IMMIGRATION REVERSALS
Magnet, Myron
30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 Immigration Reversals Immigration Reversals ’M EMBARRASSED IT TOOK ME SO LONG to grasp the phoniness of the charge that it’s...
...The clerics also were pressing local schools to teach the newly arrived kids in Spanish, so they wouldn’t “lose their cultural heritage...
...Then we should craft an immigration policy that is generous in the number of people we admit, but that chooses newcomers not because they are a citizen’s elderly parents or adult child or brother, however needy or unskilled, as at present, or because they successfully snuck into the country some years ago, like the 3 million illegal Mexicans amnestied in 1986, but because they have skills that the U.S...
...Then Victor Davis Hanson poured out a vivid tale that sharpened these impressions...
...When we do cases with Hispanic gangs, we often get full statements of admission, almost like they don’t see what’s the big deal...
...effort to stem Mexican immigration would be a human-rights violation, American officials might quietly encourage them to get their own house in order and foster economic growth, so their citizens don’t have to abandon ship...
...And as Hispanics fan out across the country, they bring gang crime in their wake...
...If the benefit to the U.S...
...U.S.-born children of Mexican immigrants are twice as likely to be on welfare as the American average, and—disturbingly —their children are even more likely to be welfare-dependent...
...After several weeks in a heavily Hispanic Manhattan neighborhood, talking to Catholic priests and their immigrant flocks, he concluded that the alchemy of assimilation was fizzling out...
...immigration policy and the even worse “comprehensive reform” bill, which thankfully failed...
...HILL ARY C L I N T O N WILL BE THE NEXT PRESIDENT OF TH E UNITED STATES UN LES S . . . H IL L A RY C L I N TO N W ILL B E TH E N EX T PR ESI D EN T O F TH E UN ITE D STAT ES U N L ES S . . . “A magisterial, s ci ntil lati ng rev ie w of America’s arms, armies, and singular soldiers...
...To say that Florence King doesn’t suffer fools gladly is an understatement akin to suggesting that Fred Astaire could maneuver quite nicely on the dance floor...
...Today, of course, such benefits attract the un-entrepreneurial and un-self-reliant to these shores, along with the hardworking...
...We need them, the advocates contend, and as a practical matter we can’t round them up and deport them even if we wanted to, so we’d better face reality with an amnesty program that will integrate them and a guest worker program to bring in still more of them...
...901, Arlington, VA 22209 Deja Reviews: Florence King All Over Again – Selections from National Review and The American Spectator Get the very best of Miss Florence King from both National Review and The American Spectator in our new book, Deja Reviews...
...In California, home to DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 3 3 M Y R O N M A G N E T Nationally, the Hispanic felony arrest rate approaches triple that of non-Hispanic whites...
...Virginia police view with alarm the spread of gang violence from suburban Washington down toward Charlottesville and the Shenandoah Valley...
...The gang bangers take violence for granted...
...Buy ten copies and give them as gifts...
...That’s why their children were just as likely to end up lawyers, engineers, or accountants as the children of native-born Americans...
...The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History Lincoln Unmasked Lincoln Unmasked —THOMAS E. WOODS JR.,bestselling author of Without an opportunity to work, illegal immigrants would return home, just as 60 percent of immigrants from the first great migration went home when the Depression dried up jobs here...
...Hispanic women are having babies at twice the rate of the U.S...
...Nationally, the Hispanic felony arrest rate approaches triple that of non-Hispanic whites, and 30 percent of federal prisoners in 2000 were foreign-born...
...With Mexican-American friends going back to his school days, when he was one of five Anglos in a class of 40, and a web of Mexican relatives by marriage, he’d chosen a career teaching the classics to mostly Mexican students, because (among other reasons) he likes Mexicans...
...We need an open and welcoming policy, shaped solely by the interests of our own nation, not by pressure from our neighbors or by passive acquiescence in the illegal status quo...
...It’s a mixed blessing to agriculture, one of the biggest employers of unskilled immigrants, since it has retarded mechanization, without which American growers soon won’t be able to compete I M M I G R A T I O N R E V E R S A L S 3 2 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 Hispanics are creating a new underclass, even more unassimilated than the old one because of its self-identification as Mexican, not American...
...As Heather Mac Donald shows in her thickly reported chapters of The Immigration Solution, based not only on the data but also on interviews with gang-bangers, jail inmates, single mothers, cops, teachers, social-service providers, and others from neighborhoods ranging from the Los Angeles barrio to New York’s outer boroughs, the prevalence of crime and illegitimacy among Mexican and other Central American immigrants and their children is as troublingly high as the rate of school-dropout and welfare dependency...
