John McCain was interviewed on Sept. 15 by the Hispanic broadcaster Jorge Ramos, and the Senator let a few cats out of the bag, like his intention of engineering a massive amnesty beginning on the first day of his Presidency. Apparently the idea that he “got” voter objections for rewarding lawbreaking foreigners doesn’t translate well into Spanish.

The dialogue below is from page three of the Univision transcript, which begins here, Alone with John McCain.

Senator, the last time we talk, you told us that it would take a year or two to secure the border, and then you said we can address the other part of it. Would that include massive legalization for millions of undocumented immigrants in this country?

I think it means that we go through a step by step process of allowing people to apply and achieve citizenship in this country, of course. But, I want to point out again; it’s a little more complicated.

It goes against the platform of your party, by the way, because they are against the legalization of millions of undocumented immigrants.

My position is very clear, and that was part of our proposal, that I took up twice. By the way, Senator Obama tried to kill it, because he proposed an amendment that would have done away with any temporary worker program. So, there is a huge difference there. So, what we need to do is take the two million according to (Michael) Chertoff, that have broken laws in our country, and deport or imprison them. They are law breakers. Other people who have come here and have been here for a period of time and are law abiding citizens and are willing to go through a certain process, of course, there are not twelve million pairs of handcuffs in America.

So, we can together, republicans and democrats, work out this issue, provide a path to citizenship, on the principle that they do not take any priority over anyone who came to this country legally, or waited legally. And, of course they should pay a fine, because they acted illegally. But, our heritage, the heritage of this country, is people who have come to this country for a better life, and as I said at the Convention, these are God’s children and it will be done in a humane and compassionate fashion.

Senator Barack Obama told us in an interview that he would present a comprehensive immigration reform to congress during the first year. Could you match that?

Sure, I would do it in the first day, but I was the one who led, I was the one who led with Senator (Ted) Kennedy, a great political risk to myself. Senator Obama tried to kill it, because he was doing what the unions wanted. The unions in America do not want a temporary worker program, so Senator Obama came to the floor and had an amendment that would have basically killed immigration reform, because it was a fragile coalition between republicans and democrats. So, don’t let Senator Obama get away with saying that he supports comprehensive reform, when he tried to kill it.

Does McCain think Sarah Palin can shield him from this level of perfidy? I don’t think that’s going to work.

Jake Jacobsen of Freedom Folks writes:

My Dad, the Legal Immigrant

Yesterday’s LA Times opinion page included a piece by Gustavo Arellano (of ¡Ask a Mexican! fame) entitled My Dad, the Illegal Immigrant.

Arellano proudly tells the story of how his father made multiple illegal border crossings from Mexico, served time for using false documents, and has failed to fully assimilate. In his words:

I’m glad that my father entered this country illegally. If he had come “the right way,” our family’s success would’ve been chalked up as just another example of immigrant can-do.

I guess that makes my dad just another example…of why Arellano’s attitude is a smack in the face to immigrants who respect this country enough to come here legally.

My dad grew up one of five children of an impoverished family in one of London’s roughest neighborhoods. He started working odd jobs at a young age, and left school at 15 to work, briefly, in a tailor’s shop. After that he was a servant for multiple members of the Astor family, working 6 to 6 1/2 days a week for a much-cherished Sunday afternoon off.

He, too, dreamed of the opportunity for a better life that America promised, so he sought a way to get here legally that was within his means. It came in the form of another job as a servant, this time with the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. He celebrated his 19th birthday on the Atlantic aboard a ship bound for New York City.

(more…)

I was mousing around with the new-to-me Google News Archive search, which pulls up historical articles, and found this item from the New York Times, December 5, 1910. It’s interesting how the immigration arguments haven’t changed, i.e. that America doesn’t really need millions of foreign workers, it lowers wages and immigrants come for the money (not to “escape tyranny”).

SAYS TIME HAS COME TO HALT IMMIGRATION; [PDF] Commission, in Forty Volume Report, Declares It No Longer Is Necessary. TENDS TO LOWER WAGES Aliens Come to Better Their Condition, Not to Escape Tyranny, and Sentiment Should Be Waived, Is Asserted.

December 6, 1910, Tuesday
Page 6, 535 words
WASHINGTON, Dec. 5. — Sentimental considerations in restricting immigration should be waived in view of the economic problems arising from adverse effects on wages and living conditions which the large number of aliens have had in recent years by their entry into basic industries, according to the final report of the Immigration Commission transmitted to-day to Congress.

