The Washington Post reports:
Tens of thousands of would-be immigrants may be unable to move legally to the United States after the State Department said Friday that a computer glitch is forcing them to scrap the results of an annual worldwide lottery for U.S. visas.
More than 14 million applicants entered a lottery last fall for one of 50,000 visas distributed as part of the annual Diversity Visa Lottery, designed for people who would otherwise have little chance of legally entering the country. The program doesn’t require applicants to have a family or employer as a sponsor.
So, there are 280 applications for every visa?
Each year the State Department selects about 90,000 applicants and trims the list to 50,000 through an extensive series of interviews, background checks and medical exams.
The lottery has been conducted by computer since its inception in 1994, according to State Department officials.
David Donahue, deputy assistant secretary of state for visa services, said the glitch discovered earlier this month prompted the computer program to unfairly select people who submitted applications in the first two days of the 30-day application process that ended Nov. 3.
“These results are not valid because they did not represent a fair, random selection of the entrants as required by U.S. law,” Donahue said ...
So, there are 280 applications for every visa and we select them randomly? And then hand out visas for, essentially, free?
Why?
Fortunately, the article provides the answer:
Congress established the lottery program to attract immigrants from countries with lower rates of immigration to the United States. Residents of countries with larger rates of U.S. immigration — including China, El Salvador, Haiti, India and Mexico — are not eligible for the program.
You see, the intention is for immigrants to be attracted from countries that don't send as many immigrants. How could I have overlooked a simple, sensible, downright tautological explanation like that? When you think of it that way, of course the U.S. must randomly pick out one out of each 280 people who apply and give them free lifetime residency in the U.S. What else could the government do? This way, we can jumpstart chain migration from even more countries. Have you noticed how immigrants from Indonesia, population 230,000,000, haven't really begun flooding in yet,? Well, our government has a plan to fix that problem!
In fact, the government should also give each of the 900,000 winners over the last 18 years (plus their spouses, adult children, parents, and and their spouses' parents, adult children's spouses, parents' adult children, and the rest of their entourages, people of the caliber of Hesham Mohamad Hedayet) a free tour of Willie Wonka's Chocolate Factory.
It's the least we can do.
Another thing we should do for those 900,000 is have the Bureau of Engraving print up $1,000,000 in cash for each one and give it to them in Gucci suitcases. C'mon, it's just like immigration: I mean, how much does the paper and ink cost? Not much, right? It's the same thing with American residency, right? We just printed up 900,000 green cards. How much could that have cost?
In fact, the government should also give each of the 900,000 winners over the last 18 years (plus their spouses, adult children, parents, and and their spouses' parents, adult children's spouses, parents' adult children, and the rest of their entourages, people of the caliber of Hesham Mohamad Hedayet) a free tour of Willie Wonka's Chocolate Factory.
It's the least we can do.
Another thing we should do for those 900,000 is have the Bureau of Engraving print up $1,000,000 in cash for each one and give it to them in Gucci suitcases. C'mon, it's just like immigration: I mean, how much does the paper and ink cost? Not much, right? It's the same thing with American residency, right? We just printed up 900,000 green cards. How much could that have cost?
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67 comments:
Would it shock if the end result were that the people who won the scrapped lottery still get to come along with those from the new lottery, as well? After all, those people have made plans, quit jobs, sold their homes, whatever, and now we're telling them they can't come.
When a mistake like this is discovered the best thing to do is fire those responsible but stand by the results. It's a free lottery, after all, and that's a game of chance - including the chance that mistakes will be made.
The lottery itself is just a reminder that, as Derb likes to say, with immigration you must ultimately discriminate somehow. How you discriminate is simply a matter of preference. Today we favor those nearby (via illegal immigration), those with the most incentive to break the law (e.g., not First Worlders), those with educations, and those with relatives already here. Historically we favored those who looked like us. I fail to see how that form of dicrimination is worse than any other.
Today our immigration system actually discriminates the most against...native-born Americans. The result of chain migration is that those with the most say over who gets to immigrate are the immigrants themselves. If, like me, your ancestors all arrived before the Civil War (and most before the Revolution; and some on the Mayflower; and yet others via the Bering Strait) you have no close relatives to sponsor, and you haven't the cultural practice of arranged marriages.
"More than 14 million applicants"
LOL
I've entered the Diversity lottery a few times.
Compared to Europe, Canada, Australia etc the USA seems to be the hardest country for skilled migrants to legally enter.
