Some years ago, Peter Brimelow applauded

the naive, almost childlike honesty which keeps the Minneapolis Star-Tribune a wonderful source of stories on the disastrous impact of recent immigration on its formerly highly functional region. News more experienced publications automatically repress keeps surfacing.

This tradition lives on. This weekend a couple of bold local newspapers have picked up a Star-Tribune story which, when carefully read, is extremely damaging to the Somalis – as I remarked last week, probably the most dysfunctional human import since the Hmong.

When job and faith conflict By Chris Serres The Morning Call June 21 2008 is a reprint of a slightly longer account published earlier in the week as on the job, their way – Star-Tribune June 15 2008.

Essentially, the story is that the rigid adherence by the Somalis to flamboyant and obtrusive Islamic customs is causing problems:

…nearly two decades after a violent civil war brought thousands of Somali refugees to the Twin Cities, their integration in the U.S. workplace is becoming more contentious.

Their insistence on maintaining Muslim traditions, including prayer times and modest clothing, have led to firings at several manufacturers across the state and a sharp increase in religious discrimination complaints.

With total predictability considering the IQ profile of their country of origin (and Richard Lynn’s new book), Somalis are drifting to the bottom of the socio-economic structure:

a disproportionate percentage of recent Somali immigrants have taken lower-level assembly line jobs where accommodations for religious practices are seen as an impediment to productivity.

Twenty-three percent of Somali workers in Minnesota work in manufacturing jobs, well above the 16 percent for the population as a whole, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. And one-quarter of Somalis in the state over the age of 25 have less than a ninth-grade education, a rate five times higher than the overall population…

However, the Somalis have quickly learned the minority grievance game. Serres quotes two sources saying

”The Somali community is highly assertive and politically engaged. It’s part of who they are as a people.”

and

”You would think this would have been more of an issue in 1993 or 1994,” when Somalis started arriving in the Twin Cities in large numbers…’But now, Somalis and employers have gotten to know each other, and the situation is only getting worse.”

Quite correctly, Serres looked for and found a source willing to deny any problems despite all the reports:

the notion that Somalis are somehow predisposed to resist authority strikes Mary Marsden, owner of Marsden Building Maintenance, a janitorial firm in St. Paul, as absurd.

About 300 of Marsden’s 1,600 employees in the Twin Cities are immigrants from East Africa nations such as Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya. Yet after more than two decades of employing Somalis, Marsden can count the number of disputes on one hand.

On a few occasions, Somali male workers complained about having to take orders from female managers. And once, as violence in Somalia intensified, a fight broke out on a job site between members of separate warring clans.

A gang-mastering business built on cheap foreign labor could hardly say anything else.

Greater integrity is shown by Abdi Sheikhosman, “Professor of Islamic law” at the University of Minnesota.

Another key difference with Somalis is that many of them have vague hopes of returning to their country one day when the fighting stops and thus may see assimilation as less of a priority than those who intend to settle down, Sheikhosman added.

So here we are. The Refugee Industry has landed Minnesota with an untalented, highly argumentative, extremely awkward and very alien group, which considers being here a convenience and thinks America should obey its will. Wonderful.

But the Cheap Labor Lobby is happy.

Object to Mary Marsden’s irresponsible selfishness. Congratulate Chris Serres on a fine piece of journalism

Normally, I edit articles I post here down to just the good stuff, but I can’t cut a word from this New York Times Magazine essay.

The New Pariahs?

By NOAH FELDMAN

Noah Feldman, a contributing writer, teaches law at Harvard and is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

No country is wholly free of anti-immigrant prejudice, whether it is the United States, where illegal immigration was a hot-button issue in the Republican primaries, or post-apartheid South Africa, where economic migrants were recently burned to death. But in many Western European countries today, something new and insidious seems to be happening. The familiar old arguments against immigrants — that they are criminals, that their culture makes them a bad fit, that they take jobs from natives — are mutating into an anti-Islamic bias that is becoming institutionalized in the continent’s otherwise ordinary politics.

Examples abound. The Swiss People’s Party sponsors ads in which three white sheep push one black sheep off the Swiss flag — and wins 29 percent of the vote. In Belgium, the Vlaams Belang deploys a clever variation, publicly praising Jews and seeking their support against Muslims, whom it tellingly describes as “the main enemy of the moment.” Meanwhile, the Dutch politician Geert Wilders calls Islam “the ideology of a retarded culture.”

(more…)

Allan Wall was recently interviewed by Silvio Canto, Jr, on Silvio’s talk show. They discussed, among other topics, Mexico’s drug war, remittances and immigration, the Mexican economy, PEMEX and The Beatles. You can listen here .