February 19, 2014

More common sense in Israel, less in America

From Haaretz:
Israel secretly flying asylum seekers to Uganda 
$3,500 inducement, pressure to leave, harsh conditions are spurring detainees to go, says one. 
By Ilan Lior | Feb. 19, 2014 | 2:17 AM |   5

Israel has begun to send African asylum seekers to Uganda, according to a senior government official who said that over the past month, dozens of asylum seekers have agreed to leave Israel for Uganda, and some have already left. The Population and Immigration Authority declined several requests from Haaretz to respond on the matter and no other official confirmation was forthcoming. 
Haaretz has obtained information that a Sudanese citizen who had been detained at the Saharonim detention center flew to Uganda, where he was reunited with his family. The man called his friends in Israel and said there were six other asylum seekers from Sudan with him on the flight, all of whom had been released from Saharonim. The man also said he had received a grant of $3,500 for leaving the country, which is in keeping with the government’s “voluntary departure” procedure. 
The state does not deport citizens of Eritrea because of danger to their lives in that country, nor does it deport the Sudanese, because Israel has no diplomatic relations with Sudan. But it does exert heavy pressure on people from those countries to leave. 
In June of 2013, the state told the High Court of Justice that it had reached an arrangement with a third country that would agree to accept asylum seekers from Africa, but would not reveal the name of the country. Senior officials confirmed that the country was Uganda; however, the state would not discuss the agreement and the Ugandan government denied the existence of such an agreement. 
Asylum seekers incarcerated at Saharonim or at the Holot detention facility say representatives of the Population and Immigration Authority are pressuring them to sign “voluntary departure” forms and are specifically mentioning the possibility of moving to Uganda. “Somebody from the Interior Ministry is going around here and asking if anyone wants to go back,” a detainee at Holot said on Wednesday. The detainee said the harsh conditions at the facility and the pressure are leading some people to agree to leave Israel despite their fears. ...
Meanwhile, Sa’ar said there has been a sharp rise in the number of asylum seekers from Africa leaving the country under what is known as the voluntary departure procedure. Speaking at the “voluntary departure unit” that the Population and Immigration Authority recently opened in Eilat, Sa’ar said that this month some 1,500 asylum seekers would be leaving, as opposed to 765 in January, 325 in December and 63 in November. 
“The number of people leaving every month recalls the number of infiltrators who were coming in at the height of the illegal infiltration,” Sa’ar said. He added that the sharp rise in departures was due to the new law against illegal entry, summonses to the Holot detention facility, the prohibition against employing illegal migrants and increasing the grant the asylum seekers receive on departure from $1,500 to $3,500. He said the figures were encouraging the ministry to continue its policy. 
According to the Population and Immigration Authority, as of September 2013 there were 53,646 asylum seekers from Africa in Israel, among them 35,987 Eritreans, 13,249 Sudanese and 4,400 people from other countries. 
According to the cabinet decision, all asylum seekers from Africa who leave the country by the end of the month via the “voluntary departure” procedure will receive a $3,500 grant. 
The Population and Immigration Authority reported on Wednesday that two Sudanese citizens crossed the border at night from Egypt to Israel. Since the beginning of 2014, 12 Africans have crossed into Israel. All have been incarcerated for one year in Saharonim, in keeping with the amendment to the law on illegal entry to Israel. ... 
 
In contrast, in the United States, from the New York Times:
Immigrants Welcome Here 
By DAVID BORNSTEIN
Earlier this month, John Boehner declared that it was unlikely that the House of Representatives would pass major immigration reform legislation this year. Given the desperate need for an overhaul of the system, the political gridlock is dismaying. But thankfully it’s not the whole immigration story. 
While Congress is locked in ideological battle, an incipient “welcoming” movement is taking root around the country as elected officials and community leaders are increasingly adopting “welcoming plans,” forming “welcoming committees” and issuing “welcoming resolutions” — to attract immigrants and improve relationships between newcomers and those who receive them. 
Historically, efforts to assist immigrants have tended to focus on services and overlook the relationship-building process. “If you think of an immigrant as a seed making its way to a new garden, we’ve traditionally focused on the seed, but not on the soil,” says David Lubell, the founder of Welcoming America, a network that has helped to define, galvanize and spread this movement.

(Here's their Our Supporters page.)
“You need to focus on both the immigrant community and the receiving community.” ...
We often think of diversity as a good in and of itself. But diversity is hard. The political scientist Robert Putnam has observed that residents of ethnically diverse neighborhoods tend to “hunker down” and develop lower levels of altruism and trust. To turn around this state of affairs takes deliberate effort; it doesn’t happen by itself. People have to get to know — and come to like or respect — individuals from different ethnic or religious groups. Then they become more positively predisposed towards those groups as a whole. Putnam calls this the “My pal Al effect,” and he notes that it hinges on having encounters with people who are different from you (pdf).

In other words, the problems caused by immigration aren't reasons to limit immigration, they are reasons for David Lubell-types from the Kennedy School at Harvard to be given NGO jobs to be paid to shame the natives into not using their Constitutional rights to vote against more immigration.
     

98 comments:

Blogosaurus said...

Israel does not have an elite which is hostile to its core population.

Anonymous said...

David Lubell, the founder of Welcoming America, a network that has helped to define, galvanize and spread this movement.

From the website:

http://www.welcomingamerica.org/about-us/staff/

"David is a recipient of prestigious Ashoka Fellowship, as well as the Cornerstone Social Justice award from Jewish Funds for Social Justice and the Community Change-Champion Award from the Center for Community Change. He is currently a Draper Richards Kaplan Social Entrepreneurship Fellow"

The Deputy Director Rachel Steinhardt:

"As the Deputy Director, Rachel works alongside the Executive Director [David Lubell]...The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, Rachel also serves on the board of Art and Remembrance, a nonprofit devoted to using the power of personal narrative in various forms of art to illuminate the effects of war and intolerance."

