IMMIGRANTS: YOU’RE NOT BLACK
Americans used to talk about “integration.” Then one day, out of the blue, the word “integration” got replaced with “diversity”—just like “global warming” suddenly became “climate change”—then “July.” Integration was about redressing historic wrongs done to black America. Diversity isn’t. Under the diversity regime, everyone gets special rights and privileges, except white men.
Affirmative action, welfare, enterprise zones, minority set-asides—all these used to be justified by the legacy of oppression: It all goes back to the Middle Passage! But now we’re talking about social welfare being dispensed in great heaping portions to Hmong, Somalis, and Latin Americans. They arrived circa 1997. So now liberals act as if they never mentioned anything about the redress of historic grievances.
The entire edifice of civil rights and discrimination law was meant to address the black experience in America, not to reward any loser with resentments. The idea was: Okay, we’ve got 10 percent of the population that got the short end of the stick for a couple of centuries, so we’re spending it all on them. America altered constitutional provisions about private property and freedom of contract—for blacks. Huge social welfare programs were established—for blacks. Affirmative action policies and racial quotas were developed—for blacks. We agreed to virtually criminalize the use of certain words—for blacks.
Are you seeing the pattern? There’s no justification for civil rights laws without blacks. But under the “diversity” regime, parasites from the entire world came in and announced, Here’s a new agenda for the civil rights movement and it doesn’t include you, black America. After pretending to care about black people for approximately six minutes, Democrats ran off and redefined “civil rights” as the right to get an abortion, the right for a lesbian to take a date to her high school prom, and the right of foreigners to vote in America on ballots printed in their native language. And thus ended the brief era of liberals’ pretending to care about black people. At least lesbians and the abortion ladies are American lesbians and American abortion ladies. Without reason, the Left has appropriated the black experience in America and given it away to foreigners. But they’ll never pay a price for it, because African Americans still bloc-vote for the Democrats.
It’s understandable that the Democrats would want to dump “integration” the first chance they got. Democrats could never accept the fact that “civil rights” was about correcting specific and severe injustices done to American blacks, principally because they were the ones who had perpetrated the injustices.27
But why did Jesse Jackson and the “rainbow coalition” give away blacks’ unique claim to America’s sympathy to people who never experienced oppression in the United States? Jews are very protective of the Holocaust as a unique event. For fifty years, there’s been a raging debate about whether the Turkish slaughter of more than a million Armenians in 1915—another chapter in the glorious history of “diversity”—can be described as a “genocide.” It’s one thing to adopt quotas and affirmative action as a response to slavery and the Democratic policies of Jim Crow. But to apply these policies to people who have never set foot in this country is insane. We owe you nothing.
LIBERAL RESEARCHER ADMITS THE TRUTH: DIVERSITY SUCKS
Even when Third World immigrants aren’t trying to blow up the First World, as in Boston, ethnic “diversity” is all downside. Members of the same ethnic group know each other, care about each other, help each other. Leaving aside the exciting parts of diversity, such as terrorism, civil wars, and ethnic cleansing, the greater the diversity, the higher the transaction costs. Even after almost four centuries together, blacks and whites haven’t yet achieved what anyone would regard as perfect harmony.
Robert Putnam, Harvard professor and author of Bowling Alone, has spent years studying the effects of ethnic diversity on a community’s well-being. It turns out diversity is a train wreck. Contrary to his expectation—and desire!—Putnam’s study showed that the greater the ethnic diversity, the less people trusted their neighbors, their local leaders, and even the news. People in diverse communities gave less to charity, voted less, had fewer friends, were more unhappy, and were more likely to describe television as “my most important form of entertainment.” It was not, Putnam said, that people in diverse communities trusted people of their own ethnicity more, and other races less. They didn’t trust anyone.28 The difference in neighborliness between an ethnically homogeneous town, such as Bismarck, North Dakota, and a diverse one, such as Los Angeles, Putnam says, is “roughly the same as” the difference in a town with a 7 percent poverty rate compared with a 23 percent poverty rate.29
Putnam refused to publish his study for seven years because he didn’t like the results. As a “liberal academic whose own values put him squarely in the pro-diversity camp,” the New York Times said, he had hoped to find another explanation. He reran the numbers, accounting for differences in crime rates, age, income, marital status, home ownership, education, language, mobility, and every other factor under the sun. But no matter how many variables he accounted for, Putnam kept getting the same results: Diversity damages social cohesion.30 When Putnam finally released his study in 2007, he included an incongruous statement of his personal admiration for diversity—leading critics to complain that he was “straying from data into advocacy,” as the Times put it.31 The disadvantages of diversity were in the cold, hard numbers. The advantages were in Putnam’s hopes and dreams.
