VDARE.COM readers seem especially enraged about Sebastian Mallaby’s April 30 Washington Post op-ed Lazy, Job-Stealing Immigrants? Nativist Nonsense Distorts a Critical Issue. And no wonder: it’s full of the silly, sneering snobbery I left England to escape.

But Mallaby later followed me to the U.S.—argh!—although, curiously, he doesn’t admit that he’s an immigrant in this piece. He’s a former writer of the London Economist, now director of something called the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Sounds ominous. (Equaly ominously, Mallaby’s article is already available on the CFR website for free).

But I was delighted with Mallaby’s article. Of course, it’s distasteful in a democracy to see Mallaby’s elitist unconcern for the fact that, even on his absurd estimate, curtailing immigration now could retrieve a quarter or more of the wage loss that even he admits immigration has inflicted on American high school dropouts. And of course Mallaby repeats various factoids about low immigrant crime rates and the high cost of border security etc. long ago exploded on VDARE.COM

However, all of this is a smokescreen for Mallaby’s self-defeating concession, in his very last paragraph, that “the total economic effect of immigration on U.S. households is a wash”. This is his perverse way of stating the consensus among labor economists, which I reported at length in Alien Nation in 1995, and which was confirmed by the National Research Council’s The New Americans in 1997: that post-1965 immigrant inflow has been of essentially of no net aggregate economic benefit to native-born Americans.

In fact, The New Americans reported a net loss after transfer payments like education. But, hey, Mallaby’s doing better than Tamar Jacoby. She just lies about it.

What this means, of course, is that America is being transformed for nothing. The question for Mallaby is: why? Why does he (and his employers at CFR) want to transform America?

Ask him. Ask the Washington Post’s discussion thread. Ask CFR.

It would have been better, for Luis Martinez, had he been named Horace, Sven or Ngogodo instead. But, as with so many of the arrivals from Latin America, he’s got a first and last name that appear and reappear with tiresome regularity, and apparently more often than in the Anglo world (and as a David Wilson, I should know). See They put wrong Luis in prison | [Bronx] man’s 9-day ordeal as he’s mistaken for robber[ By Chrisena Coleman And Leo Standora Daily News April 24th 2007. }This sort of thing has happened before in New York, and likely will again.

In saner cultural settings, it might have been resolved more quickly: smoother communication, keener senses of difference by police and bureaucrats, etc. But in outsize, polyglot, grind ‘em-up- and-spit-’em out New York, no dice.

And if anyone’s tempted to think that the foreign names flooding us really add “diversity,” check out the civil and criminal files in New York for subjects named “Amadou Diallo” – and see just how often, besides the famous one, a fellow with this particular name shows up.

Bigger question: is all this (non)diversity really making America a better place to live?

Back on March 25, I explained in VDARE.com in “Winter Kills” why the hype that Presidential candidate Barack Obama “transcends race” was slowly eroding:

To flee [winter], numerous big city reporters have convinced their editors to send them on expense-account junkets to Obama’s old tropical haunts in Hawaii and Indonesia. The articles they wrote to justify their trips have begun to undermine Obama’s carefully crafted façade.

The next credibility problem for Obama’s persona: Chicago is a great place to visit once the snow stops falling. As spring arrives, more investigative reporters will head to the Windy City to find out more about Obama’s spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah T. Wright Jr., who was one of the organizers of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan’s 1994 Million Man March.

Well, it’s supposed to be 73 degrees in Chicago today, April 30, 2007, so right on schedule appears a New York Times article:

A Candidate, His Minister and the Search for Faith

By JODI KANTOR
CHICAGO - Members of Trinity United Church of Christ squeezed into a downtown hotel ballroom in early March to celebrate the long service of their pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. One congregant stood out amid the flowers and finery: Senator Barack Obama, there to honor the man who led him from skeptic to self-described Christian.
Twenty years ago at Trinity, Mr. Obama, then a community organizer in poor Chicago neighborhoods, found the African-American community he had sought all his life, along with professional credibility as a community organizer and an education in how to inspire followers. He had sampled various faiths but adopted none until he met Mr. Wright, a dynamic pastor who preached Afrocentric theology, dabbled in radical politics and delivered music-and-profanity-spiked sermons. …