...And as the population of Hanson’s little town neared 90 percent Mexican, deeper problems emerged...
...People magazine “The lady knows nothing of mediocrity...
...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 Immigration Reversals Immigration Reversals ’M EMBARRASSED IT TOOK ME SO LONG to grasp the phoniness of the charge that it’s “anti-immigration” to oppose current U.S...
...It’s no wonder that Mexican officials, along with Mexico’s consuls in the U.S., vigorously promote the northward flight of their nationals, even providing an instruction manual, in comic-book form, on how to sneak across the border and not get caught later...
...The lack of such programs a century ago meant that only those came here who thought they could take advantage of American freedom and opportunity by their own efforts, the key to the old immigration’s success...
...If judges object that the machinery for identifying illegals—the federal government’s system for verifying Social Security numbers—is flawed, Washington should fix it at once...
...Social scientists on the right and the left now agree, after decades of argument, that children of unwed mothers do less well on average than kids from two-parent families in every department of life, from education to employment to marriage, and single parenthood, unsurprisingly, is a key marker of underclass status...
...economy needs, including the ability to speak English...
...Our writers found that none of these claims holds water...
...Unlike today’s knowledge-based economy, it also needed plenty of unskilled labor to build its new cities and work its unmechanized and still inefficient farms...
...I Steven Malanga, now revised and just published as a book, The Immigration Solution (Ivan R. Dee...
...T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R 40th ANNIVERSARY Brown Printing Company Company Headquarters 2300 Brown Ave Waseca, MN 56093 (800) 533-0475 Sales & Marketing 1500 Broadway, Suite 505 New York, NY 10036 (212) 782-7800 a Gruner + Jahr Company 40 percent of America’s immigrant population, Hispanics, who in 1970 were 12 percent of the state’s population and 16 percent of its new prison admits, grew to 30 percent of its population in 1998 and 42 percent of its new prisoners...
...Without an opportunity to work, illegal immigrants would return home, just as 60 percent of immigrants from the first great migration went home when the Depression dried up jobs here...
...But things had changed...
...Even in the high schools, gangs flourish, with names like SOK (Still Out Killing) and HTO (Hispanics Taking Over) in South Central Los Angeles...
...economy of such immigrants is modest, the cost they impose is hefty...
...No one, except for scare-mongering amnesty advocates, is suggesting the massive roundup and deportation of the millions of illegal immigrants already here...
...The priests saw their duty as signing up immigrants for every possible subsidy, especially the child-only welfare benefit available to American-born kids of immigrant mothers, a munificent sum to a newcomer from a peasant village...
...But some years ago, when I sent a writer out to see how the magic Americanizing machine was working, he came back dismayed...
...average...
...and that extremely high illegitimacy rate is skyrocketing...
...M Y R O N M A G N E T...
...Those low wages, however, give newcomers enough to send money to their families in Mexico, in a stream of remittances that are Mexico’s second largest source of hard currency and the lifeblood of entire villages...
...Oh dear, my writer thought: Now we have a system that subverts rather than promotes economic enterprise and cultural assimilation, the twin engines of Americanization...
...Myron Magnet, editor of City Journal from 1994 through 2006 and now editor-at-large, is the author of The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass...
...Just as the nation seems about to solve, or at least stabilize, its native underclass problem, Hispanics are creating a new underclass, even more unassimilated than the old one because of its self-identification as Mexican, not American...
...So it’s troubling that, for all the talk of Latino family values, illegitimacy is epidemic among Hispanic immigrants and their grown-up daughters...
...he himself had done time for “GTA”— grand theft auto...
...The Immigration Solution suggests we start by enforcing the laws already on the books, policing our borders vigorously, and stiffly fining employers who hire illegals...
...JOSIAH BUNTING III, American Spectator WHAT YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW ABOUT DISHONEST ABE “I urge readers not merely to buy and read this book...
...By contrast, the American-born children of Mexican immigrants, two and a half times likelier to drop out of high school than the average American-born kid, earn less than the national average as adults...
...They are in such oversupply that unemployment among the native-born unskilled is double the overall unemployment rate, and the labor glut has pushed down their wages by about 8 percent, no trivial matter for millions of native-born high-school dropouts, many of them minorities, including Hispanics...
...Brown Printing Company Congratulates The American Spectator on 40 Wonderful Years...
...Paul Greenberg, Introduction to Deja Reviews with foreign suppliers with even cheaper labor forces...
...The crime statistics are stark...
...Brilliant and wit h e r ing, answers the ki n d of forbidden questions that our country now more than ever needs to hear...