Below is a screen snap of part of the page. The link at the top has the whole thing.

An article from 1892, titled Talk of Total Exclusion, noted that the Senate Immigration Committee would likely recommend a one-year moratorium. Too bad that didn’t happen (timeline). We can imagine why.

Nicholas Wade of the NYT has an article on the genetics of mental diseases and intelligence that focuses on a geneticist named David B. Goldstein. (I don’t like using initials in names because I can’t really remember them, so I have to laboriously look them up, but the “B.” in his name is necessary because there are so many mildly prominent David Goldsteins.)

The principal rationale for the $3 billion spent to decode the human genome was that it would enable the discovery of the variant genes that predispose people to common diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. A major expectation was that these variants had not been eliminated by natural selection because they harm people only later in life after their reproductive years are over, and hence that they would be common.

This idea, called the common disease/common variant hypothesis, drove major developments in biology over the last five years. Washington financed the HapMap, a catalog of common genetic variation in the human population. Companies like Affymetrix and Illumina developed powerful gene chips for scanning the human genome. Medical statisticians designed the genomewide association study, a robust methodology for discovering true disease genes and sidestepping the many false positives that have plagued the field.

But David B. Goldstein of Duke University, a leading young population geneticist known partly for his research into the genetic roots of Jewish ancestry, says the effort to nail down the genetics of most common diseases is not working. “There is absolutely no question,” he said, “that for the whole hope of personalized medicine, the news has been just about as bleak as it could be.”

Of the HapMap and other techniques developed to make sense of the human genome, Dr. Goldstein said, “Technically, it was a tour de force.” But in his view, this prodigious labor has produced just a handful of genes that account for very little of the overall genetic risk.

“After doing comprehensive studies for common diseases, we can explain only a few percent of the genetic component of most of these traits,” he said. “For schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, we get almost nothing; for Type 2 diabetes, 20 variants, but they explain only 2 to 3 percent of familial clustering, and so on.”

The reason for this disappointing outcome, in his view, is that natural selection has been far more efficient than many researchers expected at screening out disease-causing variants. The common disease/common variant idea is largely wrong. What has happened is that a multitude of rare variants lie at the root of most common diseases, being rigorously pruned away as soon as any starts to become widespread.

It takes large, expensive trials with hundreds of patients in different countries to find even common variants behind a disease. Rare variants lie beyond present reach. “It’s an astounding thing,” Dr. Goldstein said, “that we have cracked open the human genome and can look at the entire complement of common genetic variants, and what do we find? Almost nothing. That is absolutely beyond belief.”

If rare variants account for most of the genetic burden of disease, then the idea of decoding everyone’s genome to see to what diseases they are vulnerable to will not work, at least not in the form envisaged. “I don’t believe we should do more and more genomewide association studies for common diseases,” Dr. Goldstein said. Instead, he suggested, the “missing heritability” might be tracked by thoroughly studying the genome of specific patients.

This is what Greg Cochran predicted back in the 1990s would be found. Contrary to the impression you’d get from reading the newspaper (at least when the estimable Mr. Wade is on book leave), your genes didn’t evolve to kill you. They evolved to help you survive and reproduce. (Here’s the February 1999 cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, “A New Germ Theory,” on Cochran and his research partner Paul Ewald.) The Cochran-Ewald theory predicts that germs– bacteria and viruses–will be found to be the causes of many major diseases.

From an alternative perspective, you could also blame an infectious disease on your genes by saying that if you only had the necessary gene variant, your immune system would have been equipped to wipe out the germ before it caused the disease. On the other hand a lot of the diseases of old age are caused by by wear and tear, with a germ or the lack of a gene as merely the trigger for something that was going to fail sooner or later anyway.

Which perspective is most useful for medical progress is a difficult question. Perhaps they all should be borne in mind.

Goldstein also can’t find any genes for IQ, which would seem more like a capability than a disease:

Another pursuit that interests him, one of high promise for reconstructing human evolutionary history, is that of discovering which genes bear the mark of recent natural selection. When a new version of a gene becomes more common, it leaves a pattern of changes that geneticists can detect with various statistical tests. Many of these selected genes reflect new diets or defenses against disease or adaptations to new climates. But they tend to differ from one race to another because each human population, after the dispersal from Africa some 50,000 years ago, has had to adapt to different circumstances.

