"Against the envy of less happier lands"

The Washington Post has been totally on board backing the Gang of Eight's slo-mo immigration putsch as representing What All the Cool Kids Are Doing These Days, so it's amusing to watch the cognitive dissonance between the American media's assumption that They Always Do Things Better in Europe and Europe's current turn to immigration restriction.

U.K. Independence Party finds its voice amid growing anti-immigrant wave 

By Anthony Faiola, Published: March 31 | Updated: Monday, April 1, 4:46 AM 

EASTLEIGH, ENGLAND — For the United Kingdom Independence Party, defeat has never looked this much like victory. 

After a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Commons was jailed on criminal charges, this struggling railroad town near the English Channel held a special election to pick his successor. The anti-immigrant U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) took up the challenge, setting up offices next to a Turkish kebab shop and narrowly losing its bid to win its first elected seat in the British Parliament. 

Its best-yet showing in a national race has, nevertheless, thrust into the national limelight a political movement that is part of a wave of anti-immigrant populism surging across Europe. The outcome of the Feb. 28 vote, coupled with national polls showing UKIP support at an all-time high, seemed to terrify Britain’s three traditional parties. In response, the Conservatives, the Labor Party and the Liberal Democrats are suddenly tripping over each other in a race to see who can more closely echo the Independence Party’s hard-line pledge to get tougher on immigration. 

Please note the fear and loathing terms in the article, which I'll put in bold. Project much?

UKIP’s ability to spark a policy stampede without even winning a seat in Parliament underscores the increasing capability of anti-immigrant forces to set the agenda amid Europe’s economic malaise. An issue at the core of the party’s platform is the withdrawal of Britain from the European Union to stem the tide of immigration — as an E.U. member, Britain is legally bound to allow the citizens of 24 other European countries to resettle here with few restrictions — which speaks to the concerns of a continent where a debt crisis and high employment are increasingly making foreigners the target of popular rage.

That fear is surging as countries including Britain, Germany and France prepare for new flows of migrants from two of Europe’s poorest countries — Bulgaria and Romania, whose citizens will win unlimited access to the E.U.’s labor market as of Jan. 1. 

With concern growing that the Independence Party will poach more and more voters from the political right, Prime Minister David Cameron, a Conservative, last week announced a plan to make it tougher for recently arrived immigrants to claim welfare benefits. The government additionally announced a dramatic makeover of the U.K. Border Agency to deal more expeditiously — and harshly — with illegal immigrants. 

Not to be outdone, Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister from Cameron’s junior coalition partner, the Liberal Democrats, announced his own plan to control illegal immigration. In a speech less than three weeks after the vote in Eastleigh, Clegg vowed to force visitors from countries with high numbers of visa violators to post a $1,500 bond — with the cash returnable only upon their departure from Britain. 

At the same time, Ed Miliband, leader of the opposition Labor Party, has offered a mea culpa for lax immigration policies during his party’s rule from 1997 to 2010, a period when net migration to Britain soared. In an apparent reference to then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s campaign gaffe in 2010 — when the Labor leader was caught off camera describing an elderly white woman as “bigoted” for complaining about immigration — Miliband said: “It’s not prejudiced when people worry about immigration. It’s understandable. And we were wrong in the past when we dismissed people’s concerns.”

Has anybody in America apologized over immigration policy?

Although not wholly new — Britain’s top parties have for years been leaning toward tougher immigration policies— observers say the steps taken since the Independence Party’s surge have amounted to some of the most aggressive yet.
“There is no doubting the influence of UKIP is now being felt in our immigration debate, partly because the main parties have refused to have a debate about this before,” said Keith Vaz, a Labor Party lawmaker. “We should stamp out illegal immigration, but we also need to avoid an arms race between the parties as they react to UKIP support.”

With a debt crisis and deep austerity entering their fourth year, Europe is facing a period of record unemployment that has allowed unpredictable political forces to take root. By comparison to some of these unconventional movements — such as the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn in Greece — the U.K. Independence Party is relatively mild. 

The party was founded in the 1990s by British politicians furious about London’s acceptance of the Maastricht Treaty, which created the European Union. Today, the party is led by the spiffily dressed Nigel Farage — a savvy, speaks-in-sound-bites politician known for his dry sense of British humor. Although he is campaigning heavily for Britain to leave the E.U., his wife is a German national. 

Under his leadership, the party has largely avoided the racially and religiously tinged jabs against Muslim immigrants taken by, say, the Nationalists in France. 

Rather, UKIP ascribes to a school of thought always just under the surface in Britain — that this is a nation that is culturally apart from Europe and has no business being part of that exotic world across the English Channel.

Those sentiments have been exacerbated by an influx of hundreds of thousands of Europeans — mostly from the east — who over the past two decades have taken advantage of the E.U.’s open-borders policy to find jobs and resettle in Britain. 

Appreciation of what Paul Johnson calls England's "island privilege" -- the ability to draw from the Continent as wished and withdraw from the Continent when needed -- has not always been kept under the surface. In fact, one Englishman spelled out this "school of thought" rather vividly in what's basically the UKIP platform:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
... This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself. 

Well said.

Britain's left moving right on immigration

Unlike what we are told by the American press, Amnesty Fever is not sweeping the rest of the world. From the left-of-center New Statesman of London:

Leader: Liberalism now feels inadequate in this new age of insecurity 

The stakes could not be higher. 

BY NEW STATESMAN PUBLISHED 27 MARCH 2013  

Ever since the Thatcher era, British politics has been defined by forms of economic and social liberalism. The right won the argument for the former and the left the argument for the latter, or so it is said. Yet in the post-crash era, this ideological settlement is beginning to fracture. ... 

Two thinkers, Phillip Blond and Maurice Glasman, and their respective factions – the Red Tories and Blue Labour – were quicker to recognise this than most. Mr Blond may no longer have the ear of the Prime Minister, if he ever did, but since the appointment of Jon Cruddas as the head of Labour’s policy review, the Blue Labour faction has emerged as the dominant intellectual influence on the Labour Party. 

With his support for a technical baccalaureate, employee representation on remuneration committees and a new network of regional banks, the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, has embraced elements of the German social-market model long championed by Lord Glasman. At the same time, Blue Labour has encouraged the party to begin to articulate concerns on social issues that have long been neglected by the left and to speak about culture as well as economics. 

In a recent speech to the Fabian Women’s Network, Diane Abbott, the shadow public health minister and once on the hard left of the party, spoke out against the “sexualisation” of childhood. “For so long,” she said, “it’s been argued that overt, public displays of sexuality are an enlightened liberation. But I believe that for many, the pressure of conforming to hyper-sexualisation and its pitfalls is a prison.” Ms Abbott concluded: “We’ve got to build a society based on open-minded family values and not ‘anything-goes’ market values.” 

More contentiously, in the case of immigration, Blue Labour has provided Mr Miliband with a language in which to engage with what went wrong under New Labour. According to Tony Blair’s globalist narrative, an open immigration policy was an unalloyed good. The interests of workers who saw their wages undercut and who felt confused and left behind by the pace of change were subordinate to those of the corporations that benefited from a larger and more flexible labour pool. Mr Miliband appears to have accepted the argument of Lord Glasman, Mr Cruddas and others that the Labour Party was too slow to respond to such anxieties among its natural supporters in working-class communities. He has argued that Labour was wrong not to impose transitional controls on migration from accession states such as Poland, as other members of the EU had done. He has pledged to ban recruitment agencies that operate exclusively by bringing in foreign workers to Britain without trying to fill vacancies locally. If it is true that immigration has had a generally beneficial effect on aggregate output, it is also true, as Mr Miliband has observed, that: “People don’t live their lives in the aggregate.”

