March 8, 2013

Jeb Bush's book "Immigration Wars"

From the Washington Post:
Manuel Roig-Franzia,
native of Spain, winner
of Don Quixote Look-Alike Contest
Book review: ‘Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution’ by Jeb Bush and Clint Bolick 
By Manuel Roig-Franzia, Friday, March 8, 10:22 AM 
Manuel Roig-Franzia is a Washington Post staff writer and the author of “The Rise of Marco Rubio.” 
In the spring of 2002, a young Florida state representative named Marco Rubio sized up one of his mentors, Jeb Bush. 
“He’s practically Cuban, just taller,” Rubio quipped to a journalist. “He speaks Spanish better than most of us.” 
Few could dispute Rubio’s inclusion of Bush in a kind of honorary Hispanics club. ... 
Both men embody an aspiration of Republicans: a chance at luring the growing Hispanic electorate that so overwhelmingly rejected the party in the last presidential election. What’s so fascinating is how they’ve suddenly reversed roles. Bush once appeared more moderate than Rubio, and most other top Republicans, on immigration. Now he’s abruptly backflipped to his protege’s right on the key issue of creating a path to citizenship, triggering a furor along the way. 
And all because of a book. 
“Immigration Wars,” which Bush co-authored with Clint Bolick, an activist conservative lawyer, was surely intended to play to one of Bush’s strengths. 
Instead, it has prompted a critical reexamination of the former Florida governor and suggestions that this skilled politician and deep thinker might be a bit rusty six years after leaving office. 
The hubbub is over a small but important part of this sober, substantive and detailed explication of America’s immigration miasma. In the book, Bush — as any cable-news viewer should know by now — reverses his previous stance and declares that he opposes a path to citizenship for immigrants who entered the country illegally. 
That jarring statement distracts from the sweep of the book, which in 225 pages of text (generously double-spaced) presents a sophisticated take on an issue that often gets reduced to polemical bullet points. Far from being an anti-immigrant screed, “Immigration Wars” often reads like an ode to immigration, with Bush arguing forcefully and convincingly for policies that would encourage more — not fewer — migrants to enter the country. 
It’s a curious time for Bush to harden his position on immigration by opposing a path to citizenship, considering the fact that Republicans are desperate to woo Hispanics. Even the Cuban American Rubio, once an avowed opponent of such a path, has been coming around to the idea lately, joining a bipartisan effort in the Senate to change the nation’s immigration laws. Bush has tried to backpedal: In interviews this past week he made qualified statements in favor of a path to citizenship and has explained that he wrote the book last year. But these limp attempts are undercut by the tone he takes in print. 
“A grant of citizenship is an undeserving reward for conduct that we cannot afford to encourage,” he writes.

I've said this a million times over the last 13 years: once Republicans start talking about compromising with the Democrats on amnesty, they always get bushwhacked by the Democrats' trotting out "the path to citizenship" (i.e., the vote). Always. It's like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown.

Eventually, Republicans figure out that giving illegal aliens citizenship is more or less the same thing as giving more votes to the Democrats.  "path to citizenship" is just a self-inflicted electoral wound to the GOP.

But, rhetoric about "citizenship" sells to white people because they assume it means responsibilities as well as rights. But Democrats see it as giving illegals the vote, making them more eligible to bring in more relatives legally, and making them more eligible for welfare and government jobs -- all good for the Democrats.

So, then, the Republican Brain Trust backtracks into saying, "Hey, we just want to make Hispanic voters like us, not make more Hispanics voters. Wait a minute, that didn't come out right. This can't be that hard -- our Democratic friends told us that "immigration reform" was going to make Hispanics love the GOP, and the Democrats wouldn't lie to us about how to beat them, would they? Look, we justwant cheap labor, not fellow citizens. Uh, strike that. Look, I'll have to go over this with the spin doctors but I'll get right back to you with the proper wording that will make it all okay."
... But for most of the book, Bush sheds this almost unrecognizably stern persona and settles back into the Jeb we once knew. The man who met his wife, Columba Garnica de Gallo, on the central square of Leon, Mexico, four decades ago argues that raising the number of legal immigrants could improve our gross domestic product by increasing the size of the workforce.

Do you ever notice how the topic of diversity just makes white people stupider?
  And he notes that cities with high immigrant populations tend to have better credit ratings.

San Bernardino? Stockton? Vallejo? Immigrants aren't stupid, so they don't move to Youngstown or East St. Louis, they try to go where the money is. But the evidence out of California is not reassuring for the long run.
In writing this odd but irresistible book, Bush has surely inflicted some wounds on himself, too, at least with moderates who thought they knew him well.
But if 2016 is his aim, he has plenty of time to heal.

