July 24, 2010

Harry Truman on Illegal Immigration

 A friend points out how much more intellectually sophisticated was Harry Truman's view on illegal immigration in 1951 than is the conventional wisdom of Washington today:
Harry Truman wrote one reasonably long statement on illegal immigration. He wrote it in the context of signing, with explicit reservations, S. 984 on June 13, 1951 [to authorize guest farmworkers; this was during worst of the fighting of the Korean War.] The contents are interesting. It is quite clear that Truman opposed illegal immigration and supported deporting illegal aliens, both on principle and to stop new illegals from entering. A few quotes
"During and since the last war, the recurrent shortages of farm labor in the United States have made the addition of contract workers from Mexico a vital factor in bringing in the crops. Last year, for example, 70,000 Mexican workers were legally admitted to this country for contract work during the harvesting season."

The bolding is mine. We have an estimated 11 million illegals. Then as now, the actual need for migrant labor in agriculture is tiny compared to the number of illegals.
"But this is very limited progress, which hardly touches our basic farm labor problems. The really crucial point, which this Act scarcely faces, is the steady stream of illegal immigrants from Mexico, the so-called "wetbacks", who cross the Rio Grande or the western stretches of our long border, in search of employment. These people are coming into our country in phenomenal numbers--and at an increasing rate. Last year 500,000 illegal immigrants were apprehended and returned to Mexico. In 1949, less than 300,000 were returned."

"And many of them are exploited, I regret to say, and are left in abject poverty. They live always under the threat of exposure and deportation. They are unable, therefore, to protest or to protect themselves."

"The presence of these illegal workers has a seriously depressing effect on wages and working conditions in farm areas throughout the southwest. The standards of living and job opportunities of American farm workers are under constant downward pressure. Thousands of our own citizens, particularly those of Latin descent, are displaced from employment or forced to work under substandard conditions because of the competition of these illegal immigrants."

Truman held to quaint notions of supply and demand.
"Shall we continue indefinitely to have low work standards and conditions of employment in agriculture thus depending on the underprivileged and the unfortunate at home and abroad to supply and replenish our seasonal and migratory work force? Or shall we do in agriculture what we already have done in other sectors of our economy-create honest-to-goodness jobs which will offer a decent living so that domestic workers, without being forced by dire necessity, will be willing to stay in agriculture and become a dependable labor supply? Just as farm employers want able and willing workers when needed, so do workers want reliable jobs which yield a fair living. Neither is being satisfied."

Truman believed that the problem could be solved by paying American workers higher wages.
"It is absolutely impossible, without the expenditure of very large amounts of manpower and money, to seal off our long land borders to all illegal immigration. But these three actions by the Congress will give us the tools we need to find and deport illegal immigrants once here and to discourage those of our own citizens who are aiding and abetting their movement into the country."

"If we are to begin to meet the basic problem, we must do two things right away. First, we must put a stop to the employment of illegal immigrants.

First, legislation should be enacted providing punishment for the offense of harboring or concealing aliens who have entered this country illegally.

Second, legislation should be enacted to clearly establish the authority of personnel of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to inspect places of employment, without a warrant, where they have reason to believe that illegal immigrants are working or quartered. Immigration inspectors are able to cope with known illegal immigrants by obtaining warrants for their arrest.

Third, a supplemental appropriation should be made available immediately to the Immigration and Naturalization Service to expand its personnel in the southwest so that all types of enforcement work can be stepped up--including apprehension, investigation, and deportation of illegal entrants."

"It is absolutely impossible, without the expenditure of very large amounts of manpower and money, to seal off our long land borders to all illegal immigration. But these three actions by the Congress will give us the tools we need to find and deport illegal immigrants once here and to discourage those of our own citizens who are aiding and abetting their movement into the country.

After the Korean War emergency, a series of good government reforms following the principles outlined by Truman reduced the number of Mexican nationals in America doing farm labor -- such as Eisenhower deporting a huge number and the end of the bracero program in 1964 under LBJ following Edward R. Murrow's "Harvest of Shame" documentary. This reduced supply of labor allowed the fiercely anti-immigration labor union leader Cesar Chavez (see my 2006 article "Cesar Chavez, Minuteman") to win higher wages for farmworkers beginning in 1965, gains that were washed away by the flood of illegal aliens from the early 1980s onward.

Of course, all that history has been shoved down the memory hole, with Chavez having been recast as the patron saint of the Reconquista. In the modern liberal mind, race is vastly more important than class, so all these liberal heroes' actual views are inconceivable.

62 comments:

  1. The right thinks low wages are good, don't they? Don't high wages kill jobs according to them or is that just the min wage? Do we want the invasion to continue or pay a little more for our some of our services?

    ReplyDelete
  2. This reduced supply of labor allowed the fiercely anti-immigration labor union leader Cesar Chavez to win higher wages for farmworkers beginning in 1965.