I wish it was as easy for me to move to the US as it would be for me to move to the UK.
I doubt if the European nations send an appreciable number of emigrants to the USA anymore, the annual quota is swamped by Mexico, India, China , Philipines etc.
Also I doubt if Europeans are eligible for this 'diversity lottery' or indeed even enter.Basically western Europeans aren't interested in immigrating to the USA anymore, all things considered life is better in western Europe than the USA - medical bills are the real killer.
If you can persuade white people "diversity is good" then they'll co-operate with self-harming insanity.
In reality "diversity destroys" but while the media keep that covered up there's no feedback mechanism to stop western civilization going over a cliff.
Whilst it is roughly understandable why these sorts of people seek citizenship, since their lives can only be improved by leaving Somalia, Haiti or wherever, without being rude I can't ever imagine why anyone from any normal country --- however rotten the governance --- better would ever want to become an American. Even gross businessmen seeking the greatest market could simply reside there temporarily whilst retaining their native nationality.
Therefore if you allow these Diversity Immigrant Visa Green Card Visas handed out at all --- during a period of around 20% unemployment --- the 'Diversity' part of the official title is emphasized and unavoidable...
Perhaps we could update the adage to: 'May you live in diverse times>'...
Court: Chicago must hire 111 black firefighters
By DON BABWIN, Associated Press Don Babwin, Associated Press Fri May 13, 4:54 pm ET
CHICAGO – A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that the Chicago Fire Department must hire 111 African Americans who passed a firefighters entrance exam 16 years ago and pay millions of dollars to thousands more who took and passed the same test.
The Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling was the latest blow to the city, which has been on the losing end of court decisions regarding the 1995 test for years, including a 2005 ruling by a federal judge who said the test discriminated against black applicants and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year that the candidates did not wait too long to sue the city.
An attorney for the black firefighter candidates said that the 111 jobs would be filled from the applicants who passed the 1995 test and their pensions would be adjusted as if they'd been firefighters since 1995. And, said Joshua Karsh, 6,000 others who also passed the test will divide "tens of millions of dollars" that would have been paid 111 firefighters from 1995 until today.
"Also I doubt if Europeans are eligible for this 'diversity lottery' or indeed even enter."
The results are here. The continent with the largest number of diversity visa winners was Africa - 53% of the visas. Few African immigrants in the US, plus lots of people trying to get out = many African applicants, thus many African winners. 29% went to Europeans, with the greatest number going to Ukraine. 83% of applications from Nigeria were invalidated due to fraud. Shocking, I know. 72% of Ukrainian applications were found to be fraudulent, as well.
UK citizens were apparently ineligible (the only European country that was), as there are supposedly too many UK immigrants in the US. The founding population of this country, and they get screwed.
Congress established the lottery program to attract immigrants from countries with lower rates of immigration to the United States.
It seems obvious to me by now that immigration is supposed to be a form of American imperial patronage. Just like the granting of citizenships in the Roman Empire.
Why?
Because the world is run by children. It has always been run by children and it will always be run by children. Wisdom is merely solace and effects nothings.
The above is written without any sarcasm or judgement. It is simply the way things are.
"Why does the government do this?"
Well, leaving aside the notion (much-discussed here in many other places anyway) that there may exist sectors in society at large and in government/bureaucracy specifically, who actively desire the aggressive dilution of the historical demographic majority, I think institutional inertia probably also has a lot to do with it. That is to say, the Titanic doesn't exactly turn on a dime.
Things have changed unimaginably quickly in this country, it's probably rather hard for the institutional hive-mind to even perceive or comprehend on the most basic level. I'm still only in my mid-40s and yet already America seems almost completely unrecognizable from the country I even went to college in as a young man in just the 1980s, let alone from my childhood a mere ten years before that. The speed of the transformation has been nothing short of astonishing. Individuals are apt to get vertigo; I reckon institutions are just plain blind and/or paralyzed.
These sorts of policies probably seemed simply generous, humanly decent, a form of noblesse oblige, and kind of interesting back in 1994, when the people who made the policies were themselves already old enough that I bet an even whiter, Christian, and more homogenous America than the 1994 model existed in their own minds from their own childhoods. They probably just couldn't imagine that such a small number (50,000/year? Nothing!) could be part of a larger problem, the way the Reagan amnesty of 1986 was shrugged off as "only" a couple million. Big deal, we could absorb that much, right?
