Hillary Clinton got another Sanctuary City endorsement this week when Oakland’s Mayor Ron Dellums announced that he supports her Presidential bid. (Sanctuary City San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is already in her camp.) Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who as Mayor of San Francisco in the 1980s decreed it to be the nation’s first ever Sanctuary City even as she burned through the City’s budget surplus with trips to China and Russia, smiled for the cameras as Dellums swore his loyalty to Hillary before a group of Clintonistas. (Feinstein is now actively championing AgJobs, to amnesty millions of self-professed farmworkers.) Will Hillary be the top choice of Sanctuary City supporters with clout, and if so, what does that mean to the many voting Democrats who oppose rewarding illegal aliens with Citizenship, and $5,000 per anchor baby (and in the meantime, costly public benefits to which illegals, under current law, are not entitled)?

I’m almost flattered that my critiques are critiqued in both Commentary’s Contention and National Review’s The Corner twice in two weeks. (See Ramesh Ponnuru and Jonah Goldberg ). There isn’t much to say, although Jonah Goldberg’s attempt to prove his Americanness through who came here earlier is weird and self-contradictory, probably reflecting a guilty conscience.

Neither I nor Peter Brimelow nor anyone at VDARE has ever suggested that non-whites, much less non-WASPs are incapable of assimilating. We have just argued that certain groups assimilate more easily than others, and that the numbers of a group that come in at the time matter too. Generally, groups with stock closer to the founders, such as Peter Brimelow, assimilate the easiest, as I noted in my response to Max Boot.

I also mentioned that my father’s family came to this country in the 1840s, though I did not mention, as Goldberg noted, that my mother is Korean. However, she immigrated to this country before the 1965 Immigration Act, when the US was very selective about the 100 Koreans who come each year. Accordingly my mother was a prime candidate for assimilation. Her father was a pro-American newspaper editor who had been killed by the Communist Chinese, while my grandmother had a job at Harvard waiting for her and was to remarry another Harvard professor. This selection, as well as the fact that there were literally none of her co-ethnics in this country, allowed for quick assimilation.

Of course these factors that are conducive to assimilation, the proof is in the pudding. The best evidence that Peter Brimelow and I have assimilated is that we support an immigration and foreign policy that puts the interests of America before any other considerations.

[Peter Brimelow adds: Of course it would be nicer if VDARE.COM readers were polite when emailing Ramesh. But I must say we get abusive email all the time. We just don’t whine about it.

I also think that Ponnuru and Goldberg are foolish to dismiss so arrogantly the intense anger building up out there in Americaland. Similarly, I think the Roman Catholic hierarchy is foolish to resurrect, through its anti-national immigration arrogance, the arguments of Paul Blanshard.]

A ten-year-old child threw a berry at a woman he was arguing with. She beat him with an iron bar, giving him two black eyes. He may be charged with a hate crime.

For once we know the races involved in this story from England–everyone involved is extremely white. The two black eyes the English ten-year old got after being apparently beaten by a Slovakian woman with an iron bar will be temporary. But he may be charged with “race hate” just the same, since, in a dispute with this woman he apparently threw a berry at her, and told her to go “back to her own country.”

Boy ‘who was attacked’ by Slovakian woman may face racism charge | the Daily Mail
A boy of ten who claims to have been attacked by a Slovakian woman with an iron bar could be charged with inciting racial hatred, it emerged last night.

Jake Stedman admitted that the woman hit him after he threw a berry at her and told her to ‘go back to her own country’.

As a result, the boy - who was left with two black eyes - could become the youngest person in the country ever to be charged with the offence.

A police source said: “There have been allegations that he used racist language and it is necessary for us to investigate the claims.”

No, it isn’t.

There is now mass Slovak immigration in this part of England, and it’s causing problems between Slovak youths and native English youths, also their parents. What makes it worse is that this is happening in Chatham, Kent, an area largely unaffected by immigration.

What makes the situation more unpredictable is that migrants from Eastern Europe are settling in areas unused to mass immigration.

This may be rural areas such as Herefordshire and East Anglia, or places such as the Luton Road area of Chatham.

(While it has a small Asian population, it should be noted that this part of Kent experienced little in the way of immigration in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies. Indeed, according to the 2001 census, 95 per cent of its population is “white” - higher than the national average.)

