It’s interesting how the argument for open borders has lately been getting all warm and cuddly: we sovereigntists are making hispanics (even legal ones, apparently) feel bad and “disheartened.” We who favor strong borders are accused of making illegal foreigners feel unwelcome. Well, yes!

Americans thought the human tsunami was about Third Worlders invading in order to rip off a First World economy and welfare system. Now the spiel is that foreigners come here to feel good about themselves, a point made by Sam Quinones’ in his most recent book Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream, where the self-esteem of Mexicans gets major attention.

For 20 years, Ruben and Martha Carranza saw Irving as a melting pot of cultures.

Here, they were encouraged to live out their version of the American dream – building a respectable life as they worked and raised their children.

“I always felt Irving was a friendly place and was just a wonderful city,” Mr. Carranza said.

But in just a few short weeks, that peace and comfort has dramatically dissolved. A firestorm of controversy surrounding the Police Department’s use of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement program placed Irving in the national spotlight. In the last year, the program has turned over for deportation proceedings more than 1,600 people – more than any other city in the nation, officials believe. [...]

Many Hispanics are afraid to leave their homes or send their children to schools in a suburb where one-third of the population is foreign-born. They feel racially profiled by police and unwanted by white neighbors.
Hispanics in Irving feeling disheartened Dallas Morning News 10/7/07]

If genuine citizens feel bad vibes, that’s regrettable. But the negative reaction on the part of Americans is the result of decades of open borders and the fact that the majority of hispanics who have entered the US recently are indeed illegal. (According to the Christian Science Monitor, “Of the Mexicans who live here, an estimated 85 percent are here illegally.”)

The solution is more enforcement. If illegal immigration is effectively ended, then eventually Americans won’t assume anyone with a Mexican accent is likely to be an illegal alien.

Problem solved by making immigration legal, controlled and reduced!

When police find a suspect’s DNA at the scene of a crime, they should be able to figure out the things that DNA tells you, which includes things like sex and race, so they know who to suspect. A scientist named Tony Frudakis is working on this, at a company called DNAPrint.A new story from Wired Magazine reveals that political correctness has led to deliberate sabotage of the database, in order to prevent the authorities from finding this out:

But while CODIS [the FBI's official DNA database]is good at linking the criminals who are already catalogued from other crimes, the system is useless in identifying physical characteristics. It says nothing about race. It has been specifically set up to reveal no racial information whatsoever, in part so that the test would be consistently accurate irrespective of race.

But non-scientific considerations also factored into how the system was established. When the national DNA Advisory Board selected the gene markers, or DNA sequences which have a known location on a chromosome, for CODIS, they deliberately chose not to include markers associated with ancestral geographic origins to avoid any political maelstrom.[The Inconvenient Science of Racial DNA Profiling By Melba Newsome, 10.05.07]

You get an insight into the psychology of the people involved when you learn that a male university professor literally screamed at the (female) reporter who was covering this story, refusing to believe that DNA markers could show what race someone was.

Besides the expense, many people who might benefit from DNAWitness either don’t know it exists or are extremely skeptical that it works. William C. Thompson, Chair of the Department of Criminology, Law & Society at UC Irvine [Send him mail]is a prominent expert on the use of DNA in criminal trials but was only marginally familiar with this technology. When I tried to describe how it works, he literally screamed at me, calling Frudakis a hack and a charlatan who obviously did not understand statistics.

But even those who believe this can be done are conflicted about whether it should be done. History is replete with examples of injustices and inequities that were conscripted into law based on racial classification. The Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s succeeded in ending legal racial discrimination, in large measure, by downplaying the significance of race and racial differences. By the mid-1990s prominent academics and sociologists even went so far as to say that race did not exist at all.

“Race is a social construct, not a scientific classification,” said an editorial in the May 3, 2001 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, adding that “In medicine, there is only one race–the human race.”

Then, along comes Frudakis with a science that seems to be saying the opposite.The Inconvenient Science of Racial DNA Profiling, Page 2

There’s more, with reference to eugenics, et cetera, which is obviously irrelevant here, since the point of a DNA sample at a crime scene is to find out who committed the crime, not to find out if they’re good marriage material.

This is serious–it’s literally a matter of life or death for victims and suspects. It’s bad when the newspapers won’t print the race of suspects still on the loose, but worse when the FBI itself refuses to know.

I recently saw the news that Ron Paul had raised almost half as much as the current front runner, Rudy Giuliani in the 3rd quarter of 2007. Now, I see that as an interesting and important development. The market at Intrade.com is now giving Paul a 5-7% chance of getting the GOP nomination. That means he’s still a long shot-but he still at least has a chance.

Now, I question the degree to which what the rank and file want will matter in the GOP nomination process. Still, if Paul gives a prime time convention speech like Pat Buchanan did, that could be significant.

However, I think that folks here at VDARE.com need to be realistic that most likely both parties will nominate someone far from sympathetic to their issues. What is the right thing to do in that case?

I would argue that the best thing to wrest corporate control from the electoral process would be a movement away from routine election of incumbents. We are going to continue to see differences on a lot of volatile issues like abortion for quite a while. These have created a situation where razor thin election results are a fact of life.

