I was looking for audio of Peter Brimelow’s recent appearance at a Hudson Institute conference, but it doesn’t seem to be up yet. However, I did find this, from 2006–a speech by Peter Wilson, introduced by John O’Sullivan;

John O’Sullivan;And I think this is going to be a very interesting afternoon because the topic is that of illegal immigration which almost, it seems, suddenly has erupted onto the political landscape as one of the two or three major topics affecting Congress, affecting voting patterns, and, just most recently, in California, affecting the result of the election in San Diego.

We think of it as having suddenly erupted, and yet, of course, to those people who’ve been following it as a controversy, it has been a controversy now for really the past decade – you could say more the past 15 years. It became a serious topic again, in political terms, very early in the 1990s. I think I can claim some responsibility – credit or blame – for this because I was editing the magazine when the article, “Time to Re-think Immigration” by Peter Brimelow, which went on to become the book “Alien Nation” was first published.

But of course it was most significantly an issue in California because it was there that the impact of illegal immigration was most harshly and significantly felt. Now, in his reelection campaign in the mid-‘90s, our guest today, Governor Wilson, took on this issue headfirst and dealt with it very frankly and clearly. He was attacked at the time for doing so, although I think everyone now acknowledges that it is absolutely essential that such an important issue affecting so many people should be freely ventilated. But at the time, as I say, he was attacked, let me quote to you what he said.

He was attacked for using a wedge issue. And he said, “wedge issues are those – they don’t get to be wedge issues unless the problems are real, and if there is such a pervasive sense of injustice and outrage that they cannot and morally ought not to be ignored. If you think about it, slavery was a wedge issue.”

Well, he went on to win that election by a substantial majority, and Proposition 187, which was on the ballot at the same time, also won a significant majority, not merely a majority of voters but a significant number of Hispanic votes. Now subsequently, it became a kind of orthodoxy, in certain circles, that, although the governor had won that election, he had in fact damaged the reputation of the Republican Party. And yet I always looked at the opinion poll results and sort of the election results following, and I noticed that the people who argued this had actually got far fewer votes and a far smaller percentage of votes of all categories of voters than Governor Wilson had. So I always thought it was rather funny that somehow he could win votes with an issue and yet by his winning those votes damage people who hadn’t used it is an issue in later elections – seems kind of a paradox which has never really been persuasively explained to me.

You can read the whole thing: ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE A Transcript of an Event on June 12, 2006 in PDF or download it in MP3.

In the year 2000 John Derbyshire wrote, regarding David Stove’s essay on THE INTELLECTUAL CAPACITY OF WOMEN, that

Often Stove falls into the philosopher’s disdain for mere facts. This is the case in that essay on female intellectual capacity, for example. Psychometricians have for some decades been measuring the smartness of women, and the results are not in any doubt. Women have the same mean intelligence as men, but a smaller standard deviation. Their bell curve is narrower, men’s is flatter, but the peaks are in the same place. There are thus more men in the “tails” of the distribution—more super-smart men than women, and more extremely dim ones, too. This fact is about as firmly established as the orbit of the moon, so that Stove’s conclusions on the subject are plain wrong.[Philosopher's Stove December 23rd, 2000 ]

A new study has shown this to be true once again, with more safeguards for people who didn’t believe the earlier tests, by testing brothers and sisters from the same family:Brother-Sister Differences in the g Factor in Intelligence: Analysis of Full, Opposite-Sex Siblings from the NLSY1979

It’s reported in Daily Telegraph:

Men: either very clever or really stupid - Telegraph

By Sophie Borland
24/09/2007

This could spark a row over the breakfast table, but recent research has found that there are more clever men than women.

An all-male team of psychologists at Edinburgh University has discovered that there are twice as many males as females in the brightest two per cent of the population.

The research, however, also points out that there are twice as many males as females in the least intelligent two per cent of the country.

The researchers said that they eliminated factors such as education and upbringing by comparing members of the same family.

They looked at the intelligence of more than 2,500 brothers and sisters by testing them on science, maths, English and mechanical ability.

Of course, this comes too late to save Larry Summers, who lost his job as University President for stating, in a closed, supposed-to-be-off-the-record academic session, this well-known fact.

Nor would it prevent him from being “disinvited“ as a speaker at the University of California’s Board of Regents dinner. That’s because it was true when he said it before, and the fact that it’s still true won’t convince the people who refused to believe it before, especially Nancy Hopkins of MIT, who told the Boston Globe that if she hadn’t fled the room where he was speaking, she “would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.”

If people don’t want to hear the truth, then no amount of evidence will convince them.

Dick Durbin announced this morning that he is no longer trying to tack it onto an immigration bill. Many of the Republicans who voted for the amnesty surge and/or initially supported the DREAM act, ended up switching sides due to public outrage. This is a very powerful development that shows that the open borders lobby is one the defensive, and the patriotic immigration reform movement has not gotten lazy after defeating 1348. [Hope fades for passage of bill to aid young illegal immigrants By MICHELLE MITTELSTADT, Sept. 26, 2007, Houston Chronicl]

We still cannot be complacent. The amnesty crowd has insisted that they will continue to press the issue. While we have defeated the DREAM act many times, they only need to win once.

It is also significant, that the conservative movement that took credit for defeating the amnesty has been complacent. Very few blogs, and most of the main talk radio hosts who vehemently opposed the initial amnesty gave little or no notice to the DREAM act. National Review’s coverage was limited to one column and a pair of blog posts by Mark Krikorian.

The Johnny come lately restrictionists did not defeat 1348 or the DREAM Act. It was groups like Numbers USA, The Eagle Forum, and my own Team America Act that rallied their supporters to the cause. I’d love for Mark Krikorian to write more good articles for National Review and for other conservatives to get on board, but we shouldn’t give them undue credit, lest we let them take over and soften the patriotic immigration reform movement.

This is from Investor’s Business Daily:

That’s not the only case. Didn’t the mainstream media report that 2006’s vast immigration rallies across the country began as a spontaneous uprising of 2 million angry Mexican-flag waving illegal immigrants demanding U.S. citizenship in Los Angeles, egged on only by a local Spanish-language radio announcer?

Turns out that wasn’t what happened, either. Soros’ OSI had money-muscle there, too, through its $17 million Justice Fund. The fund lists 19 projects in 2006. One was vaguely described involvement in the immigration rallies. Another project funded illegal immigrant activist groups for subsequent court cases.

So what looked like a wildfire grassroots movement really was a manipulation from OSI’s glassy Manhattan offices. The public had no way of knowing until the release of OSI’s 2006 annual report.[The Soros Threat To Democracy, September 24, 2007]

Ted Hayes is a Black LA homeless advocate who has been very vocal about the connection between illegal immigration and black economic issues in the US.

He recently got a small plug in Ebony Magazine:

“In South Central Los Angeles, activists on both sides of the illegal immigration fight face off a Leimert Park. Activist Ted Hayes led one of the groups.”.

Apparently, Ebony tries to be a bit more neutral towards its African-American audience than most other corporate media.