Nonfarm payrolls grew by a lower-than-expected 92,000 in July, the least seen since February. And the nation’s unemployment rate rose to 4.6%, up from 4.5% in June and the highest reading since January, the Labor Department reported.

The hint of recession did not help an already beleaguered stock market.

It’s a good thing Wall Street doesn’t focus on the “other” employment survey. The Household Survey found that employment declined in July, with non-Hispanics bearing the entire loss—and then some. Here are the details:

• Total employment fell by 30,000, or by 0.02 percent
• Hispanic employment rose by 140,000, or by 0.7 percent
• Non-Hispanic employment fell by 170,000, or by 0.1 percent

Not since December has Hispanic job growth been as robust. In fact, during May and June Hispanic employment growth lagged that of non-Hispanics—a trend undoubtedly related to the construction industry’s depression.

Obviously Hispanic workers are finding jobs outside of construction. Where, we don’t know: the Household survey identifies race and ethnicity, but not the employment sector of respondents. Illegal alien workers are more likely to be counted in the Household Survey, which is why we believe it’s a more accurate measure of overall job creation than the payroll survey.

July’s Hispanic job pop pushed VDARE.COM’s American Worker Displacement Index (VDAWDI) up to the record 122.0 first reached in April. In June VDAWDI was 121.0

The black line tracks Hispanic job growth, red is non-Hispanic, and yellow—the VDAWDI index–the ratio of Hispanic to non-Hispanic job creation. All the lines start at 100.0 in January 2001 (the first month of the Bush Administration), and reflect job growth since that time.

Month to month anomalies cannot obscure the big picture: From January 2001 through July 2007 Hispanic employment rose 4.213 million, or by 26.1 percent, while non-Hispanic employment rose 4.121 million, a 3.4 percent gain.

In other words, during the Bush years Hispanic employment—a good proxy for immigrant employment—has increased about eight-times faster than non-Hispanic employment.

Via Lifehacker, I see that the Race in the Workplace weblog has a thing about how to handle racist jokes at work, because if you just laugh at them, you’re just as guilty.[How to respond to a racist joke by Carmen Van Kerckhove(Google Cache Version--their server is down.) ] Need I say that this is not a major problem around the breakroom at VDARE.com?

I did a previous post about the ritual shunning behavior expected of New York liberals to any remark that offends the conventional wisdom on race, [What You Can Expect When You’re Winning An Argument In NYC]

Anyhow, the recommended strategy if you hear a racist joke is apparently to act really stupid.

Co-worker: Did you hear that Angelina Jolie adopted another kid, this time from Vietnam?

You: Oh really?

Co-worker: Yeah. The poor kid probably doesn’t even know he’s Asian yet. He certainly doesn’t know he’s going to be a horrible driver. Or that he’s going to be amazing at doing nails. He has no idea! [Laughs heartily.]

You: [Look perplexed.] Sorry, I don’t get it.

Co-worker: What do you mean?

You: I guess I’m missing something. Why is that funny?

Co-worker: [Looks embarrassed.] Um, well you know how people say that Asians are bad drivers. And a lot of people who work at nail salons are Asian.

You: But those are just stereotypes, aren’t they?

Co-worker: Well, all stereotypes have some truth to them.

You: So you actually believe that all Asians are bad drivers and are good at doing nails?

Co-worker: No, no, it’s just… Never mind.

Neither of the actors in this dialogue sounds very bright, or very funny. One commenter on Lifehacker said that “People will think you’re stupid or you’ve slept under a rock for the past fifty years if you don’t know some common stereotypes. Is that the image you want to get across to your coworkers? “

Then there’s a massive amount of denial in the Virtuous Worker asking “So you actually believe that all Asians are bad drivers and are good at doing nails?”

No, no one believe that stereotypes apply to all members of a class. There are people who believe that they’ve disproved stereotypes about average height, by pointing to NBA star Yao Ming,(”7’-5”) or Sammy Davis Jr. (5′3″). In any event, the stereotype about average Asian driving skills is apparently a true one, according to members of the Asian-American community.

And as for the total dominance of the burgeoning manicure industry by Asians, well, that’s a true stereotype, too. According to Virginia Postrel, writing in 1997, there were three journals published by the manicure industry in America. One of them was published in Vietnamese.

It came in the 1980s, as Southern California’s large community of Vietnamese immigrants discovered the business. From 1984 to 1989, the number of licensed nail techs in Los Angeles County jumped from 9,755 to 15,238, about 80 percent of whom were Vietnamese-born. Over the next decade, their salons spread from California across the country. The new entries, says Nails Editor Cyndy Drummey, “made the prices much, much cheaper and made what used to be luxuries more-affordable luxuries….It’s like the electronics industry.” [Reason Magazine - The Nail File, 1997]

But the real “punchline” of this morality play about the two stupid people, one trying to tell a joke, and the other trying not to understand it, is that it’s based on a real joke told by Chelsea Handler on Jay Leno. There was a link to Chelsea Handler and Robin Williams Making Anti-Asian Jokes on reappropriate.com, which is the website of a ” loud and proud Asian American woman.” She had a link to Fallout Central, an Asian-American paranoid site, [Editorial: Taking Cheap Shots at Asian Americans is Comedy Gold!] which provided me finally with some idea of what they were talking about.

You can watch Chelsea Handler, Robin Williams, and Jay Leno by clicking on this 7 megabyte MP4 link. She is being extremely funny at the expense, not of Asians in general, but of Angelina Jolie, who recently adopted three-year old Pham Quang Sang from a Vietnamese orphanage, and immediately changed his name to Pax Thien Jolie.

What Ms. Handler is really talking about it a small child being disconnected from his heritage, which you would think the Asian activists would sympathize with, but they’re so fantastically sensitive that they’re now starting an anti=Chelsea Handler campaign. In Muliculturalstan, you can’t win.

In the wake of the Minnesota bridge collapse, Ross Douthat wants to. A few observations:

• - Road-building is a national disgrace. It’s corrupt — Mayor Daley’s closest buddies in Chicago are the road-builders who finance his campaigns in return for enormous contracts–and thus the quality of our roads intentionally stink, wearing down our cars and lowering our gas mileage. They’re supposed to fall apart because that puts more money in campaign donors’ pockets. Roads in Belgium are made to last 40 years, in Chicago 12 years.
• - The more densely populated the country gets, the harder it is to build infrastructure because of Not In My Backyardism, which increases with the number of backyards. There will never be another freeway built in Southern California, even though the population is expected to climb sharply, because land is now so expensive.
• - Compared to 1950, it takes forever to build anything these days, largely because of environmentalism, but every activist has his hand out too. To finish the Century Freeway to LAX, for example, CalTrans had to payoff hundreds of “community“ organizations, including an AIDS group in West Hollywood, ten miles and two freeways to the north!
• - The simplest way to slow the worsening of the population-to-infrastructure ratio is to cut back on immigration, just as it’s also the simplest way to lessen the increasing stress on other problem spots, such as public schools, inequality, and health insurance. Instead, what we constantly hear is: “Oh, no, all we have to do is fix the public schools [inequality] [health care] [or various other problems that we have no likelihood of ever coming up with a magic bullet fix for].”