...To workers accustomed to $8 a week in Mexico, $8 an hour in the California fields or Arkansas chicken processing plants looks like a fortune (though it’s the low wages of these immigrants that account for much of the apparent uptick in U.S...
...Instead, 3 4 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 I M M I G R A T I O N R E V E R S A L S Many Hispanics see out-of-wedlock childbearing as normal, a matter for celebration not embarrassment...
...It takes a very different position from where we started out...
...In his childhood, Mexicans assimilated...
...But such encouragement aside, Hispanic crime is high because Mexican and other Central American immigrants have brought with them a gang-ridden culture...
...Like the old underclass too, a significant number of those out-of-wedlock children are receiving welfare benefits, and California is already caring for a second generation of Hispanic foster care children and group home residents...
...One Salvadoran kid told Mac Donald that most of his fellow eighth graders were already “locked up or dead...
...I can only plead blind piety...
...The advocates’ real point is that these specific 11 or 12 million illegal Central American immigrants, most of them uneducated and unskilled, are a boon to our economy and society, because of their powerful work ethic and willingness to do “jobs Americans won’t do,” and because of their strong family values...
...I feared that my misgivings about today’s immigrant flood were but a short step from the nativist know-nothingism that dismissed my forebears and their fellow newcomers as defective both mentally and culturally, sure to debase American society with their ignorance, poverty, and crudity...
...economy, their net benefit to American society is also unimpressive...
...economy of that time desperately needed all the tailors, stonecutters, retail clerks, and so on, arriving by the shipload...
...We’re amazed at the openness of the shootings,” a suburban New York homicide detective told Mac Donald...
...Like the old underclass, Mac Donald reports, many Hispanics see out-of-wedlock childbearing as normal, a matter for celebration not embarrassment...
...However unpromising today’s largely uneducated and unskilled immigrants may appear, do they really look any worse than their predecessors...
...Such cheap labor benefits a few industries, such as home repair and the hotel and restaurant business, and it provides prosperous Americans with low-cost babysitters and gardeners...
...But when high Mexican officials self-righteously and undiplomatically assert that any U.S...
...Such was the consensus among the writers at City Journal, the conservative magazine I edited from 1994 through 2006...
...In a heavily Hispanic Manhattan neighborhood, cops estimate that 70 percent of the drug dealers and other criminals are illegal aliens...
...Which may be why any collection of her writings goes off like a fireworks display...
...This is a limited time offer...
...CAN SHE BE STOPPED...
...In addition, Malanga argues, those earlier immigrants brought with them a rich store of social capital: strong families, self-reliance, entrepreneurialism, a belief in education for their children, optimism about the future and belief in their new land rather than fatalism and cynicism...
...Isn’t the lesson of my grandparents’ generation simply this: that American freedom and opportunity have a special magic, an alchemy for transforming tired, poor, huddled masses into free American citizens whose energy and grateful patriotism, and whose progeny, greatly strengthened the nation...
...But weren’t my grandparents’ generation of immigrants also unskilled...
...Other advanced nations that are immigration magnets, as Steven Malanga recounts in The Immigration Solution, have devised such selective policies with great success...
...He chased away three Mexican housebreakers at gunpoint at 3 A.M., he said...
...Any attempt at transition between the blasts would be ludicrous, like playing a waltz between artillery barrages...
...It appears that these immigrants are forming ethnic enclaves in which social pathology flourishes and gets passed down from one generation to the next...
...The issue, we quickly realized, is a lot more specific than we had thought...
...another time, outgunned, he had to let a carload of Mexicans get away with 100 pounds of oranges from his grove...
...Now—with multiculturalism stoked up to boiling by armies of Latino advocates and by schoolteachers skeptical of the worth of the American culture that has produced all the advantages that Mexicans have flocked here to enjoy—they don’t...
...IF MEXICAN AND OTHER CENTRAL AMERICAN immigrants are a net loss for the U.S...
...economy is hardly crying out for such workers...
...Please call 800.524.3469, visit www.spectator.org/DejaReviews, or mail a check to: The American Spectator, 1611 N. Kent Street, Ste...
...Since we can only admit a fraction of the millions who would like to come and participate in the prosperity and freedom that Americans have built by their own efforts and with the benefit of their uniquely American culture and political system, let’s choose our immigrants by asking not what this country can do for them, but what they can do for this country...
...The argument isn’t about Indians or Chinese or Poles but about Central Americans, primarily Mexicans, who, because we have lost control of our southern border, have entered the country illegally...
...half those new mothers aren’t married...
