My former UCLA Economics professor, a baal teshuva (he became an Orthodox Jew as an adult), Russell Roberts, a big inspiration in my life when I was in my 20s, tweets: “If immigrants scare you b/c you think they won’t assimilate, then I don’t have a good answer for you. Very old fear. Never materializes.”
I tweeted back: Why does any nation/people have an obligation to lose identity? Should Israel be less Jewish? Japan less Japanese? Why should any Anglo nation become less Anglo? A solid majority of Americans against immigration for more 150 years. Why should any people, including whites, give up sovereignty in the lands they created?
Russ Roberts: “Today’s worries about Hispanics match what people said about Jews, Germans, Irish in US.”
Those fears had some justification. People don’t assimilate except in most superficial of ways. They behave according to their genes. Jews stay Jewish, Japs Japanese, Germans behave like Germans, Swiss like Swiss, Africans like Africans.
Russ Roberts: “If immigrants scare u b/c you think they hurt wages of Americans, fight to make schools better instead of keeping immigrants out.”
The best answer to this tweet is the book by Robert Weisberg — Bad Students, Not Bad Schools. The average IQ for Hispanics in America today is 90. There’s not much educating you can do for someone with a 90 IQ.
If you want America to look more like Mexico, allow in more Mexicans. If you want America to be more like Africa, invite in more Africans. If you want America to be more like Syria, invite in more Syrians.
Russ Roberts tweets back to me: “u r a racist. Races don’t have sovereignty.”
I reply: “Name calling is not honorable argument (only facts or logic are honorable argument). Jews have sovereignty but other peoples don’t? Which people are worthy of sovereignty? Only Jews? Only Japanese? Chinese? British? Anglos? Nordics?”
Russ: “I am talking about the US. Americans. A country made up of immigrants who are somehow afraid of foreigners.”
Luke: “Would you wish Israel to be destroyed as a Jewish state as the USA has been destroyed as an Anglo state? Turn fine?”
Russ: “I reject the analogy. Better: should Israel have accepted Ethiopians? Yes. US an Anglo state? When? 1880?”
Luke: “Faux Jews from Ethiopia have been a disaster for Israel, make diaspora Jews feel ok.”
“America was an approximately 90% caucasian country until 1960, no citizenship for non-white immigrants until circa 1948.”
Russ: “I thought it was an Anglo thing. So it’s a white thing. Ugly.”
Luke: “So why is Jewish identity beautiful, black identity beautiful, Anglo identity beaut, but white identity ugly? Which people ID ok”
Russ: “Sorry, Luke. Not interested in this conversation. Good night.”
Before bashing immigrants, at least try to get the facts straight
By Linda ChavezUniversity of California professor Ruben Rumbaut, an expert on immigration and crime, looked at 2000 Census data on the institutionalized population in the United States, most of whom are in prisons, and came up with these astonishing facts. Immigrants are far less likely to be in jail or prison than other U.S. residents.
Of the U.S. population of 45.2 million men ages 18 to 39 (those most likely to be in the criminal population), 3 percent were incarcerated, or about 1.3 million at the time of the 2000 Census. But of these, blacks, whites and U.S.-born Hispanics had incarceration rates that dwarfed those of immigrants. Only .7 percent of Mexican-born males were in prison or jail, compared with 3.51 percent of all U.S.-born males, which includes 1.71 percent of non-Hispanic whites, 11.6 percent of blacks and 5.9 percent of Mexican Americans.
For all foreign-born groups, immigrants have lower incarceration rates than all U.S.-born racial and ethnic groups do, including whites.
Immigrants typically enter America past the prime age to fall into a life of crime via a youth gang. They are also intimidated by fears of deportation, and some immigrant criminals escape imprisonment by fleeing back to Mexico.
These statistics are not actually good news. In fact, they are the opposite. We are always told that the magic of assimilation into the middle class will solve all the problems with the current illegal immigrants, but what this says is that Mexican immigrants assimilate over time toward African-American norms of criminality. The problem of Mexican crime in the U.S. will thus inevitably get worse.
What Linda is saying, although she doesn’t realize it, is that America is brewing up an unholy mess for itself in the future by taking in so many Mexican immigrants today. The problem is that as Mexican-Americans assimilate over the generations, they become radically more criminal than their immigrant forefathers, and about 3.4 times more crime-prone than non-Hispanic whites, and more than half as criminal as African-Americans, which is pretty bad.
