December 10, 2012

Barone: "The End of the Wave"

A popular idea right now is that amnesty wouldn't cause more illegal immigration in the future because Mexicans are done coming to the U.S. (and don't even think about the possibility of large flows from other countries). Michael Barone makes a sophisticated (i.e., Sailerian) case for the new conventional wisdom in National Review:
The End of the Wave  
The northward surge of Mexicans into the United States may never resume. 
By Michael Barone

Is mass migration from Mexico to the United States a thing of the past? 
... There’s a widespread assumption that Mexican migration will resume when the U.S. economy starts growing robustly again. But I think there’s reason to doubt that will be the case.

Over the past few years, I have been working on a book, scheduled for publication next fall, on American migrations, internal and immigrant. What I’ve found is that over the years this country has been peopled in large part by surges of migration that have typically lasted just one or two generations.
Almost no one predicted that these surges of migration would occur, and almost no one predicted when they would end. 
For example, when our immigration system was opened up in 1965, experts testified that we would not get many immigrants from Latin America or Asia. They assumed that immigrants would come mainly from Europe, as they had in the past.  

I would take from this history of elite failure to predict the future of immigration a precautionary principle: There are a lot of different peoples in this world, and we don't know what any one of them might get up to, so we need to be prudent and protect ourselves. Instead, the failures of elite forecasting have led elites to double down on the idea that policy should be based upon a philosophy of Hope for the Best, Come What May.
Life in Mexico is not a nightmare for many these days. Beneath the headlines about killings in the drug wars, Mexico has become a predominantly middle-class country, as Jorge Castañeda notes in his recent book, Mañana Forever? Its economy is growing faster than ours.

I reviewed Castaneda's book and he emphasizes how much Mexican material desires outrun any possible fulfillment for most Mexicans within the borders of Mexico. In some other Latin American countries, middle class people are content to live in apartments and take public transportation. Mexicans, in contrast, hate sharing a wall or a subway car with other Mexicans. The Mexican Dream is a single family house with a V8 vehicle or two or three parked out front. Mexicans love sprawl.
And the dreams that many Mexican immigrants pursued have been shattered. 
You can see that if you look at the statistics on mortgage foreclosures, starting with the housing bust in 2007. More than half were in the four “sand states” — California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida — and within them, as the Pew Hispanic Center noted in a 2009 report, in areas with large numbers of Latino immigrants.  
These were places where subprime mortgages were granted, with encouragement from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to many Latinos unqualified by traditional credit standards. 
These new homeowners, many of them construction workers, dreamed of gaining hundreds of thousands of dollars as housing prices inevitably rose. Instead, they collapsed. My estimate is that one-third of those foreclosed on in these years were Latinos. Their dreams turned into nightmares. 

I call this Convergence. Letting in tens of millions of Mexicans has made the U.S. more like Mexico economically, which is what Mexicans have been trying to get away from. They don't come to American because they love the Declaration of Independence's propositions, they come to live the Exurban Dream, to emit a lot of greenhouse gases. A decade ago, the Bush Administration announced at the 2002 White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership a war on racist old downpayments to facilitate that. Now, we are out of money, but how much of a reckoning has there been? Barone has largely adopted my analysis of What Went Wrong, but how many others in the press are completely clueless?
We can see further evidence in last month’s Pew research report on the recent decline in U.S. birthrates. The biggest drop was among Mexican-born women, from 455,000 births in 2007 to 346,000 in 2010.  

The most extreme fertility is among newly arrived immigrant women, who have been saving up their babies to have them on American soil. Less immigration knocks hell out of fertility among illegal immigrants. But, that means there are a lot of women in Mexico who have been doing a lot of saving up of babies over the last 4 years. An upturn in the American economy could bring them and their future anchor babies back in a hurry. The notion that Mexican women can't delay fertility for a few years, the way women in more advanced countries have done since the 1970s, seems naive.

Keep in mind also that the Drug War in northern Mexico since 2007 has made the traditional overland routes less attractive, especially for Central Americans (e.g., the large massacres in Mexico of Central Americans heading for the U.S.). The Drug War won't last forever.
Surges of migration that have shaped the country sometimes end abruptly. The surge of Southern blacks to Northern cities lasted from 1940 to 1965 — one generation. The surge of Mexicans into the U.S. lasted from 1982 to 2007 — one generation.  