Who was it that said that America historically has been rich enough that we could afford to be stupid. Well, too late.
Now, of course, that circumstances have changed, even if the people implementing these sorts of policies actually woke up and understood the sheer madness of it all (even now, not entirely likely that they're aware of it), the sheer slowness of behemoth institutional inertia would militate against changing the policy quickly. Add in those short-sighted thinkers who've drunk the diversity kool-aid, and those who actively applaud these sorts of irreversible changes for their own ends, and if those are the folks with their hands on the steering wheel, well...
Some of them probably miscalculated, and thought they had another few generations to play around with before the problem grew to the size of an "it's them or us" existential issue. They were wrong. Others probably had/have the Chekhovian pre-1917 Russian bourgeois attitude of, "Well, as long as things stay the same in MY lifetime, I don't really care..."
When you think about it, maybe that's the real reason for today's drowning in an orgy of spending and frivolous debt. There's no tomorrow: les jeux sont deja faits. The future already belongs to a gaggle of semi-literate Mexican dishwashers and Somali "youths." What the hell, let THEM pay back the Chinese. That oughta be amusing.
"Why does the government do this?"
Well, leaving aside the notion (much-discussed here in many other places anyway) that there may exist sectors in society at large and in government/bureaucracy specifically, who actively desire the aggressive dilution of the historical demographic majority, I think institutional inertia probably also has a lot to do with it. That is to say, the Titanic doesn't exactly turn on a dime.
Things have changed unimaginably quickly in this country, it's probably rather hard for the institutional hive-mind to even perceive or comprehend on the most basic level. I'm still only in my mid-40s and yet already America seems almost completely unrecognizable from the country I even went to college in as a young man in just the 1980s, let alone from my childhood a mere ten years before that. The speed of the transformation has been nothing short of astonishing. Individuals are apt to get vertigo; I reckon institutions are just plain blind and/or paralyzed.
These sorts of policies probably seemed simply generous, humanly decent, a form of noblesse oblige, and kind of interesting back in 1994, when the people who made the policies were themselves already old enough that I bet an even whiter, Christian, and more homogenous America than the 1994 model existed in their own minds from their own childhoods. They probably just couldn't imagine that such a small number (50,000/year? Nothing!) could be part of a larger problem, the way the Reagan amnesty of 1986 was shrugged off as "only" a couple million. Big deal, we could absorb that much, right?
Who was it that said that America historically has been rich enough that we could afford to be stupid. Well, too late.
Now, of course, that circumstances have changed, even if the people implementing these sorts of policies actually woke up and understood the sheer madness of it all (even now, not entirely likely that they're aware of it), the sheer slowness of behemoth institutional inertia would militate against changing the policy quickly. Add in those short-sighted thinkers who've drunk the diversity kool-aid, and those who actively applaud these sorts of irreversible changes for their own ends, and if those are the folks with their hands on the steering wheel, well...
Some of them probably miscalculated, and thought they had another few generations to play around with before the problem grew to the size of an "it's them or us" existential issue. They were wrong. Others probably had/have the Chekhovian pre-1917 Russian bourgeois attitude of, "Well, as long as things stay the same in MY lifetime, I don't really care..."
When you think about it, maybe that's the real reason for today's drowning in an orgy of spending and frivolous debt. There's no tomorrow: les jeux sont deja faits. The future already belongs to a gaggle of semi-literate Mexican dishwashers and Somali "youths." What the hell, let THEM pay back the Chinese. That oughta be amusing.
Even the Romans had to be invaded at swordpoint to finally fall.
As for us, we're giving the country away with a smile, and not even getting anything in return.
Amy Chua's raza rising:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_theticket/20110513/ts_yblog_theticket/mensch-dan-adler-targets-minorities-with-stereotype-laden-ad
Since China (with 1/5th of the world's population) is a country counted as high immigrant the ratio must be established per country not compared to population. So everybody on Nauru, the Faroe islands or Vatican city could apply for naturalisation and they would still be low immigratiion countries. I don't know if this makes the programme more or less silly.
83% of applications from Nigeria were invalidated due to fraud.
Nigerians must be the most dishonest population of humans ever. We clearly need more of them. No reason the money from Nigerian email scams shouldn't stay in the US. You might think that email scams are a net drain, but that just means you don't understand economics. The Nigerians are just filling the market demand for fraud.
Why does the government do this?
Because they're sadist jerks.
I presume the title of this entry is a rhetorical question.