Manuel Roig-Franzia is a Washington Post staff writer and the author of “The Rise of Marco Rubio.”

Manuel Roig-Franzia is a white guy born in Spain, but that's not stopping him from hopping on the Hispanic Bandwagon for all it's worth.

38 comments:

  1. Steve, you don't need to print this. You have a spelling mistake. Change the word 'like' to lie.

    "immigration reform" was going to make Hispanics love the GOP, and they wouldn't like to us, would they?

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  2. ... argues that raising the number of legal immigrants could improve our gross domestic product by increasing the size of the workforce.

    If increasing the size of the workforce was a key to increasing GDP, then why don't all the poor nations of the world increase their workforces via immigration? Also, why would Mexico allow so many workers to leave, thus dwindling its workforce, and reducing the potential size of its GDP?

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  3. Cheetos Jones3/8/13, 9:18 PM

    I guess Jeb's wife is doing a job no American will do....

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  4. raising the number of legal immigrants could improve our gross domestic product by increasing the size of the workforce.

    And if we raised the number of legal immigrants to nearly 7 billion then all your GDP are belong to us. But Jeb (sotto voce) what would that do to the per capita figures?

    And the waxen animatronic responds...America has always been a nation of immigrants (casting eyes to heavens, arms sweeping outward) and to this day immigrants remain our source of vitality and invigoration (jaw set firmly, hands gathered to fists) but the forces of intolerance and bigotry are ever present (chin tucked, eyes wide and somber) and that is why all Americans across the globe, regardless of nationality, must unite. The very future of our brownish-yellow monoculture is at stake. And if we lose, the xenomorphs win. Thank you, and God bless America.

    The former governor then abruptly falls limp at the waist, head and arms dangling. And the only sounds that remain are faint beeps from the deactivated politician...and mariachi music.

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  5. Manuel Roig-Franzia is a white guy born in Spain, but that's not stopping him from hopping on the Hispanic Bandwagon for all it's worth.

    Your blog has sold me on this proposition, Steve: the best position to be in these days is a white or white-appearing person with a semi-credible claim (loosely defined) to being some kind of "minority." You get the benefits of being a minority (potential affirmative action, major SWPL status points) with the benefits of being white (general human preference for lighter skin, blend in with whites enough that they identify with you on the subconscious level).

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  6. "Cheetos Jones said...

    I guess Jeb's wife is doing a job no American will do...."

    Smuggling jewelry? Yeah.

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  7. I've said this a million times over the last 13 years: once Republicans start talking about compromising with the Democrats on amnesty...

    And I've said a million times that granting citizenship isn't an 'amnesty', it's a goddam jackpot.

    Using a weasel word like 'amnesty' is our first compromise. So let's stop, okay?

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  8. "Eventually, Republicans figure out that giving illegal aliens citizenship is more or less the same thing as giving more votes to the Democrats."

    you sure about that? i don't think john mccain got the memo.

    "Hey, we just want to make Hispanic voters like us, not make more Hispanics voters. Wait a minute, that didn't come out right. This can't be that hard -- our Democratic friends told us that "immigration reform" was going to make Hispanics love the GOP, and the Democrats wouldn't lie to us about how to beat them, would they? Look, we just want cheap labor, not fellow citizens. Uh, strike that. Look, I'll have to go over this with the spin doctors but I'll get right back to you with the proper wording that will make it all okay."

    LOL. now THAT was a good impression of them.

    "Do you ever notice how the topic of diversity just makes white people stupider."

    well i did notice that having a mexican wife can make normally intelligent and reasonable men like fred reed turn into blathering idiots about mexico and mexicans.

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  9. The hubbub is over a small but important part of this sober, substantive and detailed explication of America’s immigration miasma. In the book, Bush — as any cable-news viewer should know by now — reverses his previous stance and declares that he opposes a path to citizenship for immigrants who entered the country illegally.

    As far as I know, no politician has ever proposed a path to citizenship for illegals. Always -- always -- it is a path to super-citizenship involving a wide variety of privileges and immunities that White citizens do not get.

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  10. ""Do you ever notice how the topic of diversity just makes white people stupider."

    Yes, with "diversity is strength" being the most idiotic statement ever uttered.

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  11. Jeb Bush is conflicted between keeping the cheap labor donors like Sheldon Adelson happy by supporting comprehensive immigration reform while trying to appeal to the middle class whites to make up the Republican Party.

    Maybe Jeb Bush finally realized that no amount of financial support from donors is going to make up for alienating whites living in the suburbs.