    It's no criticism of Chavez, but I wonder if an opposition to mass immigration based on wages & working conditions may be a little bit self-defeating. Chavez's success made America seem all the more appealing to Mexicans and Central Americans. Perhaps the forbidden fruit isn't more appealing just because of "reverse psychology" reasons, but also because of it is forbidden to others, it will be fresher and more intact.

    Surely the answer is to base opposition to immigration less on materialistic concerns and more on nationalism.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Conservative7/24/10, 3:48 PM

    Back then, most of the elites liked our country and were invested in seeing it prosper into the future. These days, being a "global citizen" (ie a rootless cosmopolitan with no apparent loyalties) is in vogue. So taking a negative view towards illegal immigration is seen as unhip and therefore unacceptable. These days, Tancredo and Buchanan are hopeless bigots, while illegal alien Juan Chanax and Ted Kennedy are apparently what this society is all about.

    These days, being a universal altruist gets you high marks from our elite. So, if you're an ambitious politician that wants good media coverage and establishment support, it makes sense to be for unrestricted immigration.

    Also, the large number of well-organized, monied interests, backing high levels of legal and illegal immigration, make it lucrative to be against borderr security. Look at how little money JD Hayworth has been able to raise to unseat Senator John McAmnesty, who has brought in 10x the contributions of Hayworth.

    I would also add that, to whateve extent patriotic energy does exist among our elite, it gets channeled into supporting the football team at the kid's high school or the local State U. Not changing national policies.

    Fortunately, there is a group of highly affluent and influential patriots that are vociferous in their love of country, ethnonalism, and upholding of Western culture. Unfortunately, most of that patriotism and civic pride is directed to a small country thousands of miles away.

    ReplyDelete
  4. False "rightwing" movements like Neo-Conservatism and Libertarianism think low wages are good.

    Paleo-Conservatives think no such thing.

    ReplyDelete
  5. The right thinks low wages are good, don't they? Don't high wages kill jobs according to them or is that just the min wage? Do we want the invasion to continue or pay a little more for our some of our services?

    At a certain point doesn't lack of demand become a problem? If high wages kill jobs, won't too low wages kill demand?

    ReplyDelete
  6. "During and since the last war, the recurrent shortages of farm labor in the United States have made the addition of contract workers from Mexico a vital factor in bringing in the crops. Last year, for example, 70,000 Mexican workers were legally admitted to this country for contract work during the harvesting season."

    I am generally an admirer of Mr. Truman, but I would have been more impressed had he said that the phenomenon is a signal that our growers ought to devote their lands to crops whose cultivation is less labor intensive.

    And the solution is not artificially raising the cost of labor. One can make a case that great injury was done to the labor market during the Depression with high minimum wages, adversarial trade unionism, and (for a time) NIRA standards and charters.

    While we were in the business of building an enormous peace time military, erecting a global network of alliances, and clocking the reds in regional wars, we might have devoted some resources to sealing that border.

    ReplyDelete
  7. "Netanyahu: 'America is a thing you can move very easily'"

    http://www.redress.cc/palestine/jcook20100724

    ReplyDelete
  8. The unemployment rate in June, 1951 was 3.2%

    ReplyDelete
  9. The right thinks low wages are good, don't they?

    No.

    Don't high wages kill jobs according to them

    No.

    That's not to say that the government should mandate high wages, as with minimum wage laws. But government should not lower wages either. Wages are none of the governments business, under a conservative political philosophy.

    ReplyDelete
  10. If we are to begin to meet the basic problem, we must do two things right away. First, we must put a stop to the employment of illegal immigrants.

    First, legislation should be enacted providing punishment for the offense of harboring or concealing aliens who have entered this country illegally.

    Second, legislation should be enacted to clearly establish the authority of personnel of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to inspect places of employment, without a warrant, where they have reason to believe that illegal immigrants are working or quartered. Immigration inspectors are able to cope with known illegal immigrants by obtaining warrants for their arrest.


    Third, a supplemental appropriation should be made available immediately to the Immigration and Naturalization Service to expand its personnel in the southwest so that all types of enforcement work can be stepped up--including apprehension, investigation, and deportation of illegal entrants."



    You could write these exact same words today with equal truth.

    Back in the 1990's the bipartisan "Jordan Commission" was tasked with making recommendations about immigration. It said basically what Truman said.

    So the interesting question is, given that the US government has known what it should do for the last sixty years, how comes it never does it?

    ReplyDelete
  11. The right thinks low wages are good, don't they?

    No.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Your silence on this week's big racial news story has been conspicuous.

    ReplyDelete
  13. I support Reconquista.

    You have stolen this land.

    We want it back.

    Why do you find that so offensive?