...THOMAS E. WOODS, JR., bestselling author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History ThreeRiversPress.com UNMASKED Lincoln Lincoln What You’re Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe What You’re Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe Not Thomas J. DiLorenzo Thomas J. DiLorenzo Author of Author of THE REAL LINCOLN THE REAL LINCOLN “Brilliant and withering, answers the kind of forbidden questions that our country now more than ever needs to hear...
...N OW I N PA P E R B ACK A 400-YEAR HISTORY OF AMERICA AT WAR, FROM INDIAN FIGHTING TO TERRORIST HUNTING “A magisterial, scintillating review of America’s arms, armies, and singular soldiers...
...To begin with, the U.S...
...IASKED VICTOR TO TURN THESE reflections into an article, the first of what became a series of City Journal re-examinations of the immigration question by Hanson, Heather Mac Donald, and DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 3 1 B Y M Y R O N M A G N E T City Journalwriters long sympathetic to immigration’s economic and social benefits have turned against illegal immigration with a vengeance...
...income inequality...
...If, as the widely accepted “broken windows” theory of policing has it, such low-level crimes of disorder as subway fare-beating or public urination encourage more serious crime, since the criminally inclined conclude that no one cares about lawbreaking, then surely our nation’s non-enforcement of its immigration laws, Mac Donald concludes, especially in the big cities that have adapted “sanctuary” policies for illegal aliens, is the biggest crime breeder of them all...
...After all, I live in the great immigrant metropolis, lit by the Statue of Liberty’s torch, under which all my grandparents sailed a century ago to reach a land that amply fulfilled its promise to them...
...Steven Malanga made short work of the claim that this army of the unskilled enriches the nation, hard as many of them certainly work...
...JOSIAH BUNTING III, The American Spectator The American Spectator DON’T TR EAD ON ME A 400-Year History of America at War, from Indian Fighting to Terrorist Hunting H . W. C RO C KE R I II AUTHOR OF AND TRIUMPH ROBERT E. LEE ON LEADERSHIP H . W. CR OC KER I II AUTHOR OF AND TRIUMPH ROBERT E. LEE ON LEADERSHIP H. W. C R OC KER I II AUTHOR OF AND TRIUMPH ROBERT E. LEE ON LEADERSHIP THE RIGHT PLAN THE RIGHT TRADITION THE RIGHT QUESTIONS HILLARY CLINTON WILL BE THE NEXT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES UNLESS . . . Bestselling author John Podhoretz lays out the cogent, hard-hitting strategy we need to keep another Clinton from becoming president...
...To this unsettling report Heather Mac Donald piled on disturbing anecdotes from her frequent visits to southern California, stories about Mexican gangs and Latino family breakdown...
...Each low-skill immigrant household, whether legal or illegal, consumes some $20,000 per year more in government-funded services—including education, school lunches, health care, prison guards, and welfare —than it contributes in taxes, estimates the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector...
...MEXICAN IMMIGRATION may offer few benefits to the U.S., but it is an immense boon to Mexico, providing a safety valve for that country’s unreformed political culture and failed economy, which has seen per capita GDP decline from 37 percent of the United States’ in the early 1980s to 25 percent of it now...
...Immigrants most certainly do enrich our country, and not just those who are electrical engineers or medical researchers but also those who can fix an engine or run an X-ray machine or manage a small business...
...For just $24.95 (includes S&H) take a trip down memory lane, or begin the journey anew with these delightful selections of Miss King’s voluminous collection of essays from 1991-2002...
...DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 3 5 JO H N P O D H O R E T Z AU T HO R OFTH E NE W YO RK T IMES B E ST - S E L L E R B U SH C O U N T R Y JOH N PODHORETZ AU T HO R OF TH E NE W YO RK T IMES B E STSEL L E R B U S H C O U N T R Y CAN SHE BE STOPPED...
...That’s why Milton Friedman impatiently exclaimed: “It’s just obvious that you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state...
...Though advocates have tried to obfuscate it, the debate isn’t about whether immigration in general is good for this nation of immigrants, a truism that’s hard to fault...
...California’s Ventura County, once crimefree, has had to get an injunction against one gang responsible for a murder spree...
...He grew up in a half-Mexican town in California’s San Joaquin Valley, he told me, where he still lived and worked the family farm...
...Advocates are right that the United States needs a new immigration policy, though one along very different lines from what they propose...
...That was a story he didn’t want to write...
...In fact, the National Research Council reports, they were slightly more skilled than the native population, and the rapidly urbanizing U.S...
...In Los Angeles, almost all of the more than 1,200 outstanding murder warrants were for illegal aliens...
Vol. 40 • January 2008 • No. 10
