Two scholars affiliated with the Russell Sage Foundation have re-examined some earlier data to reach a familiar conclusion about the failure of Mexican immigrants to assimilate fully, although the title reveals an agenda: “Generations of Exclusion”.

Second-, third- and fourth-generation Mexican Americans speak English fluently, and most prefer American music. They are increasingly Protestant, and some may even vote for a Republican candidate.

However, many Mexican Americans in these later generations do not graduate from college, and they continue to live in majority Hispanic neighborhoods. Most marry other Hispanics and think of themselves as “Mexican” or “Mexican American.”

Such are the findings from the most comprehensive sociological report ever produced on the integration of Mexican Americans. The UCLA study, released today in a Russell Sage Foundation book titled “Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race,” concludes that, unlike the descendants of European immigrants to the United States, Mexican Americans have not fully integrated by the third and fourth generation. The research spans a period of nearly 40 years.

The study’s authors, UCLA sociologists Edward E. Telles and Vilma Ortiz, examined various markers of integration among Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas, including educational attainment, economic advancement, English and Spanish proficiency, residential integration, intermarriage, ethnic identity and political involvement.
[Mexican American Integration Slow, Education Stalled, Study Finds, Imperial Valley News, March 20, 2008]

In 2004, Prof Sam Huntington cited evidence in The Hispanic Challenge (in the journal Foreign Policy) showing that the Mexican dislike of education lasts several generations at least. One of the most telling indicators is that only 9.6 percent of fourth-generation Mexican-Americans have a post-high school degree, versus 45.1 percent of Americans as a whole.

It’s good to have even more proof that Mexican immigration is a total train wreck. However, the scholars believe the failure to succeed is America’s fault rather than the famously education-averse Mexican culture. They conclude that taxpayers should contribute mass quantities of cash for new programs that will somehow succeed when generations of American living have not.

Telles and Ortiz believe that a “Marshall Plan” that invests heavily in public school education will address the issues that disadvantage many Mexican American students.

“For Mexican Americans, the payoff can only come by giving them the same quality and quantity of education as whites receive,” they said. “The problem is not the unwillingness of Mexican Americans to adopt Americans values and culture but the failure of societal institutions, particularly public schools, to successfully integrate them as they did the descendants of European immigrants.”

Of course, other immigrant groups, the ones more inclined to pursue progress, have done just fine in the same system.

Obama had to know all along that his Rev. Wright was a potential millstone around his neck. Last fall, though, fate handed him a potential solution when Don Imus made a vulgar off-hand comment on the radio about black lady basketball players. This set off one of our routine national moral panics over race where the usual suspects rushed to call for the white guy’s head.

My vague recollection is that Obama was a little slow off the mark to demand Imus’s firing, but with Jesse Jackson taking the lead, Obama, always worried about being black enough, soon fell into line and denounced Imus. And Imus got fired. (But now he’s back on the air on a different network, because it was all pretty stupid).

What Obama should have done with the silly Imus brouhaha was to take a stand for Imus in order to pre-emptively laugh off the Wright controversy before it (inevitably) started. Obama should have said, “Imus apologized, so let’s give it a rest. Come on, lots of people say something outrageous now and then. Hey, at my church, we’d have to fire our pastor about once a month — he’s alway saying something over the top to get a reaction out of the congregation. Yeah, Rev. Wright’s kind of a shock jock of the pulpit. So, let’s not get so huffy about every little thing somebody says.”

Would this have worked?

Maybe. It certainly would have reframed Rev. Wright as a less serious figure, while letting Obama look even-handed and even-tempered.

But there would have been problems:

• It would have been out of sync with the High Pompousness of the rest of the Obama’s campaign.
• Obama was trailing Hillary among blacks at that point, and without a majority of blacks, he had no chance in the primaries, so breaking ranks with Jesse and Co. would have been dangerous.
• Wright might have gone ballistic. Keep in mind that Wright is not necessarily on Obama’s side. He just might prefer to go down in history as the Willie Horton of 2008. It’s not implausible that he’s been passively-aggressively sabotaging Obama for some time — his November 2007 lifetime achievement award for Farrakhan was clearly a bid for attention at Obama’s expense. Who knows what damage Wright could do to Obama if his amour propre was seriously offended? Perhaps he taped a few private conversations with Obama?

So, the Obama-Axelrod calculation that it was best to rely on media political correctness to bulldoze over their Rev. Wright problem may well still be proven correct.

After several years as a litigator in New York City, I thought I’d encountered every obscure language that plaintiffs spoke — and demanded translations of to press their lawsuits.