    ReplyDelete
  14. in 1950, it was impossible, even with the expenditure of very large amounts of money and manpower, to get a spacecraft from the surface of the earth to the surface of the moon. it took a nazi scientist over a decade to accomplish this feat for the US.

    it's 2010 now. technology is vastly superior to 1950. the US government can secure the border with mexico, to whatever level of security is desired, and it can do it for only 15 billion dollars or so. indeed, israel, which the US seems to be so interested in, has offered to help the US secure it's border with mexico, as israeli engineers are experts at building walls that work.

    loud mouth lawyers are not engineers, and do not build walls for a living, so we would all be wise to ignore their bullshit about how something the engineers know would work, would not work. funny how if it is part of their political agenda, the loud mouth lawyers have a "can do" attitude and want the engineers and scientists to "get right on it", but when it's not part of their agenda, they'll inform us that they know better than the people who do this stuff for a living. loud mouth democrat lawyers want engineers to eliminate all oil consumption, which the engineers cannot do, but at the same time say the border cannot be secured, something which the engineers can do.

    15 billion dollars is less than the US government spends on iraq every single year. in fact, the US government has been spending billions and billions of dollars securing the border of south korea for decades, and is only a year or two away from a full decade spent on securing the borders of afghanistan.

    US firm ratheon has for a while now been helping saudi arabia secure it's entire border with iraq, so border security could be privatized no problem, the way highway management and even package delivery have been privatized.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Conservative -- Jews don't like Israel, for the most part. Sarah Silverman, Stephen Speilberg, JJ Abrams, just to name a few, all spoke out in favor of Hamas and against Israel, and support Barack Hussein Obama, perhaps the most anti-Israeli President since Ike. American Jews are SWPL to the core. Their very affluence makes them vulnerable to it.

    The WSJ and a few other folks (Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch) think low wages are good, but neither Gates nor Murdoch are exactly "right." They may not be overt communists like Van Jones, but they are hardly men of the right.

    ReplyDelete
  16. You can trust Whiskey, guys. He's Scotch-Irish.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Whiskey, I'm sure a large segment of Jewish-Americans are SWPL, especially if they like Obama. My reference was to the neoconservatives (some of them are non-Jewish), who are a very influential group of people in the NYC-DC axis. I'm glad to see them defend Israel's right to existence vociferously, but then they turn around and denounce border security in the US. My preference would be to defend the borders of both countries.

    To give an example, take Rahm Emmanuel or AIPAC. Tough on Israeli security, but for an amnesty for illegals. Completely disappointing and something that has the potential to alienate conservatives.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Just why are today's mainstream economists so deaf to the law of supply and demand and insist - to the point of mania - that unlimited, uncontrolled immigration somehow 'benefits' American workers?
    It's also interesting to note that a presiident from 60 years ago was far more enlightened on the issue of workers' welfare than any of today's incumbents.
    Wasn't the general idea that progress in such matters was always a function of history and more development and education?

    ReplyDelete
  19. Israel are building a fence across Sinai.

    "The government held a special session this morning on various issues connected with illegal immigration. Disappointment, directed mainly at Defense Minister Ehud Barak, was expressed at the fact that construction of the fence between Egypt and Israel would begin only in November.

    The purpose of the fence is to block African infiltrators making their way into Israel via the Sinai Desert. Public Security Minister Yitzchak Aharonovitch says there are some 150,000 illegal infiltrators, only 16 percent of whom are registered and known to the authorities."


    A UK politician simply couldn't get away with some of the language used in the debate over there.

    India have built a fence across Kashmir, and are fencing off the Bangladeshi border.

    "The barrier is just under three meters high with the aim to stop infiltration of terrorists, prevent smuggling, and to prevent large scale illegal immigration from Bangladesh into neighbouring states. Under the former government of Khaleda Zia and the Islamic extremist Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh troops clashed with the Indian Border Security Force in an attempt to prevent fencing. Some indigenous Assamese fear that they, as a people, will be reduced to a minority if unabated infiltration continues."

    PS - Steve, you really need to do a post (and keep a permanent link to it on your front page) showing commenters how to do links in html.
    Blogger truncates links longer than (I think) 50 characters, and lots of people post stuff that can never be found because the last section of a lengthy url is missing.

    ReplyDelete
  20. "Conservative -- Jews don't like Israel, for the most part. Sarah Silverman, Stephen Speilberg, JJ Abrams, just to name a few, all spoke out in favor of Hamas and against Israel, and support Barack Hussein Obama, perhaps the most anti-Israeli President since Ike. American Jews are SWPL to the core. Their very affluence makes them vulnerable to it."

    http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2009_01_01_archive.html

    "Percent who really like Israel
    Jews 90.4
    All Americans 34.0"

    http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2007_06_01_archive.html

    "Like Israel very much
    Elite Jews 39.4
    All elite Americans 9.3
    Jews 60.8
    All Americans 11.7"

    Not particularly different and there's a small sample size (16 Jews, overall sample of 820), and this is all as of 1991, but the pattern here doesn't suggest this. You could say that the 10% remaining don't like Israel, but digging down deeper into the GSS (through the web application) just shows them largely to still like Israel just less. I will say that the same proportion of people with extremely strong dislike for Israel was in both groups, even though it was a vast minority.