The 1965 terminus for black migration reflects two changes: improvements for blacks in the South and the beginning of the black destruction of their own Northern neighborhoods through rioting and crime.

Similarly, Hispanic illegal immigration contributed hugely to the Recent Economic Unpleasantness, so maybe Mexicans won't find it in their interest to move to Mexico Norte anymore.
The northward surge of American blacks has never resumed. I don’t think the northward surge of Mexicans will, either.

Maybe, maybe not. Maybe there are other countries out there in this big world gearing up to send vast numbers into our land, and would find Amnesty II a big encouragement.

Certainly, the obvious lessons of history are that elites don't know what they are doing, have made disastrous immigration decisions in the past, and that they are loathe to admit their mistakes on the grounds that talking about what they did wrong could offend the busboys.

All this history suggests prudence, but the conventional wisdom is that we should make another Bet the Country decision based on tea leaf readings.

70 comments:

  1. Zealous elites or zealites.

    Mexicans are jealous and elites are zealous.

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  2. "Mexico has become a predominantly middle-class country, as Jorge Castañeda notes in his recent book, Mañana Forever? Its economy is growing faster than ours."

    If you make your citizens poor and unemployed by outsourcing all the jobs then they won't be made poor and unemployed by mass immigration.

    Progress!

    (The most important factor in becoming a member of the current ruling class is having no sense of shame and no sense of reciprocal duty towards fellow citizens.)

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  3. "An amnesty won't cause more illegal immigration from Mexico"...

    Precisely the same spin that was put on the Reagan amnesty a generation ago in 1986. How many Mexicans have invited themselves to America since that time? Untold millions. Not counting anchor babies.

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  4. Trust Barone about as far as you can throw him on immigration. His book "The New Americans," published about a dozen years ago, was nothing but spin on why illegal immigration is AWESOME! He's a thoughtful articulate, amiable, thoroughly bought-and-sold D.C. shill.

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  5. "His book "The New Americans," published about a dozen years ago, was nothing but spin on why illegal immigration is AWESOME!"

    Barone has actually learned from my critique of his book.

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  6. When exactly did this surge of prosperity take place? I could swear that a year ago I was being told that Mexicans practically deserve refugee status because so many were in constant danger of being killed by drug dealers back home. Now suddenly they're middle class?

    I guess the good news is we don't have to feel bad about deportation anymore. In fact, we're doing them a favor by paying their way back to such a growing, advanced country, right?

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  7. Mexico is middle class compared to Africa is what he is referrring too. However, if you live in Arizona near Sonoria Mexicans there immirgant less, many work in factories where the companies are giving them credit card to buy in Tucson. Mexico has car companies and aerospace now and has graduated more engineers than Germany. True there is still poverty problems in the rural areas and we still should be on guard.

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  8. Barone mentions all those federall subsidized mortgages to Mexican immigrants that went belly-up in the housing crash. But I notice that he doesn't mention how many of these immigrants decide to foot it back across the border instead of staying to collect further of the native-subsidized benefits that accrue from residing in El Norte. I suspect that the number is relatively small and would punch a big hole in his argument.

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  9. Fisk Ellington Rutledge III12/10/12, 2:07 PM

    Michael Barone is just another coward/traitor who is terrified of doing what has to be done to clean up the mess he and those like him have made.

    They shrink in horror from the fortified borders and mass deportations that are urgently necessary to even have a chance of saving the U.S.

    Michael Barone is a coward who uses whatever intelligence and prestige he has to rationalize lies and Leftist fantasies.

    These people are beneath contempt.

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  10. If I was a Democrat, I'd still want a semi-legal helot class to give my ward heelers suitably abject clients. Bonus: low wages keep legal workers from attaining that awful 'Ozzie and Harriet' lifestyle. Listen to any Democrat reference Ozzie and Harriet, you'd think it was Mengele and Reynard Heydreich.


    If I was a Republican, hey,I'm paying lower wages! 'Nuff said, true believers. And both parties are True Believers in illegal immigration; nothing outside but crazed bigots clutching themselves, their guns, and their God in darkness and wind.

    If Mexico fails, look to Pakistan. It's our moral duty to bring more Bin Ladin fans here!. Or Darfur. Or the Ethiopean pirates.