It's good to hear that Lord Glasman hasn't yet been banished for crimethink. I wrote about Lord Glasman's revival of old-fashioned Orwell-style patriotic conservative socialism two years ago for VDARE:

Lord Glasman has found himself on the less privileged side of the central ideological divide of the 21st Century—a gap that sprawls across the more familiar ideological chasms of the 20th Century. The crucial question is no longer capitalism vs. communism, but globalism v. localism, imperial centralization v. self-rule, cosmopolitanism v. patriotism, elitism v. populism, diversity v. particularism, homogeneity v. heterogeneity, and high-low v. middle. 

Barack Obama, for example, epitomizes the first side of these dichotomies, especially the high-low coalition. By being half-black, he enjoys the totemic aura of the low, but has all the advantages of the high. He has never, as far as anyone can tell, had a thought cross his mind that would raise an eyebrow at a Davos Conference. 

In contrast to the President, Glasman is certainly an original thinker. But anybody on his side of these new dichotomies faces a tactical disadvantage.
Because globalists want the whole world to be all the same, they share common talking points, strategies, conferences, media, and so forth. 

In contrast, because the localists want the freedom to rule themselves, they often don’t even realize who else is on the same side of this divide. 

For example, to most Americans, "socialism" is a very foreign-sounding word. To a lot of Brits, however, socialism is what their grandfathers looked forward to while they fought WWII and then came home to create the National Health Service. ...

Glasman recently described Orwell as "a conservative patriot working in a socialist tradition," and much the same could be said for Glasman himself.

51% of Australians want to ban legal immigration

The American press is beating the drums to convince voters that everybody is in favor of amnesty these days. It's the latest dance craze! Yet, in the rest of the English-speaking world, public opinion is more anti-immigration. Here's a story from a year ago:

Half of Australians want end to immigration: poll
AFP News – Tue, May 22, 2012

Some 50 percent of Australians want an end to the nation's immigration programme because they believe the country has too many people, a poll showed on Tuesday. 

The survey of 2,000 people, conducted for the tabloid Sydney Daily Telegraph newspaper, found 51 percent thought "our population is too high (and) we should stop immigration". 

Australia has some 23 million people, compared to 19.6 million a decade ago.
Canberra set its immigration programme for the year to June at 185,000 places, with another 13,750 slots available to refugees on humanitarian grounds.
But in the poll only 32 percent of respondents felt Australia should welcome more immigrants and almost two thirds, some 65 percent, said "migrants should adopt the Australian way of life". 

The responses revealed a marked swing away from the more tolerant attitudes of previous surveys conducted in 2005, 2001 and 1995, the newspaper said. 

Immigration expert Bob Birrell said fears over job security in the shaky global economy and local pressures on infrastructure were behind the shift in opinion.

Australia has been hugely prosperous recently because of the natural resources boom. But it doesn't have much water.

Minority Mortgage Meltdown in Prince George's County

Since 1975, the federal government has been collecting data to make sure that minorities get enough mortgages, but nobody set up a system to see if minorities were paying back their mortgages. Thus, when the mortgage market collapsed in 2007-08, there wasn't much data readily available on who was defaulting on their loans. I started pointing out in 2007 that the circumstantial evidence pointed to this being heavily "diversity-driven." After all, the government and the media had been making a huge effort to keep minorities from getting too few mortgages, so the most likely mistake was they had gotten too many.

Slowly, academic studies are emerging of who exactly defaulted, and it turns out ... I was right. For example:

Analyzing Foreclosures Among High-income Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino Borrowers in Prince George’s County, Maryland 

Katrin B. Anacker, James H. Carr, and Archana Pradhan 

Abstract 

Although Prince George’s County, Maryland, is the wealthiest Black/African American county in the nation, the national foreclosure crisis has had a profound effect on it. Using a merged data set consisting of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), U.S. Census, and Lender Processing Services (LPS) data and utilizing a logistic regression model, we analyzed the likelihood of foreclosure in Prince George’s County in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. We found that the borrowers in Black/African American neighborhoods with high-income were 42% more likely and Hispanic/Latino neighborhoods with high income were 159% more likely than the borrowers in non-Hispanic White neighborhoods to go into foreclosure, controlling for key demographic, socioeconomic, and financial variables.

These race differences are after they statistically adjust the heck out of everything. I think it's also useful to highlight the raw foreclosure rates in Prince George's County, Maryland:

White: 1.91% (372 foreclosures)
Hispanic: 6.42% (3.4X the white rate, 1,091 foreclosures)
Black: 3.62% (1.9X the white rate, 4,219 foreclosures)

That's a lot of Hispanic foreclosures for a county famous for its black population.

One thing to keep in mind about these studies is that the national racial gaps might turn out to be even bigger than the regional ones because the studies are typically done of places with a lot of foreclosures, which tend to be pretty vibrant. I haven't seen anybody yet do a study of defaults in, say, the Dakotas.

Minority Mortgage Meltdown in Atlanta Metropolis

Here's another paper on the role of diversity in the mortgage meltdown:

Analyzing Determinants of Foreclosure of Middle-Income Borrowers of Color in the Atlanta, GA Metropolitan Area 

Katrin B. Anacker
George Mason University - School of Public Policy 

James H. Carr
Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) 

Archana Pradhan
National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) 

July 14, 2012
GMU School of Public Policy Research Paper No. 2013-01  

Abstract:    
Foreclosures have disproportionately affected borrowers and communities of color. Many studies have concentrated on the nation and specific metropolitan areas, but few academic studies have focused on Atlanta. Using a merged data set consisting of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), U.S. Census, and Lender Processing Services (LPS) data and utilizing a logistic regression model, we analyze the likelihood of foreclosure in the Atlanta, GA metropolitan area. We find that African American borrowers are 52 percent and Hispanic borrowers 159 percent more likely to go into foreclosure, controlling for key financial variables. We also find that African American middle-income borrowers are 35 percent more likely to go into foreclosure. Moreover, we find that exotic mortgage products, such as balloon mortgages, adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) and mortgages with a prepayment penalty have a higher likelihood of foreclosure than standard 30-year fixed rate mortgages.

The raw, unadjusted results for the large Atlanta metropolitan area are that foreclosure percentages were:

White: 1.74% (5,692 homes in foreclosure)
Hispanic: 4.65% (2.7X white rate -- 395 homes in foreclosure)
Black: 5.82%  (3.3X white rate - 8,271 homes in foreclosure)

Immigration and cuisine

When I first started writing about immigration, I noticed that the single most influential argument in favor of massive immigration was the Restaurant Rationale: powerful people go out to restaurants a lot more than most people do, and they viewed immigration as good for cuisine. 

Traditionally, Americans weren't very good at cooking. The main ethnic stocks were English, Scottish, Irish, and German. The Germans were mediocre cooks and the English, Scottish, and Irish were awful. After the War in Italy, Americans fell in love with Italian restaurants. 

The lesson I've drawn is that you need a few immigrants to get a cuisine launched in the U.S., but not many. There have been very few immigrants from Italy, yet Italian food in America keeps getting better and better. After awhile, cooking really good Italian food turns into one of those jobs Americans just will do.

Here's my question: what has been the course of cuisine been like in recent decades in those handful of affluent countries that have resisted mass immigration, such as Finland and Japan?

Will hearings on the immigration bill be allowed?

