It’s sad to see heartland America saddled with the blowback of Washington idiocy, in particular the moronic refugee policy. If refugees from primitive tribal societies are so wonderful, then why aren’t they resettled in Georgetown?

We know the drill, and have heard it all before…

“I think that diversity brings richness to a community. We learn from those around us,” said Donna Magnuson, director of the refugee and immigration center at Lutheran Social Services, which works with government to help refugees with housing, work, English-language classes and cash assistance.

Magnuson said 650 refugees have resettled in Minnehaha County in the past three years; almost all of the arrivals in the past 12 months have come from African nations.

Multi-Cultural Center Director Qadir Aware estimates the Sioux Falls area now has more than 4,000 residents from Sudan and countries in the Horn of Africa.
[Refugees finally find home - in Sioux Falls, Argus Leader, December 8, 2007]

The article includes some sobering facts about the newcomers, e.g., only 20 percent of adults are literate and the standard work experience is farming.

According to the CIA Factbook, Burundi’s population growth rate is 3.6 percent, which makes sense when you read that the average woman has 6.5 children (TFR).

So even if Washington doesn’t import many more Burundians, there will likely be lots more like them in Sioux Falls. (And there are already 12,000 refugees and immigrants in that community, from 94 countries and speaking 124 languages — that’s diverse!)

The current batch are happy not to be in a miserable African refugee camp, and hope all their relatives can come to live in stupid-generous America.

Still, their thoughts often turn to the hundreds of thousands that remain in refugee camps nine time zones away.

“There are so many still there, and they suffer a lot, too,” Ndirariha said. “We would really like to see them relocated to Sioux Falls.”

On Monday, I linked to Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article “None of the Above: What race doesn’t tell you about IQ.” Several of my commenters alertly called attention to Gladwell’s line:

“… and in 1994 Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in “The Bell Curve,” notoriously proposed that Americans with the lowest I.Q.s be sequestered in a “high-tech” version of an Indian reservation, “while the rest of America tries to go about its business.”"

Obviously, this is flatly wrong. As “yo” acidly observed,

“‘Proposed’ and ‘argued against’ are so close in meaning that its easy to get them confused.”

This afternoon, following earlier critical comments by “Rain And” and “rone,” I posted on the Gladwell.com blog:

Dear Malcolm:

Don’t they have fact checkers at The New Yorker anymore?

Are you going to issue an apology to Charles Murray for your possibly libelous claim, “”Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in “The Bell Curve,” notoriously proposed that Americans with the lowest I.Q.s be sequestered in a “high-tech” version of an Indian reservation”"?

Soon after, Gladwell posted this on his blog:

Correction

 

To my chagrin, I made an error in my New Yorker piece “None of the Above.” In the “Bell Curve,” Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein did not advocate a “high-tech Indian reservation” for low-IQ groups. Rather, they warned that if current welfare policies continued, we would end up having to build high-tech reservations for those with low IQs–which is a very different argument, obviously (although not, if you think about it, any less ridiculous). I regret the error. The New Yorker will be running a correction.

December 12, 2007 | Permalink

The potentially libelous line remains in the online version of the New Yorker article, but an apology (a more graceful one that Malcolm’s, by the way), has been appended to the bottom of the article:

“CORRECTION: In his December 17th piece, “None of the Above,” Malcolm Gladwell states that Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in their 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” proposed that Americans with low I.Q.s be “sequestered in a ‘high-tech’ version of an Indian reservation.” In fact, Herrnstein and Murray deplored the prospect of such “custodialism” and recommended that steps be taken to avert it. We regret the error.”

Allan Wall was recently interviewed by pastor/activist Ralph Ovadal of Wisconsin, on his show “The Heart of the Matter”. You can listen to it by clicking here. The interview is on the Dec. 7, 2007 edition, and starts at 28:32.
The principal topic under discussion is the “Migrant Parliament” recently held in Mexico City.

Izzy Lyman of the Homeschooling Revolution writes:

I watched the debate with my husband.

Although we are both Ron Paul supporters, we both agreed that Tom Tancredo’s performance

was the best. I like how he went after the Huckster, the king of feel-good statist gibberish.

My husband even wants to send Tom some money. :>)

Worst: John McCain. How many times can he use the word “I” in one sentence?

Runner-up: Alan Keyes.

Best, Izzy Lyman

PS What’s with Jim Gilchrist supporting Mike Huckabee? Talk about a sell-out.