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  11. He's pandering to all the wishful thinking out there that this massive tidal wave of migration may be coming to an end. Is there some law of physics that states a country can only provide a onetime outward surge of people in it's history? A country like Mexico could conceivably produce a surge every thirty years or so. It all depends, nothing is guaranteed.

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  12. Didn't Barone predict a big Romney victory? Maybe he should get out of the predicting business altogether.

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  13. One big difference between Mexican immigration and late 19th/early 20th century European immigration is the fact that Mexico is next door to the U.S. It is pretty quick and easy for Mexicans to get here, and I imagine they still see their families every once in a while and may even get a chance to visit home (although I don't know how difficult it is for illegals). So whereas migrating from Italy meant possibly never seeing your home country or family again, migrating from Mexico is a much less dramatic upheaval, meaning the incentives don't need to be as large or significant to encourage emigration.

    Despite growth in the Mexican economy, I imagine that substantial economic incentives for immigration will remain for quite some time, especially for poorer Mexicans. Considering the cost/benefit analysis, why would we expect the immigration to stop?

    There's also the um, slightly relevant facts that WWI, the Depression, and WWII occurred, and that the United States stopped letting people come here in the 1920's. So perhaps even European immigration would not have significantly slowed down if these events had not occurred.

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  14. There's no way Barone could be wrong.

    After all, he was right about Romney winning an Electoral College landslide.

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  15. Speaking of "failures of elite forecasting" there was this during Senate debate on 1965 Immigration Act:

    "In his opening remarks, newly elected Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy, who had become Senate floor leader on the legislation, chose to speak to what he said were false fears the bill’s opponents were fanning. “First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually,” Kennedy said.14 “Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same. . . . Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset. . . . Contrary to the charges in some quarters, S. 500 will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and economically deprived nations of Africa and Asia.” Echoing him, his brother Democratic Senator Robert Kennedy of New York estimated an overall increase of “at most 50,000 a year.”


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  16. Steve Johnson12/10/12, 2:51 PM

    "Certainly, the obvious lessons of history are that elites don't know what they are doing, have made disastrous immigration decisions in the past, and that they are loathe to admit their mistakes"

    Steve, you're such an optimist.

    What makes you think any of the previous decisions were mistakes from the perspective of the people who made them?

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  17. In regards to Luke Lea's post....

    Kind of an ironic thing about the two Kennedy brothers comments about immigration. One of then would be killed by an immigrant just three years later.

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  18. The real current immigration killer is slow economic growth and high unemployment, but even that is miniscule compared to the Death Star of immigration killers: a reduction of the welfare state, which will almost certainly happen in the near future - perhaps even next year.

    Once the government stops paying people not to work (in various forms, not just unemployment benefits), they begin taking any job(s) they can get. They displace illegals. It may even result in more immigrants heading home. If I recall my Thomas Sowell correctly, about half of Italian immigrants in the early 1900s returned home after a few years, when failure wasn't rewarded by government with handouts.

    We are going to have a slow-growing economy for a long time to come. But jobs are the draw. So long as the USA is dramatically better than another nation, people from that nation will continue to try to come here, and scofflaw employers will encourage it.

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  19. An upturn in the American economy could bring them and their future anchor babies back in a hurry.

    I am guessing that there is not going to be an upturn. So, shall we then count ourselves lucky?

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  20. >Mexico has become a predominantly middle-class country,

    Easy to do when tens of millions of your underclass just walk out across the border.

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  21. "There’s a widespread assumption that Mexican migration will resume when the U.S. economy starts growing robustly again."

    It may be that massive Mexican immigration will never resume again simply because the U.S. economy will never grow robustly again.

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  22. I read Barone's previous pro-immigration tract, The New Americans. He strikes me as deeply and cynically dishonest.

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  23. Is this hack ham-fistedly trying to provide political cover for amnesty, by implying that amnesty won't incentivize more illegal immigration because the Mexicans are done coming anyway?

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  24. "There’s a widespread assumption that Mexican migration will resume when the U.S. economy starts growing robustly again. But I think there’s reason to doubt that will be the case."

    well he's correct about that last part.

    there's reason to doubt the US economy will ever start growing robustly again.

