-native English speakers, they learned it ASAP, choosing to venture out of settled communities composed solely of people from their same county of origin.
ReplyDeleteYet they managed to thrive, attaining and sustaining prosperity and high educational levels with no assistance from the government whatsoever!
They were by no means special; ample evidence, well-known to readers here, shows that this is the general pattern of most pre-1960s immigration.
WHY do pro-immigrationists today insist on conflating these earlier immigrants with those of today? Why do so many well-meaning people go along with what is, on its face, patently absurd reasoning?
First, he was English-American
ReplyDelete--
WOW. You dont see that too often anymore....
All we have to do to make up for the harm that the children of unskilled illegal immigration do to overwhelmed public schools is to Fix The Public Schools!
ReplyDelete--
And GOOD LUCK with that!
The "sancuarty" city of Chicago, IL is so bad off with thier finances, they are laying off teachers increasing class sizes.
Dutch Boy said...
ReplyDeleteA country with 10%+ unemployment and an economy in long-term decline doesn't need immigrants no matter their IQ or provenance.
7/05/2010
--
But, Democrat pols need the voters, and low IQ's are preferred.
watch the vid
ReplyDeletehttp://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/06/29/congressman-says-borders-secure/
Rep. Stark Mocks Border Security Advocates: Who Are You Going to Kill Today?
Steve, I think you hit the nail on the head. The Bush-Walker clan have, for generations, been very focused on building an enduring dynasty. Read Kevin Phillips' book "American Dynasty" for more details on this. Bringing in a large Mexican-Latino electorate that identifies with the Bush famiy is very good politics, from the perpective of the Bushes, as it sets up future generations Bushes (George P, etc.) to have a vote bank.
ReplyDeleteWhen you get right down to it, my sense is that the Bushes are a lot like the Kennedys or Bill Clinton. They don't have much in term of core ideology, but they're competent wheelers and dealers. They also have a strong long standing relationship with Mexican elites and ordinary Mexicans, not to mention Mexican-American youngsters in the family. So an open border, mass migration, and more trade and business ties is good for them from a politcal, business, and personal angle.
"We need that kind of neo-nationalism against the globocracy where American elites feel closer to the elites of other countries than with their own people.'
ReplyDeletegood idea 40 years too late.This country is changed forever. Now, the gov't is worried about getting a better relationship between NASA and Muslims.
good idea 40 years too late.This country is changed forever. Now, the gov't is worried about getting a better relationship between NASA and Muslims.
ReplyDeleteTo deport 'em to the moon?
"Steve, I think you hit the nail on the head. The Bush-Walker clan have, for generations, been very focused on building an enduring dynasty."
ReplyDeleteI don't think it's gonna work. Jeb Bush's not-too-bright 'little brown one' forgot parts of his speech at the 92 campaign.
Benjamin Franklin is The Web’s Most Wanted Benjamin!
ReplyDelete(Check your score for your name too.)
More raw data is here.
Baby Names Alert.
ot but having to do with ben franklin:
ReplyDeleteAmerica's first lending library, organized by Benjamin Franklin, went into operation in Philadelphia on Nov. 8, 1731.
(^_^)