According to the New York Times, Hispanics feel victimized by American citizens who insist that our immigration laws be obeyed. Curiously, the Times’ reporting does not mention that Mexico is quite strict about its borders, laws and sovereignty, yet Americans are condemned for similar standards.

The upshot is that Hispanics are getting naturalized (when possible) in order to vote for open borders for members of their tribe. Nice.

Hispanics regard voting this year as a strategy of self-defense, said Sergio Bendixen, a pollster based in Miami. For many of them, Mr. Bendixen said, “the immigration debate has not been about immigration policy; it has been about whether Hispanics belong in America.”

Hispanics “feel they need to vote to show they are a group that cannot be abused or discriminated against,” said Mr. Bendixen, who surveys Hispanics for the Clinton campaign. [...]

“The hard-line rhetoric on immigration is turning off all Latinos,” said Lionel Sosa, a Republican advertising executive in San Antonio who handled Hispanic outreach in the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan and both President Bushes. “When people talk about building a wall and sending those Mexicans back, it comes off as anti-Latino. We say: ‘You’re talking about my family, and I don’t like it.’ ”
[Issues Start Rush to Citizenship by Hispanics, New York Times, Feb 2, 2008]

If citizens do assume that non-English-speaking Hispanics are illegal aliens, why is that unreasonable? The same newspaper reported that most recent “immigrants” from Mexico are indeed illegal (Record Immigration Is Changing the Face of New York’s Neighborhoods, Jan 24, 2005).

Jeffrey Passel, a demographer with the Pew Hispanic Center who has studied the issue, said that nationally, 80 to 85 percent of all Mexican immigration since 1990 was undocumented, while among other immigrant groups, a great majority had entered legally.

“Any place that’s getting a lot of new immigration from Mexico, virtually all of it is undocumented,” Mr. Passel said, “and that certainly includes New York.”

There are many persons from all sorts of ethnic backgrounds, including European, who are border jumpers and have disrespected America’s law and sovereignty. However, as the chart shows, the great majority of illegal aliens in this country are Hispanic, particularly Mexican.

If legal Hispanics want respect and acceptance in America, they should support tough immigration enforcement. Otherwise, citizens will continue to reasonably assume that any foreign-appearing Hispanic — Spanish speaking, with Mexican flags everywhere — is likely a lawbreaking illegal alien. It’s a statistical fact.

To call an observation a “conspiracy theory” is widely treated as an argument-winning move. Yet, which of the major historical events of the 20th Century did not have at least some aspect of conspiracy about them?

Start with the event that set in motion the main currents of the century, the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. This was the result of a conspiracy right out of an Oliver Stone movie: Elements high up in the Serbian government and military, organized in a secret paramilitary society with the comic book name Black Hand, infiltrated nine assassins and their weapons into Sarajevo and had them sit around for a month waiting for the Archduke to show up so they could ambush him. (They proved incompetent and all missed, but then the Austrians proved incompetent too and made a wrong turn and then stalled the Archduke’s car right in front of the despondent Princip.)

Next, the Bolshevik Revolution. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and the rest of the Bolshie boys were classic cafe conspirators who got lucky. Lenin’s deal with the German high command to be transported from Switzerland to the Finland Station in order to undermine Germany’s Russian enemy is straight out of the conspiracy nut’s textbook.

The Depression, however, is the most striking exception to this tendency of major 20th Century events to in some way partake of the conspiratorial. It just sort of happened.

What about the rise of Hitler? You might call the political maneuverings by the conservative Weimar powerbrokers who gave Hitler the Chancellorship in January 1933 a conspiracy, although that’s stretching the term. Hitler’s manner of government — midnight meetings to plan great crimes with a few henchmen where no notes were taken (a particularly un-German way of running a government)–was that of a conspirator rather than a national leader.

Japan’s path to Pearl Harbor was laid down in the 1920s and 1930s by conspiracies of Army officers who assassinated all the moderates in the Japanese government.