Suppose a president made an executive decision to skip the diversity lottery because of high unemployment. Would the courts compel him to do it anyway? I think Nixon successfully argued that he didn't have to spend all the money appropriated by Congress. Would be an interesting argument.
"Chain immigration" means "Chain Democratic voters". And there you have the explanation of why something silly like this would be done.
That's exactly how my clan got here from Eastern Europe. My parents went to only one short interview, and the whole family went to one physical. Oh, and in countries where inside trading and such isn't a crime, nothing is really that random. My father was pretty sure we were in when he applied mainly because the first 2 years this thing became a possibility in my country of origin, only several people and their very select friends had access to the application form. Most won just by keeping the numbers down. We had our green cards the day after we landed in O'Hare. Thanks America!
Europeans are eligible. When I was in Germany once I saw an advetisement at a bus stop for it.
Maya said, "That's exactly how my clan got here from Eastern Europe...Thanks America!"
You are the same Maya I thought you were. (I think Blogger ate our exchange from earlier this week before I got a chance to reply.) I apologize for thinking your Eastern European schtick was creepy. The fact that you say work with elementary school children, though, still makes you kind of creepy in my book. How can you hold the values you claim and be part of the American educational system? It is nothing more than left-wing indoctrination.
But I do agree with you about Roissy. He's pitiful, truly pitiful.
Oh, and don't thank Americans for your presence (and presumably good life) here. Thank the American government which in this, as in so much else, is acting against the best interests and sincere wishes of the majority of American native-born citizens.
I always thought the visa lottery was one of the dumbest acts of government. What moron cooked up this idea?
I agree with the guy who says the country is unrecognizable from the 70's and even the mid 80's. I feel like a foreigner in my area that was 99.9 percent white in the 70's.
We also have native blacks moving into the area.
I don't know why anybody from Western Europe would want to move here, although they are also going downhill fast.
Every company has to push diversity. Just look at their websites.
OT
http://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2010/04/interview-with-mark-twain.html
Maybe we should choose our leaders by lottery too.
One guess as to why they are recinding the offers that disproportionally selected the earliest filers:
The early bird applicants are probably disproportionally from high-conscience and (correlated) high-IQ groups as well as systematic scammers who were hopefully largely weeded out.
This phenomena happens in everything from school and job applications to tax filing.
Probably diverse in the undesirable sense of the word: too many whites, NE Asians and SE Asian Indians.
The diversity lottery might have done some good if it were combined with a cap on those ineligible countries.
Because if you're going to have a million immigrants in a year, far better 10,000 each from 100 different countries than half, or two-thirds, from a single place-- particularly a single snarly irredentist place.
Their diversity is our strength. Or at least much less of a weakness.
We know that under Sharia you cut off the thieves right hand. What I don't know is if Muslim's consider stealing residency and its advantages theft.
If so, on that day when Sharia is practiced on the US-Mexico border, will we lop off the hands of those caught sneaking in? It seems to me that this practice would be effective and simple to administer.
Maybe we should not be so quick to reject the ways of the Muslim.
Albertosaurus
I doubt if the European nations send an appreciable number of emigrants to the USA anymore, the annual quota is swamped by Mexico, India, China , Philipines etc.
A girl I know in Germany actually obtained a lottery visa, but then she was unsure whether to go and asked if I wanted to join her. I immediately declined, and last time I checked she still lives in Germany.
Before looking at GSS results, let's remember that the government gives the voters what they want. I know many want to blame the government instead of their fellow citizens, in the hopes of preserving a sense of national unity at least among the governed -- but that ship has long sailed.
Unity and patriotism have been dead for awhile, like 15 to 20 years, and pretending that we're all in the same boat against the blind government is not going to change that.
Anyway, there are 6 questions in the GSS that relate to immigration and that have more than one year of data, so we can see the trend over time -- although only between two years. All of them point to more favorable views of immigration since the mid-'90s. I restricted the respondents to whites only.
1. Should immigration be decreased a little or a lot? In 1994, 66.1% said so, but by 2000 only 46.4% did. (LETIN)
2. Should America take stronger measures to exclude illegal immigrants? In 1996, 49.4% agreed strongly, but by 2004 only 34.9% did. (EXCLDIMM)
3. Are immigrants generally good for America's economy? In 1996, 33.2% agreed at all, but by 2004 45.9% did. (IMMAMECO)
4. Will immigrants make it harder to keep the country united? In 1994, 72.5% thought this was somewhat or very likely, but by 2000 only 55.6% did. (IMMUNITE)
5. Do immigrants take away jobs from people born in America? In 1996, 27.9% disagreed at all, but by 2004 33.5% did. (IMMJOBS)
6. Do immigrants increase crime rates? In 1996, 35.7% disagreed at all, but by 2004 44.3% did. (IMMCRIME)
Someone else can transform those percentages into z-scores to show in standard deviations how much change there has been in so short a time.
