Here’s a story about how the Bush crackdown isn’t very serious, which will surprise exactly no one. But the level of crime in the California agribusiness industry is shocking.

Tom Nassif, president of the California Grower’s Association, [Sic, actually the Western Growers Association]said any “no-match” letters a company receives will come out during a civil trial if that business is ever cited for immigration violations.

And if the company has not complied, it could face the tough new financial and prison penalties.

“We could be targets for these investigations,” he said. “It behooves us to do what we can to follow them.”

Nassif said he still believes the new rules will cripple California’s $37 billion agricultural industry. About 70 percent of the state’s estimated 500,000 farmworkers are illegal immigrants, he said, and he believes most will be fired by fearful employers.

“With that dramatic a loss, I think people stop producing,” he said.
[SGVTribune.com - Worker plan has no legal support, By Lisa Friedman, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, August 17, 2007

I don't know why, if he's head of an association where the members depend entirely on the proceeds of crime, and will go out of business if the law is enforced, he's surprised that he and his members "could be targets for these investigations," How is this not organized crime?

Here's another story about Mr. Nassif, from 2005

Shortly before Thanksgiving last year, Tom Nassif did something few law-abiding citizens would ever think to do: He called the U.S. Border Patrol here and suggested agents stop manning a highway checkpoint intended to keep illegal immigrants out of the country.
A former U.S. ambassador and currently the president of a powerful farming association, Mr. Nassif told officials that the agency couldn't have picked a worse time to beef up enforcement. Didn't they know it was lettuce season?

That's from a Wall Street Journal story, As Border Tightens, Growers See Threat to 'Winter Salad Bowl' [March 11, 2005 | MIRIAM JORDAN.(Pay archive.)]

Nassif, who is well-connected in Republican circles, pressured the Border Patrol to stop enforcing the law, because he has three thousand employers who need a 350, 000 illegals to pick their crops, or they’ll go out of business.

The checkpoint — complete with drug-sniffing dogs — was meant to stop the flow of illegal immigrants who might have slipped through the regular border controls. But it was also ensnaring busloads of undocumented workers who are critical to the task of picking lettuce and other vegetables during the winter growing season here. Border patrol Public Information Officer Joseph Brigman says he told Mr. Nassif that “we aren’t targeting fieldworkers; we’re conducting normal operations.”

Mr. Nassif, head of Irvine, Calif.-based Western Growers, an association of 3,000 farmers who grow, pack and ship about half the nation’s fresh produce, didn’t buy that. The next day, he issued a public protest saying the ill-timed action was provoking an “acute shortage of labor” that threatened the harvest, which was just getting under way, and the economy of Arizona’s richest agricultural region. Calling for the checkpoint to be moved, Mr. Nassif demanded a “reasonable application of enforcement now and in the future.”

Few industries have come so close to admitting they cannot survive without the labor of illegal immigrants.

Few industries would have the nerve. I think that a “reasonable application of enforcement” would start with a Federal Grand Jury investigating Mr. Nassif, the WGA, and anyone in the Border Patrol who may have given him cooperation.

The Claremont Institute, home of historian Harry Jaffa, is known for its veneration of Abraham Lincoln, and for its support, fairly uncontroversial in most of the United States, for the winning side in the Civil War.

Some of VDARE.com’s readers, and writers for that matter, would disagree with them on that. But here they’re riding their hobbyhorse in a congenial direction.

The Claremont Institute - Sanctuary Cities: A New Civil War
The ghost of John C. Calhoun still stalks the land. Calhoun, of course, was the leading architect of nullification—and secession. Almost everyone believes the issues of nullification (the doctrine that federal law can be negated by state laws) and secession were resolved by the North’s victory in the Civil War and the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments. But nullification has once again reared its hoary head, this time in the guise of “sanctuary cities.”

