Out of the Barrio

...The basis for all this hokum usually is some kind of apples-and-oranges comparison of median income that shows Hispanics still earning a fraction of what whites earn...

...Note the underhanded procedure: bilingual education was never explicitly ordered...

...Like so much other mischief, bilingual education began in the 1970s with an innocuous-sounding directive from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare ordering school districts with more than a 5 percent minority population to take "affirmative steps" to help children who didn't speak English...

...The David Dukes are already reaping the harvest...

...In the past, she notes, this proposition was accepted by immigrants and native-born alike, to the enrichment of both...

...Moreover, both have polarized the Hispanic community, driving many moderate Hispanics into a more radical, separatist camp...

...In most people's minds, the expression poor Hispanic is almost redundant...

...Back when the civil and voting rights acts were first passed in the 1960s, the enemy was discrimination and the goal opportunity...

...A number of studies over the past fifteen years have shown federally funded bilingual education to be a complete flop both in boosting proficiency in English (hard to do when students are speaking Spanish all day) and in improving performance in other subjects...

...Yet the question demonstrates that despite its many ethnic minorities America has only one language of civil rights, and it is a language of failure...

...Nor have advocates had to demonstrate support from the people they ostensibly represent...

...Neither of these efforts, however, has addressed head-on the issue of Hispanic entitlements...

...But the entitlements of the civil rights era encouraged Hispanics to maintain their language and culture, their separate identity, in return for the rewards of being members of an officially recognized minority group...

...The attitude puzzled me...

...asked one well-dressed man in d uark business suit...

...Her position established, Chavez directs her first shot at bilingual education...

...From this we are supposed to infer that Mexican-Americans have not improved their lot over time...

...The success of middle-class Hispanics is an untold—and misunderstood—story, perhaps least appreciated by Hispanic advocates whose interest is in promoting the view that Latinos can't make it in this society...

...They see Hispanics given preference in hiring, promotions, and admissions to universities...

...Parents want their children to get ahead, to do better than they did, which in America means a better education, increased career options, a mortgage—Main Street, USA...

...The upshot, says Chavez, is that if the average Joe knows anything about Hispanics, it's that they have been left behind by the rest of American society: The Hispanic poor, who constitute only about one-fourth of the Hispanic population, are visible to all...

...These are the Hispanics most likely to be studied, analyzed, and reported on and certainly the ones most likely to be read about...

...Immediately after the TV segment, a public liaison officer from Mayor Barry's office rose and proceeded to thump for the same old Great Society solutions that had just been repudiated on screen...

...In Out of the Barrio, Linda Chavez, executive director of the U.S...

...The Republican party didn't even bother to send a representative to the meeting, but that's another story...

...William McGurn is the Washington bureau chief of National Review...

...Lamenting their lack of power and influence, they compared themselves unfavorably to American blacks...

...Economic breakdowns rarely factor in time spent in the U.S...

...Previous immigrants had been eager to become 'American,' to learn the language, to fit in," writes Chavez...

...They manipulate the growing percentage of Hispanic immigrants to downplay the material progress of the community as a whole, then use this disparity to barter for ever more privileges, set-asides, and quotas...

...We have to be more like them [blacks...

...This is not to deny that there have been beneficiaries of affirmative action, only tosay that they have largely been confined to an elite funded by outside sources and politicians enjoying seats safe from challenge...

...The most invisible Hispanics today are those who have been absorbed into the mainstream," the author writes...

...A recent computer search of stories about Hispanics in major newspapers and magazines over a 12-month period turned up more than eighteen hundred stories in which the word Hispanic or Latino occurred within a hundred words of the word poverty...

...it was eased in the back door by regulations that made alternatives too difficult, expensive, or vulnerable to lawsuit, just the sort of legerdemain that lends credence to conservative suspicions about the recently signed civil rights bill...

...Other minorities have felt its sting, particularly during hard times, but the emphasis on Spanish arouses OUT OF THE BARRIO: TOWARD A NEW POLITICS OF HISPANIC ASSIMILATION Linda Chavez Basic Books/208 pages/$23 reviewed by WILLIAM McGURN 58 The American Spectator February 1992 special resentment because it bespeaks a desire for separatism and an unwillingness to abide by the old rules...

...when these factors are taken into account, virtually all discrepancies disappear...

...Except perhaps the idea that taxpayer dollars should go to reinforcing this disinclination...

...To my astonishment, a number of Chinese Americans in the audience—educated, obviously affluent, more or less conservative—agreed...

...Surely Asians would find the social and economic price paid by blacks for their political clout too steep...

...Chavez ranges far and wide in this short book, but it's held together by the assumption that assimilation is the sine qua non of any multi-ethnic democracy...

...Good thing, too, for there's no evidence bilingual education is popular with Hispanics...

...Not all of those who are part of the anti-immigration backlash, she notes, are cranks: Many are simply frustrated at what they see as an erosion in the consensus that the United States has a common language and culture worth preserving...

...They are more properly considered "ethnic power brokers" whose main base lies outside the community...

...Out of the Barrio, then, is really two books in one...