But the larger point is clear: white Americans hold much more favorable views of immigrants than they used to, and they are wimps even about *illegal* immigration (look again at #2). The government is only giving the increasingly naive, stupid, and reckless voters what they've been asking for. Blame the victim.
Like Maya, I am an Eastern European who got my green card via the lottery. At the time I did it, the form was completely online, so perhaps the INS was by then aware that people like her were restricting applications in their home countries.
Since I've emigrated, I've paid over $150k in federal taxes, so I'm that rarity: a diversity visa recipient on whom the USG is facially cash-positive. This situation is pretty rare, obviously.
I believe Brimelow had suggested that this lottery program was created by Kennedy etc.. as a way of increasing Irish immigration to his constituency. Someone else may know better than me on this.
Could THIS be a partial explanation?
It is to disguise the fact that immigration is overwhelmingly dominated by 1 ethnic group, and even 1 national origin group.
anonymous´comment at 4:54 is right on mark. but let me add this observation.The USG is no longer the gunmint of a nation-state because nation-states are as dead as Sumer or Byzantium. whatever may be left of the historical American nation is no longer the business of the USG.
Anonymous @ 5/14/11 4:58 AM said:
Things have changed unimaginably quickly in this country, it's probably rather hard for the institutional hive-mind to even perceive or comprehend on the most basic level. I'm still only in my mid-40s and yet already America seems almost completely unrecognizable from the country I even went to college in as a young man in just the 1980s, let alone from my childhood a mere ten years before that.
Save for the part about being in your mid-40s (I have a half-decade or so headstart on you), I could have typed up this paragraph, or more accurately this entire comment, practically verbatim.
Well said, I agree 100%. Not an hour before I read this I used the term "hive-mind" in almost the identical context in a conversation with my wife, who had seen the Diversity Lottery snafu written up in the paper this morning (like most Americans of our vintage, she had no idea there was such a thing).
And I agree with Captain Jack above, you just know the 'solution' to this error will be to award a green card everyone who was mistakenly selected in the first go-round. As well as the 50K selected in the second lottery.
After all, fair is fair, right?
Tens of thousands of would-be immigrants may be unable to move legally to the United States after the State Department said Friday that a computer glitch is forcing them to scrap the results of an annual worldwide lottery for U.S. visas.
Perhaps it was an air-quotes "computer glitch"... I mean, a virus put in the system by a fed-up American. The DV lottery has been tilting more and more toward Africans anyway, and even many of the "Europeans" come from Asian countries like Turkey and Uzbekistan.
The DV lottery was originally intended in the first place as a way to get more Europeans in, but of course, they couldn't discriminate, and Africans ended up being the main beneficiary. Likewise with the 150,000 or so employment visas we give out every year, but which end up benefiting Asians.
It (and the refugee admissions program) should be scrapped, obviously. The last thing we need to do is start chain migration from rapidly-growing African countries like Nigeria.
"Before looking at GSS results, let's remember that the government gives the voters what they want"
People have been brainwashed by the schools and the media. Immigration is always glorified in this country. It's the we are all immigrants nonsense. I'll bet 30 -40% of the country is either an immigrant or a child of an immigrant. How are they going to answer those questions?
Steve, as a white diversity lottery winner who now works in Silly Valley, I would be eternally grateful if you convince the FedGov to give some of us USD1,000,000.
So grateful that I would even cut you a check for USD100 each year for the next 10 years :-)
The government does this because it hates us.
you know, Steve, you're a lottery-winner railing against other lottery-winners and potential lottery-winners.
through no merit of your own, you were born White, born in this country, and born in relative affluence.
you didn't deserve it nor were you undeserving. It just is.
Right?
Political correctness is up very signficantly since the mid 1980s. I think a lot of sentiments that could be expressed just a couple decades ago are now out of limits.
Kylie,
Surely, I can still feel grateful to the people who educated me, filled my cavities and fed me lunch even if they wish they didn't? The American government paid for it all with the money taken from the Americans, so that's who I thank.