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  25. "Kind of an ironic thing about the two Kennedy brothers comments about immigration. One of then would be killed by an immigrant just three years later."

    And the other would use immigrants to kill the country...

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  26. "Certainly, the obvious lessons of history are that elites don't know what they are doing" ... "The Drug War won't last forever."

    I sure hope you're right.

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  27. http://ow.ly/fZ8LR

    GOP still wanna suck up to superrich?

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  28. Wow, Steve, you sure treat Barone with kid gloves. What's up? I mean, what is "sophisticated" about ignoring wage disparities between the US and the rest of the world? Why would you go so far as to tar your own name ("Sailerian") by associating it with such militant stupidity?

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  29. Liberals don't like what you write because your presumption (attitude) is that people are ants and you can figure them out.

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  30. What we really need to fear is black African immigration and Haitian immigration.

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  31. Harry Baldwin12/10/12, 4:59 PM

    Anonymous said...
    http://ow.ly/fZ8LR


    From the article: "Team Obama banked $1.2 billion for the 2012 campaign cycle, making the president the first billion-dollar candidate in history; Team Romney pocketed $923 million."

    Meanwhile, throughout the campaign, Obama was sending out desperate emails titled "We're being outspent!" Clever S.O.B.

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  32. So long as any part of the world is extremely poor, and the USA is very rich (and generous with welfare), the USA will attract immigrants, legal and illegal. When will we cease to draw immigrants? When we cease being a desirable place to live.

    In other words, we need immigration enforcement and to reduce legal immigration.

    That's really all there is to it.

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  33. ResnoTemperedBell12/10/12, 5:23 PM

    "The Mexican Dream is a single family house with a V8 vehicle or two or three parked out front"

    Ain't that the truth. Here in my neighborhood in San Antonio del Norte de México, the rich-enough-to-buy-a-mid-level-house-but-not-rich-enough-to-live-in-a-gated-community Mexican Nationals (there are at least cinco such familias) have three or four vehicles in the driveway (never the garage, because the garage is packed full of what I can only assume are crates of sombreros).

    One car is usually some tiny Mexican version of a Ford Festiva, but with seven-inch wheels. The other vehicles are a mix of SUVs and (because we are in TX) ridiculously large pick-up trucks.

    One house in the evening always has at least five and sometimes seven cars parked around it. One car has TX plates, all the others have Mexico plates.

    And then they love to park on the street but right in front of their driveway, like some white devil is going to come home from work early and steal their precious parking spaces.

    I still haven't figured out the prevalence of Mexico plates, as I'm pretty sure TX asks that new residents get state plates after thirty days.

    Me gusta mi barrio.

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  34. ***"For example, when our immigration system was opened up in 1965, experts testified that we would not get many immigrants from Latin America or Asia. They assumed that immigrants would come mainly from Europe, as they had in the past."***

    They were lying.

    ***"I would take from this history of elite failure to predict the future of immigration a precautionary principle: There are a lot of different peoples in this world, and we don't know what any one of them might get up to, so we need to be prudent and protect ourselves. Instead, the failures of elite forecasting have led elites to double down on the idea that policy should be based upon a philosophy of Hope for the Best, Come What May."***

    They weren't failures of elite forecasting. They were lying.

    As long as we speak about immigration as though it were some kind of act of nature, we help the elite liars. It is not an act of nature, it is an act of deliberate policy. If Mexican immigration, legal and illegal, does taper off due to natural causes, other sources of immigration will be utilized to replace them and keep the floodgates open. There's nothing natural about this; it is policy.

    ***"The Drug War won't last forever."***

    Nothing lasts forever. The USA, for example.

    ***"Similarly, Hispanic illegal immigration contributed hugely to the Recent Economic Unpleasantness, so maybe Mexicans won't find it in their interest to move to Mexico Norte anymore."***

    And maybe humans won't hunt the mammoths to extinction because it is in their best interests not to do so. But, history suggests otherwise.

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  35. From their perspective it is better than making decisions based on reading the entrails of failed elites.

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  36. http://www.france24.com/en/20121210-row-over-white-snow-miss-france

    Les femmes blanches sont l'histoire de bravoure de la beauté

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  37. Barone is the story of bravery of making dumb predictions.