...Political scientist Peter Skerry, author of a forthcoming book on Hispanic politics, notes that the use of illegal aliens to inflate population figures used for redistricting is creating "rotten boroughs" where politicians are elected by very few voters...

...Confirming the stereotype, the president of La Raza thunders that U.S...

...I attended the link-up session sponsored by the Organization of Chinese Americans at the Holiday Inn in Silver Spring, Maryland...

...What they don't tell you is that they are not talking about the same people...

...As Chavez points out, "Nothing so stirs animosity toward Hispanics as the belief that they do not wish to learn English...

...In turn, whole new classes of The American Spectator February 1992 59 beneficiaries were created...

...Today, only half of Hispanic adults are U.S.-born...

...Moreover, at the time the Voting Rights Act was passed, two Mexican-Americans from Texas (where hostility toward them was highest) held seats in Congress, a situation unthinkable for blacks in the Deep South...

...It's the elevation of a foreign tongue to parity with English through government chicanery and at the expense of the hapless taxpayer...

...Who listens to us...

...The outrage has been manifest in laws to make English the official language and in attempts to restrict Hispanic immigration...

...One Supreme Court decision (involving, oddly enough, a Chinese named Kenny Lau) and several administrative interpretations later, the deed was done...

...In 1960, more than 85 percent of Mexican-Americans had been born in the U.S...

...the government, Chavez notes, does not distinguish between the incomes of native-born and immigrants...

...Hispanic leaders, most of them funded by the large foundations (Ford in particular), are largely unaccountable to the Hispanic community...

...While the U.S...

...In fact, closer examination would show it is not maintaining Spanish per se that arouses hostility (last time I checked there were, no movements against Greek-language religious services, Yeshivas, or even Chinatowns...

...They see election districts gerrymandered to give Hispanics extra political clout, illegal aliens used to apportion legislative seats, and even demands by some Hispanic leaders that noncitizens be allowed to vote in U.S...

...EP...

...0 f course, the gulf between the Hispanic community and its leadership makes perfect sense when you recognize their opposing interests...

...The first is about the American dream (the operative word in the book's subtitle is assimilation...

...Chavez pointedly informs us, for example, that the term Hispanic did not exist before affirmative action and does not exist outside America: how else would you lump an Argentine doctor, a Mexican housewife, and a Cakchiquel Indian into the same culture...

...The engine behind these distortions, of course, is affirmative action...

...racism has left Hispanics "the poorest of the poor, the most segregated minority in schools, the lowest-paid group in America and the least educated minority in this nation...

...an Education Department survey found that a whopping majority (78 percent of Mexican-Americans, 82 percent of Cuban-Americans) opposed teaching in Spanish if it meant less time for English...

...Even the fact of past discrimination merely confirms Chavez's larger point: that Hispanics have not had it any tougher than other immigrants...

...To succeed at the affirmative action game," says Chavez, "Hispanics had to establish their failure in other areas...

...Nobody...

...And the discrimination felt by Hispanics was never comparable to that experienced by American blacks...

...Even those of us who, like Chavez, view immigration as critical to America's continued prosperity wonder about the wisdom of letting in people who become eligible for all manner of costly entitlements while being absolved of any responsibility...

...Originally a temporary program to bring youngsters up to speed while they learned English, bilingual education has become a government-subsidized mandate for Hispanic separatism, and has provoked an understandable backlash...

...Commission on Civil Rights under Ronald Reagan, illustrates the devastating effects the black model is having on Hispanics trying to become part of mainstream society...

...elections...

...did not get its first elected black governor until Doug Wilder, there have been six Hispanic governors since the turn of the century...

...Mexican-Americans, for instance, earn about 57 percent of the white average, a proportion that has held firm for roughly three decades now...

...But with affirmative action all that was thrown out the window: far from equal opportunity, the standards were shifted for certain people...

...And the leadership ignores the more compelling lessons to be learned from the distinctly different paths taken by, say, Cubans and Puerto Ricans, lessons that primarily confirm the primacy of marriage and family and warn against looking to government for solutions...

...The second relates the Hispanic experience to U.S...

...immigration policy, implying that the rejection of an American identity by Hispanic groups such as the Mexican American Legal and Defense Education Fund and the National Council of La Raza only increases public enthusiasm for more guard dogs and barbed wire along our southern border...

...Consequently, instead of celebrating the patriotism and success of Hispanics who have already made it in the U.S., Hispanic leaders might as well be writing Pat Buchanan's speeches...

...At some point non-Hispanics were bound to try to do something about it...

...Likewise significant is that the champions of bilingual education have never had to demonstrate the efficacy of their own agenda, because such a requirement would soon put them out of business...

...Given that immigrants by and large start out at the bottom of the ladder, the larger the immigrant base of any community the greater the drag on the average...

...They see Hispanic youngsters taught in their native language, ballots printed in Spanish, and licensing exams for everything from becoming a barber to driving a car administered in Spanish...

...Schools either had to "initiate bilingual programs, whose effectiveness did not have to be demonstrated, or accept the burden of proving the superior effectiveness of alternative programs...

...The upshot, as Chavez notes, is a class of leaders "more intent on vying with blacks for permanent victim status" than on helping Hispanics become the latest chapter of the American dream...