I'm a first year teacher in a southern inner city ghetto. I love children and I wanted to give back to the country that raised me, so this seemed like a really good idea. Besides, I spent a couple of years after college teaching English in Asia and Europe, and I was good at it. Last year, my father became gravely ill, and it was time to quit stressing him out, come home and get a real career.
Teach for America sent me here. You can think whatever you want about liberals knowing the truth, but hushing it up for some reason, but I considered myself a liberal and I had no clue. My fellow Teach for America fellows came in with genuine lofty ideas, and now they get drunk and cry together. How can you know unless you encounter THIS? How can anyone imagine such a... lack of human behavior and values? I thought the neighborhood where I grew up was as bad as it gets. That's what the people I trusted told me. Everyone makes fun of the Nice White Lady stereotype, but I loved those nice American ladies. They were so nurturing and well mannered. I think the majority of us immigrant kids wanted to be American because the majority of my class grew up to be average run of the mill americans with average run of the mill american views and interests. In many ways, those American teachers in the near northern suburbs of Chicago were our most important role models. They pointed to us, to our free lunches, our section 8 apartments, our 4s and 5s on all those AP tests and our student body's rate of being accepted to good colleges and asked, "Isn't it all worth it?". Every book we read about the civil rights and racism was compared to us. Maybe I ignored some things, but there was no obvious warning that... there is no way to really describe it, but I think I now really understand "The horror! The horror!" from The Heart of Darkness. I found you by googling thins I knew I wasn't allowed to say out loud.
Kylie,
I forgot to mention that my own school district did right by me. Yes, I now understand that they were brainwashing me, but every message I got from TV and, well, everywhere else was exactly the same, so I won't blame the school entirely. Otherwise, we were tracked in every subject, so I was always learning. Discipline was never a problem because disruptive students were pulled from the classes immediately by our numerous deans. I was taught writing, history, math, French and science to such an extent that I tested into Calculus and 4th year French in college and skipped a few intro classes due to 4s on several AP tests. We read, wrote, drilled and discussed a lot in high school. Students were given the grades that they deserved. If a student flunked a class, he flunked a class. A late essay lost 10% every day. I thought I was joining something really good instead of a dirty cult.
Easter European Anonymous,
I arrived in 1995. There was no such thing as "on line" for normal people, where I came from. And "people like me" skipped rope and went to school.
My father, brother and I are all gainfully employed, and by now, most likely, we more than repaid all the kindness the US showed us.
However, tell me this, did you bring anyone with you? An elderly parent? A grandparent? If so, are they on medicaid? Reduced cost utility bills? Do they receive social security? If not, then you are a rarity.
Maya,
Why so defensive? I didn't say there was anything wrong with not being a peasant. All I meant was that the process's moving on-line made it easier for people from humble backgrounds, like me, to navigate it.
I don't think anyone here is upset about people like us coming. Even if they are, we would be their lowest priority, considering the Salvadorans, Mexicans, Nigerians, Somalis, and God only knows what else, drifting in from the four corners of the Earth like a cloud of mosquitoes. After all, however square our heads may be, or how dental our "t's", we aren't the ones robbing their kids.
-- EE anon
"Why does the government do this?"
because it can?
Why does the government do this?
Simple.
They hate our freedoms.
Since I've emigrated, I've paid over $150k in federal taxes, so I'm that rarity: a diversity visa recipient on whom the USG is facially cash-positive. This situation is pretty rare, obviously.
Not that rare, surely, since there are at least two of us commenting on this blog :-) (Except I am not eastern European)
Anon at 5:45:
>>through no merit of your own, you were born White, born in this country, and born in relative affluence.
>>you didn't deserve it nor were you undeserving. It just is.
Typical atomistic liberal thinking. As if we’re all just randomly assigned a country to live in at birth. Steve didn’t win the lottery; he got where he is through the efforts of his ancestors. Steve’s parents, grandparents, etc. worked hard, saved, and made bold and risky choices, like emigrating to America, to provide him with a comfortable life.
Anon 4:58:
>> I'm still only in my mid-40s and yet already America seems almost completely unrecognizable from the country I even went to college in as a young man in just the 1980s, let alone from my childhood a mere ten years before that.
Same here. The complexion of America has changed a lot since I was in high school in the ‘80s, 25 years ago.
