Ephraim Schwartz writes at Infoworld (quoting the major presidential candidates):

Hillary Clinton
“I also want to reaffirm my commitment to the H-1B visa program and to increase the current cap. Foreign skilled workers contribute greatly to our technological development. That is well understood in Silicon Valley.”

John McCain
“I will continue to support H-1B visas, but, I’m telling you, the American people’s priority is, either rightly or wrongly, and we live in a democracy, is that we secure the borders first.”

Barack Obama
“We can do better than that and go a long way toward meeting industry’s need for skilled workers with Americans. Until we have achieved that, I will support a temporary increase in the H-1B visa program as a stopgap measure until we can reform our immigration system comprehensively.”

In 2004, Ralph Nader was quoted by Rob Sanchez as saying:

I don’t believe in giving visas to software people from the Third World when we have got all kinds of unemployed software people here.

Allan Wall was recently interviewed on “The Heart of the Matter” by pastor/activist Ralph Ovadal of Wisconsin. You can listen to the interview by clicking here.
It’s the February 29 ,2008 edition and the Allan Wall segment starts at 56:08 . The interview mostly deals with issues discussed in the recent article “Trolling for the Dual Citizen Vote – in Mexico “.

From the Wall Street Journal:

What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?

Finland’s teens score extraordinarily high on an international test. American educators are trying to figure out why.

High-school students here rarely get more than a half-hour of homework a night. They have no school uniforms, no honor societies, no valedictorians, no tardy bells and no classes for the gifted. There is little standardized testing, few parents agonize over college and kids don’t start school until age 7.

Yet by one international measure, Finnish teenagers are among the smartest in the world. They earned some of the top scores by 15-year-old students who were tested in 57 countries. American teens finished among the world’s C students even as U.S. educators piled on more homework, standards and rules. Finnish youth, like their U.S. counterparts, also waste hours online. They dye their hair, love sarcasm and listen to rap and heavy metal. But by ninth grade they’re way ahead in math, science and reading — on track to keeping Finns among the world’s most productive workers.

Gosh, I wonder what the reason could be. I’m totally baffled. It’s not like Minnesota kids usually score near the top of the NAEP tests in America.

Oh, wait, they do…

I wrote in VDARE.com last year:

In 2005, the Washington Post sent two reporters to Finland for several weeks to find out why Finland has “the world’s best educational system, produces such talented musicians and architects, and has more cell phones per capita than Japan and America.”

Sitting here in my pajamas in California, I could have saved the Washington Post all the expense. The most important reason why Finland is so Finlandy is because it is full of Finns.

According to the CIA World Factbook, the population is 93.4 percent Finnish. The biggest minority group at 5.7 percent is … Swedes. Then come Russians at 0.4 percent and Estonians at 0.2 percent. Roma (Gypsies) make up 0.2 percent and the Sami (Laplanders) are 0.1 percent.

Finland maintains its borders and thus it can maintain a governmental and social system well suited to its unique population.

Of course, all these American educators will go over to Finland for a look-see and take home the exact wrong message to their schools in the ‘hood: We need less discipline!

In the NYT Magazine, Gershom Gorenberg has an article entitled “How Do You Prove You’re a Jew” that echoes what I’ve been saying about the definition of what a racial group is for years:

Zvi Zohar, a professor of law and Jewish studies at Bar-Ilan University, told me that in Judaism’s classical view of itself, Jews are best understood as a “large extended family” that accepted a covenant with God. Those who didn’t practice the faith remained part of the family, even if traditionally they were regarded as black sheep. Converts were adopted members of the clan.

The intensity of anti-Mormon feeling displayed during the defeat of Mitt Romney must have come as a shock to Mormons. They put up the most competent-looking Presidential candidate, and he gets kicked around. In a very recent poll, 32% said they wouldn’t vote for a Mormon for President, compared to only 4% who wouldn’t vote for a black.

That must send a wake-up call to Mormons. For generations, they’ve assumed that because they have a weird religion, they will have to be the most normal of Americans. But now, being a normal American is considered weird.

It will be interesting to see how Mormons respond.

The next test of the strength of anti-Mormonism in the U.S. will come in the “American Idol” voting, because a 17-year-old Hispanic Mormon kid from Utah named David Archuleta appears to be more talented than anybody else. Here’s a video of his rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” in which he somehow turns the most hackneyed song in the world, the quasi-national anthem of Brussels Eurocrats, into a thing of beauty. The kid won “Star Search” at age 12 and appears to be a professional singer, so it’s kind of like a 17-year-old Stevie Wonder competing against a bunch of amateurs (“Hey, Little Stevie, weren’t you in all those Beach Party movies with Annette Funicello four years ago?” “Shhhhh.”)

But the anti-Mormon Evangelical demographic makes up a big chunk of the phone-in voters on “American Idol,” so it will be interesting to see if anybody can upset Archuleta.

By the way, it’s fun to compare Archuleta’s slight reworking of Lennon’s limited melody to contestant Jason Yeager’s attempt to make up his own melody for Henry Mancini’s exquisite “Moon River.” Check out the video beginning 45 seconds in, when Yeager gets a proud smile on his face as he unleashes on humanity the new tune that he’s dreamed up for the line “Two drifters off to see the world.”

Take that, Henry Mancini, I totally pwned you! Next, I’ll do a couple of songs I like to call “The Purple Panther” and “Baby Hippopotamus Walk.”

Yeager looks like Val Kilmer doing an American Idol parody on Saturday Night Live.

Also, I didn’t find much on Archuleta’s ethnic background, but if I had to guess, I would bet he’s descended on his father’s side from settlers who entered what’s now the American Southwest under the King of Spain’s rule many centuries ago. There’s a county in Colorado named “Archuleta” down on the border with New Mexico, and most of the Archuletas in genealogical databases are from that general area.