Actions like Campaign Finance reform can only do a little to help this situation. We need some fundamental change in US election rules. Adopting a system like Condorcet Voting would make it much more difficult for both major parties to nominate candidates with very limited broad based appeal.

Until election reform is on the table, what can folks that are disenfranchised by the current election process do?

I would argue the best strategy in the current situation would be to focus on making the current system more difficult for those currently participating in it. That would mean making unseating of incumbents more likely–and also making changes of the party holding a particular office more likely. Elections in recent years have been so close, that if an organized group making up only 2-3% of the electorate were to systematically switch back and forth between the two major parties, considerable disruption of the political process would take place.

The fallout from this kind of strategy might be rather painful–but this may be necessary to create a democracy that is truly responsive and capable of placing issues like immigration onto the front burner.

The Bush Administration has not been able to convince Congress to go along with its proposed liberalization of immigration.

So what to do? If they can’t get new laws to do what they want to do, well, heck, they are going to reinterpret what current laws say so they can do what they want to do anyway.[The Borjas Blog: Immigration Policy]

The story he’s linking to is U.S. lets in more immigrants for farms.[By Mark Boster , Los Angeles Times, October 7, 2007]

Officials at the three federal agencies are scrutinizing the regulations to see whether they can adjust the farmworker program, an unwieldy system used by less than 2% of American farms to bring in foreign workers. They are considering a series of changes, including lengthening the time workers can stay, expanding the types of work they can do, simplifying how their applications are processed, and redefining terms such as “temporary.”

And it highlights a Separation of Powers problem–Congress can pass whatever laws it wants, but if the Executive Branch refuses to enforce them, the invasion continues.

The reason that farmers aren’t using the farmworker program isn’t that it’s “unwieldy,” but that it makes the farmer responsible for getting the workers into the country, and then out of the country, and housing them in between.

It’s much more convenient for the farmer if he can just hire from a group of illegals wandering around in America, living in colonias near his farm.

That way, any extra expenses incurred by the workers, (such as medical care, a big item) will be entirely the responsibility of the taxpayer.

Here’s something I never thought of before. Although Jamaica was an English colony, the “one-drop rule” works the opposite way there than it does here — some white blood makes you white. (I suppose this was because Jamaica was a Spanish colony until 1655, and kept the Latin perspective on racial classification.) So, the most famous Jamaican ever, Bob Marley, who had a white father and black mother, was more or less considered white in Jamaica.

Marley’s ex-bandmate, Peter Tosh, used to complain about this. Wikipedia says: “Tosh became bitter about the success of his ex-bandmate, at one point claiming that the only reason Marley was so successful was that his father was white …”

Sorry, Peter, but I think the real reason was because Bob wrote better tunes than you did.

I remember walking out of a Tosh show at the Roxy in the late 1970s, and the club put on the English group 10cc’s pop reggae hit “Dreadlock Holiday,” [Youtube] and thinking to myself, “I know Tosh is supposed to be Mr. Authentic Roots Rock Reggae and all that, but this piece of fluff is catchier than anything in his whole show.”

I can find much to disagree with in Megan McArdle’s post in the Atlantic’s blog, but I found this part amusing and useful.

It takes some chutzpah to argue that intelligence is not heritable, and variant–frankly, I don’t know why these people are arguing with me when they could be teaching their dog nuclear physics.Megan McArdle (October 05, 2007) - I am my own lodestar

Mickey Kaus has an item about a momentary failure of the E-Verify program, which was quickly fixed.

Here’s an anguished NPR report on a victim of the highly-touted “E-Verify” system for checking the immigration status of employees. It seems Fernando Tinoco, an American citizen, “thought he was living the American dream.” But at a new job he got a “tentative non-confirmation” for his Social Security number. Two hours after being hired he was fired. And then … he “cleared up the problem” … and then he got his job back. … So what’s the big difficulty? He was … humiliated! Yes, that’s the ticket. Though he doesn’t sound very humiliated in this report–despite the egging-on of the NPR reporter (”They thought you were illegal. … Criminal! But you’re an American.” …”Yes. We’re in America, yes.”) … Remember: This is the best case NPR and the legal rights groups that feed it could come up with. … P.S.: Aren’t honest, law-abiding people humiliated by data base errors all the time–like when credit cards are wrongly turned down, etc.? Is that a reason for blocking what even comprehensivists tout as the most important immigration enforcement tool around? It is if you want to block immigration enforcement, I guess. … P.P.S.: Illinois has attempted to stop “E-verify” with a law whose “bipartisan” backing NPR pretends to be impressed by. Why, it was supported by “immigrant rights groups and and by mainstream business groups like the Illinois Chamber of Commerce.” I mean, who else could there be in the immigration debate? …Prius, the Silent Killer! - By Mickey Kaus - Slate Magazine

Of course, from a pure economic point of view, a guy named Fernando Tinoco is likely to harmed worse by Mexican illegal immigrants competing for his job than I am. According to the Washington Post, he works for Tyson Foods, a major illegal employer.
But there’s something more than economics involved here.