A common theme of permissive-immigration boosters is the generosity of “immigrants” and America’s thoughtless ingratitude: foreigners from around the world come with love in their hearts, their only wish being to serve us. But we cruel Americans just reject their entreaties. The Mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, is famous for his speech declaring, “We clean your toilets!” as an emotional appeal.

Besides improving our cleanliness, better educated foreigners believe America’s complicated gizmos would fall apart without auslanders keeping them operating with hi-tech skills (sold at bargain-basement wages). Immigrants from the subcontinent apparently overrate their importance, particularly about who built Silicon Valley. The Indian fellow shown in the photo (an activist from ImmigrationVoice) has a sign reading “We Gave You Google” — does he think the useful search engine was created in India?

In fact, half of the founding inventors of the vastly successful Google firm is Sergey Brin, who was born in Moscow, not Bangalore. So the “we” is a little squirrelly, to say the least. But the appeal to guilt is clear enough.

Chandrakanth Vemula was frustrated with trying to get an employment-based green card. He paid his taxes, was a law-abiding legal resident and contributed to the country’s economic growth and development.

Vemula, 31, got into a predicament back in 2005, when he was laid-off from his job as a software analyst at a consulting firm in Atlanta. He was in the sixth year of his H-1 visa, a document granted to highly skilled workers.

U.S. immigration law permits six years for an H-1 work visa, through the sponsorship of an employer. The visa can be extended however, if a green card application for permanent residence has been pending for more than a year.

But with the lay-off, Vemula’s green card application was essentially terminated.

“Nobody was giving me proper guidance — it didn’t seem like anyone cared,” said Vemula.
[Frustrated legal immigrants mobilize at a grassroots level to get lawmakers' attention, Medill Reports 10/17/07]

Ahem. An H-1B Visa is admittance for a temp job, with no guarantees: you are here to be exploited, bub.

But anyway, shouldn’t all these warm-hearted folks be expressing their love of humanity and desire for service closer to home? Just a thought.

Megan McCardle points to this article by David Nicholson , the former assistant editor of the Washington Post’s Book World: I Just Couldn’t Sacrifice My Son By David Nicholson, October 21, 2007.

When a high school friend told me several years ago that he and his wife were leaving Washington’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood for Montgomery County, I snickered and murmured something about white flight. Progressives who traveled regularly to Cuba and Brazil, they wanted better schools for their children. I saw their decision as one more example of liberal hypocrisy.

I was childless then, but I have a 6-year-old now. And I know better. So to all the friends — most but not all of them white — whom I’ve chastised over the years for abandoning the District once their children reached school age:

I’m sorry. You were right. I was wrong.

Megan McCardle asks

“[W]hy should all of the parents who don’t have the choice to send their kids to a private school, or move to the suburbs? How do you write an article this long without noting that there are a whole lot of parents in the DC school district, each with their own child just as precious and unique and worth saving as David Nicholson’s kid, who don’t have any choices? How does the word “voucher” not appear once?

I very rarely get angry about politics. But every time I see some middle class parent prattling about vouchers “destroying” the public schools by “cherry picking” the best students, when they’ve made damn sure that their own precious little cherries have been plucked out of the failing school systems, I seethe with barely controllable inward rage. It is the vilest hypocrisy on display in American politics today. Now, I don’t accuse David Nicholson of this particular sin . . . yet. Right now he’s only guilty of the lesser sin of viewing real estate purchases as the natural vehicle through which one should exercise educational choice. Perhaps he favors vouchers to help the kids he’s left behind. But if he does, I sure wish he’d mentioned it.

Elites ignoring the effects of social policy on the non-elites is an old story. It applies to what immigration does to working-class jobs and neighborhoods, too.

However, it’s been worse. Megan probably doesn’t have any memories of busing–that was bad. This is from David Frum’s book How We Got Here: The 70’s: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life–For Better or Worse – an excellent book by a man who, whatever our ideological differences, would make a much better editor of Commentary than the current heir apparent.

Busing triggered a whole new perception among ordinary middle-class people of the malignity of public authority. On the first day of school in 1975–the same day that Bostonians were loading their kids onto buses for a second year away from their neighborhoods—Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis was photographed walking his children to school. Dukakis lived in Brookline, an elegant suburb just minutes away from downtown Boston. He didn’t have to load his children onto a bus and send them miles away. Judge Garrity’s children did not ride the bus either. The Garritys lived in genteel Wellesley. The main author of the second Boston busing plan, Robert Dentler, [email]the then-dean of the Boston University School of Education, lived in the leafy suburb of Lexington. No wonder the Bostonians called busing “a Harvard plan for the working-class man.”

