I haven’t donated blood for a while, but when I did, the nurse would ask me a bunch of questions to find out if I had strange diseases that you get in strange foreign countries. One of the things she would ask was if I had been to any of these countries–which is normally where you catch them. Not any more.

Latin American scourge turning up in U.S. immigrants
In L.A., nation’s first clinic opens to treat deadly insect-borne Chagas disease

Mary Engel, Los Angeles Times

(11-06) 04:00 PST Los Angeles - –

A Los Angeles County hospital has opened the first clinic in the country devoted to studying and treating Chagas disease, a deadly parasitic illness that has long been the leading cause of heart failure in Latin America and is now being seen in immigrant communities in the United States.

Unless Chagas is treated early, little can be done to halt its advance. Yet because 10 to 20 years can pass before heart or gastrointestinal complications develop, many people don’t realize they’re infected with what has been called a silent killer.

“We really, really need to become more aware of the potential of this disease in our Latin American population because the long-term outcome is pretty horrific,” said Dr. Sheba Meymandi, director of the new center at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center. “If we can block the progression to full-blown Chagas disease and heart failure, we’d be doing a huge service.”

The late Sam Francis wrote about Chagas Disease on VDARE.COM in 2003,

[L]ast week the New York Times science section disclosed yet another Third World plague immigration has contributed to the scrutiny of medical science and public hygiene. It makes tuberculosis look rather like a summer cold. [ Rare Infection Threatens to Spread in Blood Supply by Donald G. McNeil Jr., New York Times, 17 Nov 2003]

This one is known as Chagas disease, which flourishes in Latin America and operates mainly by "threatening the United States blood supply," according to the public health officials the Times interviewed.

It is not—yet—common in the United States, but thanks to immigration it may soon be.

Indeed, only nine cases of Chagas transmitted by blood transfusions are known in the United States and Canada in the last 20 years, but perhaps you see the problem despite such encouraging news.

The problem is that as immigration from Latin America increases, and more Latin Americans donate blood, the greater the chance for the disease to enter blood supplies—whence the disease may come to you and your family.

Sam, may he rest in peace, was taken from us by perfectly ordinary American heart disease. But the threat he was writing about lives on, and the next time I go to give blood, the nurse will likely ask if I’ve been in Benin, Central America, Lagos…or Los Angeles.

My recent article about the Gringo Colony of San Miguel, Mexico, was posted on a Mexican internet forum by a character who calls himself “Mohammed Martinez, Aztec Al-Qaeda.”

This individual (hereafter referred to as M&M) entitled his screed

MEXICO! ALLAN WALL ES UN GRINGO RACISTA ANTI-INMIGRANTE QUE RADICA EN MEXICO! DEPORTEN ESTA BASURA!

(Mexico! Allan Wall is an anti-immigrant racist gringo who lives in Mexico! Deport this garbage!)

This is followed by my entire article, cut and pasted, in English. After that , M&M adds this exhortation:

MEXICANOS! CORRAN LA PALABRA POR TODOS LOS MEDIOS DENTRO LA REPUBLICA DE MEXICO Y LLEGEN A CONOCER A NUESTROS ENEMIGOS “MEXICANILLOS” MALINCHISTAS TRAIDORES LAMBEBOTAS COMO LOS QUE SE ENCUENTRAN EN ESTE FORO Y SUS AMOS GRINGOS RACISTAS COMO ESTE ALLAN WALL “RESIDENTE” EN MEXICO! E.F. Mohammed Martinez aka AZTEC AL-QAEDA)

(Mexicans! Let the word spread…Within the Republic of Mexico and make known to our enemies ‘Little Mexicans’ Malinchistas, Traitors, Boot-lickers such as those found on this forum and their gringo masters like this Allan Wall “resident” in Mexico!
Mohammed Martinez a.k.a. Aztec Al-Quaeda

The first response though was from “Coyote Invalido” (Crippled Coyote) who addressed M&M thusly :

So far this is the only thing that you have published that makes some sense M&M!

That is because you did not write it!

You may not like it but the guy [Allan Wall] has the same right to speak his mind just like you do.

See you later M&M

This is followed by a message from Juanh1021, who also addressed M&M:

El BURRO HABLANDO DE OREJAS! Que te deporten A TI y ten por seguro que esta persona hace mas por los dos paises que PARASITOS RABIOSOS COMO TU.
(The donkey speaks of ears! Let them deport YOU and be assured that this person (Allan Wall) does more for the two countries than rabid parasites like yourself!