    ReplyDelete
  21. "My reference was to the neoconservatives (some of them are non-Jewish), who are a very influential group of people in the NYC-DC axis. I'm glad to see them defend Israel's right to existence vociferously, but then they turn around and denounce border security in the US."

    Which ones? I know JPod's in favor of immigration, but Frum's against it...

    ReplyDelete
  22. How about we start a "send illegal immigrants to Israel" campaign? Mayor Bloomberg(my dictator, uh I mean "mayor", since he's serving an illegal third term) seems to love them so much(http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2010/04/28/2010-04-28_how_arizonas_law_will_hurt_america_mayor_michael_bloomberg_assails_the_new_immig.html). Bloomberg is the guy who attacks Arizona for trying to defend itself from invaders, while supporting Israel's attacks on Gaza, Lebanon and even the Flotilla raid and other Israeli self-preservation policies.

    While I think Israel may have gone a little overboard in response to enemy attacks, I do believe it has the right to exist, the right to defend itself, the right to build a wall around its country and the right to have a Jews-only immigration policy.

    Of course, if I were to follow Mike Bloomberg's ideology, I would have to believe that Israel should have open borders, should have no right to check the immigration status of people living in Israel, shouldn't be building a wall to keep out foreigners, should allow the right-of-return for Palestinians displaced in 1948, etc. Oh but wait a minute, but he does NOT support these things... is this the same Mike Bloomberg or are these two totally different people?

    I'm sorry, I'm so dumb, I didn't realize the Mike Bloomberg who supports allowing all the illegal immigrants in Arizona to come to NY and also supports Israel's border and military policies are NOT the same person.

    Must be a real challenge being a friend or close associate of Mayor Bloomberg(or living under his dictatorship), so rich and so powerful, yet afflicted with an extreme version of multiple personality disorder(one is an extreme liberal-altruist cosmopolitan, the other an extreme, intolerant ethnic nationalist!). Talk about eccentric billionaire - Howard Hughes couldn't hold a candle to Mike Bloomberg!

    p.s - I can't wait for the movie to come out.

    ReplyDelete
  23. Mr Truman's statements ooze common sense.

    But perhaps it is worth pointing out that despite his renown for Plain Speaking, the regime now known as 'political correctness' was, for all practical purposes, unheard of back then, and being a politician it is not clear what he might have said had PC been as firmly established and viciously enforced then as it is today.

    ReplyDelete
  24. Laban: Blogger truncates links longer than (I think) 50 characters, and lots of people post stuff that can never be found because the last section of a lengthy url is missing.

    The rest of the URL is usually there - you just need to copy on down for another line or so, then and paste the result into a word processor [and if you have really good copy-n-paste skillz, then you don't even need the word processor as an intermediary].

    But I do agree that the "blogger/blogspot" software package is just phenomenally sucky.

    Especially considering that it's owned by Google, which has [or ought to have] just about limitless resources for maintaining & perfecting their various software platforms.

    ReplyDelete
  25. Laban said..."Steve, you really need to do a post (and keep a permanent link to it on your front page) showing commenters how to do links in html."

    I would love that. I believe it was Captain Jack Aubrey who, with mixed kindness and exasperation, posted a link to a page of html how-to's. Try as I might, though, I couldn't follow the instructions successfully. Usually, I can only understand how to do things if shown, by example or illustration. But if anyone could give verbal instructions I could understand, it would be Steve.

    ReplyDelete
  26. The most striking thing to me in this entry was the first sentence:

    "A friend points out how much more intellectually sophisticated was Harry Truman's view on illegal immigration in 1951 than is the conventional wisdom of Washington today..."

    Yes, the dumbing-down of America has not been confined to the classroom. People in all walks of life now routinely and unabashedly say the stupidest things. The only lesson most seem to have imbibed is racism/white=bad, non-racism, people of color=good. All else flows from that.

    Of course, in an egalitarian society, there is no room for intellectual sophistication. Jettison that, replace it with a few vague but potent slogans (e.g., discrimination is bad or Hope and Change) and you've got the people right where you want them, dumb and malleable.

    Wonderful.

    By the way, on my screen, Truman's first name appears to have an extra "r". I hope it does, anyway; my eyesight is notoriously poor (too poor even for me to have lasik surgery) and I hate to think it's getting worse.

    ReplyDelete
  27. Truman believed that the problem could be solved by paying American workers higher wages.

