The economy lost 457,000 jobs last month, and the unemployment rate edged up to 9.5 percent–the highest in 26 years. More depressing still: the upbeat trend of last month, when job losses moderated, is decisively over. June’s decline killed off 120,000 more positions than May’s.

The V-shaped recovery that some economists thought was likely a month ago now looks more like a W–or even, heaven forbid, an L. With the stock market and consumer confidence down, and the stimulus thus far failing to stimulate, June may be remembered as the month that the Obama Administration was forced to took “ownership” of the Great Recession.

But the political implications of the “other” employment survey–of households rather than businesses–are somewhat less ominous for the Administration. Household employment declined by 374,000 positions, or nearly 100,000 less than the business survey figure. More importantly, the fastest growing ethnic group enjoyed a gain:

• - Total employment in June: -374,000 (-0.27 percent)
• - Non-Hispanic employment: -402,000 (-0.33 percent)
• - Hispanic employment: +28,000 (+0.14 percent)

White workers bore the brunt of June’s decline, as seen by disparity among unemployment rate changes:

• - White unemployment: 8.7 percent (+0.1 point in June)
• - Black unemployment: 14.7 percent (-0.2 point)
• - Hispanic unemployment: 12.2 percent (-0.5 point)

People on our side of the immigration debate warned that the Obama stimulus would benefit occupations disproportionately manned by immigrants. June’s figures do nothing to discredit their “paranoia.”

Over the long run, of course, the notion that immigrants displace native born workers is amply supported by hard evidence. From January 2001 to June 2009 Hispanic employment increased by 3,505,000 positions, or by 22.0 percent. Non-Hispanic employment fell by 1,085,000 positions, or by 0.9 percent, over the same period.

The ratio of Hispanic to non-Hispanic job growth since the January 2001, expressed as an index that we call VDAWDI (the VDARE.com American Worker Displacement Index), rose by 0.5 percent in June. Since peaking in September 2008, VDAWDI has declined by 1.4 percent:

So far the Great Recession has cut Hispanic job growth, both in absolute terms and relative to non-Hispanic job growth. This is clearly seen in the graphic:

The black line tracks Hispanic job growth; pink non-Hispanic job growth; and yellow the ratio of Hispanic to non-Hispanic job growth indices,–i.e., American Worker Displacement. (All lines start at 100.0 in January 2001.)

Every American wants the black and pink lines to line to turn up. One worries whether the yellow line–measuring the displacement of American workers by immigrants–will roar back also.

Houston Mayor Bill White stubbornly refuses to end his city’s sanctuary policy even though it has directly contributed to the deaths of officers (including Rodney Johnson, pictured) and citizens (like carjacked mom Tina Davila).

Houston’s largest police union, citing the death of six officers during Mayor Bill White’s tenure, called on the mayor and City Council this week to hire more officers, restore $14 million in overtime pay and overturn the long-standing policy of not questioning residents about their immigration status.

In a letter to White, Gary Blankinship, president of the Houston Police Officers Union, called last week’s slaying of veteran officer Henry Canales a “trifeca failure” of federal, state and city government to protect citizens and police officers from criminal illegal immigrants.

White responded with a news conference Thursday to make clear there would be no change in the department’s policy on illegal immigrants.
[Officers, mayor square off over immigration policy, Houston Chronicle, July 2, 2009]

Another Houston Chronicle article revealed the feelings of average cops about having to work with one arm tied behind their backs.

“It’s a strong issue,” Blankinship said. “My guys get tired of dealing with the criminal aliens out here, and it seems like the severity of the crimes is escalating and that’s frustrating to the rank and file.”

He stressed that calls for a change in the policy are not aimed at a wholesale roundup of illegal immigrants in Houston, a population the Greater Houston Partnership estimated last year at 420,000 in the 10-county Houston metropolitan area. It would help officers to weed out dangerous criminals in the undocumented community, he said.

The good news here is that the Houston Police Union is openly condemning the city’s sanctuary policy as dangerous to public safety and to officers on the job.

Politically correct mayors tend to forget that immigration status can be an important factor in suspect behavior: illegal aliens may react violently when they believe they are threatened with deportation. For example, Houston Officer Rodney Johnson was murdered by an illegal he had stopped for speeding. Actress and mother Adrienne Shelly was killed by an illegal alien who feared his deportation if she reported him to the authorities. She had discovered Diego Pilco stealing from her purse in her office, and he strangled her to death to hide his status.

