Peter Brimelow and Edwin S. Rubenstein will be discussing NAFTA with Doug Kosarek tomorrow morning on Daytona radio WNDB 1150 AM. Listen here, from 7:30AM to 9:00 AM.

Although Phyllis Schlafly doesn’t use the term amoral familism, she sees what is at work in the Chinese tainted baby formula scandal Patrick Cleburne has covered for VDare.com.  Cleburne also perceived immigration-driven amoral familism at the expense of Americans in the selective persecution of American teenagers by (unwelcome, to this American at least) Korean import and U.S. government lawyer Grace Chung Becker

Schlafly warns of Americans’–actually, all who rely on the Western, Christian tradition as an ethical foundation–need to be very wary in dealing with those whose traditions provide no such moral bedrock:

“The China infant milk scandal, even though it has so far not damaged any American babies, has exposed a major defect in the concept of free trade. It’s dangerous to buy products from a nation whose economy is not based on Judeo-Christian morality.

The American private enterprise system depends on honesty as normal and accepted behavior. We don’t have or want a policeman on every corner, or an army of government officials to inspect every bottle of baby formula or tube of toothpaste.

We do have regulations and random checks, but the majority of producers and sellers are restrained from criminality by adherence to the Judeo-Christian ethic.”[China Poisons Its Infant Formula, By Phyllis Schlafly--Townhall.com, September 23, 2008 ]

Everything Schlafly says here is true. But what she says is incomplete, and one more example of how even the most rock-ribbed-seeming of mainstream conservatives fail to grasp the most vital issues facing our fading civilization.

If, as Shlafly says, it is “dangerous to buy products from a nation whose economy is not based on Judeo-Christian morality”, isn’t it even more dangerous to import, through reckless and uncontrolled immigration, what amounts to a new domestic economy run by people from nations whose economies are not based on that morality, who as producers and sellers won’t be restrained from criminality by adherence to the Judeo-Christian ethic, because it is not theirs?

No doubt immigration enthusiasts will say the natives aren’t always restrained from criminality by Judeo-Christian ethics either. True but irrelevant, and nothing more than a reflection of fallen human nature. In fact, a realistic view of man’s condition only strengthens the arguments for restricting immigration – if one has to be somewhat wary even of one’s countrymen, who are supposed to be restrained by our traditional ethics, how can it make sense to import as our neighbors millions who obviously are not restrained by them at all, and may indeed find them laughable?

Mass immigration has introduced alien ethnic cronyism on a vast scale into America, as any student not only of today’s deluge but also of the Great Wave well knows. The whole point of amoral familism is that among many of the world’s ethnic groups honesty to those with whom one does not have close kinship ties is not normal and accepted behavior. As it happens, our suicidal immigration (non-)policies endlessly bring millions of members of just such ethnic groups here to be our neighbors. Americans, who in general do not practice amoral familism, are easily driven from entire sectors of our economy by those more conscious of their ethnic interests. To give only one example, when is the last time you saw a motel run by anything other than Indians? Think those Indians will hire your American kid to manage one? Since ordinary Americans seem incapable of acting consciously in their own ethnic interest, what we should do about this appears obvious.

So, many thanks to Phyllis Schlafly for this column, and for fighting the good fight for so long. But I can’t give Schlafly more than a B+ for this one, because she fails to reach the obvious conclusion: if Americans can’t trust imported products from low-trust societies, it makes no sense at all to import their producers, whose conduct is guided by those societies’ ethics. End immigration from such societies. As much as possible, reverse it.

And the next time you drop in to your local Chinese takeout for some cheap dumplings, you might give the Sanlu Group’s quality control a thought before you say “no MSG, please.”

John McCain hasn’t mentioned Rev. Jeremiah Wright in months, so I imagine he won’t start in Friday’s debate …

But here’s something I posted last March on the eve of Obama’s 5,000 word oration on the edifying ineffability of his nuanced thoughtfulness about race (which, by the way, happened right after the Bear Stearns collapse):

Keep in mind that the Wright-Obama connection has two interrelated but distinguishable aspects: the black racial angle and leftist ideological angle. My guess is that Obama will play up the black angle of his past (as being both more understandable — seeing as how Obama, kind of like Jesus, was a poor black child raised by a single mother in the ghetto of Honolulu — and more untouchable by the press) and totally ignore the leftist angle.

It would be more fun if Obama reversed the polarity and snarled, “Yeah, yeah, for the last 12 years, I forced myself to nod in seeming agreement when all those smug Friedmanite economists at my University of Chicago would ramble on about the magic of the market. But, in my heart, I knew this glorious day would someday come when the capitalist system crumbles in ruins! Nyah-hah-hah-hah!”

That would be cool.

Back in August, in a VDARE article entitled “No Real Solution — Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Algebra for Dummies,” I explained that the new California policy mandating that all 8th graders take Algebra I was kind of stupid.

Now the Brookings Institute agrees, although under a slightly less provocative title: The Misplaced Math Student: Lost in Eighth Grade Algebra. The LA Times reports:

The new study, released today by the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., looked at who is taking eighth-grade algebra and how they are doing.

And there was some ostensibly good news. Nationwide, more students are taking algebra than before. Over five years, the percentage of eighth-graders in advanced math — algebra or higher — went up by more than one-third. In total, about 37% of all U.S. students took advanced math in 2005, the most recent year in the analysis.

Yet some 120,000 of these students — about 8% — are scoring in the lowest 10% on the eighth-grade National Assessment of Educational Progress. Many thousands more are performing well below grade level.

And when students perform poorly in a math course where they don’t belong, no one benefits, said Tom Lawless, a senior fellow at Brookings.

Across the country, “you have 120,000 kids sitting in algebra and geometry classes and they don’t know how to multiply and divide,” Lawless said. “That’s an absurd situation. They’re not going to learn anything. And the kids who are sitting next to them, who are well prepared, are not going to learn anything either” because their learning will be slowed down.

On average, there are at least two students in every eighth-grade algebra class with second-grade math skills. That number rises in urban school systems where these students are more likely to attend overcrowded schools with teachers who are less experienced and less likely to have math degrees or college-level advanced math. These students also are disproportionately low-income minorities.

For many, algebra has become a civil rights issue. Students who take algebra early have a leg up on college and career. And minorities and the poor have a glaringly lower enrollment rate in early algebra. But just taking the course is not enough.

As evidence, Lawless pointed to the District of Columbia, which rates near the top in eighth-grade algebra enrollment and dead last on the math portion of the eighth-grade national assessment. Near the top in math achievement are Vermont and North Dakota, which enroll a comparatively small percentage of students in advanced math. There is no correlation nationwide between eighth-grade algebra policies and performance in algebra, Lawless said.[California's new 8th-grade algebra rule gets some poor marks | Critics warn that the requirement will be bad both for students with solid math skills and the unprepared. By Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times September 22, 2008]]