    ReplyDelete

  28. Blogger truncates links longer than (I think) 50 characters, and lots of people post stuff that can never be found because the last section of a lengthy url is missing.

    Those links can be found, but you gotta have skillz. Just left click at the beginning of the link, hold the button down, and sweep a little bit towards to the right, then sweep DOWN but stop before you highlight the next line. This will highlight the whole link, even the part you cannot see. Then right-click and select Copy. and paste this text into the URL bar of your browser.

    But you are right, people should learn how to post a link:

    instructions

    ReplyDelete
  29. Just why are today's mainstream economists so deaf to the law of supply and demand and insist - to the point of mania - that unlimited, uncontrolled immigration somehow 'benefits' American workers?

    I think you have confounded 'mainstream economists' with the editorial staff of the Wall Street Journal and Reason. George Borjas, who is perhaps the most eminent economists who studies immigration, is not an advocate of uncontrolled immigration.

    Economics has something to say about immigration (that there are some small benefits which accrue to the host country from free trade in factors of production). The thing is, immigration has implications in the realm of the sociological, the political, and the philosophical. None of these are in the economists' book.

    What do you need to seal the border? Cement, razor wire, search lights, rifles and dart guns, trucks, and about 30,000 troops. I am fairly sure these technologies were in existence in 1950. Keep in mind that during the inter-war period, military expenditure as a share of domestic product was somewhere in the neighborhood of 1%. During the period from 1949 to the present, it has varied between 3.5% and 10.5% and was at its peak in the run of years just after Mr. Truman's message. The resources were there to seal the border; the political will was not (and is not).

    ReplyDelete
  30. I support Reconquista.

    You have stolen this land.

    We want it back.

    Why do you find that so offensive?


    For the record, the population in that swatch of territory north of the Rio Grande consisted largely of aboriginals with no particular affinity for Mexican society. Mexican peninsulares, criollos, mestizos, and mission Indians in Texas in 1836 was about 3,000 and they were outnumbered by Anglophone settlers from the States by a margin of 3 to 1. The demographic balance of the settler population in Santa Fe and in California was more in favor of hispanophones from the south, but in all the number of Mexicans (rightly understood) in these territories was in the low five figures. (My home town was incorporated in 1833 with 14,000 residents, by the way). The territory was only deemed 'Mexican' by virtue of diplomatic courtesy.

    ReplyDelete
  31. There is great clarity of thought and language in those quotes from Truman.

    Here in Britain today none of our politicians can express themselves in such forthright terms. The idea that they should stick up for their own people seems lost in word games and doublethink.

    Sadly, from what I've read on iSteve and elsewhere, it seems that's also now the case in the USA. I hope I'm wrong.

    ReplyDelete
  32. @Laban,

    Thanks for the info on the India-Bangladeshi fence. I googled it and found a good entry at wikipedia on the Indo-Bangladeshi barrier.

    This type of information is good to have and disseminate. I had never heard of this fencing project.

    The open border crowd is always telling us that fences are passe, don't work and only authoritarian regimes build them. Learning that India, the world's largest democracy, is building a 4000 km (2480 mile) barrier is heartening because it shows there are still nations out there that care about their borders.

    From the wiki entry: In a construction project that will eventually reach 4,000 kilometres (2,500 mi), the barrier itself will be a barbed wire and concrete fence. Sections of the barrier totaling about 2,490 kilometres (1,550 mi) have been built over the past seven years. There is no clear completion date for the US $1.2 billion project yet. The barrier when complete will be patrolled by the Border Security Force.

    In other words their 4000 km barrier is approximately 2500 miles which is comparable to our border with Mexico. The open border crowd always pounce on references to the Israeli fence because it is so small. But this barrier is very similar to what could be done in the US. Also, the cost, $1.2 billion, is not too high. In fact even if it were to cost 4 times as much here, that still puts the cost at $5 billion which is about the cost of one month's waste in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    I think folks need to start confronting their members of Congress with this information and ask them why the US can't do a civil engineering project that the Indians can.

    ReplyDelete
  33. "The right thinks low wages are good"

    The right is bigger than the Chamber of Commerce.

    ReplyDelete
  34. "Anonymous said...

    I support Reconquista.

    You have stolen this land.

    We want it back.

    Why do you find that so offensive?"

    We didn't steal this land from you, so you have no right to it. And by what right do mexicans claim California and the southwestern states? Because Mexico inherited it from Spain? How did Spain get that land? They stole it from the indians. Mexico's claim to our land is based on nothing more than the receipt of stolen property. You have no more legitimate claim on Los Angeles, than does Spain have on Mexico City.

    And if Mexico had kept California, it would always have been a s**thole, just as it is now becoming a s**thole with the mass immigration of mexicans.