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  12. With a surname like that, this journalist is Catalan, which makes him ultra-distinct from your run-of-the-mill Spaniard--according to him anyway. The Catalans banned bullfighting a few years back to underline the difference, and they often disdain to speak the Spanish they all speak fluently even when it would be the kind and rational thing to do so--e.g. when someone asks them directions in Spanish. I once attended a wedding in Catalonia in which a Chilean was marrying one of the natives, and the priest gave his homily bilingually...in Catalan and English, naturally.

    Anyway, Mr. Roig is likely well-rehearsed in the ethnicity-parsing department.

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  13. Amusingly, the Canary Islanders banned bullfighting even earlier--but (uniquely in Spain) retained legal cockfighting. Their grip on their cultural heritage seems as tenuous as the Catalans' is fierce. After witnessing some obligatorily local-colorful dancing on Tenerife years ago, I disingenuously congratulated one of the performers and asked him what that dance was called. "Folklórico," he replied.

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  14. Chris Caldwell (whom you often quote approvingly) has or at least had a Catalan brother-in-law. As he tells or at least told the story, walking home from dinner one night in DC he and his sister and her husband came across a crime scene at which the cops had a couple of terrified Salvadoran dudes splayed on the pavement at gunpoint in latter-day overkill mode.

    The cops were pleading with bystanders for someone to translate, in order to give the guys to understand that they weren't about to be plugged in the head Salvador-style. Chris's Catalan in-law helpfully pointed to his wife and said (in halting, heavily Spanish-accented English), "Uh-shee uh-speaks Espanish."

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  15. Greek leftists must be honorary nonwhites. While Golden Dawn is excoriated for every minor physical altercation and every tasteless joke the fact that firebomb-throwing leftists killed three innocent people in 2010 has been tossed down the memory hole:

    http://news.sky.com/story/778356/three-killed-in-athens-bank-fire-amid-strike

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  16. Both men embody an aspiration of Republicans: a chance at luring the growing Hispanic electorate that so overwhelmingly rejected the party in the last presidential election.



    And every election prior to that. But hey, let's not allow any facts to creep into a news story. The purpose of being a journalist is to shape public opinion, not to pass along information and allow people to draw their own conclusions.

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  17. From the WP comments:

    Casey1 wrote:
    Jeb Bush let slip the Republican dream: Millions of low wage workers who do not have the right to vote. Corral them, control them and pay them minimum wage. Perfect.

    The-Historian responds:
    It is called Apartheid!

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  18. 'Clint Bolick'

    'C*nt Bollocks' as the Sex Pistols would no doubt (rightly) call him.

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  19. San Bernardino? Stockton? Vallejo? Immigrants aren't stupid, so they don't move to Youngstown or East St. Louis, they try to go where the money is. But the evidence out of California is not reassuring for the Steve they go to Calif not because that's where the money is they make the same in Orange County they would make in Youngstown, its that Orange County has more of them, they actually live a lower standard of living in most of California since the rent is higher.

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  20. Do you want to make 8.50 to 10.00 per her in La or St louis, most folks would say ST Louis even with all the blacks.

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  21. Somehow I doubt Jeb actually co-wrote anything. Credit should be given to all the ghost writers out there who crank things out for others but whose names never appear on the cover. Stories that Jeb is being positioned for 2016 now seem fairly credible, a book being a way to establish him as a serious thinker.

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  22. Gould K.L. Brownlee3/9/13, 8:27 AM

    At our local paper we have a reporter born in the U.S. of Italian ancestry. But that hasn't stopped him from jumping on the lively, vibrant, diverse Hmong, Hispanic, Black, whatever train. The local Hmong have essentially adopted the guy as an honorary Hmong because the reporter is so quick to make excuses for and glorify these parasites.

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  23. Your blog has sold me on this proposition, Steve: the best position to be in these days is a white or white-appearing person with a semi-credible claim (loosely defined) to being some kind of "minority."

    LOL, so true. Manuel Roig-Franzia is a converso-looking guy born in Spain.

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  24. The United States: A Sovereign Nation versus A Corporate Puppet.

    Immigration 'reform' is not broadly popular. The only reason it is discussed so much is because corporate interests want more immigrants to drive labor costs down. The hispanic-industrial complex supports it, not the broad majority of Americans. We have plenty of people already, self-appointed 'hispanic leaders' want more 'hispanics' to support their political machines and big employers want more to drive down wages. It all old style machine politics that many an Irish, Italian or Polish city boss of the 19th century would understand completely.

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  25. If increasing the size of the workforce was a key to increasing GDP, then why don't all the poor nations of the world increase their workforces via immigration? Also, why would Mexico allow so many workers to leave, thus dwindling its workforce, and reducing the potential size of its GDP?