This leads to a demand from employers for more hair-of-the-dog that bit us. In the 1945-65 era, northern employers wanted more black men from the South, but the generation that grew up on the streets of the Northern cities became much more crime-prone than their fathers who had migrated from the Jim Crow South. So, employers turned from hiring local blacks to hiring Mexican immigrants. But their American-born sons are falling into youth gangs, so American-born Mexicans are following blacks into unemployability. So, employers want more fresh immigrants who are too intimidated to cause trouble. And the cycle goes on and the underclass grows ever larger.
Life in America tends to undermine self-discipline and other forms of human capital, so our immigration system should be designed to only take in immigrants with much more human capital than the American average, so that it will take several generations for their offspring to deteriorate just down to the American mean. Instead, we’re taking in millions of immigrants who are already below our average, and a large fraction of their children and grandchildren decline into the underclass.
* Peter Schaeffer writes:
The history of assimilation can be looked at several ways, all of them revealing.
1. Perhaps the single most important point is that mass immigration was ended around WWI. The restrictive legislation of 1917 (the literacy act), 1921, and 1924 (Johnson-Reed) ended the great wave of mass immigration. Immigration continued on a much smaller scale and the composition was shifted. Because the new laws were based on national quotas, some countries were de-facto unrestricted (the UK, Ireland, etc.) while other reached their annual quotas rather quickly.
The immigration restrictions had several positive effects. Wages and working conditions improved for immigrants over time. Since most immigrants worked in manufacturing, wage gains in manufacturing were particularly positive. Sectoral differentiation (by accident) favored immigrants in this period. Manufacturing was booming and farming was in decline. Since the immigrant population was predominantly urban and employed in goods production, this was a plus.
Living conditions for immigrants clearly improved after mass immigration ended. The horrific tenements slums of the 1900 period were largely empty by the 1930s. Without new massive waves of immigrants, the prior cohorts were able to move up the social ladder into better housing (among other things).
The immigration restrictions of the WWI period clearly aided assimilation in practical ways (waves and living conditions). However, they also sent a very important message to the immigrant communities. America rejected ‘diversity’ and demanded that the immigrants embrace America rather than the other way around. There points were were well understood back then and it was widely understood that the immigration cutoff (substantial reduction actually) had accelerated assimilation.
2. The America of the 1920s and later was vastly better suited to assimilating immigrants than our nation today. We had a booming job market, no welfare state, middle-class unions (starting in the 1930s), English imposition, disciplined education, no multiculturalism, no bilingualism, no victimization ideology, intact families, rigorous law enforcement, etc. Beyond that, ‘Americanization’ (assimilation) was a widely embraced ideal and promoted heavily. Now we have the pernicious and very dominant ideology of ‘diversity’.
3. In spite of much more favorable circumstances, assimilation took time. Some groups assimilated much faster than others, but three generations were typically enough to achieve earnings party with old stock natives. The mythology is that one generation was sufficient. It wasn’t. Even well after WWII, ethnic differences in earnings, social status, etc. were measurable.
The political assimilation of ‘Great Wave’ immigrants was relatively slow but did occur. In this context, I will use the Catholic vote as a proxy for ‘Great Wave’ immigrants. By some measures, 1928 marks the zenith of Catholic alienation from the political mainstream. Al Smith got 90% of the Catholic vote (apparently) and was still easily defeated by Hoover. Indeed, he failed to carry his home state of New York (he was a former governor or New York). By the time JFK was elected, Catholic support for the Democratic party had fallen markedly. He won the Catholic vote, but by a notably smaller margin than Al Smith. A poll of Fordham University students in 1960 showed that most of the Catholic students favored Nixon over Kennedy (the Jewish students at Fordham favored Kennedy). Students at other Catholic schools favored Nixon as well.
Perhaps more relevantly, Eisenhower captured a majority of the Catholic vote in 1956. In subsequent presidential elections, Republicans were able to easily capture the Catholic vote (if they could win at all).
It’s worth noting that in an earlier era, ethnics were polled separately and political differences by ethnicity were material. By the 1980s, this practice had essentially disappeared because ethnic voting patterns were no longer different enough to measure.
