“IN AMERICA, WE have a two-party system,” a Republican congressional staffer is supposed to have told a visiting group of Russian legislators some years ago.

“There is the stupid party. And there is the evil party. I am proud to be a member of the stupid party.”

He added: “Periodically, the two parties get together and do something that is both stupid and evil. This is called—bipartisanship.Immigration policy stupid, evil and hurting Americans, by Peter Brimelow

Bipartisanship is rearing its ugly head again with the William Jefferson bribery scandal, in which a black Democratic Congressman is being investigated for receiving $100, 000 dollars in cold cash. In an act of typical Stupid Party, not only did Hastert take the side of the people objecting that Congressmen were above the law, but President Bush offered to back off, too.

At this point, all of his Justice Department people offered to resign, and it’s now a bipartisan coalition of Congressmen vs. the law, (mostly written by Congressmen, of course, but the don’t seem to feel that it applies to them.)

Anyhow, I agree with law professor Robert Turner, when he writes in the WSJ that there’s nothing unconstitutional about investigating a Congressional felon:

It is increasingly rare to find a spirit of bipartisanship in Congress these days. So a display of the spirit would have been a good thing to see–especially in a time of war–but for the fact that the issue now uniting Republican and Democratic leaders is an outrageous assertion that members of Congress are above the law, and that the Constitution immunizes legislators who betray their public trust in return for bribes from investigation by the executive branch. -Congress Isn’t Above the Law| And bribery isn’t “speech or debate.” Wall Street Journal, By Robert F. Turner , May 28, 2006

I just wish the WSJ didn’t actually like this bipartisan corruption when it comes to immigration.

A Kiwi reader writes:

I noticed on one of your website articles a claim that the IQ of New Zealand Maoris has been increasing. However, I would suspect the IQ of N.Z Maoris would be very difficult to determine. There is a very high White admixture in the Maori population and almost all Maori now have some White blood. Today almost all people in New Zealand with at least a quarter white blood would describe themselves as Maori on government forms. Indeed, many people with less than 25 percent Maori blood describe themselves as Maori. The government spends a considerable amount of money on affirmative action programmes for Maori and so there is significant economic advantage in identifying oneself as Maori.

Despite this, affirmative action has only benefited about 10-20 percent of Maoris while the majority are falling behind Whites and East Asians in economic terms. In official statistics Maoris consistently fall behind Whites and East Asians in health and education and are markedly overrepresented in crime statistics.

To get a better picture of Polynesian IQ levels one would need to look at the scores of recent Polynesian immigrants who have very little White blood and don’t qualify for many affirmative action initiatives.

What, in New Zealand they don’t give affirmative action privileges to immigrants as soon as they show up, like we do in America? How uncivilized of them!

During a visit the Utah State Capitol, President Vicente Fox gave a speech saying he wants the “movement of people across our borders” to be “legal, safe and orderly.’” [Legal, segura y ordenada.] I kind of prefer the formulation Bill Clinton used in1996:“Safe, legal, and rare.”

With Illegal Immigrants Fighting Wildfires, West Faces a Dilemma, By KIRK JOHNSON, May 28, 2006

SALEM, Ore. The debate over immigration, which has filtered into almost every corner of American life in recent months, is now sweeping through the woods, and the implications could be immense for the upcoming fire season in the West…

As many as half of the roughly 5,000 private firefighters based in the Pacific Northwest and contracted by state and federal governments to fight forest fires are immigrants, mostly from Mexico. And an untold number of them are working here illegally….

Other forestry workers say that firefighting may simply be too important –and too difficult to attract other applicants –to allow for a crackdown on illegal workers.

Being a fireman is a job Americans don’t want to do? Oh, man, haven’t they ever heard of the thousands of volunteer fire departments? Haven’t they ever seen the long lines of applicants for paying fireman jobs? Haven’t they ever watched little boys stare in awe at firemen?

Heck, in LA they even had some success recruiting black street gangs to fight brushfires. Men like to fight fires.

Here’s part of a Sacramento Bee article on the incompetents we have recently begun to send out to fight fires:

Untrained migrants fight fires: Inexperienced, undocumented hired by private contractors. By Tom Knudson — Sacramento Bee, May 7, 2006

As bright orange embers lofted through the forest, exploding into columns of smoke and flame, Mike Sulffridge and his crew of firefighters began to scramble. Their lives were in danger.

But the reaction of six Latino firefighters working near them could not have been more different. Despite the advancing flames, despite a volley of warning shouts, they did nothing.

“They did not understand English,” said Sulffridge, who was hired to battle the wildfire in the Fishlake National Forest in Utah in 2000. “They did not understand what the fire was doing.”