    ReplyDelete
  35. Steve Sailer--a legend in his own mind.

    Pretty laughable to claim influence on so many people.

    ReplyDelete
  36. Steve Sailer--a legend in his own mind.

    Pretty laughable to claim influence on so many people.


    He made you post a comment, didn't he, Brainiac?

    ReplyDelete
  37. Learning that India, the world's largest democracy, is building a 4000 km (2480 mile) barrier is heartening because it shows there are still nations out there that care about their borders.

    Its also good in a secondary negative way.

    You can also use it wave in the faces of SWPLs to prove that by their lights India is not democratic (by their standards). In their eyes Indian democracy is better than white people's democracy, it must be because its non-whites who are doing all the voting.

    ReplyDelete
  38. ... by what right do mexicans claim California and the southwestern states? Because Mexico inherited it from Spain? How did Spain get that land? They stole it from the indians. Mexico's claim to our land is based on nothing more than the receipt of stolen property. Mr. Anon.

    Another basis for a claim would be, how the latter-day regime treats descendants of the earlier inhabitants. So, how do Amerindians in the US fare economically, educationally, etc., compared to aboriginal Meso-Americans in Mexico? I'm too lazy to dig up the statistics myself, especially since it's not like El Presidente is going to show up and apologize for being full of it.

    Beyond economic statistics, it would be interesting to see if any non-Spanish-speaking tribes in Mexico have any real autonomy. I couldn't begin to guess.

    ReplyDelete
  39. I believe it was Captain Jack Aubrey who, with mixed kindness and exasperation, posted a link to a page of html how-to's. Try as I might, though, I couldn't follow the instructions successfully. Usually, I can only understand how to do things if shown, by example or illustration. But if anyone could give verbal instructions I could understand, it would be Steve.

    Do not despair, Kylie. Like you, I learn through imitation, and have noted that most HTML tutorials are useful only for Asperger's sufferers.

    Happily, one day I visited a website devoted to the writings of Cormac McCarthy, America’s best novelist (Udolpho, should you dare attempt to give me another wedgie after gym class for pointing out this self-evident truth, then please note that since our last encounter I have been assiduously studying the manly art of fisticuffs, sirrah, and shall give you the sound thrashing that you deserve), and stumbled across very clear, succinct, non-technical instructions on how to create a hyperlink. Click here, then scroll down to where it says A Few Pointers. Everything that you need to know, plus directions on how to use boldface and italics in your posts, is right there. Trust me on this

    ReplyDelete
  40. Conservative7/25/10, 2:19 PM

    Tamar Jacoby and a lot of the WSJ crows are open-borders neoconservatives.

    I think there is starting to be a shift among the Jewish neoconservatives, toward a more restrictionist position. I think this is partly a reflection of electoral realities, but also shows a realization that lots of Muslim immigrants are anti-semitic and anti-Israel. As Jewish people, it's not in their interest to have lots of angry young Muslim men around them.

    France saw some pretty nasty anti-semitic attacks against Jewish Synagogues, by Muslim Arab and black youth, a few years back. Sweden is seeing Jewish residents flee anti-semitism in Malmo, a city with many Muslim immigrants. Germany recently witnessed an attack on Jewish kids, celebrating one of the Jewish holidays, by Arab immigrant youth.

    There's also an issue of Muslim swing voters, mainly in Europe, tilting many EU nations against Israel.

    If you're a neoconservative and love Israel and Jewish people, mass immigration is not good. The key to a sensible immigration policy is getting a lot of these powerful Jewish lobbying organizations and neoconservativa intelligensia to understand this. Once they're on board, I think our side will be in a much more formidable position.

    By the way..... PM Sarkozy of France, who is a religious Jewish person with some neoconservative-type views, pushed through quite a bit of immigration restriction in his own country and attempted, but failed, to institute a EU-wide immigration decrease. I don't know why he did that, but I bet him being Jewish and living among a large and often anti-semitic Muslim immigrant population may have swayed him.

    For all its faults, the UK Tories are much better than American Republicans on immigration. I'd trade John McCain and Michael Steele for David Cameron and Damian Green.

    ReplyDelete
  41. The right thinks low wages are good, don't they? Don't high wages kill jobs according to them or is that just the min wage? Do we want the invasion to continue or pay a little more for our some of our services?

    Depends on who you're referring to as "the right." Immigration restrictionists? No. They're populists, generally, and they hate the big businesses that are corrupting the process.

    Libertarians? Sure, they seem hip deep in big business' pocket (gratis!).

    Republican establishment? Sure.

    My take on capitalism is nationalist. Don't want to pay citizens living wages? Then go somewhere else and do business. And that doesn't mean you get to offshore your operations and but remain in our country in the senses that suit you. That means you $%@! off altogether. Have fun selling your cheap Chinese products to the Chinese. That means if your big investment is in India, then you live in India, or somewhere other than my country. Et cetera. Globalists are freeloaders.