The big tactical question on immigration at the moment is whether the Gang of Eight's undisclosed bill negotiated in undisclosed locations will be slammed through the Senate with virtually no hearings, or whether Senator Jeff Sessions' call for televised hearings will be heeded. We went through exactly the same issues in 2006 and 2007, when amnesty addicts tried to slide their bills through on a trust-us-would-we-lie-to-you basis, but both times it failed when exposed to scrutiny.

As I wrote in VDARE six years ago:

By Steve Sailer on May 19, 2007 at 1:00am 

Under the leadership of Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), various Senators and Bush Administration officials pulled an all-nighter behind closed doors on Wednesday. By noon Thursday, the bleary-eyed politicos had concocted an illegal alien amnesty (a.k.a., "comprehensive immigration reform") bill. 

I presume politicians don't have Smoke-Filled Rooms anymore. So you could call this the Red Bull-Filled Room approach to deciding the fate of America. 

No committee hearings are to be held on what may well be the most important legislation of the decade. As Senator Chuck Grassley [R-IA] correctly pointed out: 

"It's disappointing and even ironic how the deal announced today skirts the democratic processes of Congress. It was cut by a group of senators operating outside the committees of jurisdiction and without public hearings on key components." 

As of early Saturday morning, May 19, the public has not even been shown the text of the bill. The ultimately failed amnesty legislation the Senate passed last year was 118,277 words long. This may well be more complicated. A photo of the first draft shows it to be almost twice as thick as a Bible. 

So reading the new bill carefully will likely take at least 10 uninterrupted hours, and quite possibly twice that, a span of time that few Senators have readily available. To truly understand how the legislation would work and what its long term implications are would take weeks of questioning and debate. 

Nonetheless, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) wants to have the entire bill passed by Memorial Day, a week from now. 

Even more appallingly, Reid wants to hold the crucial "cloture" vote to shut off the possibility of a filibuster, the best chance to derail it, on Monday, May 21! [Two days later] 

It is utterly impossible for the United States Senate to exercise the due diligence commensurate with the importance of major immigration legislation without extensive hearings. 

The pro-amnesty Senate hearings spearheaded by McCain in early 2006 aroused tremendous opposition among the public. Although an amnesty bill passed the Senate in May, House Republican leaders wisely refused to be lured into a conference committee to reconcile their enforcement-only bill with the Senate's diametrically opposed bill. Instead, they held additional hearings on immigration last summer around the country. Foolishly, Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) tried to hold his own hearings in favor of the Senate bill, but the result of the dueling hearings was the collapse of any chance for amnesty last year. 

From a good government standpoint, what we are witnessing is perhaps the most irresponsible and shameless attempt to hustle a pig in a poke past the public in recent memory. Of course, that's the whole point of the exercise—to not let us simple citizens in on the process of deciding who our fellow citizens will be. 

It's only a modest exaggeration to call this an attempted coup against the American people. 

Of course, the Main Stream Media finds this elite putsch admirable. U.S. News' Political Bulletin commented on Friday: "Media Revels in Bipartisanship Bliss The bipartisan process that led to the Senate deal is being celebrated in media reports." Today's press probably would have spun the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact as a triumph of bipartisan bridge-building. Who cares if the American people have to play the role of the betrayed Poles? 

Why this obscene haste?

The good news in 2013 is that not only Evil Old White Man Jeff Sessions is calling for hearings, but so is Vibrant Young Person of Tanning Booth Marco Rubio. Of course, the problem with Rubio's involvement is that it also means that if Rubio, America's Unelected Dictator of Demographic Destiny, ever changes his mind on the need for hearings, then we are sunk.

Greg Sargent of the WaPo writes:

Rubio is joining with other Senators who are urging a go-slow approach, such as Ted Cruz and Jeff Sessions, who may be urging a slowdown so the armies of the right have time to mobilize and strike fear into any reform-minded Republican officials, killing reform. 

Indeed, one group opposed to reform has explicitly called on Senators to slow the process down, apparently for the purposes of derailing it. And we’ve seen this before: back in 2007, opponents of reform similarly tried to slow the process, with Senator John Cornyn urging colleagues to “slow down and read this bill” because Americans had not yet digested the plan. Now, six years later, we’re again hearing the calls to “slow down.” But the American people have made their verdict clear: They want a path to citizenship.

Let's reiterate the Establishment Conventional Wisdom: Only bad people want to "slow down and read this bill" (which, by the way, hasn't yet fully gone through the formality of coming into existence, much less released to the public). Why do you want to read a landmark bill? What are you, some kind of racist? Reading is racist!

David Goodhart in The Daily Mail on immigration

Yesterday, I posted David Goodhart's essay promoting his new book The British Dream in the broadsheet Guardian. Here's his article in the Most Interesting Newspaper in the World (tm), the tabloid Daily Mail.

SATURDAY ESSAY: Why we on the Left made an epic mistake on immigration 

By David Goodhart 

PUBLISHED: 18:21 EST, 22 March 2013 | UPDATED: 18:21 EST, 22 March 2013

Among Left-leaning ‘Hampstead’ liberals like me, there has long been what you might call a ‘discrimination assumption’ when it comes to the highly charged issue of immigration. 

Our instinctive reaction has been that Britain is a relentlessly racist country bent on thwarting the lives of ethnic minorities, that the only decent policy is to throw open our doors to all and that those with doubts about how we run our multi-racial society are guilty of prejudice. 

And that view — echoed in Whitehall, Westminster and town halls around the country — has been the prevailing ideology, setting the tone for the immigration debate.

But for some years, this has troubled me and, gradually, I have changed my mind.  

... I am now convinced that public opinion is right and Britain has had too much immigration too quickly. 

For 30 years, the Left has blinded itself with sentiment about diversity. But we got it wrong. 

I still believe that large-scale immigration has made Britain livelier and more dynamic than it would otherwise have been. I believe, too, that this country is significantly less racist than it once was. 

In many places immigration is working as the textbooks say it should with a degree of harmony, with minorities upwardly mobile and creating interesting new hybrid identities in mixed suburbs. 

But it has also resulted in too many areas in which ethnic minorities lead almost segregated lives — notably in the northern ‘mill towns’ and other declining industrial regions, which in the Sixties and Seventies attracted one of the most clannish minorities of modern times, rural Kashmiri Pakistanis. 

In Leicester and Bradford, almost half of the ethnic population live in what are technically ghettos (defined as areas where minorities form more than two-thirds of the population). Meanwhile, parts of white working-class Britain have been left feeling neither valued nor useful, believing that they have been displaced by newcomers not only in the job market but also in the national story itself. 

Those in the race lobby have been slow to recognise that strong collective identities are legitimate for majorities as well as minorities, for white as well as for black people. 

For a democratic state to have any meaning, it must ‘belong’ to existing citizens. They must have special rights over non-citizens. Immigration must be managed with their interests in mind. But it has not been.

The justification for such a large and unpopular change has to be that the economic benefits are significant and measurable. But they are not. 

One of the liberal elite’s myths is that we are a ‘mongrel nation’ that has always experienced high inflows of outsiders. But this isn’t true. From 1066 until 1950, immigration was almost non-existent (excluding Ireland) — a quarter of a million at the most, mainly Huguenots and Jews. 

Post-World War II immigration has been on a completely different scale from anything that went before. These days, more people arrive on our shores as immigrants in a single year than did so in the entire period from 1066 to 1950, excluding wartime. 

... By 2066, according to one demographer, white Britons will be in a minority.