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  38. First, I don't believe the numbers that we are now seeing an outflow. Why should I believe them? We know Team Obama has been lying about their deportation statistics. They lie about unemployment numbers. They lie about pretty much everything. So I don't believe there is an outflow at all.

    While there may be a slowdown, why should they not still be showing up? We know they can get welfare, EBT, housing subsidies. It's easy living large in El Norte. You have an under the table cash job, plus a host of welfare benefits from stupid gringo. What's not to love?

    And free healthcare! And guess what? That's only going to get better and better as Obamacare kicks in. Expect ever more anchor babies.

    That said, I still maintain we are on the verge of a massive wave of African immigration. Obama will love it because it's even more disastrous to whitey, and they are all future Democrat voters.

    We already have numerous trial balloon communities of Somalis, among the most worthless riff-raff to be found on planet earth. They are doing what they are put here to do: suck up welfare and cause massive dislocations to whitey. Since the push-back on the trial communities has been nil -- certainly you don't hear a word from the Republican weasels -- we will see a ramp up that will blow your minds. Also, as the Middle East falls into chaos and the Great Egyptian Famine begins, all the Nice White Ladies will tut-tut about those poor Egyptians (as we see hungry Egyptian brats on television 24 hours a day), and we will open our bleeding hearts to millions more Sand People.

    It's over kids, it's over. Even if not one more Mexican crosses the border, our fates are sealed.

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  39. The notion that Mexican women can't delay fertility for a few years, the way women in more advanced countries have done since the 1970s, seems naive.

    Naive? Have you learned nothing from the opposition? How about "insulting, dangerous, and wrong".

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  40. "His book 'The New Americans,' published about a dozen years ago, was nothing but spin on why illegal immigration is AWESOME! He's a thoughtful articulate, amiable, thoroughly bought-and-sold D.C. shill."
    ___________________________________

    I don't think Barone's a "shill" at all. I think he's been wrong about some things but it bothers him that he's been wrong and he admits when he's been wrong....even agonizes about how he misinterpreted data or failed to consider this or that.

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  41. Right. Barone tries to learn from his mistakes.

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  42. "Sailerian" sounds like your Armenian cousin

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  43. I'm not surprised Mexico is now a middle-class country. They've dumped all their unemployed on us!

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  44. Mexico has car companies and aerospace now and has graduated more engineers than Germany.

    First, Mexico has over 100 million people. They could and should have indigenous car companies if for no other reason than to serve the domestic market. Given around 10% of their population is white, they should have at least 10 million whites in a resource rich nation with favorable trade terms to the largest economy on Earth. Sweden with 9 million people produces Saabs and Volvos.

    It appears that in 2011, Mexico finally has an indigenous car, the Mastretta MXT. Most of the other vehicles made and sold in Mexico appear to be other nations brands that are either imported or assembled in Mexico.

    Second, as to the claim that Mexico graduates more engineers than Germany, I would like to see some figures on this. I don't see how Mexico's 10 million or so whites would graduate more engineers than Germany's 75 million. Also, what about quality. Is a graduate of a Mexican engineering school equivalent to a German or US graduate? Or are they similar to all those STEM majors who graduate from schools in Arab nations, and yet are perpetually under and unemployed?

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  45. Thank goodness, just in time -- otherwise CA would be ruined. Maybe even TX too.

    ...could offend the busboys.

    Not a very 'Sailerian' remark. I think they care more about not being called xenophobic or racist by other Whites, or even sticking it to prole Whites, than they do about clean dishes.

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  46. So Michael Barone believes Mexico is a majority middle class country. The reality is they are not. Now Canada that is a majority middle class country.

    Even though Canada shares a border with the U.S, you dont see millions of pregnate Canadian women immigrating to the U.S in order to give birth to anchor babies.

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  47. Jean Raspail 2011 interview - English subbed.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW7s9Qi72dk

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5pdk7OiqgM

    Camp of The Saints was written in 1973.

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  48. Barone is one of the people who needs to be pushed out of the conservative movement if things are ever really going to change.

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  49. "If you run out Mexicans where will politicians import a new people from?"

    Plenty more non-whites clamouring to colonize the West.

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  50. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyDsvc5nmjk

    Boomer academic who teaches American students.