Other messages and weird pictures follow, including a doctored photo of George Bush trying to eat a cat.

The recent NYT Magazine article by Zev Chafets on the rich and rapidly growing enclave of 75,000 Syrian Jews in Brooklyn is quite fascinating. Unlike some other Orthodox Jewish groups, they dress in modern clothes, which facilitates their making a huge amount of money as merchants. (Some had forged close business ties with the late Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart). Under an Edict put forward in 1935 and most recently reaffirmed by community leaders in 2006, they utterly ostracize anybody who marries a Gentile, along with their descendants.

“Never accept a convert or a child born of a convert,” Kassin told me by phone, summarizing the message. “Push them away with strong hands from our community. Why? Because we don’t want gentile characteristics.” …

“It’s really a matter of statistics,” [Rabbi Elie Abadie ] explained to me. “Except for the Orthodox, the American Jewish community is shrinking, disappearing. In two generations, most of their grandchildren won’t even be Jews. But our community is growing. We have large families, five or six children. And only a tiny fraction of our kids leave. The Edict is what makes that true.”

Abadie and Kassin agree that the vast majority of SY youth abide by the strictures of the Edict. “Ninety-nine percent accept it,” Kassin said. “When someone doesn’t, it’s painful, but it’s better to lose a kid here and there and save the community. Families get sick over it, sure, but that’s how it is.”

Kassin knows this from personal experience. His sister Anna ran off with a gentile. Naturally it was a great scandal in the community, but the chief rabbi didn’t bend the rules for his daughter. “We cut her off,” Jakie Kassin told me. “We didn’t see her for 25 years. But we never stopped hoping she’d come back. Finally, after all these years, she made contact. We told her she was welcome to come back, but not with her husband or kids. She’s not here yet, but we do talk on the telephone.”

In addition to the strictures imposed by the Edict in instances of proposed intermarriage, any outsider who wants to marry into a Syrian family — even a fellow Jew — is subject to thorough genealogical investigation. That means producing proof, going back at least three generations and attested to by an Orthodox rabbi, of the candidates’ kosher bona fides. This disqualifies the vast majority of American Jews, who have no such proof. “We won’t take them — not even if we go back three or four generations — if someone in their line was married by a Reform or Conservative rabbi, because they don’t perform marriages according to Orthodox law,” Kassin said. Even Orthodox candidates are screened, to make sure there are no gentiles or converts lurking in the family tree. …
The force of the Edict is lasting: the children of people who have been excluded under the terms of the Edict are themselves declared ineligible to marry into the community.[The Sy Empire, October 14, 2007]

The Syrian Jews of Brooklyn differ from Ashkenazi Jews in many ways: their birthrate is very high; their intermarriage rate with gentiles is minuscule; they show no interest in science, the arts, or ideology; they don’t pursue higher education; they don’t become doctors or lawyers; they don’t seem concerned about making the world in general a better place; and very few Syrian Jews become celebrities. Well-known half-Syrian Jews include Jerry Seinfeld and Paula Abdul, but Dan Hedaya (an actor best known for looking like Richard Nixon) is perhaps the most famous celebrity raised in a Syrian Jewish environment.

The other prominent Syrian Jews tend to be businessmen who get caught in scandals, such as Crazy Eddie, the tri-state area electronics hawker of a generation ago. (There’s an amusing Wikipedia page detailing the depths of the Antar family’s fraud. I spent a couple of weeks in Manhattan in 1982 looking for a job, and I came to the conclusion that New Yorkers believed that Crazy Eddie was the second most famous person in the world, behind only George Steinbrenner.)

In other words, the Syrian Jews of Brooklyn are very Middle Eastern. This article reminds me that Greg Cochran has been tentatively kicking around for some time the idea that Middle Eastern-style clannishness is the wave of the future for humanity, that from a Darwinian perspective the ideals underlying the great accomplishments of Western Civilization–curiosity, fair play, rule of law, free speech, and so forth–are turning out to be a demographic dead-end. Perhaps the future belongs not to the Einsteins but to the Crazy Eddies?

This study from the Center For Immigration Studies confirms something we’ve said before about farmers, “crops rotting in the fields,” and mechanization–the decision to grow the kind of crops that will rot in the fields if farmers don’t have corrupt access to illegal labor is an economic one.

