On Tuesday, October 7, the Social Contract Press sponsored the release of a new report on non-citizen voting by David Simcox at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Simcox, a former director of the Center for Immigration Studies and a retired foreign service officer of the State Department, produced a compelling study that shows how non-citizens (illegal alien voters) could impact election outcomes, especially in key districts in California, Texas, Florida, and New York where the foreign-born population is considerably large.[Download the study in PDF]

The standing-room only event was well attended by members of the press, including CNN, Univision, several newspaper reporters, a local NPR-affiliate reporter, members of the immigration reform community, and a few bloggers from the radical Left.

Two questions from two bloggers in attendance seemed scripted right from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC’s) scandal-mongering playbook. One blogger raised spurious “guilt by association” allegations of The Social Contract’s editor and managing editor. Another radical blogger, identified as representing “New World Revolution,” raised the recent muckraking accusations lodged against John Tanton, the publisher of The Social Contract, and which were recently posted on the SPLC’s “Hate Watch” site.

For years Leftists complained about the excessive “guilt-by-association” abuses of the “McCarthy era,” especially the “blacklisting” period when many government bureaucrats and Hollywood screenwriters lost their careers after being suspected of promoting a Marxist-Leninist ideology with ties to Communist organizations. The irony is that the SPLC and other radical groups traffic in these very smear tactics as a way of trying to silence their opponents.

Wayne Lutton effectively countered these accusations last Tuesday and directly rebutted these muckraking accusations when they were raised. Others should do likewise.

We must be deep in a cultural hole if even diversity worshippers on the left are warning about demography-altering Hispanic immigration. Heather Mac Donald comments about a new book focusing on Latinos’ failure to assimilate educationally…

John McCain and Barack Obama have largely avoided discussing immigration during the presidential campaign. But when it comes to the legal side of the issue, they both seem to support the status quo: an official policy centered around low-skilled, predominately Hispanic immigrants. A forthcoming book shows just how misguided that policy is, especially in light of the nation’s current economic woes. The Latino Education Crisis: The Consequences of Failed Social Policies, by Patricia Gandara and Frances Contreras, offers an unflinching portrait of Hispanics’ educational problems and reaches a scary conclusion about those problems’ costs. The book’s analysis is all the more surprising given that its authors are liberals committed to bilingual education, affirmative action, and the usual slate of left-wing social programs. Yet Gandara and Contreras, education professors at UCLA and the University of Washington, respectively, are more honest than many conservative open-borders advocates in acknowledging the bad news about Hispanic assimilation.

Hispanics are underachieving academically at an alarming rate, the authors report. Though second- and third-generation Hispanics make some progress over their first-generation parents, that progress starts from an extremely low base and stalls out at high school completion. High school drop-out rates—around 50 percent—remain steady across generations. Latinos’ grades and test scores are at the bottom of the bell curve. The very low share of college degrees earned by Latinos has not changed for more than two decades. Currently only one in ten Latinos has a college degree. [...]

California provides a glimpse of what such changes might mean for America’s economic future. The Center for Public Policy and Higher Education predicts that unless the rate of college matriculation among “underrepresented” minorities (that is, Hispanics) immediately rises, the state will face an 11 percent drop in per capita income by 2020.
[Honesty from the Left on Hispanic Immigration, City Journal October 8, 2008]

Hispanics, and particularly Mexicans, are academic underachievers because their culture does not value education. In contrast, Chinese and some other nationalities of Asian immigrants excel in the same schools where Hispanics do poorly, because Asians understand that the path to success in America starts in the classroom. Hispanics, not so much: just 9.6 percent of fourth-generation Mexican Americans have a post-high-school degree, compared with 45.1 percent of Americans as a whole.

A recent education article made the same point of increasing underachievement among Hispanics [Report: Minority college attainment up, but stalls, AP, October 9, 2008]:

However, significant gaps among racial groups remain, and by some measures are widening. In 2006, among 18- to 24-year-olds, 61 percent of Asian-Americans were in college. That compares with 44 percent of whites, 32 percent of blacks and 25 percent of Hispanics.

Department of Education figures show that in 2006, 18 percent of older Hispanics had at least an associate’s degree, compared with just 16 percent of 25- to 29-year-olds. Council researcher Mikyung Ryu said the numbers do not suggest that’s simply because students are delaying getting an associate’s degree until after 30.

“The fact that this younger generation is attaining less than the older generation should really be ringing bells across this nation, and we really should be asking ourselves why,” said Dolores M. Fernandez, president of Eugenio Maria de Hostos Community College, which is part of the City University of New York.

Meanwhile, ethnic cheerleader broadcaster Jorge Ramos is still cheerfully touting an eventual majority-Hispanic USA, recently on the Colbert Report.

Talk about a recipe for societal failure–importing one of the most progress-resistant cultures on earth is surely the top ingredient.

Another case of immigrant mass murder syndrome: David Gardner and Robert Mendick write in the Daily Mail:

Mr Rajaram, originally from India, left two suicide notes as well as a will at the home in Sorrento Pointe, a gated community in the Santa Susana Mountains.

Rajaram wrote of two options: committing suicide or killing himself and his entire family. “He talked himself into the second strategy,” said Mr Moore, “That would be the honourable thing to do.”

I would suggest that it is simply irresponsible to select immigrants who can’t really adapt well to live in the US. I suspect that if the US didn’t have such a lax immigration policy, this family might still be alive today.

I also can’t help but wonder what other types of unusual behaviors are lurking in the US immigrant community? There is a tendency in the present system(or that in Canada) to select for immigrants who “look good on paper”. Nobody sensible would select a roommate that way–and the stakes are much higher when a grant of permanent residency is at stake.

We need a system that selects immigrants that are good for the general American community and can truly benefit by immigrating to the US. I’ve sometimes thought that a simple immigration jury of US citizens selected at random would be a good idea in most cases. Let immigration authorities do their paper check–but then let them use some common sense in a final sanity check. We might also require private insurers post bonds ensuring immigrants wouldn’t become public charges, institutionalized, or incarcerated, carry infectious diseases or endanger other Americans. I suspect we’d get many fewer immigrants with seriously difficult problems adjusting to life in the US if these measures were taken.

Here’s a point that hadn’t occurred to me–we’ve been writing about William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn for years, before their association with Obama made them the subject of the national conversation, but I hadn’t thought of what it would be like to study with a terrorist as professor. Sarcasm and the Socratic method make professors objectionable enough, but terrorism? You’d be afraid to raise your hand in class.

Evan Coyne Maloney, whose documentary Indoctrinate U exposes political indoctrination on the college campus, shot a scene about the subject. It wound up on the cutting room floor, but he’s posted it on his website.

In this deleted scene, we told the story of how 1960s campus radicals morphed into today’s academics. Three of those radicals were Ayers, his now-wife Bernardine Dohrn, and Mark Rudd. Together, they led the Weather Underground, a group committed to the violent overthrow the U.S. Government.

To bring about their hoped-for communist utopia, the Weathermen bombed dozens of targets around the country including the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and military recruiting stations. In executing their various attacks, the Weathermen killed a few of their own and also murdered a security guard while robbing an armored car. They targeted the families of judges, celebrated the Manson murders, and through legal technicalities, most of them avoided jail.

Decades later, they’re still unapologetic. In an interview published on September 11th, 2001, Ayers told The New York Times, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”

What does all of this have to do with higher education? Watch the video to find out.