This newish finding has raised fears that other, more significant differences might emerge among races, spurring a resurrection of racist doctrines. “There is a part of the scientific community which is trying to make this work off limits, and that I think is hugely counterproductive,” Dr. Goldstein said.

He says he thinks that no significant genetic differences will be found between races because of his belief in the efficiency of natural selection. Just as selection turns out to have pruned away most disease-causing variants, it has also maximized human cognitive capacities because these are so critical to survival. “My best guess is that human intelligence was always a helpful thing in most places and times and we have all been under strong selection to be as bright as we can be,” he said.

This is more than just a guess, however. As part of a project on schizophrenia, Dr. Goldstein has done a genomewide association study on 2,000 volunteers of all races who were put through cognitive tests. “We have looked at the effect of common variation on cognition, and there is nothing,” Dr. Goldstein said, meaning that he can find no common genetic variants that affect intelligence. His view is that intelligence was developed early in human evolutionary history and was then standardized.

The idea of standardization in evolution is attractive. After all, we standardized on one head, two eyes, and so forth a long, long time ago. Just about everybody who isn’t clearly defective can learn to speak a language and even learn some moderately complex grammar. (Although that doesn’t mean my grammar is as good as William F. Buckley’s was.)

Okay, but one problem with applying the idea of standardization to intelligence is that intelligence clearly isn’t standardized. David B. Goldstein, to pick an example, is smarter than the average person. Heck, he’s a lot smarter than the average David Goldstein.

But, as last month’s whoop-tee-doo in Beijing demonstrated once again, just because something “was developed early in human evolutionary history and was then standardized” doesn’t mean that everybody can do it equally well now. For example, running presumably developed tens of thousands of generations ago, and everybody pretty much runs today using the same basic, natural technique (as opposed to the various swimming strokes or ways that horses can move). Further, as Dr. Goldstein might say, my best guess is that human footspeed was always a helpful thing in most places and times and we have all been under strong selection to be as fast as we can be.

Yet, you and I still can’t run anywhere near as fast as Usain Bolt can.

So, my guess is that the answer to the problem is that quite a bit of IQ variance is in the genes, it’s just in a whole lot of genes.

Here’s the full length version of the Sarah Palin article I wrote for The American Conservative a week and a half ago.

Mexico is a third-world country, with farming practices to match. The procedures of growing food vary widely, from healthy to irrigating crops with untreated sewage water. But the Mexican farmers who use good practices (assuming some exist) get no advantage because of there’s no regulation. As usual, the health and safety of American consumers matters little compared with keeping Mexico City happy.

The AP has found that while some Mexican producers grow fruits and vegetables under strict sanitary conditions for export to the U.S., many don’t–and they can still send their produce across the border easily.

Neither the U.S. nor the Mexican governments impose any safety requirements on farms and processing plants. That includes those using unsanitary conditions–like those at Agricola Zaragoza–and brokers or packing plants that mix export-grade fruits and vegetables with lower-quality produce.

In fact, the only thing a Mexican company needs to do to sell produce to the United States is to register online. [...]

In the latest contamination case, the U.S. government traced the suspect jalapenos to two farms in the state of Tamaulipas. Both shipped through Agricola Zaragoza in neighboring Nuevo Leon state. Agricola Zaragoza shipped the peppers to its warehouse in McAllen, Texas, where the FDA found the first contaminated jalapeno.

Though usually smaller in scale, such outbreaks are relatively common–at least 3,000 between 1990 and 2006 from FDA-regulated foods, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nutrition and food safety advocacy group. Those numbers include fruits, vegetables and seafood, and contamination both in the U.S. and abroad.

The cases include a 2004 hepatitis outbreak linked to Mexican green onions that killed four people and sickened 650 in Pennsylvania, and a 2006 nationwide E. coli outbreak that infected about 300 people and killed three and was traced to tainted spinach from California. [Few safeguards for Mexican produce heading north, AP, September 14, 2008]

This article is informative as far as it goes in explaining what goes on in Mexico and the lack of oversight and inspection.

However, it does not mention country-of-origin labeling which would allow consumers to protect themselves at the grocery store. Congress passed legislation in 2002 that would require that information, but the Bush administration has not allowed it to be implemented because of heavy lobbying from all over.

Here’s a clip from Lou Dobbs Tonight from July 2007 on the topic of Country-of-Origin labeling.