Ultimately, the men were rescued. But the fire took a toll. One man was burned badly across his face. “In another few seconds, those guys would have been burned up,” Sulffridge said. “They would have died.”

Firefighting has always been dangerous. But today, with the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies hiring more private contractors to do the work, a different kind of firefighter is in harm’s way: migrant workers who have minimal experience and training, speak little or no English and often are in the country illegally.

Public records offer a glimpse of what crew inspectors have documented: underage workers, counterfeit IDs, falsified training records, a van roll-over, broken and dangerous tools, even a firefighter with only one lung who “went into convulsions … and was having difficulty breathing,” as one federal inspector in Washington put it.

I just finished Neal Stephenson’s famous 1992 sci-fi satire novel Snow Crash, which is kind of like The Da Vinci Code for smart people (although I imagine Dan Brown was inspired, if that’s the word for it, more by Umberto Eco’s 1989 bestseller Foucault’s Pendulum).

It must have been a startlingly great book back in 1992. It’s the early 21st Century in Los Angeles, and government has fallen apart just about everywhere in the world, except perhaps Japan. Private enterprise has taken over all the functions of the state. A few ethnic groups — the Cantonese and the Sicilians — are flourishing in the absence of public order (indeed the Mafia are pretty close to being the good guys in the novel). I guess a lot of libertarians see it as a utopian novel, but I doubt if Stephenson would agree. (Here’s an interview with him in Reason magazine where he appears to be implicitly suggesting that libertarianism is another mind-virus.)

A major plot element in Snow Crash is the Raft, a vast agglomeration of flotsam, inhabited by impoverished south and southeast Asian refugees drifting inexorably across the Pacific, headed for California. Stephenson’s description of The Raft is a pretty funny variation on the usual sentimental cant about how illegal immigrants have more gumption than us natives, and thus are just what us decadent Americans need:

“When [the Raft] gets to California, it will enter a new phase of its life cycle. It will shed much of its sprawling improvised bulk as a few hundred thousand Refus cut themselves loose and paddle to shore. The only Refus who make it that far are, by definition, the ones who were agile enough to make it out to the Raft in the first place, resourceful enough to survive the agonizingly slow passage through arctic waters, and tough enough not to get killed by any of the other Refus. Nice guys, all of them. Just the kind of people you’d like to have showing up on your private beach in groups of a few thousand.” [p. 272]

Clearly, Stephenson picked up his idea for the Raft from Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, which is about a similar ramshackle armada heading from south Asia to the south of France. So, I went to Google to read about the influence of Camp of the Saints on Snow Crash. As a cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash is, unsurprisingly, much discussed on the Internet, with 360,000 Google hits. Camp of the Saints shows up in 53,000 places.

And how many webpages discuss the overlap between them? As far as I can tell, exactly one.

One feature of the recent immigration bill that has passed the senate recently that needs more discussion: it grants a full amnesty to employers of illegal aliens.

Now, the fines on employment of illegal aliens are already far to low compared to the profits these folks have made by using immigration rights as a corporate benefit.

I understand the sympathy that many leftists have for illegal aliens themselves. Anyone willing to risk death in the desert to work for below minimum wage is in a difficult situation. What I don’t get is why are these folks are so intent on giving an amesty to companies like Tyson Foods and Wal-Mart?

Enforcing existing fines against employers could yield around $200 Billion. Shouldn’t those funds go to fixing the difficult problems created by immigration, refugees and development of Latin America?

Why shouldn’t America be prepared to seize every factory farm, every construction site, every restaurant, every meat packing plant employing illegal aliens if necessary to ensure the rule of law in the area of immigration?

H-1b/L-1 expansion was posed by some congressman as a “stopgap” measure until the US could train more software engineers. Let’s check a little about one measure of the “progress” that has been made:
In 1997, 14 of the top 27 teams in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest were from the US. By 2006, only one of the top 27 teams was from the US.

Now, we are also seeing similar decline in science knowledge among high school students.

The rise of temporary worker visas in the US has been accompanied by significant educational decline by a variety of measures.

The reason is really quite simple: scientific and technical professions are more subject to direct competition from foreigners via immigration compared to other occupations. Real Estate Salesmen, CPA’s, Lawyers, stockbrokers all have some very well paid practitioners - but none of these occupations have a special visa classification aimed at enabling foreigners able to get jobs in the US to do so.

The US’s leading competitors in technical areas include countries like Japan and South Korea with virtually no immigration, high education levels, large trade surpluses - and which lack the natural resource base the US has.

The US needs to cease this failed strategy and look elsewhere for a solution.