On a strategic level, the Cold War was not particularly conspiratorial–it naturally grew out of the radically different interests of the two major victors of WWII. But–probably fortunately–both sides preferred to wage it largely by conspiratorial means rather than by tank battle in the Fulda Gap.

According to Paul Johnson’s Modern Times,

“Eisenhower’s chief fear, in the tense atmosphere engendered by the Cold War, was that the government would fall into the grip of a combination of bellicose senators, over-eager brass-hats and greedy arms-suppliers — what he termed the ‘military-industrial complex.’” [p. 464]

Eisenhower preferred to fight the Cold War using cheaper means — building a nuclear deterrent and using CIA covert operations, as in Guatemala and Iran.

Finally, the fall of the Soviet Empire doesn’t seem terribly conspiratorial at this point, but the history hasn’t all been written. I’d be particularly interested in what promises, if any, were made by the American government to Saudi Arabia in 1985 to persuade the Saudis to pump so much oil that the world price plummeted and the Soviet Union, a major oil exporter, went broke.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that most (or any) of the popular conspiracy theories are true. Most are obviously pretty stupid.

What it does show is that, like with predictions, people are easily bored and depressed by true conspiracy theories. For example, the fact that WWI, the catastrophe of catastrophes, was set in motion by a classic large-scale conspiracy is of almost no interest to anybody–I was only vaguely aware of that fact myself until I looked up the history tonight

NumbersUSA’s Roy Beck, in a powerfully written Action Alert to his e-army yesterday, makes the interesting point that, according to last Sunday’s Washington Post/ ABC poll, when likely Republican voters were asked which candidate, “regardless of who you may support,” did they “trust most to handle immigration issues,” 47% said McCain, 22% Romney, 10% Huckabee, 5% Paul.

This naturally drives Roy crazy. The heroic band of immigration patriots inside the belly of the Beltway can’t stand arch-amnestiac McCain (nor can Beltwayites who agree him on the issue, it seems). And not only are the other GOP candidates better on immigration, but Huckabee and Paul have actually signed NumbersUSA’s anti-amnesty pledge - in the case of Paul, sincerely.

(NumbersUSA doesn’t post its Action Alerts - you have to sign up for them - but you can read this one on Larry Auster’s View From The Right here.)

We’ve already noted this phenomenon of what Roy disgustedly describes as “political illiteracy among Republican voters” on immigration as it relates to McCain’s record in Iowa and South Carolina.

Exactly the same thing happened in Florida. A remarkable 16% of GOP voters told the New York Times exit pollsters that immigration was their top issue, making it the third-highest behind “Terrorism” (21%) and the economy (45%). (Immigration, of course, to a considerable extent is an economic issue). McCain got a quarter of these immigration patriots. (Paul got a disgraceful 3%).

Even more striking, a remarkable 45% of Florida GOP voters stoutly told the NYT exit pollers that illegal alien should be “deported to the country they came from”. (The option of enforcement through attrition was apparently not offered). And McCain got 26% of them. (Paul got 4%).

Today, Rasmussen Reports shows immigration and the economy as as the top (!) issues in California, both named by a remarkable 32% of the overall electorate. Presumably, it’s even hotter among GOP voters. But as I write this, it’s far from clear that McCain’s opponents have succeeed in getting the California electorate to make the connection between immigration and McCain’s appalling record.

Nevertheless, as a battered veteran of the Second Great War For Patriotic Immigration Reform, I take a more cheerful view of this situation than Roy. (Of course, I don’t live inside the Beltway).

I remember years when pollsters never asked about immigration at all. (They would explain to us that their politician clients didn’t want to know the answer.) Now, apparently, the issue is irrepressible.

Rasmussen reports that, as of January 23-24, immigration was the top issue for a heathy 8% of the overall national electorate (”Economy” got 40%, Iraq 13%. Abortion, in contrast, was nowhere.)

Unmistakeably, immigration is now the rock beneath the water of American politics. If McCain wins and Ron Paul runs as a third party candidate - and I’d guess he will - it could sink the GOP in 2008.