One was an African language called either “Konobo” or “Kron Konobo” (phoenetic, Google doesn’t bring up anything for “Kron Konobo”)[VDARE.com Note: That's Krahn Konobo, one of the indigenous languages of Liberia.] that sent my client scurrying to the U.N. to find a translator. Amazingly, we found one, although the plaintiff’s daughter complained halfway through a deposition that the translator spoke the eastern version, while her mother spoke a western version. I was later told that this language had no written version. Oy vey, as they say.

Here’s one I missed. An Alexandria, Va. judge recently denied a rape defendant’s motion for a re-translation of his entire court transcript (something taxpayers would foot the bill for) on grounds that the first court-appointed translator of Amharic screwed it up. Amharic? Turns out, it’s a Semitic language spoken in Ethiopia.

All of which might make for a nice little geo-linguistics lesson, if we can get past the fact that there’s an Ethiopian running around who shouldn’t be here to begin with, either as an (alleged) rapist or confounder of a legal system that has enough trouble operating under one language.

Funny, I can’t get past that.

“I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother … a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street…” – Barack Obama, 3/18/08.

As part of my ongoing plot to divert the course of history and elect Hillary and/or McCain President by sitting here in my underwear typing into my blog passages from Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s bestselling 1995 autobiography, here’s an excerpt from pp. 269-271, discussing his Chicago years in his mid-20s, in which Obama expresses the same supposed anti-black “racism” which he recently attributed to his 85-year-old grandma.

“That night, well past midnight, a car pulls up in front of my apartment building, carrying a troop of teenage boys and a set of stereo speakers so loud that the floor of my apartment begins to shake. I’ve learned to ignore such disturbances — where else do they have to go? I say to myself. But on this particular evening I have someone staying over …

“‘Listen, people, are trying to sleep around here. Why don’t y’all take it someplace else?’

“The four boys inside say nothing, don’t even move. The wind wipes away my drowsiness, and I feel suddenly exposed, standing in a pair of shorts on the sidewalk in the middle of the night…. One of them could be Kyle. One of them could be Roy. One of them could be Johnnie.”

Kyle, Roy, and Johnnie are all black male characters in Dreams from My Father — in other words, the fellas in the car are black.

The chapter ends:

“The engine starts, and the car screeches away. I turn back toward my apartment knowing that I’ve been both stupid and lucky, knowing that I am afraid after all.”

Shocking, isn’t it?

To make this comprehensible, I left out hundreds of intervening words of vintage Obama posturing about what a bad-ass he had been when he was the same age and philosophizing about the meaning of it all. Let me quote one sentence to show you why so few people ever finish reading Dreams from My Father:

“As I stand there, I find myself thinking that somewhere down the line both guilt and empathy speak to our own buried sense that an order of some sort is required, not the social order that exists, necessarily, but something more fundamental and more demanding; a sense, further, that one has a stake in this order, a wish that, no matter how fluid this order sometimes appears, it will not drain out of the universe.”

I think this means Obama is admitting to himself that he’s just realized he’s now on the side of the cops rather than on the side of the criminals.
But getting his point across is not the point of most of Sen. Obama’s verbal efforts. (In this respect, Obama is the exact opposite of Rev. Dr. God Damn America, who is a master at distilling his meaning down to an agitating phrase, such as “U.S. of K.K.K.”) The candidate’s goal is more typically to induce in the reader or listener a trance-like state of admiration of Obama’s thoughtfulness. He’s expert at implanting the idea, “Surely, such an intelligent person must agree with me. All we need to do to end these wearying partisan disputes is to turn power over to a reasonable man, a man much like, say, Barack Obama!”

The highly motivated folks at Red China, Inc. are working overtime to get their signage and menus comprehensible for English speakers for the upcoming summer Olympics. Hilarity ensues…

For years, badly translated signs have had the Englishman abroad in stitches. But for tourism officials in Beijing, a city preparing for the arrival of millions of visitors for the Olympic Games in August, the problem is far from funny. [...]

Restaurateurs have been given a list of the proper English names for the most commonly mistranslated items, including “virgin chicken” for a young chicken dish, “steamed crap” instead of crab, and “burnt lion’s head” describing Chinese pork meatballs.

“These translations either scare or embarrass foreign customers and may cause misunderstanding on China’s diet habits,” the state news agency said.

Some of the signs have been celebrated on websites and books, including one sign that greets Western visitors to a café with the words: “Welcome big nose friends” and another for the Tibetan “Reception Centre for the Unorganised Tourists”.

English speakers in Beijing have been invited to visit “Racist Park” - more accurately translated as the Park of Ethnic Minorities - and warned to take care on wet roads as “the slippery are very crafty”.
[Signs of panic over 'Chinglish' in Beijing, Telegraph UK, March 19, 2008]

In the same vein, check out a whole website dedicated to mostly Japanese wreckage of the English language: Engrish.com.