The sanctuary cities’ defiance of United States law is a kind of nullification, and while it’s not secession, it would be better if it were. If your city council is sheltering illegal immigrants, they’re not keeping them in the sovereign state of Los Angeles–they’re sheltering them in America. The worst-case scenario has actually happened, when Muhammad Atta and his gang took off from Boston’s Logan Airport and murdered 3,000 people in New York City. You may not live in a sanctuary city, but you sure live within a few hours flying time of one. Here’s more from the Claremont people:

SANCTUARY CITIES ARE ILLEGAL

What is most remarkable about sanctuary cities is that they are illegal. In 1996 Congress passed two laws dealing with the subject: the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. Under both statutes state and local governments could no longer prohibit employees from inquiring about immigration status or tipping off immigration authorities. The Court of Appeals upheld both provisions in New York v. U.S. (1999). [VDARE.COM note: A lawsuit brought by THE CITY OF NEW YORK and RUDOLPH GIULIANI, as Mayor of the City of New York, in an attempt to protect the illegal alien population of NYC.]

The Appeals Court remarked that “the City’s sovereignty argument asks us to turn the Tenth Amendment’s shield against the federal government’s using state and local governments to enact and administer federal programs into a sword allowing states and localities to engage in passive resistance that frustrates federal programs.” The court concluded that where the federal government has undoubted power to act, as in the case of immigration, the Supremacy Clause “bars states from taking actions that frustrate federal laws and regulatory schemes. We therefore hold that states do not retain under the Tenth Amendment an untrammeled right to forbid all voluntary cooperation by state or local officials with particular programs.”

There probably are Federalist concerns somewhere in the conflict between cities and the federal government, specifically a thing called the “anti-commandeering principle” which is meant to prevent the Federal Government from unilaterally imposing duties on state and local governments that will have to be met out of state and local taxes, but it’s pretty clear that in places like New York and Los Angeles the City Council is not just refusing to do the US Government’s job for it, the City Council is actually sleeping with the enemy.

However, I don’t want to carry the Civil War parallel too far–if I recall, Lincoln’s army used to be a little aggressive in dealing with cities that defied it. “Some people think [General Sherman] is a kind of careless man about fire.”said Henry Grady in 1886.

Seriously, the Federal government has a lot of things it can do to City Council or Mayor who insist on violating the law, but that requires a certain amount of willingness on the part of the President of the United States, and that’s what’s been missing.

This crime story encompasses so much that is objectionable in Mexican culture that it is hard to ignore.

The central fact is that six-year-old Bryan Mendoza was killed as a result of the criminal recklessness of his father, with the complicity of his mother in a drunk driving crash.

The father, Rodrigo Mendoza, argued with his wife that he was not too drunk to drive the family home from an Escondido swap meet on May 5 and she relented. The accident occurred as he swerved over the highway at speeds estimated to reach 80 mph. He had a blood alcohol level of .30, nearly four times the legal limit, hours after the crash.

The vehicle rolled down an embankment and little Bryan, who was not wearing a seatbelt, was thrown from the car and killed. A nine-year-old brother had fastened his seatbelt and survived. An 18-month-old girl who was in a car seat that was not secured to the car also lived.

Incidentally, hispanics are culturally disinterested in using seatbelts, which goes against their progress-resistant, fatalistic view of life. They believe that children should be held tightly on their laps in the front seat of the car and regard American safety constraints as cold and unloving.

Rodrigo Mendoza, an illegal alien, was sentenced in late July to six years in prison.

A judge told Rodrigo Mendoza at a sentencing hearing Thursday that his behavior was “despicable.”

“It was simply your reckless behavior that resulted in this terrible tragedy,” Superior Court Judge Aaron Katz said.
[Man sentenced 6 years in drunken driving crash that killed son, San Francisco Chronicle 7/27/07]

Mendoza’s wife, Rosa Carachure, could have gotten a year in county jail but received only probation.

“In my culture, you do what the husband says,” Carachure told court officials.

Carachure, who initially lied to authorities about the circumstances of the May 5 wreck, pleaded guilty to child endangerment in June and was spared a jail term. [...]

“Your actions that day failed to protect the children that rely on you to keep them safe,” Katz told Carachure as she cried. “You should have taken the appropriate steps to protect your children.”
[Mother gets 4 years' probation , San Diego Union-Tribune 8/03/07]

So we have an arrogant macho Mexican male who insisted on driving drunk and his culturally obedient wife acting in collusion. An innocent little boy is dead as a result, and taxpayers are stuck with the tab for years of imprisonment and a lot of social service costs as well.