You can contact Mayor White at mayor@cityofhouston.net with your thoughtful comments.

The Iranian election protests have apparently sputtered out, significantly faster than the Mexican election protests of 2006 that excited far less interest in the American press. Obviously, there are a lot of specific reasons for this disparity, but I think there’s a general pattern emerging.

As English has become the world’s dominant language, it has become easier for Americans to be influenced by foreigners who are fluent in English. For example, Americans follow political controversies in Iran by reading blogs by Iranians — Iranians who like to write in English, of course, which is hardly a representative sample of Iranian opinion.

This means that the American press will tend to be biased toward political movements who represent the better educated, wealthier, more cosmopolitan, Internet-savvy, and more elitist elements in a foreign country (i.e., those likely to speak English well), while the American media will be less sympathetic toward parties comprised of the less educated, poorer, more xenophobic, offline, and more populist elements. (more…)

Right about four centuries ago, the London Government, desperate to maintain control of the upwind (critical in the days of sail) and populous island of Ireland, kicked out much of the hostile Roman Catholic population of the northern province of Ulster and invited immigrants from (mainly) the Border Country between England and Scotland to replace them.

This community, known very accurately to American (but not British) historiography as the Scotch-Irish, is generally agreed by all who have subsequently had to deal with them to be the most violent and irascibly aggressive of any Anglophone population – including the native Irish.

A very few generations after going to Ireland, many of their descendents moved on to the southern United States. This process is beautifully documented in Albion’s Seed–imperative reading in my opinion for anyone who wants to understand America. My copy, alas, is not to hand, but I recollect Professor Fischer noting that, fortuitously, the most violent settlers of the East Coast met the most violent Indians–whom they promptly destroyed.

Shortly after that they supplied much of the fighting spirit of the Confederacy – along with the tunes for many of its songs and of course the Battle Flag.

Meanwhile, their cousins left in Ireland have defeated every effort to eradicate them – in recent decades shamefully connived at by Administrations in London.

And this continues. Hat Tip The Irish Savant – (the other sort of Irishman, I believe) –

Diversity Delight in Norn Iron

They’re getting their collective knickers in a twist in Northern Ireland over the spate of ‘racist’ attacks on… ‘gypsies’ ….As has been widely reported, people up there got a bit fed up with the activities of such gypsies and in the traditions of that very special place, violently ran them out. All but two of the 110 are now winging their way, at the expense of the NI taxpayers (actually the UK taxpayers, who keep NI afloat) back to their countries of origin.

“in the traditions of that very special place” - Ah, it takes an Irish way with words.

Gypsies of course are a European curse, unleashed by political correctness.

For all of them to leave the persuasion must have been…persuasive.

The question is, what is it that these Ulstermen have, that, perhaps unique in the WASP world, equips them to survive in this wretched era?

As Justice Alito’s concurring opinion in Ricci documented in amusing detail, Frank Ricci and colleagues were the victims of blatant racial discrimination by a black power broker and his allied white mayor in New Haven.

Stanford Law Professor Richard Thompson Ford says, that, well, equal protection of the laws isn’t the point of civil rights legislation. Sure, the laws include a lot of colorblind rhetoric, but the whole point is to benefit blacks at the expense of whites, so it’s a dirty trick for the Supreme Court to read the laws and the Constitution literally and apply them evenhandedly. He writes in Slate:

The plaintiffs in Ricci were undoubtedly sympathetic: hardworking public servants—17 of them white, one Hispanic—who expected that the exam they studied for and did well on would determine their eligibility for moving up the ranks. But their legal argument is the latest in a long-standing campaign to turn civil rights laws against themselves. There’s a striking progression in the attacks on civil rights. In the early 1970s, affirmative action was widely considered to be a logical extension of civil rights principles: Even President Nixon—a man not known for his enlightened racial attitudes—supported it. But by the end of the decade, affirmative action was under attack as reverse discrimination. And now we see the next step in the march against civil rights with the part of federal civil rights law—Title VII—called “disparate impact” that prohibits employers from using promotional or hiring procedures that screen out minorities unless they can prove that the procedure is closely job-related.

