The thorough article from Steven Malanga about the history of non-alliance between black citizens and Hispanic immigrants is worth your attention. And not a minute too soon: Los Angeles has been suffering Mexican-on-black violence for some time, where Hispanic gangs have conspired to drive out black citizens.

There’s a lot of evidence that the whole rainbow idea was just a marketing strategy from ethnic shake-down artists like Jesse Jackson. Average black workers have always done done better economically in periods of low immigration.

Plus, it’s good to see long-time sovereignty stalwart Terry Anderson get overdue attention as the person quoted first in the piece…

Terry Anderson is angry. From his KRLA-AM radio perch in Los Angeles, the black talk-show host thunders, “I have gone on the streets and talked to people at random here in the black community, and they all ask me the same question: ‘Why are our politicians and leaders letting this happen?’ ” [...]

Black unease about immigration goes back a long way. In the 1870s, former slave Frederick Douglass warned that immigrants were displacing free blacks in the labor market. Twenty-five years later, Booker T. Washington exhorted America’s industrialists to “cast down your bucket” not among new immigrants but “among the eight million Negros . . . who have without strikes and labor wars tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities.” Blacks supported federal legislation in 1882 that restricted Chinese immigration to the United States. They favored the immigration reform acts of the 1920s, which limited European immigration, and also urged restrictions on Mexican workers: “If the million Mexicans who have entered the country have not displaced Negro workers, whom have they displaced?” asked black journalist George Schuyler in 1928.
[The Rainbow Coalition Evaporates, City Journal, Winter 2008]

I did an interview with Congressman Ron Paul for Middle American News which covered a number of topics including immigration. Here’s an excerpt:

MANews: In eleven years of publishing, we’ve found that while the immigration crisis has dominated the rhetoric of politics, the situation is worse than ever. Are there pragmatic steps that can be taken - immediately - to stem the tide of illegal aliens entering the U.S?

Rep. Ron Paul: First, we need to bring home our border patrol agents we have sent to Iraq and get them back guarding our border. I think it is absurd that we are worried more about the borders of Iraq and Syria than we are about our own. Next, we need to immediately end federal mandates compelling states to give state welfare benefits to illegals. Right now, states are required to provide free medical care, education and sometimes even food assistance to illegal immigrants, and this acts as a subsidy for illegal immigration. Free education and medical care? This is a powerful incentive to come here illegally. Why wouldn’t people bring their families here? If we cut off the subsidies, a lot of people here illegally would just leave.

MANews: Do you support the idea of ending birthright citizenship, one of the spoils of war from the invasion of illegals?

Rep. Paul: Absolutely, Peter. I have a bill in Congress right now that would do just that. [Editor's note: Paul's bill, H.J. Res. 46, introduced on 6/13/2007, states that "a person born to a mother and father, neither of whom is a citizen of the United States nor a person who owes permanent allegiance to the United States, shall not be a citizen of the United States or of any state solely by reason of U.S. birth."]

The entire interview can be found here.

James Bowman, who has written an entire book about honor,writes about McCain’s peculiar sense of honor:

An essential element of honor has always been loyalty, and loyalty has never been Senator McCain’s strongest suit. Rather, he has always been proud of being a “maverick” — a man who likes to be thought of as one whose friends and comrades are less important to him than his own exquisite conscience. To be sure, we also honor those whose independence of mind makes them less than reliable party men — if we didn’t, there would be no reason for the senator to make such a point of demonstrating such independence — but it is the honor of the senator rather than his country which is thus enhanced.

Moreover, the media and popular culture routinely exaggerate the extent to which the “whistle-blower” mentality may be expected to trump the honorable one in public life. As a result, Senator McCain has made quite a habit of appealing to higher considerations than mere party, and on every such occasion he has thereby characterized his fellow Republicans as, to say the least, less morally sensitive and clued-in than his good self. Such moral preening and posturing has doubtless played a big part in making him so popular among Democrats and Independents and therefore in making him the front-runner for the nomination at the time of writing. It’s his form of “triangulation,” just as “compassionate conservatism” was President Bush’s in 2000.[JamesBowman.net, January 22, 2008]

Anthropologist Peter Frost has been writing on his Evo and Proud blog about the implications of last month’s big paper by Cochran, Harpending, Hawks, Moyzis, and Wang on the recent acceleration in the rate of human evolution. Frost’s topics include understanding just how different human races really are:

The rising curve

Thoughts on the EEA

The 99.9% truism

The 85% truism

Why I have no answer:

In my last two posts, I argued against two widespread truisms:

1. The human genome is 99.9% the same in all people.

2. If we look at the 0.1% that does vary, 85% of this variation exists only between individuals and not between populations.

Both truisms are at best superficially true. They don’t mean what many seem to think they mean. Moreover, they’ve been known to be misleading for some time; in the case of truism #1, from the moment it was first presented.

So Mr. Smarty Pants, how much do genes really differ within our species? And how much of this difference clusters into recognizable populations?

Informationweek published a good series of articles on the debate about IT worker shortages. Dr. Ron Hira’s article “No, The Tech Skills Shortage Doesn’t Exist” is particularly good. Overall the arguments on both sides are debated skillfully, except for one moronic statement by Chris Murphy:

But our recent survey found something surprising: Business technology managers and staffers hold very similar views on whether there’s a shortage. About two-thirds of both groups see some signs of a shortage.

I almost was willing to give Murphy the benefit of the doubt because he included “staffers” with managers, which at first blush seems to balance the survey out. The problem is that the staffers are just a bunch of HR toadies. How’s that for a scientific survey?

The most prevalent view–by 45% of managers and 40% of staff–is that there’s a shortage only in certain IT specialties and some geographies. Another quarter of staffers and 29% of managers see a shortage in many IT areas, according to our survey of 893 managers and 270 staffers involved in the IT hiring process.