Revealed: the racial tensions behind Slovak mother’s pipe attack on boy By TOM RAWSTORNE, September 29th 2007

It’s occasionally suggested that immigration restrictionists wouldn’t have a problem with mass immigration if the immigrants were white. In fact, that’s not the case, and it’s ridiculous to say that US must accept massive Mexican immigration because the poorer Mexicans who are coming north are mostly Mexican Indians or what Mexico calls mestizos And in the 19th Century, almost all of the immigrants in New York slums were white.. That immigration was what originally led to the 1924 Immigration Act.

However, no such act could be passed in modern Britain. First, because the immigration is required by the EU treaty.

Second, because British politicians who say the wrong thing on the subject of race and immigration can be arrested under anti-racist legislation.

That’s why it’s good that the US isn’t part of the North American Union–and why it’s vital to protect First Amendment rights.

[The cultural reference in the title is explained here.]

In Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi novels, one of the recurrent features (besides nudism) is that the hero is typically a math prodigy. I was reminded of this when reading that the State of California, like most states in recent decades, has put a lot of effort into coming up with “academic content” standards to delineate precisely what each public school student will learn. In fact, teachers are supposed to write the Standards on the classroom whiteboards so that the students can make sure that the teachers aren’t slacking off and leaving out anything that is officially mandated.

Unfortunately, the mathematicians who made up the California Mathematics Content Standards seemed to assume that the young people of California are characters from Heinlein novels.
(more…)

More from “The New Affirmative Action” by Dave Leonhardt in the NYT Magazine:

NYT: “Even if U.C.L.A. tried to get around Proposition 209 by giving a big leg up to low-income applicants, it wouldn’t increase its black population very much. At every rung of the socioeconomic ladder, the academic record of black students is worse than that of other groups. As Taylor says: “There is a great deal of pressure to look for a proxy for race. There is no proxy for race.””

Indeed.
(more…)

Nationals from 27 countries (including Western Europe) can enter the U.S. without a visa on the Visa Waiver Program.

Today, roughly one half of temporary visitors to the U.S. come in under the relatively new Visa Waiver Program (VWP). The streamlined visitor entry program became permanent in 2000 just in time for 9/11. In fact, Zacarias Moussaoui, a convicted 9/11 conspirator, entered the U.S. on the VWP, Feb 23, 2001. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was also a would-be VWP entrant.

In a review of the program when it was in pilot prior to 2000, INS inspectors found that “identified terrorists and criminals believed they would receive less scrutiny during the inspection process if they applied under the VWPP and would have a greater chance of entering without being intercepted.”

That’s for sure – there is no U.S. consular interview or pre-inspection for travelers from VWP countries. Their first encounter with U.S. officials is on U.S. soil where they are pretty much waived through if they have a passport from a VWP country. After all, these are mostly Western countries with which we have relaxed travel reciprocity agreements. But wait, the current issue of the Georgetown Immigration Law Journal notes in an article (The Role Of Immigration In A Coordinated National Security Policy, Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, Vol 21:383 2007 by Donald Kerwin and Margaret D. Stock) [PDF] that a “A recent quantitative study of more than 300 Islamic terrorists found that forty-one percent were nationals ofWestern countries…”

No surprise, the article finds that “Terrorists both live in VWP countries and can be expected to use stolen passports from VWP countries.”.

Belgium recently had the highest rate of stolen passports in the world. Part of a Belgian passport’s value on the black market is as an entrée to the U.S. on the VWP.

Though the USA PATRIOT Act now requires participating countries to issue machine-readable passports which include biometric identifiers and and other recent U.S. law requires these countries to track and report lost or stolen passports, don’t expect major changes soon since the VWP supposedly provides economic benefits to the U.S. and convenience to U.S. travelers.

The Law Journal reports

An April 2004 report by the DHS Inspector General criticized: (1) the program’s uncertain leadership; (2) its failure to perform mandatory reviews of participating countries; (3) its failure to collect information on the use of fraudulent passports in the program; (4) inadequate training on passport fraud for inspectors at ports-of-entry; and (5) the ability of VWP participants to avoid the US-VISIT entry/exit system. The program remains the U.S. immigration system’s area of greatest vulnerability. (Italics added)

When Donald Kerwin, the Executive Director of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. and an advisor on immigration to the promiscuously open-borders U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is alarmed, the situation is truly dire.