J. Anthony Lukas. who wrote a classic book on the Boston schools battle, describes how a community meeting to explain busing to the people of South Boston “erupted into shouting and jeering from the audience when It was discovered during the question and answer period at the end that none of the four panelists, two blacks and two whites, lived in the city of Boston.” “How can it be the law of the land, as we are told,” a mother in the working-class Irish neighborhood of Charlestown asked In a bitter letter to Judge Garrity, “when you can move less than one mile away and be out from under this law?”

The television show 60 Minutes reported in 1971 that many of Washington’s leading advocates of busing sent their own children to private schools. Senator Edward Kennedy sent his sons to St. Alban’s. George McGovern, although a District of Columbia resident, paid $1450-a-year in tuition to enroll his daughter in the Bethesda public schools—a school system then 3 percent black. Thurgood Marshall had two sons in Georgetown Day School Kenneth Clark, the sociologist whose work was the main authority cited In the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision, sent his children to private school as well. “My children,” he said, “have only one life and I could not risk that. “Your children get educated only once,”The judge who ordered the integration of the school systems of Richmond, Virginia, and its suburbs, Robert Merhige, likewise sent his children to private school. “When I’m on the bench I’m a judge,” he said, “and when at home, I’m a father.” Frank Mankiewicz, McGovern’s campaign manager, Benjamin Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post; and Senator Phil Hart, the very liberal senator from Michigan: all Georgetown Day parents. Senator Birch Bayh and ultra-liberal newspaper columnists Tom Wicker of the New York Times and Philip Geyelin of the Washington Post sent their boys to mingle with Senator Kennedy’s at St. Alban’s.

In their now-classic study of the failure of the US. Army in Vietnam. Crisis in Command, Richard Gabriel and Paul Savage scathingly point out that American senior officers In Vietnam were about half as likely to be killed as American senior officers In World War II. “[T]he leaders who formulated the rules of the game—duty, honor, country—did not live up to them . . . °”The American military in Vietnam was, Gabriel and Savage charged, disfigured by officers’ disloyalty to their subordinates. The fathers of the South Boston public school students of 1977 were the sort of men who served in Vietnam. They had first glimpsed this disloyalty on the Indochinese battlefields of the l960s. Now they were confronted with it in the courtrooms and legislative chambers of the 1970s.

See also “Busing’s Boston Massacre” by Matthew Richer. If it’s any consolation to the liberal minded Nicholson, his son will probably grow up less “racist” if he attends a suburban school. Remember Preventing Kid Prejudice: The Sailer (One Point) Plan?

Sailer’s one point was this

1. Don’t let your children get beaten up by underclass minorities.

Hey, it worked for Ted Kennedy!

Boasian cultural anthropology was a glamor field in academia in the 1950s, yet it is now among the least publicized. What went wrong?

For example, sci-fi great Robert Heinlein wrote Boas’s student Margaret Mead into his 1957 sci-fi “juvenile” novel Citizen of the GalaxyYoung Thorby flees Sargon and is adopted into the extended family of Free Traders, a people who buy and sell anywhere in the galaxy. The rules of the spaceship crew / family are baffling to Thorby.

Fortunately, anthropologist Margaret Mader (i.e., Margaret Mead) is on board to explain why Thorby can’t fall in love with any girls in his Starboard Moiety, but must find his bride on the Portside Moiety, along with the other complications of Free Trader family structure.

Family structure is interesting stuff, and obviously has real world applications for, say, all those countries where America has soldiers wandering around, such as Afghanistan and the borders of Somalia. But nobody is interested these days.

So, what went wrong? First, anthropologists became obsessed with what Robin Fox, the author of the 1967 textbook Kinship and Marriage calls “ethnographic dazzle.” The exception became the rule. A few decades ago, you’d always hear arguments beginning, “Well, there’s this one tribe where …” which I parodied in The American Spectator in 1992 in “Report Cites Bias Against Women in Drug Rackets: ‘Aspiring Female Traffickers Lack Role Models,’ Notes Expert.”

“All the experts indignantly dismiss biological conjectures purporting to explain why males seem more violent than females. “Then why are the Nuzwangdees of Guyana — or is it the Wangduzees of New Guinea? Well, anyway, I heard there’s some tribe somewhere where more women than men are into GrecoRoman wrestling, or is it Australian football?” retorts Dr. Charles Womyndaughter.”

The point of all this is to deny that there is a basic human nature, in order to facilitate intellectuals being funded to carry out improbably social engineering projects.

Fox wrote in 1991:

“But find me a society without a kinship system, and one without one that operates on the six basic parameters I outlined … Such societies do not exist. … This being so the question becomes not whether or not we “socially construct” the kinship systems we have, but why we construct the limited number of types we do out of all the possible types.”