    She once wrote a book on Japanese cinema.

    http://www.amazon.com/Joan-Mellen/e/B001H9RRCC

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  51. "Speaking of Somalis, police in Columbus had to mace a crowd waiting for section 8 vouchers. Based upon their appearance, they look like Somalis."

    Judging by their appearance: yep. And according to local reports: "Hassan Omar, the leader of the Somali Community Association of Ohio, said many Somalis already live at Heritage. Columbus [Ohio] is home to the second-largest Somali community in the United States, and housing is a real problem for them, Omar said. Families are large, and many crowd into too-small apartments. Anytime word of a vacancy spreads, people want in, he said."

    According to this NPR report, the unemployment rate among the Columbus Somali community, 45 thousand strong, is 40%.

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  52. African immigration to the US ended in the 1840s when the British Empire made it illegal.. Otherwise the plan was to make the US as African as possible.

    After that the various immigration exclusion acts stopped immigration from becoming overwhelming until the 1965 act opened the flood gates.

    But I see no evidence of immigration reaching a saturation point and stopping naturally.

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  53. For those that think immigration stops when there are more immigrants than work to be done, please explain Haiti. When did African immigration to Haiti stop? Not pretty, is it?

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  54. Immigration is just about free markets, just like everything else is.
    To put it bluntly, if life in the USA is infinitely better than life in Nigeria (which it is), then you can be damn sure that all of Nigeria (apart from a few chiefs), will move in on the USA. Nothing in the book of fate is more certain.
    It's all just so f*cking simple, as simple as a store selling i-pads for $10 soon running ot of stock far into the ininite future. Why so many 'intelligent' people can't or won't see the stark, staringly obvious is a mystery to me.
    As I sais it is the root and essence of the free market, the only principle that actually matters in economics and explains all, rational actors will do what is rationally beneficial for themselves personally, for a raggedy assed starving Ngerian, you couldn't think of a better bargain even if he died and gone to heaven.

    Good and rational for the unwashed hordes.
    But not good and rational for the chumps who they are foisted upon.

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  55. As long as the USA pays welfare and Mexico doesn't they will keep coming.
    It's the rational thing (for them) to do.

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  56. Why so many 'intelligent' people can't or won't see the stark, staringly obvious is a mystery to me.


    They don't want to coz it doesn't fit the meme.

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  57. "For example, when our immigration system was opened up in 1965, experts testified that we would not get many immigrants from Latin America or Asia. They assumed that immigrants would come mainly from Europe, as they had in the past."
    Am I being too cynical in speculating that these "experts" were not being entirely honest in their testimony about the likely results of the 1965 immigration act?

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  58. Somalis were mentioned in this thread.

    Does anyone know anything about them? How they act, and how they do in school?

    I ask because most American Blacks originated in West Africa. I presume Somalis are racially the same people as Ethiopians and Eritreans genetically. They definitely aren't Bantus.

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  59. Really I don't think welfare is the factor as people make it out. Many states are more generous with welfare than Texas is and it has the 2nd highest illegal population. California is more generous but San Diego which gets more illegal aliens than San Franciso is less generous. According to liberals San Diego has harder standards for getting welfare than even Texas cities like Houston or Dallas San Diego still has red areas and only went for Obama for 5 points so this may be true.

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  60. Well, in the states we get the dumber Mexicans that can't make a living in Mexico and Mexico overall has a larger populaton than Germany. So of the mestizos are not as dumbed as the ones that usually come to the states. Mexico like a lot of Latin America countries doesn't develop their own companies as much.

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  61. Has Barone ever been to the border? It seems the media can yank out self styled, well coifed experts who's main experience seems to be cocktail parties at DC to talk about issues as opposed to asking someone who deals with the reality everyday.

    Nothing is slowing down at the border. You still have groups of 100 crossing multiple times a day, and deporting someone is still nearly impossible. The "most deportations ever" that liberals love to tout? Those are not true deportations- its more slight of hand trickery by this Administration fucking with the numbers. They're simply sacking up the people who are out in the desert and counting them as deports (which they are not, in a legal and administrative sense) when in reality they are illegal entries (USC 8 1324).