Thanks to the internet, you can see artifacts from that lost world. Watch the video for ZZ Top’s “Legs,” which was a major mainstream hit in ’84. There isn’t one non-white in the whole video. The three hot chicks who are the heros of the video and bring the young lovers together, are all white. Inconceivable today. It would have to be a diverse group: one white, a black, and an Asian.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EXXZVdUJ98
EE anon,
I get defensive when it's suggested that my family was anywhere near "the top" of my country of origin because that would make them thieves and murderers. Where I come from "favors" was the currency of the professionals and skilled tradesmen. Perhaps you don't know this because you are from a more western part of Eastern Europe? Anyway, except for the very select few, everyone's salary was comparable. The motivation to become a doctor or a plumber, instead of a street sweeper wasn't the money, but the ability to trade favors. My grandfather died in Gulag, so my father had his appendix taken out with a couple of orally administered opiates, restraints and something to bite down on instead of anesthesia. He became an engineer so his future kids could be taken care of better. My sister was declared medical waste while alive and screaming because my dad was still a college student and there was no beds available in the premature baby unit. By the time my brother overturned a boiling teapot on himself, in daycare, my dad was able to expedite a case of a standard engineering service that everyone was entitled to, but millions of people weren't getting for a local plumber. The plumber was always God, everywhere, for obvious reasons, so he "found" my brother a bed in the children's burn unit. All skilled people traded favors as a rule because the government had a monopoly on all services and failed to provide them. One day my dad did a techie favor for an old classmate's cousin, and they guy handed him a form. My great grandmother was a cow milking peasant who couldn't read. Another one was an orphan and the rest died in Gulag. If you were a skilled grown up, your origins were as extravagant as my parents'.
""I'll bet 30 -40% of the country is either an immigrant or a child of an immigrant."
Then you need to go back to 2nd grade and learn how to count, idiot.
I overestimated in my quick guess. This article says it's about 25%.
http://dscriber.com/2805-almost-25-percent-of-americans-are-foreign-born-or-have-one-foreign-born-parent
Heh, this how my parents got their green card back in 1989-90. Although, they probably would have gotten one at some point regardless.
I think we've paid our dues to the country that has given us a great life; well at least my father, I'm still in college so I haven't had the opportunity to really pay taxes. Also, I am not of European heritage.
This will probably go the way of the co-ethnic perv Polanski.
14 million lottery applications for 50,000 visas? That's an equation crying out for auction process (ditto with H1-B work visas).
Maya said, "Kylie,
Surely, I can still feel grateful to the people who educated me, filled my cavities and fed me lunch even if they wish they didn't? The American government paid for it all with the money taken from the Americans, so that's who I thank."
"Taken" is the operative word here. If you want to thank the American people for choosing to pay taxes to subsidize causes they don't support rather than being persecuted by the IRS into perpetuity, then go ahead.
"I'm a first year teacher in a southern inner city ghetto."
As far as I'm concerned, that makes you part of the problem, not part of the solution.
"I love children and I wanted to give back to the country that raised me, so this seemed like a really good idea."
It's not.
"Teach for America sent me here."
You're not helping your cause any by telling me that.
" You can think whatever you want about liberals knowing the truth, but hushing it up for some reason, but I considered myself a liberal and I had no clue."
Unlike many here, I think most liberals are clueless, rather than knowingly hushing up the truth. Some come to a real awareness of the horrors of modern liberalism, as you seem to have done, but most are so far gone in their delusion that they're hopeless.
"Everyone makes fun of the Nice White Lady stereotype, but I loved those nice American ladies."
I don't. I know that just because people are ridiculous does not mean they are not also dangerous. Nice White Ladies always gave me the creeps. I don't trust anyone who enjoys the kind of rescuing nurturing they specialize in. It's fine and natural for women to nurture the young people around them. But to seek out the needy who are so unlike them and pour resources into them, to favor those different from own kith and kin is unnatural biologically. And it indicates a particularly toxic kind of narcissism, a "Look at how much I'm helping these poor black/Hispanic/foreign etc. kids!"
I realize "Maya" could be some troll yanking my chain. If so and it's been fun for you, fine. If you're for real, I wish you'd start doing something for real Americans.
"I thought I was joining something really good instead of a dirty cult."
I had it worse than you. I was raised by a type of Nice White Lady. Even seeing up close the egoism, cluelessness and essential unfairness that are the toxic by-products of modern liberalism didn't help me to reject it. I had to do that myself, in adulthood, the hard way.