Anonymous said...

The world has changed, : radio, TV, computer, etc. have all created a global culture which makes many people "Americans" before they even get here.

Add to that, urbanization, modernization, and development in those most countries and you get a decidedly more worldly person than you would have had in the 1880-1920 period. Further, during that earlier period, many groups fanned out to the plains states, the west, etc. to create these small and midsize cities the author references.

The key problem in those places is that the US shut the door to so many immigrants in 1924 and didn't reopen it until 1965 with the net result being the gradually dying off of immigrants and the acculturation of their descendants.

Dan said...

The US should pay Afrikaners to reesettle in the US. 500,000 sprinkled around the ruin porn of Detroit or Baltimore would work wonders.

Anonymous said...

Both the City of Tucson and Pima County have adopted resolutions affirming a welcome to immigrants. Developments like this suggest the political tide is turning in a state that once led the nation in anti immigrant fervor. The change is being driven by the Arizona Interfaith Network of faith based institutions, business leaders of many stripes and a serious reconsideration of the negative impacts of legislation like SB 1070.

The Minute Men once a public relations factor in border politics and politicians like State Senator Russell Pearce who sought to capitalize on anti immigrant sentiment have departed the scene. Now the way is opened for a much healthier economy along with repair of the social fabric of the state.

Anonymous said...

Keep Afrikaners OUT, at all costs.

We don't need potential white supremacists ruining our country.

Anonymous said...

I've never quite understood how undocumented immigrants who work at jobs using fake SSNs can possibly "soak up our tax dollars." They pay taxes in--Social Security, Medicare, federal, state, and in some places county or city--but can't file tax returns to get what would almost certainly be nearly full refunds, or receive any of our national entitlement benefits. Could someone please explain how the math works out on that in their favor?

And I may certainly be guilty of stereotyping, but I suspect that most of the denizens of this site are people who are benefitting from the "unskilled peasant" labor the "alt-right" deplore. Do you buy cheap produce from Wal-Mart or other bargain grocers? Do you plant inexpensive flowers in your garden or hire lower-cost contractors to work on your house? How do you think those things are so cheap? Please explain.

Enioy your xenophobia, but don't expect all of us to share it.

Anonymous said...

"Both the City of Tucson and Pima County have adopted resolutions affirming a welcome to immigrants. Developments like this suggest the political tide is turning in a state that once led the nation in anti immigrant fervor."

This are not "developments"... they would put out statements even back in the minute men days...

IHTG said...

Sailer, your blog is infested with Anonymous troll commenters. Maybe you need to apply some "common sense" here as well.

Anonymous said...

They use the fake SS numbers to collect EITC, tax refunds and SNAP.

They're barnacles, like the Indians and Chinese. They come here with expectations of great infrastructure, but they never maintain or build it themselves, they just chip a little off for themselves and expect the actual Americans to keep it going for them.

Anonymous said...

"There are many arguments to be made in favor of immigration. For example, immigrants are twice as likely as nonimmigrants to start businesses (pdf), and most economic research indicates they boost the economy. In fact, immigrants or their children founded 40 percent of the country’s Fortune 500 companies."

It gets so depressing, having to hear the same bilge repeated again and again. Here, the Fortune 500 myth gets trotted out for another go around. Of course, like always, they treat immigrants as an undifferentiated mass. Hence, we are supposed to not notice that Mexican mestizos (the single biggest source of immigrants) are not exactly taking up a lot of space on that Fortune 500 list.

Anonymous said...

Israel's elite is from the core population.

Our elite is not.

Anonymous said...

"In 2012, Dayton’s mayor, Gary Leitzell, traveled to Turkey with a group of local business leaders to strengthen the city’s reputation as a hub for Turkish immigrants. The city reports that between 2011 and 2012, immigration increased 40 percent (pdf).

One of them is St. Louis. After a study in 2012 revealed that less than 5 percent of the population of the St. Louis metropolitan area was foreign-born — and that the relative scarcity of immigrants was the primary cause of the region’s poor economic growth (pdf) – the city launched the St. Louis Mosaic Project, with the goal of becoming “the fastest growing major metropolitan area for foreign born residents by 2020"

This is why attempts to adopt Israeli style immigration policies will fail.

Reg Cæsar said...

They pay taxes in--Social Security, Medicare, federal, state, and in some places county or city…

Perhaps you could explain to us how someone whose very function is to undercut the earning power of citizens already close to or at the minimum wage, and thus well below the tax threshold, can be paying federal and state income taxes.

While you're at it, you might also explain how this person can pay into the Social Security and Medicare system without either committing identity theft, or colluding with a corrupt employer and a corrupt government.


Q: How do they say "xenophobe" in Mexico?

A: They don't.

Survivor said...

Sam Donaldson, Speaks!

Anonymous said...

Israel is operated for the benefit of its citizens.

The United States, sadly, is not.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous:"Why doesn't a Republican politician advocate for an "Israeli-style" or "Israeli model" approach to immigration. Anyone who opposes would be labeled an anti-Semite or at the very least be forced to be critical about Israel"

The Republican elite is fully on board with massive immigration. There is no daylight between them and the Democratic elite on this issue. The only thing holding back the Republicans to any degree is the rank and file.

And the Republican elite will never allow a genuine immigration restrictionist to rise to power in the party. They would do whatever it takes to stop that.

Dave Pinsen said...

OT, Steve, but you (and Mangan, Greg Cochran, etc.) are now Heroes of the Dark Enlightenment.

Anonymous said...

According to the cabinet decision, all asylum seekers from Africa who leave the country by the end of the month via the “voluntary departure” procedure will receive a $3,500 grant.