In a new Comment, Barry Ritholtz, blogger (The Big Picture) and author of Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy, replies to a sampling of my articles on how “Diversity was a major factor in the mortgage meltdown:”

I think we are approaching this from two entirely different universes.

I am looking for cause and effect; I want to see data that supports or detracts from the proposition at hand. PROVE TO ME that X caused Y (including actual statistics).

Your proposal of Diversity causing the housing crash reads to me as a soft philosophical argument that is by definition unprovable — and undisprovable.

At the very least, I see no proof in your writings. They are cogent arguments that leap from A to B to C — but they lack the rigorous statistical evidence to demonstrate something convincingly to people who insist on hard data.

In my belief system, I use as few assumptions as possible. I try to avoid things that are unquantifiable. Statistical back testing is just on way to do that.

But even softer analyses such as war-gaming and alternative scenarios have to have some reasonable basis for proceeding. It cant be all assumptions, beliefs guesses and hunches.

This shows heartening progress in just a few days. Before he was exposed to my work, Mr. Ritholtz was denouncing and demonizing anybody who shared my views.

Here’s a sample of what he wrote at the beginning of this week:

I’ve run out of patience with tired memes and discredited claims by fools and partisan.

(more…)

I have been complaining that none of mainstream Immigration Reform outfits – like NumbersUSA, FAIR, or CIS – nor the allegedly “Conservative” media will take a position on the baleful and threatening Hate Crimes Bill S.909 – despite many of the individuals involved knowing full well it is part of a deliberate attempt to repress the causes they are supposedly in business to advocate. So it is refreshing to note a couple of exceptions.

Hating Hate Crimes Investor’s Business Daily 07/01/2009

is a straightforward and direct condemnation:

This new law won’t reduce hate one bit, but it will limit your rights…Anyone who values the rule of law in America should reject it…in effect, the justice meted out depends on the victim’s status — not on the severity of the crime.

This violates major swaths of the Constitution. It certainly twists the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection” clause beyond recognition. And it likewise impinges on First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of speech and thought. And subjecting those guilty of state crimes to additional federal prosecution is double jeopardy.

(After Attorney General Holder’s disastrous Senate testimony last week, acceptance has broadened that the Bill is intended to create privilege.)

IBD concludes

Equal treatment under the law is a fundamental principle of American jurisprudence. Hate crimes trample this principle by creating a special class of victims.
Congress might mean well, but this is a bad law that will have bad results and only add to our nation’s growing divisions.

Some might be surprised that Investor’s Business Daily would address this subject, but in fact the paper has published some solid political material over the years.

Where are you, Wall Street Journal?

The Cato Institute’s Hate Crime Legislation: A Shocking Disregard for Federalism by David Rittgers July 1 2009 (which incorporates a podcast on the subject) is intellectually more adventurous (if wonkish). It is based on watching last week’s Judiciary Committee hearing (webcast on right). Complaining of Judiciary’s

casual disregard (if not outright hostility) for the principles of limited government and equality under the law.

Rittgers asserts

The bill federalizes violent acts against victims by reason of their actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability….
The federal government would also be authorized to prosecute whenever “the verdict or sentence obtained pursuant to State charges left demonstratively unvindicated the Federal interest in eradicating bias-motivated violence.” While this doesn’t violate the letter of the Supreme Court’s Double Jeopardy jurisprudence (the federal and state governments are considered separate sovereigns) it certainly violates its spirit.

Rittgers was particularly appalled, as was I, by the performance of Senator Ben Cardin :

The hearing video shows a complete disregard for limitations on federal power. Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) claims that we need a “uniform” law across the states (82 minute mark). This claim…disregards the fact that general police powers belong to the states, not to the federal government.

(Cardin’s performance was chilling. He is apparently the second-generation descendent of immigrants from Russia and clearly thinks things were ordered better in the Old Country. I have not seen anything as ominous since watching Commissar Reich back in January.)

The Rittgers essay deserves credit for repudiating a dangerous assertion popular with the legislation’s boosters:

Don’t expect the application of this legislation to be the rare and exceptional prosecution that Attorney General Holder promises in his testimony. Janet Cohen testified that her upbringing in a racially divided America decades ago justifies passage of this law. She also proposes that prosecutions with the new law will be “wise” on account of Holder’s “brilliance and integrity.”