Anyhoo, enough about me. Now that you know it's a dirty cult, what are you going to do?
you know, Steve, you're a lottery-winner railing against other lottery-winners and potential lottery-winners.
through no merit of your own, you were born White, born in this country, and born in relative affluence.
That doesn't make it a "lottery." Steve's dad and Steve's mom got together and had a kid. The stork had nothing to do with it.
Maybe we should choose our leaders by lottery too.
Didn't the Greeks do that back in the day?
My fellow Teach for America fellows came in with genuine lofty ideas, and now they get drunk and cry together. How can you know unless you encounter THIS? How can anyone imagine such a... lack of human behavior and values?... I found you by googling thins I knew I wasn't allowed to say out loud.
Gosh, I would love to hear more.
I guess it would be kinda difficult for Maya to write a guest column here at iSteve, but do you think that maybe she could write a piece for Taki's Mag?
Or one of those other oddball counterculture sites [AmCon, New English Review, etc] that you and the Derb write for?
There's nothing quite like hearing a voice from the trenches.
"tommy shanks said...
""I'm still only in my mid-40s and yet already America seems almost completely unrecognizable from the country I even went to college in as a young man in just the 1980s, let alone from my childhood a mere ten years before that.""
Same here. The complexion of America has changed a lot since I was in high school in the ‘80s, 25 years ago."
Quite so. This country is verging on becoming unrecognizeable to someone like me who was born in the 60s.
"I'm a first year teacher in a southern inner city ghetto."
As far as I'm concerned, that makes you part of the problem, not part of the solution."
Doing honest work educating children makes one "part of the problem?" I'm sorry Kylie, but it's a good thing you never had kids.
Rob said:
"Nigerians must be the most dishonest population of humans ever."
Well, they have a lot of competition from Somalians. Canada keeps bringing in lots of Somalians. Most of them are either in jail or on welfare in Toronto. So why do we keep bringing in more of them? My theory is that the immigration system in Canada has been corrupted by diversity hires. It is a sad situation.
Canada used to be such a nice country.
There seems to be two kinds of space alien sci-fi movies.
Conservative kind present space aliens as dangerous invaders who must be stopped. We are the good guys, they are the bad guys.
Liberal use of space aliens often have them as superior beings who interfere--indeed have the moral right to interfere--in our human affairs cuz, if left to our own freedom and devices, we'll only end up blowing the world up, destroying our planet, killing ourselves, etc.
DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL is like this. So is STAR TREK IV, where space aliens try to 'save the whale'.
In the conzo sci-fi space alien movies, conservatives gladly identify with the humans against the aliens.
In the lib sci-fi space alien movies, liberals gleefully identify with superior beings who force bitter but necessary medicine on stupid humanity.
Hollywood Jews must have ambivalent feelings about the conzo space alien movies. On the one hand, they are very popular. But given that Jews were often seen as the 'alien elite', these movies can send wrong signals, which is why INDEPENDENCE DAY emphasizes that the scientist is Jewish and the hero jet fighter is black. Thus, the aliens are made out to be like Nazi-Jap-like genocidal invaders. Anti-alien patriotism has been made into 'the good war'.
Or, War of the World by Spielberg is narrated by magic negro Morgan Freeman who tells us that our genetic diversity led to the demise of the monoracial aliens. (But if they're are of our blood, why should we be immune to their germs? After all, whites were the invaders in the Americas, but the main victims of disease were not whites but native Indians. If human germs kill aliens, shouldn't alien germs kill humans?)
Liberals are more into the cult of superior knowledge and intellect socially engineering and lording over the rest of us, and so the liberal space alien movie probably has its appeal. The underhanded message is humanity would be all lost without liberal intellectual and political elites who tell us how to think and act and live our lives.
Our role in the Middle East is interesting for both its conzo and lib attitudes. On the one hand, it's us vs them(Muzzie subhumans). But the other narrative is 'we superior western folks need to save the Muslims from themselves', just like the superior alien in DAY EARTH STOOD STILL is here to save us.
"So why do we keep bringing in more of them? My theory is that the immigration system in Canada has been corrupted by diversity hires. It is a sad situation."
My theory is that the elites want a divided and occasionally disorderly society. Consider Muslims. The practical reaction to 9/11 would've been a long-term halt to Muslim immigration into the West. That didn't happen, however. Instead, the establishment uses terrorism caused by Muslim immigration to justify government intrusion into all of our lives. That's the power they really want.
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