It wouldn't surprise me if the source of that grant money was the American taxpayer.

Reg Cæsar said...

…while a small portion of the population lives in mediocrity, and the rest in squalor, like Brazil. --Sancai

Except that Brazil has a sensibly selective immigration policy, and everyone speaks the same language. So our version will be all the worse.

Anonymous said...

"Blogosaurus said...

Israel does not have an elite which is hostile to its core population.

2/19/14, 1:54 PM"

Yep, you said it.

Gordo

Anonymous said...

Illegal aliens and EITC:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/16/collecting-billions-in-a-loophole-fraudulent-tax-r/

EITC is the largest income transfer welfare program:

http://halfwaytoconcord.com/welfare-program-tax-code/

Anonymous said...

Leaving petty economic arguments aside, diverity is good in and of itself. Diversity is good because it integrates new ideas and cultures into the society. This provides people with inspiration and motivation to develop, grow and change.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous:"Israel's elite is from the core population.

Our elite is not."

Elite White Gentiles are in total agreement with elite White Jews on this point. There is no elite White Gentile institution that favors restricting immigration.

If there were genuine disagreement, we would see some White Gentile billionaire doing something about it (cf the Koch Family). But they believe in massive immigration.

Anonymous said...

The lack empathy on display here, and in the alt-right in general, is wow...just wow.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous:"Leaving petty economic arguments aside, diverity is good in and of itself. Diversity is good because it integrates new ideas and cultures into the society. This provides people with inspiration and motivation to develop, grow and change."

Seems that we have a satirists among us.

Anonymous said...

The arguments of the anti-immigration camp can be summed up in one sentence:

"Oh no! Here come the big scary brown men!"

For a bunch of high-IQ ubermensch you guys sure seem to lack confidence in yur ability to beat out a bunch of (according to the alt-right) "low IQ peasents."

Marissa said...

Could someone please explain how the math works out on that in their favor?

While others have explained, there is also this pesky law against requiring proof of citizenship for enrolling children in public schools. There's also no ID required for voting in some states.

Marissa said...

"Oh no! Here come the big scary brown men!"

Big? Do you mean the world's fattest population--Mexicans? Because they're a pretty small people, height-wise. But if that's all you're getting out of the conversation, then you can be grouped into the low-IQ peasant category since it sounds like you want the third-world these people arrive from.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous:"The lack empathy on display here, and in the alt-right in general, is wow...just wow."

Basing decisions on empathy alone is foolish. Sometimes you have to think in terms of "The Cold Equations*."


* A story that I suggest you read.

sancai said...

Empathy in the West is like a mental disorder.

Diversity is good because [insert worthless hippy value here]. Face it, advocacy for diversity is out of emotional resentment for whites. See if you'd feel the same way if the immigrants are coming to oppress you.

Fun fact: A more diverse America will only result in our well meaning, social justice types being oppressed by a more diverse crowd. If a white man dies and takes his foot off your neck, mine will be there in its place. This would happen even if I didn't intend to. Except we'd be doing this in the interests of our own minority group, so it wouldn't benefit most of the losers that make up the leftist coalition the way it did by proxy when most of the country was white.

Anonymous said...

anonymous:"The arguments of the anti-immigration camp can be summed up in one sentence:

"Oh no! Here come the big scary brown men!"

For a bunch of high-IQ ubermensch you guys sure seem to lack confidence in yur ability to beat out a bunch of (according to the alt-right) "low IQ peasents."


Try looking up La Griffe du Lion's "Smart Fraction" theory. The health of a society depends, to a significant degree, on the percentage of people with high IQs. Bringing in low IQ Mestizos and Black Africans is not good for American society as a whole.

Anonymous said...

I've never quite understood how undocumented immigrants who work at jobs using fake SSNs can possibly "soak up our tax dollars."


It would have been more efficient for you to simply write the words "I'm stupid". Tax dollars go to pay for a lot of things besides Social Security. (If you want to be hyper-technical about it, SS is not paid for by "tax dollars" at all)

The "undocumented workers" and their families consume a vast amount of tax dollars to pay for their food, their shelter, their medical care, their education, and on and on. Poor people in general are net consumers of taxes, and that applies in spades to "undocumented workers".

Anonymous said...

anonymous:"The arguments of the anti-immigration camp can be summed up in one sentence:

"Oh no! Here come the big scary brown men!"

For a bunch of high-IQ ubermensch you guys sure seem to lack confidence in yur ability to beat out a bunch of (according to the alt-right) "low IQ peasents."

Actually, I rather doubt that many people on this blog have much to fear from Third world immigrants, who mostly occupy the left-hand side of the Bell curve. I'm certainly not competing with Mexican Mestizos for jobs in my field. No, what we fear is the damage being done to American society as a whole. I have no desire to be an upper middle class man in an America that has been reduced to the level of, say, Brazil. I love my country too much to want that to happen.

Carney said...

Anonymous @ 2:08pm, you ignore the vast panoply of government expenditures to not only these people but also - crucially - their dependents. Crushing costs incurred or charged by hospitals, schools, cops and jails, transit, utilities, food stamps / WIC / ObamaCare etc, interpreters, the massive "anti discrimination" machine etc etc. All mincingly careful never ever to ask awkward questions about "status". Not to mention the heavy long term costs of linguistic Balkanization, irredentism, pervasive national security and loyalty problems, leftward political drift weighing down the economy, and most of all dumbing down the country by increasing the absolute and relative numbers of a lower IQ group.

el supremo said...