However, voting patterns are not the most important aspect of assimilation in my opinion. The assimilation of American values is far more important. Once again, studies show that ‘Great Wave’ immigrants embraced the values of old-stock natives (personal responsibility, individual effort, hard work and education as the keys to advancement, national loyalty, limited government, etc.). Basically, ‘Anglo-conformity’ worked.
It is wrong to suggest that Jewish Americans don’t like WASP America. More like they resent it. The American Jewish community remains (privately) obsessed with the efforts of WASPs to exclude Jews from elite society. The fact that many of these efforts were more than 100 years ago doesn’t appear to matter. Nor does the fact that even with Jewish quotas in place, Jews were vastly overrepresented at Harvard and other elite schools.
The bigger picture, that America has been a wonderfully hospitable nation with immense opportunities for personal and professional advancement is subordinated to resentment of country club prejudice in the 1920s. As a consequence, American Jews define themselves as outsiders and vote accordingly.
As these notes should indicate, America was once a much better place for immigrants and their families. The historic advantages of assimilation, ‘Americanization’, Anglo-conformity, immigration restrictions, and a strong economy are all gone (along with quite a few other historic virtues). It’s also true that the immigrants were better historically. They were much more likely to be skilled, educated, etc. The ‘Great Wave’ immigrants has much lower skill levels and the turn of American society against immigration was largely a consequence. Contemporary mythology emphasizes the role of nativism in the restrictions of the 1920s. Declining skill levels provides a different and more germane explanation.
* Assimilation, 21st Century-style: The NYT starts to get it
Steve Sailer writes: In VDARE.com in 2001, I wrote:
ConEstablishment types assume that “assimilation” works automatically, sort of like “osmosis,” to solve any minor cultural problems created by heavy immigration. They tend to have this 19th Century picture of assimilation in action: The huddled masses stumble off the docks in Boston, only to notice the Cabots and Lodges glowering at them for their uncouth behavior. Chastened, the newcomers resolve to begin the long struggle to become good Americans just like those august families.
Of course, these days, the descendants of those Puritans are working as program officers for foundations telling the newly-arrived immigrant how much better the culture back home in, say, Guatemala was than the culture created by their Boston Brahmin ancestors – who, as you will recall, were so criminally insensitive as to glower.
There is, however, one vibrant, self-confident culture in modern America: hip-hop. … Hip-hop is doing what whites no longer have the will or means to do: assimilate the children of Hispanic immigrants.
Of course, Dr. Dre, Puff Daddy, and the rest are leading Latino-Americans toward the African-American model. As I wrote last year, “Currently, 22% of white births are illegitimate compared to 69% of black births. Among immigrant Latino mothers, 37% of their new babies were illegitimate. But among American-born Latino mothers, the illegitimacy rate rises to 48%.”
The New York Times is finally catching on. Jason DeParle writes in “Struggling to Rise in Suburbs Where Failing Means Fitting In” about the children of Latino immigrants in the suburban slums of the Washington D.C. metroplex:
As Jesselyn [8th grade dropout daughter of Salvadoran immigrants] tells it, she assimilated to the surrounding values of gangsta rap. Writing in her eighth-grade yearbook, she celebrated friends as “my n****!” and labeled enemies “crackers,” “bamma” and “whyte.” …
Part of what sets the area apart is the strain between immigrant parents and their Americanizing children, who wince at their accents and dirty jobs. Langley Park is an immigrant neighborhood where it is an insult to be called an immigrant. Teenagers call the rough-looking newcomers “hinchos,” or “hicks.”
“Hinchos try to look black, but they’re not as good at it as we are,” said Jesselyn’s 14-year-old brother, Victor Jr.
Weak parental authority abets strong gangs. The dominant force in many young lives is Mara Salvatrucha-13, or MS-13, which is known for its violence and international reach. But there are scores of lesser cliques — Street Thug Criminals, Sexy but Stupid — that strive to live up to their name. …
In addition, the scholars say, a seductive youth culture encourages poor teenagers to denigrate work and school and find valor in violence. Unwilling to take bad jobs, unable to get good ones, teenagers like Jesselyn often seek satisfaction in the streets.
“I’m not going to scrub someone’s toilet,” she said.