I’m at a computer with no TV, so I’m relying on other web commenters to see what’s going it. So far I’ve learned that John Podhoretz really, really, doesn’t like Alan Keyes. I assume that this not based on racial or religious prejudice, because JPod is such a paragon of non-bigotry.

OK, this is unimpressive–from the Atlantic’s blog:

Marc Ambinder (December 12, 2007) - First Take: The Final Republican Debate
The debate format was not given to exchanges, and the moderator peremptorily took immigration off the table. [Emphasis added.]The audience did not cheer, really, or validate, or boo.
Romney and Huckabee were like two cultivars of fine Iowa maize.

The moderator took immigration off the table? Can he  she do that for the election, too?

Roy Beck at NumbersUSA recently spoke very favorably about Fred Thompson’s recent tough talk on immigration:

“Reading Thompson’s full proposed immigration policy this afternoon, I am blown away by its depth, its breadth and at how it would so fundamentally change Americans’ future for the better.”

In his group’s recent rating of presidential candidates platforms on immigration, Beck’s group rated Thompson “good” on guest worker policies.

Now, here are some words from Fred Thompson current campaign statement on temporary worker visas:

“Caps for any category of temporary work visa would be increased as appropriate, if it could be demonstrated that there are no Americans capable and willing to do the jobs.”

Anyone with real experience in the trenches in a profession impacted in recent years by guest worker visas understands what this means: more visas on terms that benefit major employers.

Frankly, I have real problems with stuff like what NumbersUSA did–when there was already other analysis out there. It is hard to predict what someone might actually do with the presidency once they have it. However, campaign statements are an especially poor indicator of future performance. That is why with my own analysis, I focused on criteria like actual voting records of the candidates themselves, the recipients of their donations and the voting records of their congressional endorsers.

Similarly, we get Jim Gilchrist endorsing Huckabee.

Now, in that case, at least Huckabee has a serious shot at getting onto the GOP ticket(most likely as the VP nominee). Huckbee’s electability has been shown in recent weeks to be rising considerably.

Still, what bothers me here is this–why are restrictionists messing with candidates who have had such horrible records on immigration at all? There are other candidates here that have much better records on immigration–Paul and Tancredo both come to mind–and Paul actually has been showing considerable recent fund raising ability and has a small, but real chance at actually getting the GOP nomination.

In the Wall Street Journal today, Jeffrey Lord of Qube.tv writes that America needs President concentrated on principle, not mere data, and it worries him that Fred Barnes is touting Romney as “The Man Who Wants To Fix Washington“:

Is there a place for data? Is there value in process? Sure.But base an entire presidency on the importance of data and process over principle? Is this what Mitt Romney would do? Is this where a Romney presidency would lead? If so, conservatives have been here before.

It is not a good place to be.[That Does Not Compute |Mitt Romney has a passion for data. A great president needs a passion for principle. By Jeffrey Lord, OpinionJournal  December 12, 2007]

I’m familiar with this argument, and while his example of Abraham Lincoln sticking to his course in the face of hundreds of thousands of casualties is unfortunate, his example of Jimmy Carter as the wonkish, data-driven, know-it-all President is worrisome.(It worries me that National Review has formally endorsed Romney.)

But after eight years of George Bush, I personally would like to see a President who had a lot more time for facts.

The widely-repeated assertion by the Icelandic firm deCODE genetics that James Watson is 16% black and 9% Asian (see, for instance, the new NY Times article “DNA Pioneer’s Genome Blur Race Lines“) reminds me of one of the least understood contradictions in the conventional wisdom that Race Doesn’t Exist:

- The existence of the One-Drop Rule shows that race is an arbitrary social construct.

- Therefore, lots of white Americans must have lots of black ancestors.

But when you stop and think about it, you realize the opposite is true: that the One-Drop Rule is the reason that so few self-identified white Americans have much black ancestry. As I wrote in 2001, when racial admixture testing via DNA was in its infancy:

Among self-identified whites in Shriver’s sample, the average black admixture is only 0.7 percent. That’s the equivalent of having among your 128 great-great-great-great-great-grandparents (who lived around two centuries ago), 127 whites and one black.

It appears that 70 percent of whites have no African ancestors. Among the 30 percent who do, the black admixture is around 2.3 percent, which would be like having about three black ancestors out of those 128.

In contrast, the lack of One Drop Rule meant that Mexico’s black minority has been almost completely absorbed into the general population.

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