Diversity from immigration harmed social harmony even more than America’s traditional black-white racial diversity. “[B]oth ‘percent black’ and ‘percent immigrant,’” Putnam said, have a “significant and independent” negative effect on social capital. But comparing “percent black” with “percent immigrant,” he found that the “more consistent and powerful” degradation of social capital came from “percent immigrant.”32
Leaping out from Putnam’s graphs is the fact that wealthy, wildly diverse San Francisco repeatedly comes in dead last in social capital. This is one problem you can’t blame on the blacks—that city is 42 percent white, 33 percent Asian, 15 percent Hispanic, 6 percent black (and 100 percent fabulous). Notwithstanding all the blather about Asians being the “model minority” and Hispanics being such “hard workers”—compared to you-know-who—people who live in communities dominated by the traditional black and white races trust their neighbors a lot more than they do in places like San Francisco with large immigrant populations.33
This is especially noticeable in Southern towns, where black and white Americans have been living together forever. In San Francisco, only 29 percent of people trust their neighbors. By contrast, in each of these three mostly black and white North Carolina towns, more than 40 percent of people trust their neighbors:
Greensboro: white: 48 percent; black: 40 percent; Hispanic: 8 percent; Asian: 4 percent.
Winston-Salem: white: 51 percent; black: 35 percent; Hispanic: 15 percent.
Charlotte: white: 50 percent; black: 35 percent; Hispanic: 13 percent; Asian: 5 percent.34
Also unlike San Francisco, people in these towns trust one another without regard to race. In San Francisco, the correlation between “same race” and “trust” is quite high.35
There’s nothing good about diversity, other than the food, and we don’t need 128 million Mexicans for the restaurants.36 True, America does a better job than most at accommodating a diverse population. We also do a better job at setting compound fractures. But no one goes around mindlessly exclaiming: “Compound fractures are a strength!”
5
THIRTY MILLION MEXICANS
SO DIVERSITY IS NOT A STRENGTH. BUT THE STRANGE THING IS, IT’S NOT EVEN diverse. In New York Times–speak, “diversity” simply means “non-white.” Most of the time, it means “Mexican.”
The first recorded use of “Diversity is a strength,” according to Nexis, was on November 16, 1989, and we haven’t been able to get rid of it since. The phrase ap
peared in a Boston Globe retrospective about court-ordered busing in Boston in the 1970s—which illustrated the wonders of diversity by inciting race riots.1 The second use of this grating cliché was in a 1992 Los Angeles Times article gassing on about diversity at A. G. Currie Middle School in Tustin, California. The school was celebrating diversity by flying sixty-five flags to represent its students’ home countries. Principal Dan Brooks said he planned to turn Currie into a “model multicultural school,” adding that although many view diversity as an obstacle, he saw “diversity as a strength.”2 By 2009, the most recent year for which statistics are available, A. G. Currie Middle School was 91 percent Hispanic.3 There’s “multicultural” for you. Nine percent more Mexicans, and it will have achieved perfect “diversity.” Compared with other schools in California, A. G. Currie scored a D− in math, a C in language, and a C+ in science, for an overall grade of D+.4 Diversity is a strength!
About the same time, Hollywood High School was flipping from the storied institute of legend to the high school of the barrio. Or, as CNN put it in a series of rave reviews for the “predominantly Latino” school: “Hollywood High Now a Diverse High School.”
Hollywood High alumni include Cher, Carol Burnett, Lon Chaney, James Garner, Linda Evans, John Huston, Judy Garland, Ricky Nelson, Sarah Jessica Parker, John Ritter, Mickey Rooney, Lana Turner, and Fay Wray, among many others. By the mid-2000s, Hollywood High was more than 70 percent Hispanic,5 and students were less likely to be getting publicity shots than mug shots. Today the school is mostly famous for its stabbings, shootings, child molestations, thefts, and graffiti.6 Around 1990, a California TV producer trying to enroll a German exchange student in a Los Angeles high school asked the principal at Fairfax High if a foreign exchange student would be better served by Fairfax or Hollywood High. Without looking up, the principal replied, “Well, 90% of my students can speak English, and we haven’t had a shooting here in 5 years.” As CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux said, that’s why Hollywood High School is called “Diversity High.”7
In 2011, the New York Times described the angry reaction of Mexicans living in 80 percent Hispanic El Paso to proposals to enforce the border. People in the majority-Mexican town booed when Obama mentioned putting up a fence, viewing efforts to reduce illegal immigration from Mexico as part of a “larger surge of xenophobia.”8 So Hispanics living in a town that’s already 80 percent Hispanic denounce limits on how many more Hispanics can move in as “xenophobia.” You know who doesn’t seem to like diversity? Hispanics. Do they fear white Americans, seeing them as “the other,” as they say on MSNBC? Why are we letting in immigrants who are racists? At what point will the New York Times stop accusing opponents of nonstop immigration from Latin America of “xenophobia”? (That’s a rhetorical question. The answer is: “Never.”) The Times needs to come up with a new word for people who think 80 percent Hispanic is enough, something like “I-Didn’t-Want-to-Live-in-Mexico-bia.”
DOESN’T MEXICO WANT ANY MEXICANS?