This is already the case in some towns and cities, including London, Leicester, Slough and Luton, with Birmingham expected to follow in the near future.

Okay, Slough (all I know of it is John Betjeman's poem), but London ... That's as crazy as giving California away to foreigners.

If Britain had a clear and confident sense of its national culture and was good at integrating people, then perhaps this speed of change would be of little concern. But this is not the case. 

We are deep into a huge social experiment. To give it a chance of working, we need to heed the ‘slow down’ signs that the electorate is waving. And all the more so given that the low economic growth era we are now in means people’s grievances cannot easily be bought off with rising wages and public spending. 

The fault lies with our leaders, not with the people who came for a better life. There has been a huge gap between our ruling elite’s views and those of ordinary people on the street. This was brought home to me when dining at an Oxford college and the eminent person next to me, a very senior civil servant, said: ‘When I was at the Treasury, I argued for the most open door possible to immigration [because] I saw it as my job to maximise global welfare not national welfare.’

I was even more surprised when the notion was endorsed by another guest, one of the most powerful television executives in the country. He, too, felt global welfare was paramount and that he had a greater obligation to someone in Burundi than to someone in Birmingham. 

Such grand notions run counter to the way most people in this country think or arrange their priorities. 

The British political class has never prepared existing citizens for something as game-changing as large-scale immigration, nor has it done a good job at explaining what the point of large-scale immigration was and whose interests it was meant to serve.  

Probably because the answers were:

Q. Whose interests it is meant to serve?

A. Not yours, dear voters, not yours.

Q. What is the point of large-scale immigration?

A. To rub your noses in diversity. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a human nose being rubbed in diversity — forever.

Crucially, they failed to control the inflow more overtly in the interests of existing citizens. On the contrary, the idea that immigration should be unambiguously in the interests of existing citizens was blurred from the start. 

Then, whenever there were problems with immigrant communities, the tendency was for the host society to be blamed for not being sufficiently accommodating or for being racist, rather than considering the self-inflicted wounds of some minority cultures.

Parts of white working-class Britain believe that they have been displaced by newcomers not only in the job market but also in the national story itself
Thus, the absence of fathers in many African-Caribbean households was excused as a cultural trait that just had to be accepted rather than a dereliction of duty that needed addressing. 

Yes, being a newcomer can be hard, even in a liberal society such as Britain’s that today offers undreamed of protections and rights compared with earlier eras. But what has been largely ignored is that mass immigration makes big demands on host communities, too, and a successful strategy must engage the attention, consent and sympathy of the host majority as well. 

Democratic common sense demands that politics and law cannot concern themselves only with the problems of minorities. The majority must have a voice, too, in how we manage a multi-racial society.

What, for example, do we say to the elderly white people of the Pollards Hill estate in Merton, in South-West London — which I visited on my travels — many of whom feel displaced and disrupted by the arrival of a large Ghanaian population in recent years?  

To the local whites, the Ghanaians are not fitting in but imposing their own way of life on the neighbourhood. Similar small battles are taking place in thousands of other housing estates up and down the country.  

David Goodhart: "The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-war Immigration"

David Goodhart writes in The Guardian:

Why the left is wrong about immigration

Mass immigration is damaging to social democracy, argues David Goodhart in his controversial new book – it erodes our national solidarity. What's more, welcoming people from poor countries into rich ones does nothing for global equality

The word "controversial" has evolved over the course of my reading lifetime from meaning "hubba hubba" to meaning "you aren't supposed to like this"

David Goodhart 

In busy offices up and down the land some of Britain's most idealistic young men and women – working in human rights NGOs and immigration law firms – struggle every day to usher into this society as many people as possible from poor countries. 

They are motivated by the admirable belief that all human lives are equally valuable. And like some of the older 1960s liberal baby boomers, who were reacting against the extreme nationalism of the first half of the 20th century, they seem to feel few national attachments. Indeed, they feel no less a commitment to the welfare of someone in Burundi than they do to a fellow citizen in Birmingham. Perhaps they even feel a greater commitment. 

Charity used to begin at home. But the best fast-stream civil servants now want to work in DfID, the international development department. Their idealism is focused more on raising up the global poor or worrying about global warming than on sorting out Britain's social care system. 

Many people on the left, indeed many Guardian readers, are sympathetic to these global citizen values: they see that the world has become smaller and more interdependent, and feel uneasy about policies that prioritise the interests of British citizens. The progressive assumption seems to be that it is fine to have an attachment to friends and family, and perhaps a neighbourhood or a city – "I'm proud to be a Londoner" – and, of course, to humanity as a whole. But the nation state – especially a once dominant one like Britain (above all its English core) – is considered something old-fashioned and illiberal, an irrational group attachment that smart people have grown out of. 

In the 21st Century, the fundamental difference between conservatives and liberals is that the conservatives have concentric loyalties while liberals have leapfrogging loyalties.

... If all human lives are equally valuable, how can we any longer favour our fellow national citizens over the impoverished masses of the global south?

You know, you can always donate your own money to the impoverished masses of the global south. A pound goes a lot further toward feeding the hungry in the Congo than in England.

This "post-nationalism" nags away at the conscience of many liberal-minded people.

But it is a category error. It does not follow from a belief in human equality that we have equal obligations to everyone on the planet. All people are equal but they are not all equal to us. Most people in Britain today accept the idea of human equality, but remain moral particularists and moderate nationalists, believing that we have a hierarchy of obligations starting with our family and rippling out via the nation state to the rest of humanity. Britain spends 25 times more every year on the NHS than on development aid. To most people, even people who think of themselves as internationalists, this represents a perfectly natural reflection of our layered obligations, but to a true universalist it must seem like a crime. 

Many people on the left are still transfixed by the historic sins of nationalism. But if people are squeamish about the word "nation" they should use another: citizenship or just society. And the modern law-bound, liberal nation state is hardly a menacing political institution. You join automatically by birth (or by invitation) and an allegiance to the liberal nation state is compatible with being highly critical of the current social order and with support for bodies such as Nato and the EU. 

Indeed, the modern nation state is the only institution that can currently offer what liberals, of both right and left, want: government accountability, cross-class and generational solidarity, and a sense of collective identification. As societies become more diverse, we need this glue of a national story more not less. This is ultimately a pragmatic argument. The nation state is not a good in itself, it is just the institutional arrangement that can deliver the democratic, welfare, and psychological outcomes that most people seem to want. It is possible that in the future more global or regional institutions might deliver these things; the EU is one prototype but its current difficulties underline what a slow and stuttering process this is likely to be. (Germany, the least nationalistic of the big European states, was happy to spend about $1tn on unification with east Germany but is very reluctant to spend much smaller sums supporting the southern European economies.) 

We have a hard enough time policing corruption in our own country. The Euro Follies show that corruption fighting is that much harder spread across languages and cultures.

Anti-nationalists also underestimate just how much the nation state has liberalised in recent decades. One might say that the great achievement of post-1945 politics, in Europe at least, has been to "feminise" the nation state. 

The nation was once about defending or taking territory and about organised violence.

It still is.

But now that Britain's participation in a world war is highly improbable, the focus has switched to the internal sharing of resources within the nation – and the traditionally feminine "hearth and home" issues of protecting the young, old, disabled and poor. Notwithstanding recent trimming, Britain's social security budget has increased 40% in just the last 15 years. 

The modern nation state has become far more inclusive in recent generations and is underpinned by unprecedented social provision, free to all insiders – but towards the outside world it has become, or is trying to become, more exclusionary. There is nothing perverse or mean-spirited about this. As the value of national citizenship in Britain has risen, so the bureaucracy of border controls has had to grow. 

