Luke Ford

Blacks in America have an average IQ of 85 and American Hispanics have an average IQ of 90. These groups should vote in their self-interest, which means for a big welfare state.

Ann Coulter writes:

Republicans don’t need to treat Hispanics with the contempt that Democrats treat gun-owners. We do not dislike Hispanics. We do not dislike any group.

We just have to protect Americans first—American jobs, American taxes and American social programs being bankrupted by immigrants. Most voters don’t think it’s an outrageous imposition to ask people to obey our laws.

Donald Trump opened his campaign talking about Mexican rapists, pledged to build a wall and deport illegals—and has soared to the top of the polls.

The massive Hispanic blowback consists of this: Trump is getting about the same percentage of the Hispanic vote as Romney did.

I have no doubt that the 73 percent of Hispanics who will be voting against Trump are prepared to be much angrier about it than the 73 percent who voted against Romney. But the result won’t look any different on election night. Voting machines don’t register angry glints in people’s eyes.

On the other hand, by driving up the white vote—to say nothing of the black vote—we will see a difference in the Republicans’ box score on election night.

The Holy Grail year for Republicans is supposed to be 2004, when President Bush won a record-breaking 40 percent of the Hispanic vote. He had to turn his entire White House into a Hispandering operation to do that—and he still lost the Hispanic vote.

It’s crazy to deform our whole platform in pursuit of some group that won’t give us at least 51 percent of its vote, anyway. The Democrats ignore white voters and they were 73.7 percent of the electorate in 2012. Hispanics were only 8.4 percent that year.

I haven’t seen an estimate of the electoral percentage of gun-owners, but with one-third to half of all Americans owning guns, it’s a lot more than 8.4 percent.

Democrats know not to fritter time on constituencies they can’t win, but have buffaloed Republicans into wasting resources on a quixotic bid to win a slightly larger—but still losing—percentage of the 8.4 percent of the electorate that is the Hispanic vote.

You’ve been conned, GOP. You are never going to beat the Democrats at sucking up to foreigners. And your conservative base will flee.

The GOP should expend precisely as much effort fawning over the Hispanic vote as Democrats do over the gun vote, the pro-life vote and the white vote.

Republicans have got to stop believing The New York Times line that the only honorable votes are from minorities. It’s honorable to get votes from taxpayers, too.

Steve Sailer writes in 2006:

In countries like the United States still blessed with a "market-dominant majority", heightened racial heterogeneity means less support for social insurance programs for the least fortunate citizens combined with more race-based handouts for the best-connected.

As Goodhart noted in 2004, pervasive Nordic-style social
insurance schemes have flopped in America because of the
lack of solidarity across ethnic lines.

And also, to be frank, becauseblacks, American Indians, and to a somewhat lesser extent,
Hispanics have shown that they get corrupted faster by the "moral hazard" of social insurance than do whites.

Sweden began its welfare state in 1935, and,amazingly, it hasn`t completely wrecked the Swedish work ethic yet. Although American free marketeers have been gleefully anticipating the imminent demise of the Swedish economy as far back as I can remember in the 1970s, last week`s GDP figures showed that Sweden grew 4.1 percent over the last year.
In contrast, in the mid-1960s when liberal northern states in America imported Swedish ideas about raising welfare for single mothers to generous levels, crime and illegitimacy rates among blacks shot upward almost immediately.

This quickly alienated white voters. The Democratic Presidential candidates` share of the overall vote plummeted from 61 percent in 1964 to 43 percent in 1968.

Here in the U.S., the big increase in diversity from immigration has not yet led to much in the way of increased tax-and-spend redistribution policies on the national level. (Instead, President Bush has pursued an “Après moi le deluge” strategy of cut-tax-and-spend.)

This pattern, though, can be seen in some states. New Mexico, which has always been ethnically diverse, is notorious for its economic fecklessness and dependence on the federal treasury. After six generations as Americans, the Hispanics of New Mexico continue to exhibit traditional Hispanic attitudes toward political economy, suggesting that the miracle cure of “assimilation”, which is supposed to solve all our problems with immigrants Real Soon Now … won`t.

Steve Sailer writes in 2011:

In the summer of 2001, Jorge G. Castañeda Gutman was one of the most important men in the Western Hemisphere. As the foreign minister of Vicente Fox, the newly elected president of democratizing Mexico, Castañeda was a figure of considerable glamour as he negotiated with a yielding Bush Administration a vastly ambitious Mexican plan that merely began with amnesty for illegal aliens.

At the time, I found Castañeda a fascinating figure—in part because he wasn’t a terribly diplomatic diplomat. Instead, he was something rare in Mexico: a controversialist, a public intellectual who had a lot on his mind and didn’t mind explaining it.

Now, having largely given up on trying to foist Mexico’s problems onto the U.S., an older and possibly wiser Castañeda is back with a consistently interesting new book: Mañana Forever? Mexico and the Mexicans, about how Mexico should and (perhaps) can solve its own problems.

When George W. Bush entered the White House in 2001, his chief foreign policy goal was an immigration deal with Fox. Castañeda recounts the Mexican leadership’s visit to Washington in early September 2001:

“Fox was further informed by Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice that, despite the known reluctance of Congress, the administration would attempt to deliver on its promise of some sort of immigration deal by the end of 2001. The specifics were not entirely clear, but private conversations by senior officials in both governments suggested that a compromise could include a legalization process for Mexicans in the United States without papers, as well as a temporary worker program for new migrants at a level well above the existing legal flow, though below the total illegal sum.”