Attempts to come up with a Darwinian explanation for the high average IQ of European Jews go back at least to Norbert Weiner’s 1953 autobiography, in which he argued that arranged marriages between the shetl’s brightest young rabbi and the richest merchant’s daughter would lead to large numbers of smart children having enough money to survive. In 2005, Greg Cochran, Henry Harpending, and Jason Hardy put forward a sophisticated theory pointing to selection for the mental demands of traditional Ashkenazi occupations such as moneylender. In Commentary, Charles Murray recently suggested the Babylonian Captivity could have played a role.

For a number of years, anthropologist Peter Frost has been privately advocating a fourth theory. Frost is the author of the 2005 book Fair Women, Dark Men: The Forgotten Roots of Color Prejudice, which I reviewed in VDARE.com. On Wednesday, Frost posted in the comments to Mahalanobis’ item on economist Greg Clark’s new book showing that the prosperous had many more surviving children than the poor in medieval and early modern England. The comment summarizes Frost’s theory of the evolution of Ashkenazi intelligence:

The same process was going on in other European nations, but to varying extents. I commented on this point in the following letter to Commentary (which was never published):

In “Jewish Genius” [April] Charles Murray states that selection for intelligence has historically been stronger in some occupations than in others, being notably stronger in sales, finance, and trade than in farming. Insofar as he is right, the reason lies not in the occupation itself but in its relations of production.

In the Middle Ages and earlier, farmers had little scope for economic achievement—and just as little for the intelligence that contributes to achievement. Most farmers were peasants who produced enough for themselves, plus a surplus for the landowner. A peasant could produce a larger surplus, but what then? Sell it on the local market? The possibilities there were slim because most people grew their own food. Sell it on several markets both near and far? That would mean dealing with a lot of surly highwaymen. And what would stop the landowner from seizing the entire surplus? After all, it was his land and his peasant.

The situation changes with farmers who own their land and sell their produce over a wide geographical area. Consider the “Yankee” farmers who spread westward out of New England in the 18th and 19th centuries. They contributed very disproportionately to American inventiveness, literature, education, and philanthropy. Although they lived primarily from farming, they did not at all have the characteristics we associate with the word “peasant.”

Conversely, trade and finance have not always been synonymous with high achievement. In the Middle Ages, the slow growth economy allowed little room for expanding a business within one’s immediate locality, and expansion further afield was hindered by brigandage and bad roads. Furthermore, the static economic environment created few novel situations that required true intelligence. How strong is selection for intelligence among people who deal with the same clients, perform the same transactions, and charge the same prices year in and year out?

This point has a bearing on the reported IQ differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews. Charles Murray, like others, believes that the Ashkenazim were more strongly selected for intelligence because they were more concentrated than the Sephardim in sales, finance, and trade, especially during the Middle Ages. Now, we have no good data on the occupations of medieval Ashkenazim and Sephardim. But the earliest censuses (18th century for Polish Jews and 19th century for Algerian Jews) show little difference, with the bulk of both groups working in crafts.

There was, however, one major demographic difference. While the Sephardim grew slowly in numbers up to the 20th century, the Ashkenazim increased from about 500,000 in 1650 to 10 million in 1900. The same period saw strong population growth among Europeans in general. This boom used to be attributed to falling death rates alone, but demographers now recognize that rising birth rates were also responsible, in some countries more so. In England, the rise in fertility contributed two and a half times as much to the increase in growth rates as did the fall in mortality, largely through a decline in the age of first marriage.

This trend toward early marriage coincided with growing use of roads, canals and, later, railways to distribute goods over a much larger geographical area. The baby boom was particularly concentrated among semi-rural artisans who produced on contract for urban merchants and who could ably exploit these larger, more elastic markets. “They were not specialized craftsmen in life-trades with skills developed through long years of apprenticeship; they were semi-skilled family labour teams which set up in a line of business very quickly, adapting to shifts in market demand” (Seccombe 1992. A Millennium of Family Change. p. 182). Their workforce was their household. In more successful households, the workers would marry earlier and have as many children as possible. In less successful ones, they would postpone marriage, or never marry.