No one knows for sure how many people would come to live in a rich country like Britain if border controls were abolished. But in many poor parts of the world, in Africa in particular, there has been rapid urbanisation without industrialisation or economic growth or job creation. That has created a large surplus of urban labour well connected enough to know about the possibilities of life in the west and with a miserable enough life to want to get there. Who could say confidently that 5 million or 10 million people would not turn up in the space of a couple of years, especially to a country with the global connections that Britain already has? 

A few countries, such as the Philippines, have become part-dependent on exporting people to rich countries and benefit in many ways from the process.

Personally, I think of the Philippines as a major underachiever, with too high of a total fertility rate and lousy government. Emigration to the U.S. provides an outlet that that lets the country not fix itself up. I remember when Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos got kicked out and that was supposed to put the country on the road to reform. Well, that was a generation ago.

But they are the exception. Most poor countries are actively hostile to permanent emigration. And it is hardly surprising. Desperately poor countries cannot afford to lose their most ambitious and expensively educated people. 

... Rich countries should be saying: we will help you to grow faster and to hold on to your best people through appropriate trade and aid policies; we will also agree not to lure away your most skilled people, so long as you agree to take back your illegal immigrants (which many countries don't). The coalition government's combination of a lower immigration target and its exemption of the aid programme from cuts is an expression of this idea.

Tallest people in Europe

Average height is fairly interesting from both a nature and a nurture standpoint. The hygienic and well-fed Dutch famously shot up in height in the second half of the 20th Century. Yet, mountain people from the Balkans, mostly poor areas that underwent some chaos in the 1990s, still have taller young men.

From Dynamique de l'évolution humaine:

Average height of adolescents in the Dinaric Alps. 

[Article in French] 

Pineau JC, Delamarche P, Bozinovic S. 

Dynamique de l'évolution humaine, CNRS, UPR 2147, 44, rue de l'Amiral-Mouchez, 75014 Paris, France. jc.pineau@wanadoo.fr

This study contributes to an update of average heights among European populations. Our investigation covering 2705 boys and 2842 girls aged 17 years, shows that, contrary to the general belief, adolescents of the Dinaric Alps are, on average, the tallest in Europe. With an average height of 185,6 cm [6'-1.1"], they are taller than Dutch adolescents (184 cm on average [6'-0.4"]).

In the U.S. in 2003-2005, the government's NHANES study (conducted to help the clothing industry get the most common measurements), barefooted white men ages 20-39 averaged 5'-10.4", black men 5'-10.0", and Hispanic men 5'-7.1".

Above all, the density of very tall subjects appears to be characteristic of the Dinaric Alps, since 28% measure 190 cm [6'-2.8"] or more in height, as opposed to only 20% in Holland and 1.5% in France.

NHANES found the 95th percentile for American white men age 20-39 at 6'-2.9" and for black men 20-39 at 6'-3.1".

Although our information is not complete, adolescent girls in the Dinaric Alps, with an average height of 171 cm [5'-7.3"] come a close second to girls in Holland.

The Dinaric Alps are a 400 mile-long range that runs along the Adriatic coast through most of the countries of the Balkans, such as Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, and Albania. Yugoslavia used to be the third best country in Olympic basketball after the U.S. and the Soviet Union, although its successor states have tailed off. Lots of long-legged fashion models come from these countries.

This isn't a new discovery, by the way. Physical Anthropologist Carleton Coon's 1950 book on the Gheg tribe of Albania was entitled The Mountain of Giants.

The other area that traditionally produces a lot of basketball players is the Baltic, such as Lithuania.

Not a White Hispanic

The Google Guys aren't really into Easter, so for today's Google Doodle, they're celebrating the birthday of Cesar Chavez by putting up a religious icon depicting somebody or other: That guy in the Philippines who gets himself nailed to a cross every Good Friday? Don Ho resurrected to sing "Tiny Bubbles" one more time? Apparently, Google doesn't have any photos of Cesar Chavez on file, so they had to go with an artist's conception of what Chavez must have looked like as He rose on the third day in his raiment white as snow.

Artist's conception of Cesar Chavez
(Chavez's photo unavailable on Internet as of press time)

It's a funny illustration of how the union boss's birthday has transmogrified into a racial-religious holiday, a celebration of today's religion of race.

In reality, the Arizona-born Chavez was a pretty typical-looking Mexican-American of his generation, as illustrated by how he looked rather like the Texas-born golfer Lee Trevino. 

Cesar Chavez

Lee Trevino

Over the decades, Mexicans in the U.S. have been getting more Indio-looking as the more recent immigration is from farther south in Mexico.

Race Trumps Class: Happy Cesar Chavez's Birthday

Union boss Cesar Chavez was one of the leading class warriors of my youth, but today he is remembered only as the patron saint of La Raza. As I wrote in The American Conservative in 2006:

In California, only three birthdays are official state holidays: Jesus Christ’s, Martin Luther King’s, and Cesar Chavez’s (March 31st). ...

Chavez was a more interesting figure than either the plaster idol worshipped in the public schools or the celebrity control-freak he turned into as he aged. 

Chavez embodied both the old class politics and the new identity politics. Out of this duality grew the fundamental conflict of his life. What was more important, la causa or la raza? The UFW union or the Mexican race? This irresolvable contradiction culminated in the terrible ironies of his tragic later years and the uselessness of the UFW ever since. 

During his prime, Chavez, a third-generation American citizen from Yuma, Arizona and Navy veteran, was an American labor leader fighting against the importation of strikebreakers from Mexico. But as power and praise went to his head, his image morphed into that of a Mexican mestizo racial emblem, the patron saint of the reconquista of Alta California by la raza. 

In 2006, we automatically assume that America’s self-appointed Latino leaders—the politicians, campaign consultants, media mouthpieces, and identity-politics warriors—favor ever more immigration. Their influence and income flow from their claim to represent vast numbers of Hispanics, so the more warm bodies they can get across the border, the larger will be the ethnic quotas upon which their careers are based. But the union leader who is honestly battling for the welfare of his members—as opposed to the boss merely attempting to maximize the number of dues-paying workers—wants less competition for them. 

Chavez’s essential problem was straight out of Econ 101, the law of supply and demand. He needed to limit the supply of labor in order to drive up wages. Just as American Federation of Labor founder Samuel Gompers, himself a Jewish immigrant, was one of the most influential voices calling for the successful immigration-restriction law of 1924, Chavez, during his effectual years, was a ferocious opponent of illegal immigration. 

His success stemmed from the long-term decline in the farm labor supply. According to agricultural economist Philip L. Martin of the University of California, Davis, migrant farm workers in the U.S. numbered 2 million in the 1920s. Eisenhower cracked down on Mexican illegal immigrants, shipping one million home in 1954 alone. The famous 1960 “Harvest of Shame” documentary by CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow inspired liberal Democrats in Congress to abolish the bracero guest-worker program in 1964. 

The supply of migrant workers dropped to about 200,000, most of them American citizens, making unionization and better contracts feasible—as long as what Marx called “the reserve army of the unemployed” could be bottled up south of the border. The next year, Chavez began his storied organizing campaign. 