Here at VDARE.com, we followed these high-level conversations with concern. Fortunately, by 9/5/01—i.e. before Arab terrorists forced immigration enthusiasts to “lie low” temporarily, in the unguarded words of Cato’s Steve Moore  —we had concluded that Congress was unlikely to ratify quite that blatant a betrayal of Americans. Similarly, Bush subsequently failed to push his immigration plans through Congress in 2004, 2006, and 2007.

In retrospect, what Castañeda calls a “new place for Mexico under the American sun” was fatally eclipsed by 9/11 less than a week later.

Several things happened at once:

First: the Bush Administration’s attention, and that of the American public, was turned toward the Muslim world. This torpedoed Bush’s hope for amnesty and a massive guest worker program—although it also allowed Bush to follow a policy of malign neglect of border security that proved nearly as disastrous.

Second: The recession aggravated by 9/11 stymied the wider part of the Fox-Castañeda plan. This went far beyond immigration to something approaching the European Union. Their goal was for America to give vast sums to Mexico for its economic development, just as Germany had subsidized Greece to bring the Greeks up to Europe Union standards (at least in theory).

As Castañeda told the Los Angeles Times:

“That`s what Fox essentially wants, the type of resource transfers that occurred in Spain and, before Spain, in Ireland, and, after Spain, in Portugal and Greece. The Germans were willing to build highways in Spain. Somebody else has to build our highways. We don`t have the money.”

[Jorge Castaneda: Mexico`s Man Abroad, by Sergio Munoz,, August 12, 2001]

Even then, at the tail end of the Internet Bubble, it was impolitic for Castañeda to point out in English the ultimate logic of the Bush-Fox honeymoon. In 2011, of course, with Greece’s corruption undermining the European Union, this plan of turning Mexico into a giant Greece at American expense seems like another bullet dodged.

It’s important to note, however, that these fond hopes continue to be nurtured in shadowy meetings among the elites. In a footnote, Castañeda praises the planning for a “North American Economic Union, or Common Market” still being done by “the North American Forum, chaired by George Schultz, Pedro Aspe, and Peter Lougheed…”

Third: in the aftermath of 9/11, the Mexican public just did not endear itself to the stricken American public. As Castañeda explains in his current book:

“Quite simply, there was no outpouring of broad Mexican sympathy, support, and solidarity for the tragedy befallen its neighbor. Fox’s supposedly slow response would be forgotten; Mexican society’s coolness would not.”

Fourth: Castañeda did not endear himself to the Mexican public.

Castañeda had dazzled the American press before 9/11 swept away Mexico’s Moment, but his cosmopolitanism always made him an awkward political figure at home. Known as El Guero for his reddish-blond hair, he is the son of a 1970s Mexican foreign minister and a Soviet Jewish translator who met at the UN during Stalin’s time. (Castañeda’s chief advisor in the immigration negotiations was his elder half-brother Andrés Rozental.) He spent the first twelve years of his life in New York, Geneva, and Cairo. He then studied at the French Lycée in Mexico City, Princeton, and earned a doctorate in economic history at the University of Paris.

Thus when Castañeda became foreign minister in 2000, he often botched the countless patriotic rituals that public schools instill (if nothing else) in the average Mexican. He writes:

“I found it difficult to know … when to sing the national anthem, salute the flag, or look circumspect, wistful, or happy … Worse still, I was even less adept at respecting age-old customs of indirect communication, euphemisms, rhetorical flourishes, and elliptical expression.”

This Mexican mode of obfuscatory discourse was parodied by the great film comedian Cantinflas, the most famous of Mexican movie stars (he was born 100 years ago last Friday). A representative Cantinflear: “There’s the rub, that it’s not one thing or the other, but rather quite the contrary”.

Still, while Castañeda didn’t make a terribly suave Mexican diplomat (he left office in 2003 and now divides his time between Mexico City and New York University), he makes an above-average New York public intellectual.

And that’s a valuable thing, since practically nobody else in the Boston – New York – Washington corridor knows much of anything about Mexicans. When discussing the impact of immigration policy, Northeastern public intellectuals often assume that Mexican immigrants in the U.S. will turn out like Italians or Jews or blacks or whatever group they happen to have experience with. Or, they simply assume that Mexicans must be the opposite of those evil rednecks in the Southwest that they hate.

In contrast, while Castañeda has had to learn a huge amount about his fellow countrymen. And his Mañana Forever? is an admirably impatient attempt to diagnose and reform the Mexican national character.

Like most intellectuals, Castañeda’s suggestions for his fellow citizens tend to boil down to: “Be like me” — more well-read, logical, educated, argumentative, and Americanized. But it’s important for American intellectuals to hear from one of their own kind that, overwhelmingly, Mexicans aren’t like him.

His book is also full of interest to Americans who might be wondering what we are getting ourselves into by letting tens of millions of Mexicans immigrate.

Castañeda isn’t an outstanding prose stylist in English, and he sometimes struggles with the quantitative parts of his analysis. Still, he’s a fine observer. For example, he notes that the impoverished Indian south of Mexico “continues to provide much of Mexico’s personality”. In contrast, the wealthier “north is industrious, modernizing, violent, lighter-skinned, and devoid of charm …” In short, the north sounds a lot like Los Angeles.

And Castañeda’s recommendations for reform in Mexico do make some sense.

In 2001, Castañeda made a valiant effort to foist Mexico’s problems off on America—hey, you can’t blame him for trying.