It is beyond comprehension that in the wake of 1.5 million Americans losing their jobs last year, there still is talk in Congress about bringing in even more foreign workers to compete in a rapidly shrinking job market.

Calling it a major offensive aimed at educating the media and members of Congress, NumbersUSA founder and CEO Roy Beck Jan. 7 sent a letter to President-elect Barack Obama urging him to remember his campaign commitment to protecting American workers. Among Beck’s proposals to help the new president deal with the problem is the suspension of most legal immigration and nationwide mandatory use of the E-Verify workplace verification program.

In his letter to Obama, Beck asks where is the logic during our economic free-fall of issuing around 138,000 new work permits and green cards to foreign workers each month:

The Honorable Barack Obama
President-elect of the United States
1800 F Street NW
Washington, DC 20405

7 JAN 09

Dear President-Elect Obama,

Congratulations on your historic victory. NumbersUSA – a non-profit, non-partisan group with more than 850,000 active members – is focused on America’s economic troubles that continue to grow. I am writing to urge you to make American workers and already-resident legal immigrant workers your first priority when you take office on January 20th.

With the federal government reporting continuing giant losses of jobs, it is time to slow the massive importation of workers.

Non-farm employers in the U.S. eliminated 533,000 jobs in November alone. At the same time, in a typical month the Department of Homeland Security issues 138,000 new work permits and green cards (not including replacement or renewal documents) to foreign workers.

How can it make any sense for the American people’s own government to be approving more competitors for a dwindling number of jobs? Month after month as hundreds of thousands of Americans lose their jobs, the feds keep pumping another 138,000 new foreign workers into the labor force.

(more…)

Throughout Asia and the Middle East, sons are valued, while daughters are often unwanted. Baby girls may be killed, thrown in the trash (as commonly occurs in China) or aborted as a result of prenatal scanning — a medical technology that was developed to improve the health of mother and child.

India made sex-selection abortion illegal a decade ago, to little effect. The estimates of missing females there range from 10 million over 20 years to a total of 50 million. China’s 2000 census found 19 million more boys than girls in the under-15 cohort. Social pathology has followed this imbalance as some desperate bachelors have turned to kidnapping to procure a wife: Chinese police freed more than 42,000 kidnapped women and children in 2001 and 2002. Tens of millions of unattached young men in Red China may spark social unrest of various kinds. Emigration is another strategy of men determined to get married.

Speaking of Asian immigrants, do newcomers from those socially retrograde countries retain their cultural misogyny when they relocate to egalitarian America? Absolutely. A recent study has shown that among some Asians, having mere daughters is simply unacceptable: It’s a boy! Asian immigrants use medical technology to satisfy age-old desire: a son [San Jose Mercury, Jan 7, 2009].

Researchers are finding the first evidence that some Asian immigrant families are using U.S. medical technology to have sons instead of daughters, apparently acting on an age-old cultural prejudice that has led to high ratios of boys to girls in parts of China and India.

The new research, produced by independent teams of economists who arrived at similar conclusions, focused on Indian, Chinese and Korean families who first had girls and then used modern technology to have a son.

With birth records in Santa Clara County showing that Asian mothers are more likely to give birth to sons than white or Latino mothers are, the new data could reawaken a local controversy. Some local South Asian women have pressured local Indo-American newspapers and magazines in recent years to stop running ads for medical procedures that offer prospective parents the promise of a son.

For some South Asian couples, having a boy is a “status symbol,” said Deepka Lalwani of Milpitas, the founder and president of Indian Business & Professional Women, a nonprofit business support network. “If a woman has male children, she feels in her family, certainly with her in-laws, that her status will go up because now she is the mother of a male child.”

Such cultural pressures may explain the recent findings. A Columbia University study suggests that Chinese, Indian and Korean immigrants have been using medical technology, most likely including abortion, to assure their later children were boys. And a soon-to-be published analysis of birth records by a University of Texas economist estimates there were 2,000 “missing girls” between 1991 and 2004 among immigrant families from China and India living in the U.S. — children never born because their parents chose to have sons instead.

“Missing girls” in America — another symptom of diverse immigration!

After a century of progress in the area of women’s equality in the West, welcoming immigrants from misogynist cultures may well reverse that trend.

See also…

Sex Selection Alive and Well in South Asian Immigrant Communities in the U.S.

Clinics’ Pitch to Indian Émigrés: It’s a Boy

In China’s Countryside, ‘It’s a Boy!’ Too Often

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove has an op-ed saying “President Bush Tried to Rein In Fan and Fred.” It’s true that liberal Democrats had been leading the war against “redlining” for years before  Bush took over, and that to the extent that Bush is to blame, it’s because he was acting (on the advice of Karl Rove) like a liberal Democrat. It’s also clear that when he decided to act like a liberal Democrat, he did so good and hard. This is from Steve Sailer’s piece, Karl Rove—Architect Of The Minority Mortgage Meltdown, [September 28, 2008].