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  62. Well, the Bush Era so a high spike just like the Clinton era, the Obama era shows a low spike. We need to be on guard and hopefully the legalization of millions of Mexicans doesn't come to past. A lot of libertarian and fiscal conservatives pushed for the legalization like Paul Ryan, Jeff Flake and Mike Lee. Mike Lee is a favorite of the tea party which means that some tea party people will pick low taxes over immirgation restriction.

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  63. The Census estimates the number of foreign born Latin-Americans.

    2010 21.2 miljon
    2000 16.1 miljon
    1990 8.4 miljon
    1980 4.4 miljon

    between 2007 and 2011, the number of foreign-born Mexicans stood still. However Latin-Americans as a whole continued to increase.

    The Census ACS averages out a few years for a bigger sample. The number of foreign (legal and illegal) born Latin-Americans was:

    2005-2007: 19.9 million.
    2009-2011: 21.1 million.

    So the number of foreign born Latinos has continued to increased by around +300k per year even after the economic crash. This is slower than the +600k per year prior to the crash, but still a rapid increase.

    In addition between 2007-2011 the number of U.S born Latinos increased by an average of +530k per year.

    http://www.census.gov/acs/www/

    /Victarion

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  64. On the other hand, it's easier to move to a nearby country than a faraway one, so if Mexico is no longer a major immigration source, immigration to the United States overall would be expected to fall significantly in any case.

    I think the TFR of a country 20 years ago is a much more useful indicator of immigration flows, especially for nearby countries. Over the next 20 years, immigration from Guatemala and Haiti might increase, and Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic will remain at about their current levels, but for all other countries, it should fall, as it already has for most ex-British Caribbean islands.

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  65. Re Somalis,how they act and how they do in school: What do you think,Einstein??

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  66. I don't think Barone's a "shill" at all. I think he's been wrong about some things but it bothers him that he's been wrong and he admits when he's been wrong....even agonizes about how he misinterpreted data or failed to consider this or that


    The New Americans was the work of a man who started with his preferred conclusion and sledgehammered the evidence into shape around it. And ignored all the unsightly signs that he had done so. It was an apology for and a celebration of immigration, not a sober and judicious examination of the topic.

    For example, he started the clock running for African-Americans to assimilate to the American main-stream in the 1940's. Why? No good reason really. He just needed some explanation for why, a century and half after slavery ended, they are still so dysfunctional, relative to other Americans. So he made up a "rule" under which they still have a few decades more to assimilate.

    His "rule" for the Irish was that they became assimilated when they started voting equally for both political parties, in the 1980's. All right, fair enough. But he pronounced the Jews as fully assimilated even though they still fall well short of the standard he set for the Irish! The book is full of examples like this where he not only makes logical errors, he fails to even apply his faulty logic consistently and evenhandedly to all the ethnic groups he examines.

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  67. Can there possibly be a less desirable group of people to have as newcomers anywhere on the face of the planet earth then Somalians?

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  68. Brief anecdote about those wonderful somalis.

    I know someone who had a relative die after a brief stay in intensive care. Realizing that there wouldn't be a good outcome, the family made the obviously difficult decision to end life support.

    What does this have to do with somalis? While I visiting the hospital I happened to walk by a room with an elderly somali person, unconscious. I also noted the hospital had signs in what I presume was the language of somalis.

    I'm wondering 1) just how long had that guy been there, 2) who was paying for it, 3) and just how often had immigrant somalis shown up in ICU so that the hospital felt the need to post signs in that language?

    No actually, I suspect I know the answers. What I'd really like to know is why the XXXX I'm supposed to get a warm fuzzy about getting yoked into tax-servitude to support foreigners who can't pay their medical bills and like to return to the old country to fight in the jihad.

    I'm ain't happy about that, obviously.

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  69. Barone is a really smart guy who is extremely well informed. Yeah, Barone's immigration book of a decade ago was pretty bad, as I pointed out at length, but he's since moved quite a ways toward my position, which speaks well of him.

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  70. "Somalis were mentioned in this thread. Does anyone know anything about them? How they act, and how they do in school?"

    Somalia - or at least bits of it - is still in the state of permanent clan warfare that most populations left centuries or millenia ago.

    Black gangbangers complain about how violent they are.

    .
    "Really I don't think welfare is the factor as people make it out."

    Most illegal immigrants come for the jobs and stay for the welfare.

    There are exceptions though who go straight into crime, welfare or crime and welfare.

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