"For a bunch of high-IQ ubermensch you guys sure seem to lack confidence in yur ability to beat out a bunch of (according to the alt-right) "low IQ peasants"

I am not worried about my ability to out-compete them. I do have a sense of solidarity with my fellow citizens of whatever race whose wages are undercut by mass migration, whose already weak schools and hospitals are undermined by a mass influx of non-English speakers, whose neighborhoods become more crowded, and whose local culture and way of life is upended by a mass influx of foreign people.

Putting the quality of life of ordinary fellow citizens first used to be the hallmark of the old left - its pretty pathetic that only the so-called "alt-right" seems to even care about these things anymore.

Anonymous said...

Leaving petty economic arguments aside ...

... because let's face it, you have the same understanding of economics as you have of quantum physics and brain surgery.

diverity is good in and of itself.


Your professor told you so, and when you repeated his words back to him he gave you an "A", so clearly you're really smart and stuff and those words must be true!


Apparently it's never dawned on those people in Israel that diversity is good for them. Why don't you go instruct them about it?

Anonymous said...

"Enioy your xenophobia, but don't expect all of us to share it."

"The lack empathy on display here, and in the alt-right in general, is wow...just wow."

What's with the comment-bombardment consisting of distinctly feminine rhetoric? These posts are so generic in nature that they may in fact be bots.

2Degrees said...

Jews are too powerful to have as enemies on this issue. They are motivated by self-interest. I don't hold that against them.

They believe that in a mixed up country, they will rise to the surface.

This calculation has gone badly wrong. In Europe, mixed-up means Islamic and the Muslims will be enemies of the Jews as long as Israel exists.

America can usually be relied upon to subordinate its interests to Israel's. Israel may have the US congress in its back pocket, but it still cannot survive without American muscle.

As the moment, the US is a rottweiler. How much use to America will it be to Israel when it has been turned into a Chihuahua-Chow Chow cross?

2Degrees said...

Troll said:

And I may certainly be guilty of stereotyping, but I suspect that most of the denizens of this site are people who are benefitting from the "unskilled peasant" labor the "alt-right" deplore. Do you buy cheap produce from Wal-Mart or other bargain grocers? Do you plant inexpensive flowers in your garden or hire lower-cost contractors to work on your house? How do you think those things are so cheap? Please explain.

Enioy your xenophobia, but don't expect all of us to share it.

1). I employ New Zealand citizens at fair wages. So far most have been white, with some Maori.
2). I wash my own dishes and mow my own lawn.
3). New Zealand is a beautiful, prosperous country with a population of 4.4 million. I want it to stay that way.
4). I have lived in Japan. If they can survive without a tidal wave of Third World immigrants so can we.
5). I am a great admirer of what the Jews have achieved in their history, in particular the fact that after 3000 years they are still here. I think we should emulate them.
6). If your ideology places no value on anything higher than having your house cleaned on the cheap, then you have my pity.

Enjoy your slave labour economy, but don’t expect us all to join you.

Reg Cæsar said...

Someone must have posted a link to this at another site, to draw all the hostile boilerplate we see here. Only question is, was it a pseudoliberal or a pseudolibertarian site? There's nothing defensibly liberal or libertarian about present immigration policy.

Visitors who disagree are not bad per se, and would even be a boon if they studied the issue and engaged the questions discussed here. You mean, present policy is not a Robin-Hood-in-reverse impoverishing of labor to enrich capital, not socially divisive, not environmentally destructive, not importing statism and corruption? Please explain…

Steve and many of his readers are open-minded, and opposing comments have been welcomed when they're polite, thoughtful, informed, and honest.

Immigration enthusiasts, though, are rarely all of those, and too often none.

Anonymous said...

I've never quite understood how undocumented immigrants who work at jobs using fake SSNs can possibly "soak up our tax dollars." They pay taxes in--Social Security, Medicare, federal, state, and in some places county or city--but can't file tax returns to get what would almost certainly be nearly full refunds, or receive any of our national entitlement benefits. Could someone please explain how the math works out on that in their favor?

Assumes they even have a fake SSN and aren't working under the table.

The top expenditures for illegal immigrants are: food, clothing, rent and remittances, none of which are taxed in my state. The imputed annual property tax of $1000/mo 2 bed room apt in my township is about $1600, while per pupil spending is close t $13,000. So there's a big deficit right there.

Also birthing kids is expensive ($20,000 to $40,000) as the NYT as documented time and time again. And by law (EMTLA) hospitals will have to treat birthing mothers.

My state is considering making S-CHIP available to illegal immigrant kids. NY, CA and IL already do.

Art Deco said...

It used to be a rule-of-thumb if I am not mistaken that refugees were to be sheltered as near as practicable to their countries of origin and repatriated when feasible.

As always, the problem with refugees and asylum is sorting claims.

Israel's population is smaller than that of metropolitan Chicago, and the only refugee populations anywhere near them are an existential threat, so they are not an appropriate refugee destination. The U.S. has a great deal more margin here.

Art Deco said...

In other words, the problems caused by immigration aren't reasons to limit immigration, they are reasons for David Lubell-types from the Kennedy School at Harvard to be given NGO jobs to be paid to shame the natives into not using their Constitutional rights to vote against more immigration.

That's the standard party line among sociologists who specialize in the study of immigration. I used to have in my possession textbooks published in the mid-90's which pushed that thesis.

It is also the party line among the more obnoxious proponents of immigration among publicists. See Leon Wieseltier's condemnations of Stephen Spender and David Mellor &c. a generation ago.

Anonymous said...

Art Deco:"It used to be a rule-of-thumb if I am not mistaken that refugees were to be sheltered as near as practicable to their countries of origin and repatriated when feasible.

As always, the problem with refugees and asylum is sorting claims.

Israel's population is smaller than that of metropolitan Chicago, and the only refugee populations anywhere near them are an existential threat, so they are not an appropriate refugee destination. The U.S. has a great deal more margin here."


And the American elite are working hard to exceed that margin.