In December 2003, when signing the American Dream Downpayment Act, Bush bragged:

“Last year I set a goal to add 5.5 million new minority homeowners in America by the end of the decade. That is an attainable goal; that is an essential goal. And we’re making progress toward that goal. In the past 18 months, more than 1 million minority families have become homeowners. (Applause.) And there’s more that we can do to achieve the goal. The law I sign today will help us build on this progress in a very practical way.”

What was truly significant about Bush’s 2002 speeches (including the doozy he delivered on October 15, 2002 at his White House conference, which you should read for the schadenfreude alone) was not the legislation he endorsed—but the unsubtle message he was sending to lenders and, most importantly, to his own employees, the federal regulators.

Bush made clear at his October 15, 2002 conference that he opposed not merely discriminating against borrowers who might turn out to be bad credit risks—he wanted more money to go to documented bad credit risks. He brayed:

“Freddie Mac recently began 25 initiatives around the country to dismantle barriers and create greater opportunities for homeownership. One of the programs is designed to help deserving families who have bad credit histories to qualify for homeownership loans.”

Let’s put Bush’s influence in perspective. I’m not saying that financial institutions would intentionally make hundreds of billions of dollars worth of bad loans just on the President’s say-so. But what I am saying is that federal employees, such as financial regulators, do listen closely to what the Chief Executive says about what he wants done regarding those iffy loans.

Read the whole thing.

In C. S. Lewis’s Narnia novel The Horse And His Boy a young boy named Shasta is washed up on the beach in Calormen, an imaginary country that shares many semi-barbaric features with Arabia. Shasta, a fair-haired Narnian,  is adopted by a fisherman named Arshish, who beats him, doesn’t feed him much, and makes him work. One day, a nobleman rides up on a horse and offers to buy Shasta,  since slavery is one of the many features that Calormen society shares with Arabian society. (Also polygamy, autocracy, cruelty, torture, treachery, and bloody dynastic squabbles.) The fisherman starts to talk price:

“O my master,” replied the fisherman (and Shasta knew by the wheedling tone the greedy look that was probably coming into his face as he said it), “what price could induce your servant, poor though he is, to sell into slavery his only child and his own flesh? Has not one of the poets said, `Natural affection is stronger than soup and offspring more precious than carbuncles?”‘

“It is even so,” replied the guest dryly. “But another poet has likewise said, “He who attempts to deceive the judicious is already baring his own back for the scourge.” Do not load your aged mouth with falsehoods. This boy is manifestly no son of yours, for your cheek is as dark as mine but the boy is fair and white like the accursed but beautiful barbarians who inhabit the remote North.”

I thought of this, as I listened to a dramatization of it done by UK writer and broadcaster Brian Sibley.

The dramatization contains exactly the  the same incident, but the nobleman  simply says “He is, unless I am much mistaken,  one of those beautiful barbarians who inhabit the remote North,” without letting the listener know how he can tell–because  “father” and son are two different colors.

The difference between the two versions is that Lewis wrote the story in 1954,  when there were almost no Muslims in England, and no Commission On Racial Equality, and the dramatization was done in 2000, when both Muslims and the CRE were already powers in the land.

The federal government runs a number of gigantic multi-decade human sciences studies of Americans, with the best known being the 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth, which was featured prominently in The Bell Curve in 1994, but is still going on, with IQ scores now available on thousands of the children of the original sample.

Newer studies are including genetic data. In the Chronicle  of Higher Education, Christopher Shea reports in “The Nature-Nurture Debate, Redux:”

What has led to the new genetic turn in sociology, at least among a minority? In part it has to do with the availability of important new data sets. The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, aka Add Health, for example, at Chapel Hill, was designed from the start to incorporate both sociological and genetic information. It was begun, in 1994, by Bearman, J. Richard Udry, and Kathleen Mullan Harris. The idea was to capture as much information as possible about the social circumstances, friendship networks, and family conditions of 21,000 teenagers in 132 schools, from grades 7 through 12. The survey included a disproportionate number of twins, both fraternal and identical, full- and half-siblings, and adopted kids, allowing preliminary analyses of the heritability of traits. Follow-up interviews were conducted a year later.

(more…)

Because of technical difficulties, Joe Guzzardi did not appear on the Rocky-D Show yesterday. He is rescheduled today, Thursday, at 12:30 p.m, EST. The show airs in Charleston, SC and can be listened to here.

He will be discussing Wall Street Journal writer Miriam Jordan, winner of the 2009 Worst Immigration Reporter award. At 4:30 EST, Chuck Wilder will interview Joe on “George Putnam’s Talk Back”. You can listen live here, and it’s repeated at 8 p.m. Pacific Time.