And even if Paul doesn’t take it up - I’d guess he may continue to fumble it, alas - I remain comfortable with my prediction in Alien Nation (p.199-201): the immigration issue will ultimately break the current party system.

Can’t happen a moment too soon.

James Taranto made a mistake recently when he linked to a San Francisco Chronicle story about John McCain calling his North Vietnamese Communist captors “gooks.”

He writes

This was sent to us by a reader who had seen it linked yesterday on the Drudge Report, but what we failed to notice is that it was published in February 2000, during McCain’s previous run for the presidency. We wrote about it as if it were news, and we very much regret the error.

Of course, James Kirchick, who dug up dusty old Ron Paul letters from the late twentieth century, won’t be apologizing any time soon. I wrote about the double standard regarding Ron Paul and John McCain here. See also John McCain - Licensed to Hate, from the year 2000.

When McCain referred to his Vietnamese captors as “gooks” months ago, not one journalist objected, and few reported it. His campaign last week said he will discontinue using the term. When he belittled the teenager, according to U.S. News and World Report, “one reporter just begged McCain to shut up and protect himself.” [ Honest John, on the Loose, September 19, 1999] Journalists on board sometimes seem more like campaign aides.

McCain’s bus may be the most celebrated since Ken Kesey’s psychedelic bus crisscrossed the U.S. in the days of Barry Goldwater’s campaign. The LSD-ingesting Merry Pranksters on Kesey’s bus sought to create their own magical reality. The assumably sober journalists on McCain’s bus are supposed to find their way to objective reality. [John McCain and the Media: a Buss-Fest or a Bust? by Jeff Cohen, LA Times, February 24, 2000]

Cohen felt that the media rolling over for McCain, and not harrassing him about every remark that could be interpreted as racist, (the way they always do with Pat Buchanan, for example) had ” killed the myth of the liberal news media.” He’s a left-wing media critic. But by the same token, it could just as easily be said to have killed the myth that McCain was a conservative.

The New York Times piece referenced by Gene Healy in Liberty, (quoted below) in which John McCain said that his childhood idol was Napoleon, is this one: P.O.W. to Power Broker, A Chapter Most Telling, By Nicholas D. Kristof, February 27, 2000. It’s certainly worth reading.

The late ecologist Garrett Hardin opined that “it takes five years to change your mind about anything important,” and the process of that change is always interesting to observe and examine.

In the article, Immigration Reversals (from The American Spectator, Dec07/Jan08), City Journal editor-at-large Myron Magnet describes how he evolved from an uncritical supporter of massive immigration to a person who recognizes the current crises in the rule of law, assimilation and social costs caused by open borders.

In short, the overwhelming mountain of evidence appearing in his own magazine (and now republished in a book) eventually persuaded him to reverse his views. He doesn’t specify the number of years it took to accomplish the change, but he does remark at the outset, “I’m embarrassed it took me so long to grasp the phoniness of the charge that it’s “anti-immigration” to oppose current U.S. immigration policy.”

Better late than never! Welcome to the company of immigration realists.

But weren’t my grandparents’ generation of immigrants also unskilled? In fact, the National Research Council reports, they were slightly more skilled than the native population, and the rapidly urbanizing U.S. economy of that time desperately needed all the tailors, stonecutters, retail clerks, and so on, arriving by the shipload. Unlike today’s knowledge-based economy, it also needed plenty of unskilled labor to build its new cities and work its unmechanized and still inefficient farms. In addition, [Steven] Malanga argues, those earlier immigrants brought with them a rich store of social capital: strong families, self-reliance, entrepreneurialism, a belief in education for their children, optimism about the future and belief in their new land rather than fatalism and cynicism. That’s why their children were just as likely to end up lawyers, engineers, or accountants as the children of native-born Americans. By contrast, the American-born children of Mexican immigrants, two and a half times likelier to drop out of high school than the average American-born kid, earn less than the national average as adults.