Anonymous said...

anonymous:"And I may certainly be guilty of stereotyping, but I suspect that most of the denizens of this site are people who are benefitting from the "unskilled peasant" labor the "alt-right" deplore."

Do I benefit from it? Sure. Do I want to benefit from it? No. I am willing to pay more in exchange for the social benefits that would come from reduced immigration.


Anonymous:" Do you buy cheap produce from Wal-Mart or other bargain grocers?"

Don't live near a Wal-Mart or a Target.


Anonymous:" Do you plant inexpensive flowers in your garden or hire lower-cost contractors to work on your house?"

Don't have a garden. Since I rent, I don't hire contractors.

Anonymous:" How do you think those things are so cheap? Please explain."

They are cheap because of immigrant labor, both legal and illegal. The question that you should be asking yourself is: should those things be that cheap? Wouldn't America be better off if we did not have an endless reservoir of immigrant labor depressing wages in un- and semi- skilled jobs?

syon

Ed said...

How many refugees has Japan taken in this last year or so?

Anonymous said...

Let's ignore the Fortune 500 boilerplate. Illegal immigrants do start lots of businesses-- they are just illegal taco trucks and the like, where they don't even pay rent to the owner of the parking lots they camp on. They also don't pay permits, restaurant license fees, or employment taxes on their 2-3 employees.

So they just suck up resources, keep all the profit and pay nothing to the city/town they are leeching off. Like I said, barnacles. And that kind of 'business' never grows larger, as even they know they can't set up a whole fleet of illegal taco trucks without finally managing to upset the SWPLs who buy the tacos. The SWPLs just want one or two for 'diversity', not a whole fleet's worth. So there's never any chance that those businesses will go legal.

Some economic benefit, huh.

Let's! said...

"Immigrant welcoming committees" are actually a good idea and much more feasible...under a low-immigration policy.

Anonymous said...

Israel's population is smaller than that of metropolitan Chicago, and the only refugee populations anywhere near them are an existential threat


It seems that African refugees in Israel are in existential threat, whereas in America they're not. Funny how that works.

Let's! said...

Anonymous 2:08 ...hire lower-cost contractors to work on your house?

You mean the house that I had to overpay $125,000 for (plus additional property taxes and interest) because most of the local school districts have become "immigrant welcoming committees" instead of offering a 21st-century education?

Or are you talking about some other house? You seem uninformed.

Anonymous said...

Do you buy cheap produce from Wal-Mart or other bargain grocers?


The idea what consumers are getting a fantastic deal on the price of lettuce thanks to illegal immigrant labor is one of the dumbest and most debunked pieces of open borders nonsense. If the wages of crop pickers were doubled, that would translate into about a 2% increase in the cost of produce. Consumers would save money if all illegals were kicked out, as the trivial increase in lettuce prices would be more than offset by the drop in taxes to pay for the external costs associated with the illegals.

Anonymous said...

"Diversity is good because it integrates new ideas and cultures into the society. This provides people with inspiration and motivation to develop, grow and change."

In Europe it's given us female genital mutilation, honour killing, homegrown Islamic terrorism, and khat chewing. None of which we had before.

Anonymous said...

"We don't need potential white supremacists ruining our country."

Hysterical.

Anonymous said...

"Welcoming America" seems like a massive missed opportunity. We should have started something like this.

Obviously Steve himself is a known quantity, so he couldn't get away with it. But that could well have been a bunch of right wing white guys soaking up foundation grant money. And under right wing white guy control, the welcome would be more along the lines of shaming immigrants to not litter, or telling them that they would be deported for any minor infraction to scare them into not littering, instead of just corralling immigrants to vote for hillary.

Obviously the platitudes would have to be mouthed, but, I estimate there is in reality zero oversight on these kinds of orgs -- as long as the quarterly reports said the money was spent teaching the immigrants to be good little democrat voters, nobody would really look into it.

And if our people were the welcoming committee, we would know who and where the immigrants were living, which would make it easy for our more thuggish fellow traveler right wing white guys to, um, check up on, any immigrants who weren't doing a good job integrating.

Anonymous said...

Afrikaners? Oh yeah, Afrikaners...

http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/story/24683563/multiple-stab-wound-victims-found-at-house-fire-in-detroit

Anonymous said...

Re: Israel and African immigrants

The best solution for Israel's problem to for it promote affirmative action to ensure the immigrants' inclusion in government, work, and academia; integrated schools to help the clearly xenophobic Israelis learn to humanize the Other; and working to change social norms in order to promote intermarriage. The resulting children will help bring peaceful change to a troubled land.

One of the world's leading experts on multiculturalism, Barbara Lerner Spectre, is "a former American who made ‘aliyah’ [to Israel as a returning Jew] and then ten years ago, with the help of the government of Sweden, set up a non-denominational institute of Jewish learning with the Greek name ‘Paideia’," also known as European Institute for Jewish Studies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2Vq_e2Z1ug Ms. Spectre has spoken extensively on the need for societies -- particularly ethnostates that were centered around particular ethnic groups -- to undergo profound changes in order to accept modernity, immigration, and becoming multicultural.

Just as the Swedes (who she was working with in the interview) need to learn to embrace a non-Swedish majority in their traditionally Swedish country, Israelis need to embrace multiculturalism, immigration, and intermarriage in Israel. Only by abandoning the false constructs of religion, race, and ethnicity while accepting that we are all one people, one race, will Israelis be able to accept and embrace the profound changes that globalization are bringing to us all.

Anonymous said...

Diversity is good because it integrates new ideas and cultures into the society. This provides people with inspiration and motivation to develop, grow and change.

Laugh out loud hilarious! I actually thought you were being ironic. You cannot provide a shred of evidence for this absurd garbage can you?

