Generally speaking, the reaction of most proponents of the recently defeated Amnesty/Immigration Surge Bill has been venomous outrage. So it was pleasant to come across a courteous and respectful assessment by Carlos Sanchez, Editor of the Waco Tribune-Herald:

I have long supported Bush’s philosophy on immigration…And I supported his recent attempts to pass immigration reform…

But, alas, the opponents of the bill prevailed and did so in a grand manner that I had to respect. It was democracy at its best — and an instructive lesson for anyone remotely interested in politics… I’m certain there were people who supported the legislation, but I never saw a single shred of evidence that they were out there…countless times a day, I received messages from a variety of groups that had Freedom or American or Liberty as part of their title. All of them deplored what they called the amnesty legislation.

The discipline of these groups was a sight to behold. Someone created a set of talking points that declared opponents need only focus on one word — amnesty — to denounce the legislation. And every group that came out against it did precisely that.

So my hat is off to those mostly conservative groups who won this debate. It was textbook democracy and they deserve the victory.

Skilful immigration word games Sunday July 8 2007

But what makes this editorial stand out is not good manners but a startling anecdote. Sanchez reports that a former Mexican Government official, Juan Hernandez (whom we have had occasion to notice before)

was the keynote speaker at a Mission Waco dinner and he urged everyone to get in touch with a member of Congress and support the immigration legislation. So intent was he to demonstrate the message that he pulled out his cell phone, held it up to the microphone and called Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s office, only to hear a recording that her voice mail was full.

Would an American public figure have dared to do the same in Mexico? Will it always be a one way street?

In the San Francisco area, local media are busy ginning up interest about the All Star Game, which is being played Tuesday afternoon in the Giants’ spiffy new stadium.

The Giants are putting on a gaggle of festivities at Moscone Center to sell baseball stuff and generate excitement about the game and baseball generally. The green-eyeshade guys figure that fans will spend up to $65 million on items like souvenir shot glasses and celebrity cruises on the Bay.

This being San Francisco, diversity is being served up as a main course. Tony La Russa is being inducted into the Hispanic Baseball Hall of Fame — who knew? All those years as an A’s fan, I thought he was Italian. Oh, well!

But it’s worse than ethnic plaques being awarded. Baseball has decided to market itself to the global marketplace, and that means diversity outreach in the usual style, by importing skill-challenged foreign players and using a lot more Spanish.

[Giants Executive Vice President Larry] Baer said the Giants’ fan base already is seeing more — but not enough — diversity. A study by the team in 2004 found that 64 percent of Giants fans — including those who attend games and watch or listen to broadcasts — were non-Latino whites. Latinos made up 14 percent, followed by Asian fans (11 percent) and African Americans (6 percent).

In an effort to attract Latino fans, the Giants have upped the number of games broadcast on Spanish-language radio to 93 from 62 last year, officials said. The team each year wears “Gigantes” uniforms during a game and throws a “Carnival” party, and has a promotional partnership with Univision, the Spanish-language TV station.

“We see it as a bubbling, growing momentum, moving toward the Hispanic part of the Giants fan base,” Baer said. “We’re much more inclusive in our outreach than we were 10 years ago.”
[ 'Futures Game' shows baseball's global allure, San Francisco Chronicle 7/907]

Uh oh, too many white American fans — the Giants better hire a diversity consultant!

A website called BlackNewsWeekly.com has noticed the relationship between mass immigratio and crime, which isn’t always about the immigrants themselves committing crimes. It may also be unemployed Americans, (mostly black) who commit crimes.

There appears to be relationship between illegal immigration and the US prison population explosion

By Noble Johns

LOS ANGELES, California (BNW) — With the rise in the illegal immigration population over the past decade, and the rise in the prison population in this country over the same period, it hard to believe that the two are mutually exclusive. In fact, there is a positive relationship between the independent variable and dependent variable. In other words, the more they ship these illegal immigrants over here, the more they lock US citizen, especially Black men, in prison.

Consider this, when a country displaces its workforce by sending working aged citizens to jail for basically nonviolent crimes, it is force to replace those workers with illegal immigrants, who are probably criminals from their own counties.

Steve Sailer has written about this on Vdare.com: 09/24/06 - Black Crime: The Immigration Dimension

From the Washington Post

The theory offered by the economist, Rick Nevin, is that lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical theory for fluctuations in the crime rate, and it is based on studies linking children’s exposure to lead with violent behavior later in their lives.

What makes Nevin’s work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries.

“It is stunning how strong the association is,” Nevin said in an interview. “Sixty-five to ninety percent or more of the substantial variation in violent crime in all these countries was explained by lead.” …

“It is startling how much mileage has been given to the theory that abortion in the early 1970s was responsible for the decline in crime” in the 1990s, Nevin said. “But they legalized abortion in Britain, and the violent crime in Britain soared in the 1990s. The difference is our gasoline lead levels peaked in the early ’70s and started falling in the late ’70s, and fell very sharply through the early 1980s and was virtually eliminated by 1986 or ‘87.