Though “assimilation” and “upward mobility” are often used as synonyms, Mr. Portes and Mr. Rumbaut emphasize that they are not the same thing. Some groups move up by resisting assimilation; they study and work in ethnic enclaves. Others assimilate to values and behaviors of the American ghetto.
That is what Jesselyn said she and other poor, streetwise Salvadorans had done: followed the example of poor streetwise blacks.
“They’re like a role model,” she said. “We’re a lot like them.”
Sometimes she said that both groups simply react to the same forces of poverty and prejudice. (“We’ve lived the same thing.”) But she also talked of consciously imitating what she sees as the strengths of poor blacks. (“They don’t let themselves get pushed around.”)
Either way, she saw herself behind a color line, with success beyond her reach.
“I thought the American dream was just meant for white people,” she said. “The big house with the two beautiful kids, the dream car, and the dream career — when the hell you hear a Spanish has that?”
During the Housing Bubble.
As I pointed out most of a decade ago, let’s say Latinos are only 1/3rd as likely as African Americans to fall into the underclass. Well, then, in a few decades when the Latino population is three times the size of the current black population, we’ve created for ourselves a new Hispanic underclass as big as the current black underclass.
* From Openborders.info: Steve Sailer is a prolific and widely respected writer and journalist known for his writings on race, IQ, immigration, politics, movies, and many other subjects. He writes for the anti-immigration website VDARE and also maintains his personal weblog here. Sailer’s writings for VDARE focus largely on immigration issues, but his writings for his own blog cover a range of other issues.
The Wikipedia page about Steve Sailer is here.
Blog posts and articles
Below are listed some of the blog posts and articles by Sailer that have been referenced on this website:
- Americans First, appeared in the February 2006 issue of The American Conservative. The piece is referenced and excerpted on the citizenism page.
- Citizenism versus White Nationalism for VDARE. The piece is referenced and excerpted on the citizenism page.
- Economists On Immigration: What’s The Matter? for VDARE. The piece is referenced on the sentimentalism and economist blind spot pages.
- Elitist Economists, Immigration, and the American Future for VDARE. The piece is referenced on the economist blind spot page.
- Black Crime: The Immigration Dimension, an article for VDARE. The piece is referenced on the second-order crime page.
* Steve Sailer writes in 2011: My quoting Paul Krugman’s nostalgic reminiscences about his upbringing has set off a broad but not particularly deep discussion (e.g., Kevin Drum, Alex Tabarrok, Matthew Yglesias, and Megan McArdle).
The funny thing is how economists and economically-minded writers ignore the economists’ toolbox of concepts, such as ceteris paribus (all else being equal) and opportunity costs, that are most relevant for thinking about the actual issues raised by this topic. For example, Krugman himself says that he wouldn’t want to go back because now, “You can get really good coffee just about anywhere.” Similarly, Tabarrok reasons: “I remember those idyllic summers of the 1970s earning a few extra dollars mowing lawns–80,000 amputated fingers, hands and mangled toes and feet every year back then and just 6,000 today. Would I even let me kid use a mower from the 1970s?”
The point of thinking about the past is not to decide whether or not we’d rather live there. Since we don’t actually have time machines, we aren’t confronted with an all or nothing choice between living in the past and living in the present. Uninventing advances in coffee-making machines or lawnmowers isn’t on the table. The point is to understand the past to help us make decisions in the present to make the future better.
For example, Benjamin Franklin explained in the 1750s why, all else being equal, a less populated America would be better for the average American’s future than a more populated America, and the implications for immigration policy.
Please note that the relevant issue for policymaking isn’t whether or not the future will be better or worse in some overall sense than the present or the past, the issue is to choose the policy now that would make the future better than alternative futures in which worse policies were chosen now. Fortunately, we have analytical tools for considering tradeoffs resulting from policies. Unfortunately, these are tools that are almost never used whenever the topic comes within a country mile of immigration.
The immigration policies that most of these pundits advocate have had tremendous effects of various kinds on the affordability of family formation, but most pundits would rather discuss side issues like coffee and lawnmowers.
My policy suggestion has long been that when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging. But that is not so much an unpopular view amongst the punditry as one that simply can’t be remembered for more than a few seconds at a time because it so orthogonal to the dominant ideologies.