Growers fought back by busing the reserve army up from Mexico. In 1979, Chavez bitterly testified to Congress: 

… when the farm workers strike and their strike is successful, the employers go to Mexico and have unlimited, unrestricted use of illegal alien strikebreakers to break the strike. And, for over 30 years, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has looked the other way and assisted in the strikebreaking. I do not remember one single instance in 30 years where the Immigration service has removed strikebreakers. … The employers use professional smugglers to recruit and transport human contraband across the Mexican border for the specific act of strikebreaking… 

In 1969, Chavez led a march to the Mexican border to protest illegal immigration. Joining him were Sen. Walter Mondale and Martin Luther King’s successor as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Ralph Abernathy. 

The UFW picketed INS offices to demand closure of the border. Chavez also finked on illegal alien scabs to la migra. Columnist Ruben Navarrette Jr. reported in the Arizona Republic, “Cesar Chavez, a labor leader intent on protecting union membership, was as effective a surrogate for the INS as ever existed. Indeed, Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union he headed routinely reported, to the INS, for deportation, suspected illegal immigrants who served as strikebreakers or refused to unionize.” 

Like today’s Minutemen, UFW staffers under the command of Chavez’s brother Manuel patrolled the Arizona-Mexico border to keep out illegal aliens. Unlike the well-behaved Minutemen, however, Chavez’s boys sometimes beat up intruders.

It's fascinating how today race trumps class so unquestionably that almost nobody can even imagine that a Mexican-American union boss would oppose illegal immigration.

Being married v. getting married

Ross Douthat writes:

Yet for an argument that has persuaded so few, the conservative view has actually had decent predictive power. As the cause of gay marriage has pressed forward, the social link between marriage and childbearing has indeed weakened faster than before. As the public’s shift on the issue has accelerated, so has marriage’s overall decline. 

Since Frum warned that gay marriage could advance only at traditional wedlock’s expense, the marriage rate has been falling faster, the out-of-wedlock birthrate has been rising faster, and the substitution of cohabitation for marriage has markedly increased. Underlying these trends is a steady shift in values: Americans are less likely to see children as important to marriage and less likely to see marriage as important to childbearing (the generation gap on gay marriage shows up on unwed parenting as well) than even in the very recent past. 

Correlations do not, of course, establish causation. The economy is obviously playing a leading role in the retreat from marriage — the shocks of recession, the stagnation of wages, the bleak prospects of blue-collar men. Culturally, what matters most is the emergence of what the National Marriage Project calls a “capstone” understanding of marriage, which treats wedlock less as a foundation for adulthood and more as a celebration of adult achievement — and which seems to work out far better for our disciplined upper class than for society as a whole. 

But there is also a certain willed naïveté to the idea that the advance of gay marriage is unrelated to any other marital trend. For 10 years, America’s only major public debate about marriage and family has featured one side — judges and journalists, celebrities and now finally politicians — pressing the case that modern marriage has nothing to do with the way human beings reproduce themselves, that the procreative understanding of the institution was founded entirely on prejudice, and that the shift away from a male-female marital ideal is analogous to the end of segregation. 

Now that this argument seems on its way to victory, is it really plausible that it has changed how Americans view gay relationships while leaving all other ideas about matrimony untouched? 

You can tell this naïveté is willed because it’s selective. There are plenty of interesting arguments, often from gay writers, about how the march to gay marriage might be influencing heterosexual norms — from Alex Ross’s recent musings in The New Yorker on the sudden “queer vibe” in straight pop culture to Dan Savage’s famous argument that straights might do well to imitate the “monogamish” norms of some gay male couples. It’s only the claim that this influence might not always be positive that is dismissed as bigotry and unreason. 

A more honest, less triumphalist case for gay marriage would be willing to concede that, yes, there might be some social costs to redefining marriage. It would simply argue that those costs are too diffuse and hard to quantify to outweigh the immediate benefits of recognizing gay couples’ love and commitment. 

Such honesty would make social liberals more magnanimous in what looks increasingly like victory, and less likely to hound and harass religious institutions that still want to elevate and defend the older marital ideal.
But whether people think they’re on the side of God or of History, magnanimity has rarely been a feature of the culture war.

Back in 2000, I wrote in National Review:

But could it be, instead, that fewer gay men want to be married than to get married? Does gay marriage appeal more because sexual fidelity offers a role for a lifetime, or because a wedding provides the role of a lifetime? ... 

So legalizing single-sex marriage isn't likely to prevent the next gay venereal epidemic. Yet, will gay weddings destroy society? Overall, I'm not terribly worried. Still, the fervor with which some gay grooms will pursue the perfect wedding will make straight men even less enthusiastic about enduring their own weddings. The opportunities for gays to turn weddings into high-camp farces are endless. For example, if two drag queens get married, who gets to wear white? And anything that discourages straight men from marrying would be widely harmful. While most straight guys eventually decide that being married is fine, the vast majority find getting married a baffling and punitive process. (You may have noticed that while Modern Bride magazine is now over 1,000 pages long, there is no Eager Groom magazine.) About the only comment a straight man can make in favor of his role is that at least it's a guy thing … not a gay thing. But for how much longer?

My experience with being married has been that it’s great. On the other hand, my experience with getting married (e.g., worrying about the color of tablecloths, registering for domestic gifts that I never wanted and couldn’t imagine using, etc.) was that it was a nightmare than any self-respecting masculine man would only put up with for love. From a self-respect standpoint, about all you could say for being a groom was that it was, legally, a guy thing, not a gay thing.

Now, the gays are trying to make getting married de jure into even more of a gay thing than it already tends to be de facto.

Those of us on the right half of the bell curve ought to ask ourselves what guys on the left half of the bell curve are going to think as gays increasingly become the most theatrical participants in getting married? Is this really going to be good for society on the whole?

I'm not predicting that many guys will articulate this feeling, but that's who we need to worry about: the less articulate.

Of course, the notion that gay marriage most disturbs men with two-digit IQs is widely seen as a feature, not a bug. A boot stamping on the human face of a social inferior forever is nirvana.

"White Men with Guns"

From the Washington Post:

Opinions

White men with guns

Charlotte Childress and Harriet Childress4:39 PM ET

Our nation must confront why they perpetrate so many shootings.

Sabermetrics is making baseball worse

The big lesson in late 20th Century statistical analysis of baseball was that in the ancient debate over baseball strategy between Ty Cobb (make contact, hit line drives, and steal bases) and Babe Ruth (hit homers, take walks, or strike out), the Babe was right, just like his tens of millions of fans believed. Baseball insiders found Cobb's athletic style more elegant, but fans liked the professional wrestling aspects of a huge man bashing the long ball. 

Bill James and his followers proved that Ruth's philosophy was better at winning ballgames, and that baseball men had not fully embraced his philosophy out of aesthetic prejudice: Cobb's style looks better.

Sabermetric sophistication encouraged steroid use and sabermetricians like James overwhelmingly turned a blind eye to the causes of the absurd statistics of the 1990s and 2000s. There's drug testing now, but the sabermetrics continues to make baseball less elegant. Baseball used to have customs about how things were done that were generally good for the game overall if not for the individual team, but today's emphasis on exploiting weaknesses in the structure of the rules to win, win, win is making baseball more of a stand-around bore. When I was a kid, there was slow pitch softball semi-pro circuit where various businesses hired giant oafs to try to hit three or four homers per game. I don't hear about it anymore, but it seems like a lot of the kind of guys who would have been stars in this sideshow game in 1975 are now gainfully employed as MLB first basemen.

I realize that Bill James is a huge hero to a lot of guys like me (including me), but we need to keep in mind that most things in life that succeed run into diminishing marginal positive returns and increasing negative returns. Bill James made baseball more intellectually interesting, but many of the trends he set in motion eventually had negative consequences.