In Western Europe, these cottage industries were concentrated in areas like Ulster, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Brittany, Flanders, Alsace, Westphalia, Saxony, the Zurich uplands, the Piedmont, and Lombardy. In Eastern Europe, they were concentrated among Ashkenazi Jews. Selection for intelligence among the Ashkenazim may thus have been part of a larger European-wide selection for intelligence among cottage industry workers. These entrepreneurial artisans had optimal conditions for selection: 1) a tight linkage between success on an intelligence-demanding task and economic achievement; 2) considerable scope for economic achievement; 3) a tight linkage between economic achievement and reproductive success; and 4) considerable scope for reproductive success. Such artisans were a minority in Western Europe. Among the Ashkenazim, they appear to have been the majority.

In the late 19th century, cottage industries gave way to factories and the tight linkage between economic achievement and reproductive success came undone. Entrepreneurs could now expand production by hiring more workers. Henry Ford, for instance, produced millions of his famous Model T but had only one child.

In conclusion, Charles Murray errs in thinking that selection for intelligence is driven by the type of occupation. The relations of production seem to be more important, in particular whether the worker owns the means of production, whether there is scope for economic achievement, and whether increases in production are driven by increases in family size.

By the way, it’s quite sad how anthropologists have gone from glamour boys and girls in the 1950s to being almost ignored in the 2000s. Cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, for example, was the Steve Levitt of the post-war era, an omniscient seer consulted on every topic imaginable. (For example, a fictionalized version of her named “Margaret Mader” has a sizable role as a space-traveling anthropologist in Robert A. Heinlein’s 1957 sci-fi classic Citizen of the Galaxy. She explains to the young hero the complex family structure of the Free Traders’ spaceship.)

But the rival school of physical anthropologists led by the two-fisted Carleton Coon could also generate celebrities. Coon, for instance, was a regular panelist on a high-brow TV gameshow called “What in the World?” that ran from 1951-1964. On it, Coon and a couple of other anthropologists would be shown some random object from a museum collection and then try to guess whether it was a Neanderthal’s sternum or whatever.

Coon’s specialty was “The Wilder Whites:” Berbers, Albanians, and other tough mountain peoples who found the macho Coon to be their kind of man. During WWII, Coon served in the OSS and his chief assignment was to prepare to be “Lawrence of Morocco”–if Franco ever let Hitler’s armies have right of passage through Spain, they could land on the North African coast behind the Anglo-American forces fighting Rommel’s army in Libya and roll them up. If that happened, Coon would disappear into the Rif Mountains and rally the wild Berber tribes to fight a guerilla war against the German occupiers.

My guess is that what went wrong was that the Franz Boas / Margaret Mead school of cultural anthropology succeeded in demonizing their enemies like Coon. Without rivals anymore to keep them on their game, the cultural anthropologists got complacent and politically correct, and thus boring. The subject is still fascinating, but you’d only find that out these days from a handful of anthropologists, such as Frost, Harpending, Stanley Kurtz, and Peter Wood.

That’s too bad because anthropology ought to be the foundational social science, what physics is to the hard sciences.

The New York Police Department, which is working very hard to spot the next terrorist attack, is talking about some Muslims who are engaging in pseudo-assimilation to try and blend in, but actually more radical than ever.

NYPD warns of homegrown terror threat - Yahoo! News

By TOM HAYS, Associated Press Writer Wed Aug 15, 7:01 PM ET

NEW YORK - They preferred bookstores or hookah bars to mosques. They stopped listening to pop music and instead surfed Web sites promoting radical Islam. They threw away their baseball caps and grew beards.

New York Police Department intelligence analysts have concluded those were some of the telltale signs of homegrown terrorists in the making — a mounting threat as grave as that from established terrorist groups like al-Qaida.

An NYPD report released Wednesday warns of a “radicalization” process in which young men — otherwise unremarkable legal immigrants from the Middle East — grow disillusioned with life in America and adopt a philosophy that puts them on the path to jihad.

But if someone is an immigrant, he can’t be a homegrown terrorist like Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, or even like American Muslims John Walker Lindh and John Allan Muhammad. They’re immigrant terrorists, part of the modern phenomenon of mass immigration which brings the problems of foreign lands to America.