And to think, we were once a nation of laws, not of men.

History shows this kind of legislation invariably gets more damaging when implemented.

Congratulate David Rittgers.

When I heard that Moira Herbst of Businessweek wrote an article about Norm Matloff, I read it with extreme trepidation. Herbst is a skilled writer and journalist, but she is very much a corporate globalist who supports H-1B and outsourcing. Despite her obvious bias the article wasn’t as bad as I anticipated.

There are a few things in the article that I felt should be commented on.

To some opponents of H-1B visas, Matloff is something of a hero — and in a sense, the intellectual backbone of their movement.[ An Academic’s Labor Helps Fight H-1B Visas, BusinessWeek, June 28, 2009.]

That may be the most profound thing Herbst has ever written (which probably isn’t saying very much!). As far as I know, Norm Matloff is the first one to make the connection between H-1B and age discrimination. I first found out about Matloff many years ago when I was trying to figure out why I couldn’t find good engineering jobs. For many reasons I began to suspect my 40+ age was a factor (in one interview the manager asked me if I would have a problem riding go-karts with “the boys” on Friday). I stumbled into Matloff’s “Debunking” paper and much to my astonishment it read like my autobiography. The stories in that paper have been accused of being anecdotal, but they are the story of my ruined career. They aren’t anecdotal to me!

My journey into the H-1B issue originated from the wealth of information that Matloff provided on age discrimination in the computer/IT professions. (more…)

Traditionally, the New York Times has the world’s worst Letters-to-the-Editor page, filled with credentialed but clueless poohbahs writing in to say how much they agree with the NYT’s soporific editorials, but they were disappointed that the editorial didn’t include some additional argument so dumb that not even the NYT Editorial board would fall for it.

It indicates just how badly the diversitarians got smoked intellectually on Ricci that even the NYT’s Letters-to-the-Editor section (The Firefighters’ Test: Flawed or Fair?) responding to the paper’s editorial denouncing the New Haven test is pretty good.

That Justice Ginsburg’s dissent in Ricci managed to get four out of nine votes points out major flaws in both American intellectual life and in the Supreme Court.

Some of what’s wrong with the Supreme Court is structural. Justices used to drop dead of heart attacks before they aged too far into mental decline. By this point, lots of people have heard about the best solution: replace lifetime tenure with single 18 year terms, with the President getting to select two justices for each election he wins.

What nobody knows, as far as I know, is how to get there from here. How do you work out which Justice gets forced into retirement first to make room for new blood? This could be very hard to work out in a bipartisan manner. (If you have any technical suggestions for how the transition should be managed, please put them in the comments.)

Now that the Democrats have complete power in Congress and the White House, however, they can just go ahead an make this reform on their own. I can’t imagine they would, though.

A more subtle defect in the Supreme Court is the lack of adult supervision. We still have the obsolete system of ailing Justices such as 76-year-old Ginsburg (cancer surgery in February) and extremely elderly Justices (Stevens is a ridiculous 89) being assisted solely by clerks who are largely in their late 20s: the senile being aided by the puerile.

Consider the futility of relying on clerks for a complicated topic like testing in the Ricci case. Do you think Justice Ginsburg’s clerks were told the truth about testing when they were in law school? I don’t care what your LSAT score is, to understand the reality behind Ricci, you have to do a lot of self-education and you have to learn about how the world really works. And that takes time. I moved to Chicago at age 23, and from then on I heard a lot about fireman and policeman testing, but it took me until my mid-30s to develop a mature understanding of the subject that wasn’t just based on idealistic assumptions about how things should work. And I’m still figuring out things about fireman testing that make me say, like Huxley reading The Origin of Species, “How stupid of me not to have thought of that.”

Occasionally, we see Justices instead hiring grown-up clerks with some experience of life (Justice Thomas recently hired a clerk who had already made partner at her law firm), but the salary is only around $65,000. (Supreme Court clerks get big signing bonuses from the private law firms that hire them when their year is up, but still …)

What we need is a modest budget (say, $3 million per year across the 9 Justices) to allow each member of the Supreme Court to hire a mature Chief of Staff to manage the clerks, with, say, a three year term.