It would be interesting to see Nevin’s new data. Here’s an old article. (I haven’t read it yet.) And here’s a newspaper article about another researcher’s lead-IQ-crime connection.

Abortions can be assigned to very precise times, which quickly allowed big doubts to be raised about Steven D. Levitt’s abortion-cut-crime theory, since the cohort born soon after legalization had much higher murder rates. Lead is a little slipperier to analyze, because it hangs around in the environment, perhaps providing wiggle room for the analyst if the chronology doesn’t quite match up.

The WaPo article ignores Nevin’s link of lead to lowering IQ, as in this 2000 article. That ingesting lead makes you stupider was known for a long time. In James T. Farrell’s 1930s novels about Chicago prole Studs Lonigan, Studs and his pals debate whether to give up the good pay of working as painters because all the old painters seem pretty dim from exposure to lead paint.

Meanwhile, Modern Dragons offers another potential source of influence on human behavior, one that’s been analyzed even less: gut flora.

Alan Cowell and Scott Shane wrote in the New York Times:

Two of the medical doctors arrested in connection with the bungled London and Glasgow car bomb attacks had made preliminary inquiries about practicing medicine in the United States, an American law enforcement official said Friday.

The official confirmed a report in the Philadelphia Inquirer that the doctors had contacted the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates, a non-profit organization in Philadelphia that screens foreign citizens wishing to train or work as doctors in the United States.

Nancy O’Dowd, a spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said one of them “was applying” for approval to practice in the United States.

Now this points out just how pathetic the US screening criteria for immigration is–especially in the case of skilled workers. Just because someone is smart and hardworking doesn’t mean he has the interest of the American people at heart. If anything a ‘really smart’ terrorist or criminal is far more dangerous than a dumb or unskilled one.

It would be a real simple matter to simply require a bond be posted with respect to criminal actions on the part of a prospective immigrant. I would expect such a bond to be rather inexpensive for say a German or a Japanese-but rather expensive from countries that have a stronger relationship with criminal or terrorist activity.

Now, the cost of 911 and the war it inspired is over $1 Trillion. I think it will be rather hard to justify much US immigration from unstable regions of the world if we expect those profiting from immigration to truly pay their own way.

Immigration advocates tend to look at benefits-and ignore the costs. That is because their real job is to shill for wealthy interests that stay wealthy at the expense of their fellow Americans.

Granting folks like these foreign doctors the right to practice in the US doesn’t come for free. The risk of terrorism aside, each immigration slot has a value of over $225,000. It would be far less expensive to expand medical scholarships for US citizens

This from Jane Galt’s site:

July 9, 2007
From the desk of Jane Galt:

Insight into a troubled mind

At the top of the Volokh Conspiracy queue in my RSS reader is Jonathan Adler’s post headlined “Fencing Out Aliens:”

My thought upon reading this: “But they have spaceships. They’ll just fly over the fence.”

In my defense, I haven’t had my morning coffee yet.

A commenter defends the workability of a fence here, saying

It is interesting to me that those most against a fence vehemently deny the likelihood that it could possibly work (Great and Berlin Walls be damned), dismissing it for cost and efficacy.

But to the extent illegals are not using their spaceships or hopping cargo ships, then tackling the major entry point would seem to make sense. No matter the draw (jobs or benefits), you can’t sneak your way through a solid wall manned by a combination of people, dogs, radar, electronics, and tanks.

If this is quickly or simultaneously followed by onerous penalties on business, the tide would halt.

And if you’re interested, Adler’s original post wasn’t about the border at all, it’s about the fence the Corp of Engineers built to keep Asian carp out of Lake Michigan.

Update:A Volokh.com commenter writes

The Republicans have now forfeited the Asian Carp Vote for all time!

Peter Gadiel writes me this morning: “Were VDARE.COM and I ‘ahead of the curve’ with the article calling for impeaching George II?” Peter, whose June 2 article was bluntly titled A 9/11 Father, Lifelong Republican, Says: Time To Impeach Bush Over Immigration, was referring to Sunday’s Washington Post piece by National Review’s Byron York: Base To Bush: It’s Over (July 8, 2007). Peter notes that York quotes a “conservative strategist” as saying that Bush and his party’s base are “in divorce court”.

WaPo is hosting an online forum with York today at noon ET. I invite VDARE.COM friends to join in and ask York if he now regrets NR’s slavish support for Bush. Perhaps significantly, in view of our VDARE.COM debate about how seriously to take NR’s welcome return to immigration patriotism, York seems to rank not pardoning Scooter Libby above amnesty as a base-busting Bush blunder.