Anonymous said...

and khat chewing. None of which we had before.

Khat keeps those wogs quiet. Imagine how ultra-violent they would be like on alcohol?

Henry Canaday said...

Tiger Mom and Tiger Dad loped into the Local Lefty Bookstore last night to discuss their book, whose core conclusion is the true-but-should-be-trite proposition that Effort Matters.

Tiger Mom and Tiger Dad talk very, very fast and very confidently. They are both smart lawyers.

The book argues that, historically, success-producing Effort has proceeded from: 1) group confidence in superiority; 2) intense group pressure on children to perform; and 3) impulse control. The authors would like to see 1 & 2 decline, as they are unpleasant qualities, while Effort is maintained or strengthened. So clearly it is Effort that Matters.

The book says that most immigrant-group superiority fades after a generation or two, except for Jews. So maybe Jews continue to feel like outsiders, or something. Continuing black underperformance can of course be explained by historical racism and structural changes in the macro-economy, so we must all remain good liberals and stay socially active, etc, etc. Hispanic immigrants were not mentioned.

One LLB questioner asked whether, along with Effort, genetics might also matter and had Tiger Mom and Dad consulted any behavioral geneticists. Tiger Dad acknowledged that genetics might matter, but studies proved that people could learn to control their impulses.

The LLB audience was very friendly, in contrast to what the Tiger family described as some of the reception for the book. And the Tigers did not engage in too much tush-covering, for Yale professors.

Hunsdon said...

Art Deco said: Israel's population is smaller than that of metropolitan Chicago, and the only refugee populations anywhere near them are an existential threat, so they are not an appropriate refugee destination. The U.S. has a great deal more margin here.

Hunsdon said: Yes, brother---but less all the time.

2Degrees said: They (Jews) believe that in a mixed up country, they will rise to the surface.

Hunsdon said: Brother, they already rose to the surface. I think they fear that in a racially homogeneous society, they will eventually be regarded as interlopers. (To the extent that America was racially homogeneous in, say, 1965.)

I just wish our Jews would let us run our country the way Israeli Jews run theirs, but there always seems to be a hitch. An unqualified exception, one might say. Israel: Darn it, it's just different over there!

Anonymous said...

Yeah, someone should invent the internet, the telephone, the television, the printing press, TOURIST visas. Those would all be terrific ways to spread ideas without overwhelming your country with outsiders.

ben tillman said...

Sorry about that misplaced comment. It belonged in another thread.

ben tillman said...

The key problem in those places is that the US shut the door to so many immigrants in 1924 and didn't reopen it until 1965 with the net result being the gradually dying off of immigrants and the acculturation of their descendants.

That's a problem? Are you David Lubell?

Willis said...

Illegal aliens do not need bogus IDs or SSNs to get a job at employers not using Everify. They can acquire an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN), which the IRS will issue without regard to their legal status. The IRS is not allowed to share their data with Homeland Security or any other law enforcement agency.

In my state, about 15 years ago, some state legislature proposed an amendment to driver's license regulations allowing people with ITINs to get licenses. Many of the state legislators never bothered to find out who was eligible for an ITIN, so they were fooled into voting for driver's licenses for illegals. Of course they refused to fix the mistake.

Illegals don't come anywhere close to paying in taxes what they use in benefits. Per student spending is now around $10,000 per year in typical school districts. They are also eligible for the EITC, any of their children born in the US are eligible for food stamps, and they get free school lunches. Of course they also add to the infrastructure burden of the communities in which they live, and increase the need for law enforcement, etc.

The average illegal immigrant comes nowhere close to paying $10,000 in total taxes each year. They don't even cover the cost of a single child in the school system, let alone all that other stuff.

But the truth is that, absent some major economic collapse that might actually bring us to our senses, amnesty is a done deal. Perhaps not this year, perhaps not this decade, but it almost certainly will happen. There is almost zero chance Congress will pass a genuine enforcement bill. There is almost zero chance a Republican president will launch a serious effort to secure the border. The illegals will all still be here the next time Democrats are in control. The Democrats would have done it in '09 or '10 if the economy hadn't been in freefall. The next time they get total control of the government, if the economy's halfway decent, they will pass an amnesty

Chicago said...

The largest item on property tax bills here is earmarked for the Board of Education. The biggest group of students in the public school system is Hispanic, larger than the black share and way larger then the white. All the anchor babies are being paid for by others. Pay taxes? I went to a sizable Mexican restaurant in their neighborhood. They had a sign up that said "Cash Only". It's apparent what the situation regarding that happens to be, which is repeated everywhere.
The trolls all seem to be of a group that decided to converge together.

Willis said...

I used to have an office around the corner from a community health clinic, a charity funded by the largest hospital corporation in my state. The money to fund it came from paying patients, mostly those with insurance. In a town 90% non-Hispanic, about 90% of the clinic's patients were Hispanic. I ate lunch with a girl who worked there one day. She was white, but spoke Spanish, as did every other employee. She told me that another clinic she worked at, in a different city, had the same clientele - 90% Hispanic.

The costs these illegals impose on us are immense. Our government's financial position has not improved with the addition of 12 million illegals.

Anonymous said...

If you think Tucson is representative of Arizona politics, you're either ignorant or full of it.

Tucson was the epicenter of the inane movement to secede from Arizona (Baja Arizona) a few years ago. Its current exports are a famous hot dog stand and awful traffic along the I-10. Oh, and plenty of illegal aliens "living in the shadows", which means 'walking around out in the open' in spite of the fact that Tucson Sector Border Patrol HQ is smack in the middle of downtown.

Go to a McCain or Flake town hall to get a feeling for how the average Arizonan feels. Flake stopped doing them after he got shouted down by citizens. McCain just gets red faced and gets into shouting matches with people who demand to know what happened to "build the damn fence".