It’s the same as deciding whether it costs more to get the gold out of a mine than it’s worth, or whether a retail store is making enough money to pay its employees and suppliers. We may owe a lot to farmers, (I ate today, how about you?) but we don’t owe them so much that we want to make them rich off cheap labor and tax dollars.

• Production of fruits and vegetables has been increasing. In particular, plantings of very-labor intensive crops such as cherries and strawberries have grown by more than 20 percent in just five years.
• The average farm worker makes $9.06 an hour, compared to $16.75 for non-farm production workers.
• Real wages for farm workers increased one-half of one percent (.5 percent) a year on average between 2000 and 2006. If there were a shortage, wages would be rising much more rapidly.
• Farm worker earnings have risen more slowly in California and Florida (the states with the most fruit and vegetable production) than in the United States as a whole.
• The average household spends only about $1 a day on fresh fruits and vegetables.
• Labor costs comprise only 6 percent of the price consumers pay for fresh produce. Thus, if farm wages were allowed to rise 40 percent, and if all the costs were passed on to consumers, the cost to the average household would be only about $8 a year.
• Mechanization could offset higher labor costs. After the “Bracero” Mexican guestworker program ended in the mid-1960s, farm worker wages rose 40 percent, but consumer prices rose relatively little because the mechanization of some crops dramatically increased productivity.
• Labor-saving mechanization can be difficult for one farmer, since packers and processors are usually set up to deal either with hand-picked or machine-picked crops, but not both. Government has a key role to play in facilitating mechanization.

Farm Labor Shortages: How Real? What Response? By Philip Martin, November 2007 [PDF]

The Observer in Great Britain has an article about amnesty for illegals and the Hispanicization of America. (They’re in favor of it–they’re leftists, and it isn’t happening to them.)

Viva la revolution!

For decades, Hispanics have existed mainly in the shadows of the American dream. Now they’re taking to the streets in their millions, in the biggest march for equality since the Civil Rights movement. And with $1 trillion to spend, millions ready to vote and their own candidate for President, Hispanics hold the key to the new American century. Paul Harris reports

Sunday November 4, 2007

Eddie ‘El Piolin’ Sotelo does not look like a revolutionary threat to America. He is short, stocky, with neat dark hair and a broad smile. His nickname means simply ‘Tweety Bird’ in Spanish. Until 18 months ago, Sotelo was virtually unknown. Though more than a million listeners tuned into his radio show, the majority of America was blissfully unaware of his championing of the rights of illegal immigrants - simply because he did it in Spanish. Then, one day, he publicised protests against a draft law to classify undocumented migrants as felons. Sotelo urged his Hispanic listeners to take to the streets. They answered his call in their millions. In Los Angeles, 400,000 marchers streamed through downtown. A similar number jammed Chicago. In dozens of cities, millions of people were suddenly protesting against a law few other Americans even knew about. And ‘El Piolin’ was at the front of the marchers. ‘More than two million marched. And I am proud that we were peaceful,’ he tells The Observer

After much blah blah blah, during which it transpires that El Piolin himself “entered the US illegally on a forged green card,” they get down to finding out how actual Americans feel about being invaded.

The power of the backlash was most keenly felt in the defeat of Bush’s immigration bill. Tens of thousands of activists rallied against it, sending literally millions of faxes to politicians that scared them into voting down the law. The main group behind the protest, Numbers USA, had just 55,000 members three years ago. Now it has more than half a million. Much of their distress over immigration is based on a simple fear of difference. ‘They come here to work but they make no effort to integrate. They do not want to,’ says Edwin Rubenstein, an economics consultant and commentator on anti-immigration issues.

The hero of the anti-immigration backlash is Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, whose 2004 book Who Are We: America’s Great Debate postulated that Hispanic immigration would destroy America’s protestant Anglo-Saxon character. ‘He was right,’ says Rubenstein, whose own ancestors were Russian Jews. ‘They keep their culture and customs. When other immigrants arrived they had to break their bonds and commit themselves to the US for better or worse.’

But behind the cultural and political arguments lies a more powerful economic phenomenon. Hispanic migration is also driven by the desire of major corporations to create a low-wage workforce. The fear of the American middle class is not just over Spanish or a brown skin; it is also a more justifiable anxiety that jobs are disappearing and wages being lowered. Much of the rhetoric of the right attacks big business. ‘It is a betrayal. The corporate elites have hijacked government on behalf of business interests and profits,’ says Rubenstein.

Don’t read the whole thing–it’s 3500 words long. But you can skim it, to get an idea of how the immigration debate is viewed by the British left-wing.