Drug testing has reduced homers, but strikeouts continue to rise (here's the WSJ on the subject, and the NYT). Matthew Futterman writes in the WSJ on the rise of strikeout pitchers:

Sabermetrics, the data-centric approach that prizes doubles and home runs over singles and stolen bases, hasn't done hitters any favors either. ... The problem for baseball over the long term is that the strikeout is the one offensive event that hardly ever sets into motion an unpredictable result. The batter generally mopes back to the dugout. Some fans find it boring, and some purists find it lame.

By the way, I suspect that one thing that's going on in the rise of strikeout pitchers is that tall, athletic white youths have largely given up on basketball, so that leaves more tall talent to concentrate on pitching. 

Coaches now emphasize developing sheer velocity in child pitchers, because the way you get recruited is by wracking up high numbers on the radar gun. You can work on control when you are older. I wonder what this is doing to the enthusiasm for the game of little boys who have to come up to bat against bigger little boys who are trained to throw as hard as possible and not worry about where the ball goes, such as at the batter's face?

Larry Auster, RIP

The author of the 1991 classic, The Path to National Suicide, has died of cancer at age 64.

Hispanics delinquent on mortgages 4.7 times as often as whites

Going on a half dozen years after the mortgage meltdown that began in 2007, the evidence continues to trickle in about the key role of diversity in the disaster. Granted, there's very little demand for hard-headed analyses. Here, for example, is a paper finished in 2011 that has, according to Google, been cited once:

Mortgage Default by 2009: Effects of Race, Ethnicity and Economic Standing During the Boom Years  

Heather Luea
Vanderbilt University  

Adam Reichenberger
Bureau of Labor Statistics  

Tracy Turner
Kansas State University 

Abstract: This paper examines the determinants of 2009 mortgage delinquency by race and ethnicity using new household-level data on mortgage distress from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Controlling for homeowner and loan characteristics as well as residence in a nonrecourse state, we find startling differences in mortgage delinquency rates that cannot be explained by observables. The unexplained black/white gap corresponds to a 44% higher likelihood that black homeowners will be delinquent on their mortgages relative to non-Hispanic white homeowners. The unexplained difference in Hispanic mortgage delinquency relative to non-Hispanic white homeowners is even greater, at double the black/white delinquency gap.

... The economic decline that began in 2007 was preceded by nearly two decades of government-aided, rapidly rising homeownership rates among minority households (Bostic and Lee, 2007). Given this and the severity of the recent economic crisis, it is important to understand the extent to which minority households have weathered the crisis as well as non-Hispanic white households, all else equal. Indeed, the recent and historical role played by the US government and nonprofit agencies in boosting access to homeownership by underrepresented groups makes understanding these groups’ outcomes particularly relevant.4 

Footnote 4: As recently as June 2002, President Bush announced a goal of closing the homeownership gap for minority households by 5.5 million households by the end of 2010 through innovatiosn such as zero-down-payment loans. That administration's efforts followed more than a decade of housing market interventions, including President Clinton’s National Homeownership Strategy, a trillion dollar commitment by Fannie Mae, the Campaign for Homeownership of the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation, and expanded lending to low-income and minority households in part as a result of the implications of the Community Reinvestment Act (Turner and Smith, 2009). 

... As a preview of our findings, we find that black and Hispanic households that own their housing in 2005 are significantly more likely to become delinquent on their home loans by 2009 than non-Hispanic white homeowners. We find an unconditional, weighted likelihood of delinquency of 11.3%, 16% and 3.4% for black, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic white homeowners, respectively, making black homeowners 7.9 and Hispanic homeowners 12.6 percentage points more likely to be delinquent than non-Hispanic white homeowners. 

Let's break those delinquency-by-2009 rates out:

Whites: 3.4%
Blacks: 11.3% (3.3X the white rate)
Hispanics: 16.0% (4.7X the white rate)

The sample sizes of 2005 homeowers in the PSID are not huge: 2344 for whites, 810 for blacks and 263 for Hispanics (the number of Hispanics in a long-running longitudinal study naturally lags behind their number in the population). Also this study design excludes the 2006-07 vintage of new mortgages, which were the bottom of the barrel. However:

While the sample size of the PSID may be considered small compared to loan-based samples (for example, in the 2009 survey, there are roughly 8,000 households), the PSID has a number of advantages over larger samples that are either not household-based or not longitudinal. First, importantly, the unit of observation is the household, and the PSID collects extensive household-level data on employment, income, wealth, and housing costs and characteristics. In 2009, for the first time in the history of the PSID, survey respondents were also asked questions regarding mortgage delinquency and foreclosure, making this a dataset well suited for our study. Second, the PSID is a longitudinal dataset following families from as early as 1968 to present. Using the PSID, we have borrower and loan characteristics overtime, which to our knowledge are data not available in any other single dataset. Third, once sample weights are applied, the PSID is a nationally representative sample of the US population.

Statistically adjusting for all the info in the PSID, it turns out that there are still substantial racial gaps in staying current on mortgages:

Conditioning on extensive borrower and particularly loan characteristics reduces the race and ethnicity gaps in mortgage sustainability considerably, but does not entirely eliminate these gaps. In the full specification, we find that black and Hispanic homeowners remain 1.5 and 3 percentage points more likely to be delinquent than non Hispanic white homeowners, respectively. These unexplained effects are  large relative to the underlying mortgage delinquency rate of 3.4% for non-Hispanic white households.

In other words, statistically adjusting for everything they can come up with (e.g., income), there are still unexplained racial gaps:

Whites: 3.4%
Blacks: 4.9% (1.44X the white rate even after adjustment)
Hispanics: 6.4% (1.88X the white rate after adjustment)

In many ways, the first set of numbers is the more important. As the population shifts from whites to Hispanics, the delinquency rate would tend to get worse. 

But the second table can help explain why money-hungry but politically true-believing lenders like Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide could mess up so badly. You are not allowed to use race/ethnicity in credit modeling, but it turns out that race/ethnicity still matters a lot even in cases where the facts you are allowed to look at are all the same. During the 1990s, Mozilo became convinced that it was sheer racism to worry that Hispanics could default at higher rates than the model predicts.

We find startling differences by race and ethnicity in mortgage delinquency rates that cannot be fully explained by observables ...

The homeownership rates of black and Hispanic households have been and remain substantially below that of non-Hispanic white households. That certain groups experience low homeownership rates is cause for concern particularly to the extent that these gaps are involuntary and in light of the possibility that homeownership generates private and community benefits (i.e., Turner and Luea, 2009; Haurin, Dietz, and Weinberg, 2002). Belief in the positive externalities of homeownership has motivated substantial efforts in the past two decades to boost the homeownership attainment of underrepresented groups, and these efforts have generated relative gains in minority homeownership (Bostic and Lee, 2007). Evidence is mounting that the Great Recession has adversely impacted minorities to a greater extent than non-Hispanic white households. It is likely that the economically disadvantaged households that are losing their homes are some of the same households propelled into homeownership through federal assistance to begin with. If there is a silver lining, it may be that, according to recent work by Molloy and Shan (2011), post-foreclosure households on average do not end up in either less desirable neighborhoods or more crowded living conditions than what they experienced as homeowners. Determining the extent to which housing policy may have fueled the 2009 differential delinquency rates by minority status and why, and whether these households are nonetheless better off for their homeownership stint, would be valuable information for future policy design.

This might also be valuable information for current immigration policy design.