    ReplyDelete
  42. Conservative -- Jews don't like Israel, for the most part. Sarah Silverman, Stephen Speilberg, JJ Abrams, just to name a few, all spoke out in favor of Hamas and against Israel, and support Barack Hussein Obama, perhaps the most anti-Israeli President since Ike.

    (Authoritarian, Incurious, Obsessed, Deceptive)

    See, if my brother goes on a ten state killing spree and I don't smile and offer him a bed for the night when he shows up on my doorstep all covered in blood, I don't like my brother.

    ReplyDelete
  43. One big reason our government has been so keen on a "virtual" fence is that it would be easily reversible. Anytime the government chose to flick off the switch, the fence would cease to work in the slightest.

    A real fence would be a big problem for the pro-illegals because it would force illegals, drug runners, and the rest to use very predictible paths to get across the border. That in turn would make it very simple to lay ambushes for the ones that did try to cross.

    A fence would also make it harder to go back across. A lot of drug dealers will scurry back if they encounter law enforcement on this side. If you know which hole they have to run back through it makes it much easier to cut them off.

    I once spoke with a local police officer at a community safety chat. He made the comment that it takes law enforcement 4 - 5 man hours to process an arrested drunk driver. He needs to be aprehended, booked, driven to the clink, the officer needs to write a report, go to court, etc. In town where there are sometimes only 2 cops on duty (sunday night) that can literally reduce the size of the police force by 50%. A similar pattern occurs with illegals. As long as the border patrol is spending all of its time catching the same guy 15 times and then releasing him again and again nothing ever gets done.

    In short, a real fence would not only lower the number of illegals that attempt to enter, it will allow the border patrol to be more aggressive in handling the ones that do cross.

    ReplyDelete
  44. Here I'm just surprised the crowd here hasn't commented on the fact that the guy who stabbed the other dude in the eye with a pen at Comic Con was a black nerd in a Harry Potter shirt. I'm sure someone can work that into an NAM unified field theory if he tried.

    ReplyDelete
  45. Off topic, but concerns two Steve Sailer's subjects: NY Times Mag, and Will Saletan. (and women, come to think of it)

    "And here's where it gets icky."

    Yeah, Saletan actually wrote that.

    http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/humannature/archive/2009/01/26/rape-fantasies-and-female-arousal.aspx?obref=obnetwork

    Times article (suprisingly brave)

    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/magazine/25desire-t.html

    Icky!

    ReplyDelete
  46. For the record, the population in that swatch of territory north of the Rio Grande consisted largely of aboriginals with no particular affinity for Mexican society.

    In 1850, two years after the end of the war (and after the Gold Rush had begun), the total population of the territory ceded by Mexico, which would go on to form all or part of 6 of our largest states, was less than 170,000. By contrast Alabama alone had nearly 800,000 people. About half of them were English speaking Americans.

    ReplyDelete
  47. In Firefox, if you just double or triple click (I forget which, and my mouse isn't working right ATM; I think it's double) the text of the link, it will all be selected (even if you don't think it is), and you can right click and copy it to clipboard.

    Hyperlinks:

    [a href="X"]Y[/a]

    X is the address (best to go with full address) of the page you want to link to. Y is the text you want displayed.

    E.g.:

    [a href="http://www.blogger.com"]This is my handy dandy hyperlink![/a]

    The only trick is, I used [ and ] for the purposes of illustration because otherwise Blogger would read them as HTML code and hide the text. You have to replace them with < and >.

    If you replace the [ and ] in the above example with < and > you get:

    This is my handy dandy hyperlink!

    HTML is very simple. The trick is to find a site that explains it well, which I remember took a bit of doing. But once you do, you'll be writing HTML in an hour.

    ReplyDelete
  48. [i]Steve Sailer--a legend in his own mind.

    Pretty laughable to claim influence on so many people.[/i]

    Well, it would be a fair criticism if people like Steve Sailer weren't actually rare.

    Look around the web, and you'll find scores of hugely popular celebrity-oriented websites, mommy blogs, home improvement blogs, etc.

    However, you really won't find much quite like isteve.

    Guys like Steve are hardly a dime a dozen, so I think he's right about the influence. In certain matters, it really is a small world.

    ReplyDelete
  49. 'Pretty laughable to claim influence on so many people'

    Steve does very little self promotion considering the quality of his work.
    Your comment just proves that common sense and the appreciation of it ain't that common.

    ReplyDelete
  50. I support Reconquista.

    You have stolen this land.


    Unless you're an Apache, this is meaningless gibberish. The only people stealing land these days are you mestizos.

    ReplyDelete
  51. I have another persepective: we Americans stole the Southwest, and we're damn well going to keep it!