If you think Arizona is going to go "blue" because of some college liberals and hispanic bullshit artists around Tempe, parts of Flagstaff, and Tucson you probably think Texas is in play because Wendy Davis wore pink sneakers or something.

Anonymous said...

"Israel does not have an elite which is hostile to its core population."

Have you ever read Haaretz?

Anonymous said...

"Why doesn't a Republican politician advocate for an "Israeli-style" or "Israeli model" approach to immigration. Anyone who opposes would be labeled an anti-Semite or at the very least be forced to be critical about Israel."

Not a terrible idea, but every time any Republicans propose "Israeli-Style" airport security (i.e. pattern recognition) they're instantly called out as racist.

So not sure on the efficacy of that.

Anonymous said...

Biggest Difference

Israel's elite are hostile to Israel's enemies. America's elite are hostile to Americans.

Biggest similarity

Israel's elite are mostly Israelis. Our elite are mostly Israelis.


Hunsdon said...

Anonydroid at 8:25 PM said: Have you ever read Haaretz?

Hunsdon said: To be sure, there are degrees of hostility.

Hunsdon said...

Anonydroid at 8:27 pm said: Not a terrible idea, but every time any Republicans propose "Israeli-Style" airport security (i.e. pattern recognition) they're instantly called out as racist.

Hunsdon said: Play thick. "When our good friends the Israelis apply these common sense measures . . . . " It's not wit that's lacking, it's will.

Anonymous said...

Israel's elite are mostly Israelis. Our elite are mostly Israelis.

No, America's elite is partially made up of American Jews, many of whom are sympathetic to Israel. There's a difference between that and being Israeli.

Anonymous said...

"For a bunch of high-IQ ubermensch you guys sure seem to lack confidence in yur ability to beat out a bunch of (according to the alt-right) "low IQ peasents."" -we'd rather keep an open relatively non-tribalist society. You wouldn't like the inevitable changes that will occur as a result of using demographics as a weapon against us.

Anonymous said...

"Obviously the platitudes would have to be mouthed, but, I estimate there is in reality zero oversight on these kinds of orgs -- as long as the quarterly reports said the money was spent teaching the immigrants to be good little democrat voters, nobody would really look into it."

Careful reading of this blog can lead to many entrepreneurial ideas. Now, generally, this won't be the "build a business with your two hands" entrepreneurialism, but...

Anonymous said...

Do you people ever tire if being on the wrong side of history?

Anonymous said...

Leaving petty economic arguments aside, diverity is good in and of itself. Diversity is good because it integrates new ideas and cultures into the society. This provides people with inspiration and motivation to develop, grow and change.


Diversity is pure magic. There's nothing that can't be achieved with the power of diversity behind it. You can even wipe out an entire race of humanity and still record it as an increase in diversity (provided that race is white, I mean).

Anonymous said...

It seems that African refugees in Israel are in existential threat, whereas in America they're not. Funny how that works.

Funny, but simple enough to understand: Israeli existence matters; white existence doesn't.

I apologize profusely beforehand if this offends the estimable Art Deco, who is considered a great friend of this blog, cos facts shouldn't be allowed to spoil such a valued friendship.

Anonymous said...

>> It wouldn't surprise me if the source of that grant money was the American taxpayer


Virtually all of what we receive from US taxpayers are actually "vouchers" which can only be spent on US-made defense goods.

I will not claim we deserve it, merely that the Aid picture is quite different from what's imagined.

Anonymous said...

"Do you people ever tire if being on the wrong side of history?"

But tonight I say, we must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.

Arnold Willis said...

Yes. But then we go to bed and wake up the next morning, refreshed. Next question.

Anonymous said...

anonymous:"Do you people ever tire if being on the wrong side of history?"

History has a right side and a wrong side? Funny, I never realized that human history had the moral architecture of a cartoon.

Anonymous said...

Do you people ever tire if being on the wrong side of history?

Truth has no expiry date.

Sequester Grundleplith said...

If it's hard, then at a certain point why do it??? Gaaaaaaah [head hits desk]

International Jew said...

I can add a few more ways Israel is different.

1. The "proposition nation" has no traction.
2. Universal military service toughens people up and punctures "noble savage" myths tthat fill the heads of American 22-year-olds.
3. The parliamentary system, and the diversity of parties, gives people real choice.
4. There's generally a lot of interest in politics. A stealth population replacement strategy, as in the US, won't go unnoticed.

Anonymous said...

Elite white Gentiles are in total agreement with elite White Jews on this point. There is no elite White Gentile institution that favors restricting immigration.

Translation via Baron Evola:

http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/08/evolas-anti-semitism/
(...)
In his “spiritual autobiography,” The Road of Cinnabar (1972), Evola writes that following the Second World War he thought it “absurd” to continue stressing the white man’s superiority over the Jew “because the negative behavior [traditionally] attributed to Jews had now become that of the majority of ‘Aryans.’” That is, in an age where the Jewish spirit of liberal modernity prevailed and most whites had succumbed to it, it was futile to exalt Aryan values, for whites, the Aryans’ alleged heirs, now behaved no differently than Jews.
(...)

Anonymous said...

"Do you people ever tire if being on the wrong side of history?"


... exclaimed the communist.

Anonymous said...

$3500 is, what, ten times GDP per capita in their countries of origin.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous:"Translation via Baron Evola:

http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/08/evolas-anti-semitism/
(...)
In his “spiritual autobiography,” The Road of Cinnabar (1972), Evola writes that following the Second World War he thought it “absurd” to continue stressing the white man’s superiority over the Jew “because the negative behavior [traditionally] attributed to Jews had now become that of the majority of ‘Aryans.’” That is, in an age where the Jewish spirit of liberal modernity prevailed and most whites had succumbed to it, it was futile to exalt Aryan values, for whites, the Aryans’ alleged heirs, now behaved no differently than Jews.
(...)"