America has already taken in more than one-quarter of Mexico’s entire population, according to the Pew Research Center’s analysis of census data.9 The United States has more Hispanics than any other country besides Mexico.10 Do we have to admit all 120 million Mexicans to prove to the New York Times that we’re not “nativist”? Eighty percent Mexican wasn’t good enough for the Hispanic residents of El Paso. In two states, New Mexico and California, Hispanics have already surpassed whites as the largest ethnic group—and that’s just the official count from the U.S. census, which massively undercounts illegal aliens. The Hispanic population, overwhelmingly Mexican,11 makes up 47 percent of New Mexico, 39 percent of California, 38 percent of Texas, 30 percent of Arizona, and 27 percent of Nevada.12 Hispanics are also the largest minority group in Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.13
Is that “diverse” enough, yet?
This is a shockingly rapid transformation. In 1980—back when California was giving us our Republican presidents—it was home to 4.5 million Hispanics.14 Today, there are officially 14 million.15 There are more Hispanics in California than there are people in 46 other states.16 Reagan couldn’t get elected in a congressional district there now. And the state is running like a top! According to the county supervisor, Los Angeles alone spends more than $1.6 billion a year on illegal aliens—$600 million for welfare, $550 million for public safety (mostly jail costs), and $500 million for their healthcare.17 In 1980, Nevada was less than 6.8 percent Hispanic.18 By 2010, Hispanics had grown an astonishing 386 percent to nearly one-third of the population. Or, as Brookings Institution researchers put it, “the ethnic composition of the state has become considerably more diverse.”19
Would the media be so thrilled with mass immigration if it were coming from Western Europe? No, the blue-chip immigrant investment is Hispanic—maybe Indian or African. You can’t lose with those in New York Times World. Tatars are worthless in multicultural terms. They, too, have a distinctive look and unique culture, but it’s not going to get you anywhere in America being a Tatar.
Diversity in immigration ought to mean every country on earth sends the same percentage of immigrants. Instead, our immigration policies are producing a less diverse country. Before Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 immigration act extended “civil rights” to the entire world, immigrants to America were far more varied. Seven countries each provided 5 percent or more of the total number of immigrants each year—Italy, Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Mexico.
By 2000, Mexico was the only country supplying more than 5 percent, accounting for nearly a third of all immigrants to the United States. China came in a distant second, finally surpassing 5 percent in 2010.20 At the same time, immigrants from Britain, Canada, Germany, Italy, and Poland were cut off—none of these countries was among the top ten immigrant-supplying countries by 2010. Each one accounts for less than 2 percent of all immigration to America.21 In 1970, there were fewer than 10 million foreign born in the United States, and 75 percent of them were from Europe. By 2010, there were 40 million foreign-born in the United States and only 13 percent were from Europe.22
Even the pro-browning-of-America Pew Research Center describes Mexico’s domination of American immigration as “one of the largest mass migrations in modern history.”23 From 1890 to 1970, there weren’t enough Hispanics in America for the Census Bureau to count.24 In 1970, there were fewer than a million Mexican immigrants here. Today there are between 25 million and 50 million Mexican immigrants, depending on whose estimate of the illegal population you accept. And that’s not including babies born to Mexican illegal immigrants, who are instantly labeled “Americans.”
Commenting on this stunning displacement of Americans by Mexicans, the Census Bureau dryly stated: “Paradoxically, as the number of foreign born continued to increase after 1980 and the regions of origins shifted to include more countries in Latin America and Asia, the foreign born became proportionally concentrated into fewer country-of-birth groups.”25 Paradoxically!
This isn’t “paradoxical”; it’s “diabolical.” The Democrats never particularly cared for Americans, so they needed to bring in new people. Immigration is the advance wave of left-wing, Third World colonization of America. Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards used to claim that there are “two Americas,” the rich and the poor. If Democrats have their way, there will be two Latin Americas, both of them poor. You’re living in one of them right now.
THERE ARE A LOT MORE THAN 11 MILLION ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS
Most Americans have no idea of the scale of Third World immigration pouring into the country. This is where numbers can make a difference. Sometimes quantity is quality. So it’s significant that Americans are being so aggressively lied to about the number of illegal immigrants in the country. Has it ever seemed strange that there have been exactly 11 million il
legals here for the past decade? Did they stop coming? That’s hard to believe. President Bush prosecuted border guards for getting too rough with illegals. President Obama encouraged one hundred thousand illegals to surge across the border, then put them on buses to their new homes in the United States, courtesy of the taxpayer.
The reason we are angrily told there are 11 million illegals and you’re a racist if you say there is one more than that is that if Americans ever suspected there were 30 million illegal immigrants in the United States, our elected officials would find out what a “crisis” really is.
There were 11 million illegals in the United States as of 2005, according to everyone. Thus, for example, the pro-browning Pew Hispanic Center estimated the number of illegal aliens in the United States to be 11.1 million in March 2005.26 The Department of Homeland Security put it at 10.5 million in January 2005.27 Other estimates from the New York Times, the Center for Immigration Studies, the Urban Institute, and the Current Population Survey produced similar numbers.28
It’s been a decade and we’re still being told—emphatically—that there are just 11 million illegal immigrants here. Manifestly, 11 million is less a serious estimate and more “the smallest number illegal immigration advocates think they can get away with.” The usual impulse of special interest groups is to overestimate their numbers. But with illegal immigration, the number has to be just large enough to hector Republicans about alienating the coming Hispanic majority, but not so high that Americans boil politicians in oil.