    Goddamnit, stop asking so many questions, I can barely hear the guy with the bullhorn.

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  26. Anonydroid said: It all old style machine politics that many an Irish, Italian or Polish city boss of the 19th century would understand completely.

    Hunsdon: We had Polish city/ward bosses? How cool is that.

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  27. A fair-haired, green eyed, long-skulled Spaniard whose bloodline is unsullied since Visigothic times, but there's no political upside in pointing out that racial connection these days, at least not in America. He's certainly not one of the "Hispanics" that La Raza represents, but who cares when there's a continent to be won?

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  28. When I was a management consultant we had a Cuban secretary. She was, like Marco Rubio, one of those pure Castilian Spanish Cubans. She was very concerned with social position and would not have liked to be considered just an ordinary Cuban - she was from the elite.

    In this country we don't classify people from south of the border the same way they do. For example Marco Rubio is a Caucasian who speaks Spanish. Antonio Villaraigosa on the other hand is an Amerindian who also speaks Spanish. Neither is completely pure racially but these two "Hispanic" politicians are not of the same race.

    One consequence of this confusion is that we lose sight of the IQ difference. Rubio and people like him have normal IQs of around 100, while people like Villaraigosa have IQs around 90. National wealth is a function of national IQ. Bringing in low IQ peoples makes the nation poorer.

    Albertosaurus

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  29. Anonymous said...
    ...

    LOL, so true. Manuel Roig-Franzia is a converso-looking guy born in Spain.
    ----
    I don't remember on what site it was posted but I once came across a map that showed how prevalent jewish ancestry was in the spanish population. I was very surprised that the "celtic" regions like the Asturies and Galicia were those with the highest % of jewish admixture. On the other hand, Catalunia was the spanish region with by far the smallest amount of genetic jewish heritage.

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  30. Don't knock Youngstown. I wouldn't call it a comeback yet, but they just got a brand new steel mill to produce pipe for fracking.

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  31. Do you have a source for that, Ogunsiron? Hopefully it's not that uniparental DNA study from a few years ago that naively assigned Jewish and Moorish ancestry in Spain on the basis of Y-haplogroups. It is not likely, for instance, that all of the Y-chromosomes belonging to haplogroup J in Spain are of Jewish origin given the links between prehistoric Spain and North Africa, the impact of Neolithic demic diffusion, presence of Phoenician traders, and Roman settlement in addition to Jews and Moors. What is also odd is that prior to the expulsion, there were more Jews in Catalonia than in Galicia.

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  32. Dr Van Nostrand3/10/13, 1:20 PM

    Heck if Antonio Banderas, Paz Vega,Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz can portray Mexicans why cant this Castillian fellow also from the mother country portray a real life one?

    If its anything feminist columnists who use Kill Bill ,Alien and GI Jane as arguments for women in combat have taught me is that if you film it, it will occur.

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  33. Still tough to see the name Roig-Franzia without getting distracted by his main claim to fame: getting punched in the face by 68-year-old ex-Marine editor Henry Allen at the office where they both worked--in the Style section.

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  34. Caldwell's one of that odd breed who went from being ethnic Dem to Rockefeller Rep, not overall too similar to his born-again Wilsonian-Wanniski brethren. However he does seem to retain unfashionably retrograde/realistic views on the social rights of lower class folks who hold down jobs, as opposed to the other kind who just buy a lot of stuff from Foxconn.

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  35. The big Rubio boomlet of 2½ whole months at the end of '12-'13 was a bit odd, considering he never got traction anywhere except Florida (possibly the most eccentric state, after Utah). It reminded me of the people who had seemed to really believe Dennis Kucinich's local appeal would translate nationally.

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  36. If its anything feminist columnists who use Kill Bill ,Alien and GI Jane as arguments for women in combat have taught me is that if you film it, it will occur.

    I thought feminists HATE HATE HATED science fiction.

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  37. Not really off topic:

    "Are foreign students the ‘best and brightest’? Data and implications for immigration policy", Norman Matloff. February 28, 2013.

    A fair amount of the type of data you sometimes like to crunch, Steve. (Matloff has written a book on programming in the R statistics language.)

    H1-B abuse, particularly in public high-tech companies, epitomizes everything that's wrong with the current powers-that-be and with evaluations of the worth of public companies.

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  38. troll silent, troll deep3/10/13, 11:08 PM

    I thought feminists HATE HATE HATED science fiction

    Hmm, yeah, I don't think anybody ever claimed that once, ever... It's undoubtedly true they prefer Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood over Asimov & Orson Scott Card. But now here we are, pretending "feminism" means any one thing in particular besides.

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