That might just stand as the stupidest piece of political analysis that I have ever read, which is saying something. Liberal modernity has an impeccably White Gentile pedigree: John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, etc.
The only White Jew who played any kind of role in shaping liberal modernity was Spinoza*. And unless you are Jonathan Israel, it's pretty rough sledding blaming the whole thing on him.

* Bear in mind that the liberal project was brought into being before Jewish Emancipation. Hence, figures like Freud and Marx were working within an already established liberal order.

Anonymous said...

That might just stand as the stupidest piece of political analysis that I have ever read, which is saying something. Liberal modernity has an impeccably White Gentile pedigree: John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, etc.


Notice that everyone you named was an Anglo-Saxon or Scot? But there was also the French Revolution, and it gave birth to an opposition that became conservatism/"the Right" that was entirely Gentile. Jews didn't/couldn't play much of a role in politics until the emancipations that began with the Revolution.

ben tillman said...

That might just stand as the stupidest piece of political analysis that I have ever read, which is saying something. Liberal modernity has an impeccably White Gentile pedigree: John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, etc.
The only White Jew who played any kind of role in shaping liberal modernity was Spinoza*. And unless you are Jonathan Israel, it's pretty rough sledding blaming the whole thing on him.


There's also Adam Sutcliffe, who studied under Israel. And, yes, they think Spinoza was a key figure, but there's more to it than that. "In short, the Enlightenment came to define itself, Mr. Sutcliffe argues, as the antithesis of all things Jewish." In other words, the Enlightnment was a reaction to the Jewish presence in Europe.

ben tillman said...

Bear in mind that the liberal project was brought into being before Jewish Emancipation. Hence, figures like Freud and Marx were working within an already established liberal order.

Jews played a huge role in European intellectual life through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, long before emancipation. Read Popkin, Newman, et al.

Anonymous said...

ben tillman:"There's also Adam Sutcliffe, who studied under Israel. And, yes, they think Spinoza was a key figure, but there's more to it than that. "In short, the Enlightenment came to define itself, Mr. Sutcliffe argues, as the antithesis of all things Jewish." In other words, the Enlightnment was a reaction to the Jewish presence in Europe."

Only in the fantasies of certain Jewish and Judeophile thinkers. One of the odd habits of many Jews is to view human history through a Jewish lens, which has the odd effect of making them central figures in everything.

The Enlightenment was not a reaction to the Jewish presence in Europe. Jews were not central to the thinking of Hume, Locke, Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, etc.

The only way to make Jews central to the process is to focus on certain aspects of continental thinkers like Voltaire. Even then, it takes a good measure of Jewish paranoia to reduce Voltaire to his opinions on the Jews.

Anonymous said...

ben tillman:"Jews played a huge role in European intellectual life through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, long before emancipation. Read Popkin, Newman, et al."

I have; their work does not make a convincing case that Jews played a "huge role" in Western thought during the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Jewish influence on Western thought comes in two great waves:

1. The early Christian period: Paul, of course, is the most important Jewish thinker in Western history.Indeed, one can argue that he was instrumental in creating Western Civilization, as the term only really makes sense after the introduction of Christianity.

2. Post Emancipation: Marx, Freud, Einstein, etc.

Anonymous said...

Razib Khan on the fantasy that Jews created modernity:

"Many Jews and anti-Semites are focused on the necessary and sufficient role of the Jewish people in the modern West. In the case of Jews I believe it derives in part from the same sense of national pride which is at the root of embarrassing imitations such as Afrocentrism. But the reality is that Jews did not become part of the mainstream of Western intellectual and cultural life until after their emancipation. For most of Europe this was at some point in the 19th century, and for Jews who did not convert to Christianity it was probably later in the 19th century at that.
To put a not too fine point on it, Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, and Rene Descartes were not Jews. Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant, and David Hume, were not Jews. John Stuart Mill was not a Jew. There were plenty of gentiles involved in the “invention” of modernity, and because of the social constraints placed upon Jews, there were very few of that people of any note before the 19th century in Western public life. The religious minority often seen to be disproportionately involved in the French Revolution were Protestants, not Jews. The exception to the Jewish abstention from early modernity would probably be Baruch Spinoza (I don’t think Moses Mendelssohn would be noteworthy were he not a Jew, while Spinoza would have been).
The enormous Jewish contribution to the 20th century intellectual world is undeniable. Jews were critically involved in the maturation and ripening of Western modernity. But they were not present at, or instrumental, in its birth. Therefore, it is ludicrous to claim that Jews “invented” Western modernity. Whether the invention of Western modernity is something to be proud of depends on your perspective, of course.
Note: In Catholicism and American Freedom the author argues that after World War II American Jews turned away from the tacit “white ethnic” coalition with Roman Catholics, and aligned themselves with the liberal post-Protestant Eastern Establishment in the incipient culture wars. But the narrative seems to indicate that initially Jews were junior partners in the project, even if they eventually became peers, or even dominant, vis-a-vis the old W.A.S.P. coterie." (http://www.razib.com/wordpress/?p=36607)

Mr. Anon said...

"Anonymous said...

Virtually all of what we receive from US taxpayers are actually "vouchers" which can only be spent on US-made defense goods."

And given that Israel is going to buy US made defence goods anyway, and that the money you save is fungible - it can be spent on anything else - it's a ridiculously good deal for Israel, isn't it?

Your protestations are akin to someone saying: "The government gives me a bunch of money to buy food. What good is that?"

Mr. Anon said...

"Anonymous Anonymous said...

Do you people ever tire if being on the wrong side of history?"

History doesn't have sides. People do. You're not on mine.