    ReplyDelete
  52. Google "a href" to see examples of how to create hyper-links.

    ReplyDelete
  53. For a really simple way to see how an HTML link or any other HTML code is generated simply go to the menu bar and click View, then Source, then scroll down in the page to the code in question. Pretty simple really. And if you actually want people to bother clicking on your links it's worth the extra second or two of typing.

    ReplyDelete
  54. "My take on capitalism is nationalist. Don't want to pay citizens living wages? Then go somewhere else and do business. And that doesn't mean you get to offshore your operations and but remain in our country in the senses that suit you. That means you $%@! off altogether. Have fun selling your cheap Chinese products to the Chinese. That means if your big investment is in India, then you live in India, or somewhere other than my country. Et cetera. Globalists are freeloaders."

    I asked the question and agree with this answer.

    ReplyDelete
  55. Benito Juarez7/25/10, 9:53 PM

    While the US may lacked the political will, Mexico took them and added much stricter terms to form their immigration policies. From Wikipedia on Immigration to Mexico:

    "The Law of Population" is to regulate immigration as to volume, structure, and distribution. This law was written to distribute immigrants across Mexico.

    Immigration must be deemed appropriate, and assimilate to the national average and their proper distribution throughout the country. (pre-1965 US law)

    Foreign nationals are restricted when the national interest so requires.

    Immigration to urban population centers can be restricted to ensure effective delivery public services.

    The immigration of foreigners is allowed according to their potential to contribute to national progress. (Canada's point system)

    Foreigners are subject to approval concerning appropriate activities they will pursue, and the location of residence.

    Immigrants must be useful elements for the country and have the income needed for subsistence and persons under their economic dependence.

    Foreigners may be denied entry for the following reasons, if: No international reciprocity, The national demographic balance is altered, It is deemed harmful to the national economic interests, he/she has violated national law or have a poor record abroad, deemed not physically or mentally healthy.


    For a foreigner to pursue other activities in addition to those that have been expressly authorized, requires permission from the Interior Ministry.

    The authorities of the Republic, whether federal, local or municipal, as well as public notaries, are obliged to check if foreigners are legally in the country. (Arizona SB1070 law)

    The judicial authorities are required to notify the Interior Ministry of defendants of foreign descent who are being prosecuted, and sentencing handed down. (opposite of US sanctuary cities)

    ReplyDelete
  56. kudzu bob said..."Do not despair, Kylie...Click here, then scroll down to where it says A Few Pointers. Everything that you need to know, plus directions on how to use boldface and italics in your posts, is right there. Trust me on this."

    Wow, thanks a million!

    I want to visit The Cormac McCarthy Entry at the IMDb.

    I knew how to use italics and boldface but the other instructions for doing links eluded me. I think I got it this time.

    ReplyDelete
  57. Thanks people for the tip about blogger hiding the ends of long addresses but still enabling copy of the whole thing. Many a time I've cursed a truncated link - now I'll have to revisit them all...

    ReplyDelete
  58. Svigor sez:My take on capitalism is nationalist. Don't want to pay citizens living wages? Then go somewhere else and do business. And that doesn't mean you get to offshore your operations and but remain in our country in the senses that suit you. That means you $%@! off altogether. Have fun selling your cheap Chinese products to the Chinese. That means if your big investment is in India, then you live in India, or somewhere other than my country. Et cetera. Globalists are freeloaders.

    Fully agree with you. I have trouble imagining all the trophy wives going shopping in say Mumbai, or even Shangai. Even though the elite keep telling us how amazing these places are, they generally like to live on the East Coast, Paris, Monaco or Geneve.
    We are supposed to be bled dry so they can live fancy lives in Europe or the US, whilst praising the East, Africa and Mexico.

    ReplyDelete
  59. >"The right thinks low wages are good"

    >The right is bigger than the Chamber of Commerce.<

    Bigger than the WSJ, the Republican Party, and the Libertarian Party, too, eh?

    ReplyDelete
  60. Libertarians? Sure, they seem hip deep in big business' pocket (gratis!).

    Seems to me libertarians should be entirely objective on this front, neither favouring capital or labour. But, certainly online, I get the feeling they are very much in the capital camp.

    ReplyDelete
  61. "I support Reconquista.

    You have stolen this land.

    We want it back.

    Why do you find that so offensive?"

    California belongs to mestizo Mexicans because a few thousand Spaniards lived there in the 18th century? What's next, reclaiming the gulf coast because it was under Spanish (not Mexican indigenous) control for a decade or two?
    If that's the case, I support Europeans reclaiming the full extent of the former territories of the Roman Empire. The Arabs stole it, we need it back. How is that so offensive?

    ReplyDelete
  62. It is amazing that a single soul exists in America who takes David Frum's weather vane politics seriously.

    ReplyDelete

Comments are moderated, at whim.