It is hard to imagine, though, how Mr. Obama can truly distance himself from Mr. Wright. The Christianity that Mr. Obama adopted at Trinity has infused not only his life, but also his campaign. …
Still, Mr. Obama was entranced by Mr. Wright, whose sermons fused analysis of the Bible with outrage at what he saw as the racism of everything from daily life in Chicago to American foreign policy. Mr. Obama had never met a minister who made pilgrimages to Africa, welcomed women leaders and gay members and crooned Teddy Pendergrass rhythm and blues from the pulpit. Mr. Wright was making Trinity a social force, initiating day care, drug counseling, legal aid and tutoring. He was also interested in the world beyond his own; in 1984, he traveled to Cuba to teach Christians about the value of nonviolent protest and to Libya to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, along with the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Mr. Wright said his visits implied no endorsement of their views. …
Mr. Wright preached black liberation theology, which interprets the Bible as the story of the struggles of black people, whom by virtue of their oppression are better able to understand Scripture than those who have suffered less. That message can sound different to white audiences, said Dwight Hopkins, a professor at University of Chicago Divinity School and a Trinity member. “Some white people hear it as racism in reverse,” Dr. Hopkins said, while blacks hear, “Yes, we are somebody, we’re also made in God’s image.” …
Mr. Obama was baptized that year, and joining Trinity helped him “embrace the African-American community in a way that was whole and profound,” said Ms. Soetoro, his half sister. …
In the 16 years since Mr. Obama returned to Chicago from Harvard, Mr. Wright has presided over his wedding ceremony, baptized his two daughters and dedicated his house, while Mr. Obama has often spoken at Trinity’s panels and debates. Though the Obamas drop in on other congregations, they treat Trinity as their spiritual home, attending services frequently. The church’s Afrocentric focus makes Mr. Obama a figure of particular authenticity there, because he has the African connections so many members have searched for. …
Generally, Mr. Obama emphasizes the communal aspects of religion over the supernatural ones. …

In other words, Sen. Obama’s much celebrated “faith” is essentially a religion of race, an exercise in black solidarity through antipathy toward white America that is only nominally linked to Christianity. That would be his own business, if he wasn’t trying to get elected President by misleading the public about it.

And by the Associated Press, at that!

Target employee Caffie Bradshaw, 19, said she was in a break room with two other people when they heard shots. She said co-workers saw a white man with a rifle [emphasis added]who was “spraying bullets.”3 shot dead at Kansas City shopping center | Dallas Morning News | Associated Press April 30, 2007

But he knows one thing for sure: I can’t possibly be right about it!

The Washington Monthly’s blogger Kevin Drum loyally tries to stand up for his employer’s much-snickered over story by young Alexander Konetski about his brief tenure as a copy editor at The American Conservative and how he heroically resigned because the editors wouldn’t spike my Obama story, Obama’s Identity Crisis, on his say-so.

Of course, there’s also the possibility that Drum is subtly sticking it to his employer by quoting a particularly amusing part of the self-important Konetski’s screed:

Even before I read the piece I knew I wouldn’t like it. TAC’s editor, who was pleased with Sailer’s work, had told me as much. But I found the piece so offensive when I first read it that I jumped out of my chair and rushed into the managing editor’s office to try to kill it on the spot. She and the editor promptly dismissed my objections. The piece is provocative, they said — it’s edgy. It’s racist, I said — and the magazine will be regarded as such for publishing it. ….The weekend after Kara and Scott dismissed my objections to Sailer’s essay, I read Dreams From My Father.

In other words, Konetski jumped to a conclusion with no idea what he was talking about, then scrambled to find evidence for it.

Ironically, the Washington Monthly did an abysmal job of fact-checking an article accusing The American Conservative of poor fact-checking. Konetski, who had been hired in November, tries to give the impression that he was a Major Player at the magazine while implying that I was some obscure figure who had “submitted” an article on Obama (instead, it was commissioned) that for some inexplicable but no doubt vile reason the editors chose to believe me over a Big Wheel like him.

In reality, the editors trusted me rather than him because I had a track record of approximately 100 pieces published in TAC going back to its first issue in 2002. As they well know, I’ve frequently been smeared by more formidable figures than Alexander Konetski, but have always ended up with the facts on my side.

Drum’s item is most interesting for his somewhat philistine but reasonable characterization of Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance:

None of which is to say that Obama wasn’t confused and uncomfortable with his racial identity for much of his first three decades. In fact, that’s the whole point of the book. What’s more — and this is the part of Dreams I found most peculiar — it’s never really clear why. In language that’s often florid and overwrought, but also oddly artificial, he tells us how he feels, but the circumstances of his life are never drawn starkly enough to make it clear why he feels the way he does.

In other words, Drum implies that Obama’s emotions about race weren’t objectively justified by the rather pleasant life he has lived. Which is certainly true.

But after that brief foray into honesty, Drum goes back to beating the, uh, drum over my sins. Unfortunately, all he can come up with is naked assertion:

… Sailer wants us to believe that this act of black identification automatically suggests a rejection of Obama’s white heritage. Unfortunately, this says more about Sailer’s state of mind than Obama’s. There’s simply nothing in the book to seriously back it up.”

Well, no, it’s not true that black identification “automatically” suggests a rejection of Obama’s white heritage. For example, Obama’s half-white half-brother Mark, a Stanford physics student who had grown up in Kenya, refused to reject his white heritage, which caused Obama break off contact with him.

But it is true in Obama’s specific case, as voluminously documented in his long autobiography, that identification with the black race involved emotional rejection of the white race. (At least, if his book is to be believed, which is a big if — he didn’t actually reject the many privileges granted to him by such white-founded institutions as Punahou Prep, Occidental College, Columbia University, and the Harvard Law School.

At this point, all I can say is, “Please read the book.” It’s better-written than Drum claims, and not so puzzling as Drum found it … if you don’t make the a priori assumption that I just have to be wrong about it.

Crossposted at Isteve.com