How much land do rich people use up?

From the Washington Post:

As income inequality in the United States has soared and median wages have flatlined since 1980, economists have spent a lot of time debating why the top 1 percent have done so much better than everyone else. Is policy to blame? The decline of labor? Technology? 

An equally pressing question, though, is what those increasingly hefty incomes at the very top mean for the lives of everyone else. And a big, newly revised paper (pdf) by the University of Chicago’s Marianne Bertrand and Adair Morse finds that there is a connection, but not a happy one: The gains of the rich have come alongside losses for the middle class. 

As the wealthy have gotten wealthier, the economists find, that’s created an economic arms race in which the middle class has been spending beyond their means in order to keep up. The authors call this “trickle-down consumption.” 

The result? Americans are saving less, bankruptcies are becoming more common, and politicians are pushing for policies to make it easier to take on debt. 

If that argument sounds familiar, it’s because Cornell economist Robert H. Frank has been making this case for years. Those at the top are spending more on fancy goods and bidding up the price of homes. In response, the slightly-less-rich have been spending more to keep pace. That pressure, in turn, eventually ripples down to the middle class — where incomes have stagnated of late — in what Frank calls “expenditure cascades.” 

“What you think you need depends on the context you find yourself in,” Frank said in an interview. “And standards tend to be local. When most of the income gains are going to the very top, the people around them feel relatively poorer and spend more because of that.” 

What Bertrand and Morse have done is put together a detailed empirical case that “trickle-down consumption” really is occurring in cities and counties around the United States — and that it’s responsible for roughly one-fourth of the decline in household savings rates since the early 1980s. 

“Middle income households would have saved between 2.6 and 3.2 percent more by the mid-2000s had incomes at the top grown at the same rate as median income,” they conclude. 

But how does trickle-down consumption actually work? One way is through housing. In cities like New York, the wealthiest are competing for the most valuable apartments and bidding up prices — which has broader ripple effects. What’s more, as those at the top buy bigger and bigger houses, those below them have moved to buy up bigger houses too. (Frank has noted that the median size of a new single-family house in 2007 was 2,300 square feet, or 50 percent bigger than in 1970.) 

That’s just part of the story, though. In areas where incomes of the top 10 percent are growing, Bertrand and Morse found, the supply of businesses and services that cater to the well-off also increase. Swankier bars replace cheaper bars. Expensive restaurants replace cheap restaurants. Whole Foods nudges out the local grocery store. And less-well-off residents end up spending more at these places. 

There also seems to be a “keeping up with the Joneses” effect. As wealthier Americans spend more on things like expensive preschools or fitness clubs or even fashion, their middle-income neighbors start spending more on these goods too — without cutting back elsewhere.

I'm all in favor of economists finally thinking about the cost side of inequality instead of just obsessing over the income side. Yet, this analysis seems largely backwards to me. No doubt it's true to some extent, but it seems to be missing the larger point of who is truly expensive for middle class people to share a metropolitan area with. Instead of Trickle Down consumption, what we see is more like Push Up consumption.

When a Whole Foods opens in your neighborhood, it doesn't actually nudge all the crummy grocery stores out of business. I drive past a Whole Foods all the time to get to the Jon's grocery store frequented by ominous flatheads from Omsk. Yet, Whole Foods is nicer than Jon's.

The real problem is not when you get more for what you pay more for (e.g., Whole Foods over Jon's), but when you have to pay more for the same old thing (e.g., a house with a yard in a safe neighborhood with a good public school).

Let's consider some major costs. 

Do the 1% bid up medical care costs? Facelifts, certainly. They don't demand a lot of diabetes treatment, however.

Do the 1% bid up education costs? Manhattan kindergartens, no doubt. Private colleges to some extent. In the big picture, though, this doesn't seem all that significant.

Do the 1% increase transportation costs? The 0.05% get the 0.1% drooling over private jets that they can't afford. But as for cars, some, but really, it's hard to spend over $100,000 on a car. There are plenty of people who waste money buying or leasing more expensive cars than is prudent for them, but it's more like the 25th percentile aping the 5th percentile. 

Let's think about the Big One, real estate costs. How much metropolitan land do the top 1% take up for their houses and yards? I was going to say 10%, but since many of the 1% live in a small number of urban areas with relatively small lot sizes (e.g., New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles), it may well be less on a national scale.

I've spent most of my life living in Los Angeles and Chicago between really rich people on one side and poor people on the other. One thing I've noticed is that the rich don't really take up all that much room. 

When I go for a hike in the Hollywood Hills, for instance, I often walk by an imposing gated estate that other hikers assert is owned by some major movie star: Will Ferrell is the most popular claim. But it looks like about 4 to 8 acres, most of that steep hillside. 

Last year I taking out the trash when I heard a whoop-whoop-whoop from overhead. I looked up and there was the Marine Corps One helicopter carrying the President to his fundraiser at George Clooney's house, around the corner from the supposed Will Ferrell manor. To be precise, Obama's helicopter was on its way to an airport to land, from which Obama's motorcade would wind up into the canyon. Clooney's house is 7,354 square feet and his estate is 3.16 acres, and apparently doesn't have a big enough lawn to safely land a large helicopter upon.

I'm trying, but I'm having a hard time feeling really oppressed by the fact that George Clooney's house is about as big as my yard. That doesn't strike me as unreasonable.

Now, you could get me riled up over the unconscionable injustice of Clooney owning his Lake Como mansion in the Italian Alps instead of an average person, like, say, me. I could totally picture Comrade Sailer leading an enraged mob to evict Class Criminal Clooney from his Lake Como house and requisition it for the private use of The People, as personally embodied in Comrade Sailer.

But the fact that Clooney owns a bigger chunk of the San Fernando Valley than I do seems pretty ho-hum.

Now, the San Fernando Valley is 260 square miles. The rich take up the southernmost fringe, generally on mountain land that is expensive to build on and rather inconvenient to live on unless privacy is your foremost concern. The flat parts of the San Fernando Valley vary slightly in climate, but, really, it's all about who your neighbors are. And almost the entire Valley is in Los Angeles school district, so getting your kids in with good peers requires intricate feats of gamesmanship.

Granted, the environmentalism of the rich raises land prices by ruling out land for development, thus lowering the supply of housing and raising housing costs. But, I also like to go for hikes, so I understand the tradeoff.

I'm trying to think of how many personal golf courses there are in the Los Angeles area. Having a golf course in your yard is pretty extravagant, but then Los Angeles has always had a lot of extravagantly rich people, so this is an interesting measure of how much metropolitan land extremely rich people use up. 

Offhand, I can think of four small backyard golf courses in the L.A. area. Bob Hope, who was a real estate tycoon in his spare time, had a one-hole golf course at his house in Toluca Lake. Jerry Perenchio, former owner of Univision, has a 10-acre golf course in Malibu. There's a small par 3 course in a coastal canyon farther out toward Zuma Beach. And I believe I've read that Will Smith has a one hole course on his property at Sherwood. No doubt there are some other miniature personal golf courses in the L.A. area that I'm not aware of (and there are several in Palm Springs, 125 miles away), but this isn't really Downton Abbey.

And, rich people's kids don't overwhelm your public schools.

What's really expensive for middle class families are poor people. Middle class people move to upscale school districts or send their kids to private school to get them away from poor people. New exurban developments have excessive house sizes to try to keep the public schools upscale.

The real problem with the rich is that they dominate political thinking on questions like immigration. Keeping Up with the Bloombergs ideologically is politically disastrous for people in the middle.