The flip side of this is that there tend to be general patterns in family structure that follow regional and racial structures, suggesting that within the basic human nature, some variation has evolved.

Cultural anthropologists didn’t want to hear that at all, so they intellectually emasculated their subject rather than follow the facts to their conclusions.

The Washington Post’s lead editorial today “Not Another Katrina” was intended to put out a potential brushfire that the newspaper touched off in yesterday’s front page coverage of the calm, orderly, and relatively peaceful scene surrounding the thousands of evacuees who have fled to Qualcomm stadium in San Diego from their fire ravaged homes, which stands in sharp contrast to the horrific scene of chaos, violence, and disorder at the Superdome two years ago following hurricane Katrina.

Of course the real concern is buried in today’s WP editorial: “Some will be tempted to attribute the quick action exclusively to race.”

The editorial goes on to note that San Diego County is predominantly white, therefore wealthier, while the population of New Orleans is largely black and poorer.

Yesterday’s WP coverage quoted San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, “This is a neighbor-helping-neighbor situation.”

Staff Sgt. Zell Evans, who spent 45 days in New Orleans after the 2005 hurricane noted the Qualcomm difference: “This is real different from Katrina.Here? There’s no fear, no pushing, no fighting. Everybody is calm. It’s just a completely different situation.”[In the Great State of Serenity, Staying Cool Amid the Flames By William Booth and Sonya Geis, October 24, 2007 ]

Dean Beavers, quoted by Cox News Service said, “I’m from New Orleans , and this place is completely different…. There’s a different culture here.”[Stadium like a resort vs. Superdome By Bob Keefe,October 24, 2007 ]

Could it just be that a major reason why chaos, violence, and raw sewage were prevalent conditions in the Superdome, and cots, blankets, yoga classes, Starbucks coffee, and neighborly cooperation dominated the scene at Qualcomm is due to differences of the evacuees, which are not just socioeconomic but also racial and behavioral in nature? Why is the human element in the press coverage of natural disasters so typical of other news items whereby race is never a relevant factor?

As I wrote in VDARE.com right after the Southern California fires exactly four years ago:

Brushfires and mudslides used to seem more amusing because they afflicted Hollywood celebrities significantly more often than average citizens. This was not just a matter of God’s good taste. Hoi polloi lived in the cheaper and safer flatlands. The rich poised precariously in the hills, where construction and maintenance costs are higher—especially if you want your home to survive what Mother Nature keeps up her sleeve.

But the plains of Southern California filled up long ago. So the ever-growing population has been spilling into the more treacherous wild areas.

This is regularly denounced as “sprawl,” which implies that individuals are wastefully consuming more and more land per capita. But in California the driver has been population growth. According to a 2003 Center for Immigration Studies report by Roy Beck, Leon Kolankiewicz, and Steven A. Camarota, from 1982 to 1997 the total number of developed acres in California grew by 32 percent, but the per capita usage was up only two percent. Essentially all of California’s population growth in the 1990s was due to new immigrants or births to foreign-born women. (Indeed, close to 1.5 million more American-born citizens moved out of California during the 1990s than moved in from other states.)

As low-income immigrants pour into Southern California’s lowlands, crowding the freeways and overstressing the older cities’ public schools, the middle class (at least the ones who don’t leave the state) have responded by taking to the hills.

The hill country’s environment is benign most of the year. But the local ecosystem evolved to require periodic blazes. Up through American Indian times, these brushfires were frequent and thus relatively mild.

Unfortunately, we modern people haven’t really figured out how to manage the chaparral and pine forests yet—especially when the canyons and mountains are home to housing. The best-known remedy, controlled burns, is disliked by people who live in the backcountry because they pollute the air, and they can jump out of control. The 2000 Los Alamos fire set by the Forest Service ended up destroying hundreds of structures.

Thus the policy has been to try to suppress all fires. This, however, causes fuel in the form of dry brush and dead trees to build up each decade, inevitably leading to infernos like those of 1993 and 2003. …

It’s just California’s problem? ‘fraid not! Taxpayers across the country always end up chipping in, through government disaster loans, new federal firefighting and forestry management programs, lower stock market prices for insurance companies, and other forms of burden-sharing.

And, in some ways, that’s fair, because so much of California’s current crisis traces back to the federal refusal to adequately enforce immigration laws.

California desperately needs a slower population growth rate until it learns how its current vast population can live with its lovely but sometime lethal landscape. And the state’s burgeoning numbers are solely driven by immigration.

The logical solution: cut back on immigration.

Reality is literally lighting a fire under us.