When blogging about the Cato Institute’s book forum on Wall Street Journal editor Jason Riley’s Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders , James Fulford noted that the commentator was Michael Barone and the moderator was Dan Griswold, so we shouldn’t expect spirited debate.

I wouldn’t really call it “debate,” but Riley was so off the charts that he even gave Michael Barone pause.

Riley’s speech was supposed to demolish the various distorted arguments used by us restrictionists.[Watch or listen here.] I am not familiar with the statistics he used, but I’ll take them at face value for the sake of argument.

He began with crime. He said that within every ethnic group, the crime rate among immigrants is lower than native born. Of course this just shows that the children of immigrants are not assimilating—or assimilating downward. The important point is that the ethnic groups that are immigrating to this country—namely Hispanics–whether legal, illegal, or native born are committing more crimes than the (still) majority white population. Therefore, any increase in Hispanics increases crime.

Riley [Email him.] then goes to dismissing the welfare arguments. He says that since illegal immigration has skyrocketed in the mid 1990s, overall welfare rates have gone down. Of course this confuses correlation with causation. Welfare Reform probably had something to do with the drop. When you compare the rates of Hispanics and immigrants who are eligible for welfare, they both have much higher rates than the rest of the population. Moreover, the average immigrant household costs taxpayers $20,000 in benefits other than means tested aid. Then there was Michael Barone’s familiar comparison  of Hispanics to various European ethnic groups’ dysfunctions in the past. Presumably this proves that all objections to Hispanics are unfounded.

In the Q&A, I brought up the inconvenient fact that all the groups they talked about were European, while both Blacks and Native Americans have yet to assimilate. Both Barone and Riley responded by bringing up that African immigrants are doing much better than blacks. What they did not mention is that the population of Africans is still quite small and self selective,  and that like Hispanics the second generation is assimilating downwards.

By comparison to Riley, even Michael Barone seemed relatively sane. He acknowledged that it is hard to predict immigration flows, and that the crafters of the 1965 Act were wrong when they said that immigration levels would not affected by the new law. He expressed some sympathy for reforming prioritization for legal immigration away from family reunification and towards a skill based system.

He admitted that, as a whole, the influx of Hispanics is bad for the GOP, but said it was a fait accompli that the GOP must adapt to. Unlike Riley who called for completely open borders, Barone thought that we should make our decisions based on citizenship and assimilation rather than just having a willing employer.

Barone is still on the other side from us, but it actually seems like he has been thinking about this issue. The same cannot be said of Jason Riley, who seems incapable of doing anything besides regurgitating WSJ editorials.

Allan Wall is scheduled to be interviewed by Chuck Wilder on “George Putnam’s Talk Back” show (George Putnam has been off the air lately due to health problems, though he is doing better). The interview is scheduled for 1:05 p.m Pacific Time, Wednesday June 18th, or 4:05 Eastern, i.e. in a little over an hour from…now.

You can listen live here and it’s repeated each night at 8 p.m. Pacific Time.

The New York Times runs a comically biased “article” about Michelle Obama’s all-around wonderfulness, but if you make it to the third page carefully, you’ll find out a few things:

By 2001, Mrs. Obama, married for nine years and the mother of two daughters, had taken a job as vice president of community affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center. She soon discovered just how acrimonious those affairs were.

Hospital brass had gathered to break ground for a children’s wing when African-American protesters broke in with bullhorns, drowning out the proceedings with demands that the hospital award more contracts to minority firms.

The executives froze. Mrs. Obama strolled over and offered to meet later, if only the protestors would pipe down. She revised the contracting system, sending so much business to firms owned by women and other minorities that the hospital won awards.[Michelle Obama Looks For A New Introduction, By Michael Powell And Jodi Kantor , June 18, 2008 ]

Which awards? Diversity Racket Victim of the Year? How many of these non-lowest bid contracts went to potential political allies of her husband? The Obamas were using other people’s money to build their power base.

She also altered the hospital’s research agenda. When the human papillomavirus vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer, became available, researchers proposed approaching local school principals about enlisting black teenage girls as research subjects.

Mrs. Obama stopped that. The prospect of white doctors performing a trial with black teenage girls summoned the specter of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the mid-20th century, when white doctors let hundreds of black men go untreated to study the disease.

So, rather than educate blacks about why they should help with a medical study that had the potential to help all of humanity, Mrs. Obama, who has zero qualification in any scientific field, stopped medical research from taking place. Swell …

A reader writes:

“Wasn’t organizing bullhorn-wielding protestors part of Barack Obama’s job description as an ACORN-Alinskyite “organizer”? Heck, she might of known the protestors from cocktails at the Ayers’…”

The Obamas’ allies protest, and in return the Obamas get paid to give them other people’s money to get them to go away. It’s a perpetual motion machine. Nice work if you can get it.

Speaking of the Ayers couple, why does the hubby get all the publicity? Sexism? After all, the wife, Bernardine Dohrn, told 400 people at a Weatherman convention in 1969, in reference to the Manson Family murders of Sharon Tate and others:

“Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in their bellies. Wild!”

California is the ideal place to experiment with a fundamental redefinition of society’s foremost building block, marriage. After all, there are only 38 million people in California, Californians are famously level-headed and rational, and Californians don’t have any influence over the media. So, if it turns out a generation from now to have been a bad idea, no harm done!

My concern, since 2001, is that more gay men would be interested in getting married (i.e., in a theatrical ceremony) than in being married (i.e., sexual monogamy). We’re talking about some awfully flamboyant folks: Gay Pride parades could more honestly be renamed Gay Narcissism parades.

So that the long term danger from gay marriage would likely be to make more straight guys reluctant to go through the already punitive process of getting married. Being the groom in a wedding ceremony is a pretty uncomfortable thing already, but at least it’s a guy thing, not a gay thing. As John Derbyshire quoted me in 2003:

On the other hand, there’s a process of gay ghettoization that goes on when straight men recognize that some institution is disproportionately attractive to male homosexuals. Broadway, for example, has gone from a popular national institution to a largely gay ghetto in recent decades. It’s hard to get a serious discussion going of this since nobody wants to be accused of being homophobic, but I see it everywhere. I don’t think marriages will be popular enough among gays to start this process, but I worry that weddings will be. It wouldn’t take much to get the average young man to turn even more against participating in an arduous process that seems alien and hostile to him already. If some of the most enthusiastic participants become gays, then his aversion will grow even more.

The subheadline in the LA Times today reveals a campaign by gay leaders (and, no doubt, their allies in the media) to keep the ceremonies toned down until after the November California initiative vote:

“Flamboyant images from same-sex ceremonies, activists say, could be used by opponents to convince California votes that gays and lesbians shouldn’t have the right to marry.”