It’s amazing the groundbreaking research coming out of academia these days. A recent investigative project in an American university actually discovered that Canadian immigrants to the U.S. are the best assimilators, and assimilate much better than Mexicans.

What will they discover next?

You can read about it in an article (The Gilroy Patch, January 19th, 2009) which says that a professor actually designed an assimilation index to see how various immigrant groups were assimilating. Here is an excerpt:

… Hispanics have been slower to assimilate than past immigrant groups, says Jake Vigdor, and the numbers show it. The associate professor of public policy and economics at Duke University in North Carolina measured indicators such as the ability to speak English, educational attainment, military enlistment and rates of becoming citizens.

And the results:

An assimilation index he put together found Mexico far behind other countries that also send lots of immigrants to the United States. Mexico scored 13 on the index. Canada had the highest score, 53. Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines scored more than 40.

Imagine that, Canada # 1. Could that possibly be because the Canadians are so similar to us to begin with? But as for Mexican immigrants, says Professor Vigdor…

“That is troubling,” Vigdor said. “What really distinguishes Mexican immigrants from other immigrants both past and present is that they don’t make a lot of progress over time.”

Another academic at Tufts University weighs in

Lawrence Harrison, director of the Cultural Change Institute at Tufts University in Massachusetts, said Hispanics are too resistant to assimilation. “Latin American culture has a number of attitudes that help explain why it has been so slow to develop democracy, social justice and prosperity,” Harrison said.

Harrison, who is fluent in Spanish from decades of work as a U.S. government aid worker in five Latin American countries, said that Hispanic immigrants are hardworking but that they lack the entrepreneurial, small-business-founding tendencies that turn other immigrant groups into success stories.

There’s more in the article, and of course another academic and another study are brought to provide a different perspective.

But given (1) the massive numbers of Mexican (and other Hispanic) immigrants entering annually, (2) a U.S. government which encourages them not to assimilate, and (3) the growing power of the Mexican ethnic lobby, it’s rather hard to come to such a conclusion.

From the late Daniel Seligman’s Keeping Up column in Fortune:

September 10, 1990,

Soon after this article is printed, it will take up residence in the Nexis database and, apparently, become the only verbiage in disk memory whose author is unenthusiastic about diversity in education. The “apparently” is in there because we did not have the strength to make it through every one of the stories that turned up in a Nexis search the other day. We had asked our electronic buddy for all articles wherein “diversity” appears within 30 words of “college,” and there is no doubt that the ensuing avalanche showed boundless support for the D word.

Most of the 1,266 entries proffered by Nexis concerned the efforts of colleges to diversify on the racial, sexual, and (a late starter) sex-preferential fronts. (Item No. 56 was about the chap who cited himself as an example of diversity in that he was the first openly gay valedictorian in Dartmouth history.) Our own special favorite was Item No. 81, a letter to the editor of the New York Times from Mary S. Hartman, dean of all-female Douglass College. Mary was writing about the recent controversy at all-female Mills College, and it turned out, somewhat unstunningly, that she favored the students’ efforts there to continue excluding the swains. You might think this was an antidiversity posture, but Mary is too cagey to get caught in one. Her letter argues that single-sex colleges like Mills actually increase diversity by offering another option for female students — a line of reasoning that management unaccountably forgot to invoke at the Shoal Creek Country Club.

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Hmm I just posted a speech called “America’s Egalitarian Temptation - Stalinism’s Unquiet Ghost” and here is somebody called Dolores Prida proving me right in the New York Daily News (Assimilate this, February 11).

Prida’s attack (VDARE.COM appears as an “anti-immigration blog”) is inspired by the long-suffering Marcus Epstein and his American Cause study showing that patriotic immigration reform either was not an issue, or was stolen by the Democrats, in the 2008 House races that the GOP lost. I spoke at Marcus’ press conference announcing the study and we were all denounced by an $PLC enforcer at the New York Slimes, yawn.

Prida’s summary:

…some Republicans wasted no time and just one week after the inauguration of President Obama met in Washington to argue that pandering to pro-amnesty Latino voters is not the way to go forward.

A press release listing their topics of discussion, includes this: “Whatever gains, if any, pandering to Hispanics gives is greatly outweighed by loss of the White Vote, which is more important.”

Of course, it is simply a fact that the white vote is “more important” - whites were 74% of voters in the last Presidential election according to the CNN Exit Poll. Hispanics were just 9%.

Prida then goes on to assert:

Immigration reform advocates, particularly Latino activists, are falsely characterized as advocating “open borders” and “blanket amnesty.”

These comments constitute “hate speech,” as defined in a preliminary report on a pilot study conducted by UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center.

Hate speech leads to hate crimes. No argument about that. Violence against Latinos has increased by 40% in the past four years — sometimes with deadly results, as evidenced by last year’s murder of Ecuadoran immigrant Marcelo Lucero on Long Island.

Of course, there is an “argument about that”. Lucero, who needless to say was not an “immigrant” but an illegal alien, was killed by students from a school long notorious for muggings. It is ludicrous to pretend that any of them were motivated by statistical analyses of Congressional races. Prida simply wants to suppress debate.

But of course she herself is not merely a leftist, but an immigrant from Latin America, where there is no tradition of debate anyway. Her authoritarianism is merely part of the rich diversity that immigration has brought here.

Prida concludes with an assertion arrogant even by Latino immigrant standards:

There’s no one American “dominant” culture. There never has been. Throughout history, American culture has evolved, and will continue to evolve, with the ebb and flow of immigration from different parts of the world.

It’s all a matter of time.

Bunk, of course. How many Latinos signed the Declaration of Independence? But then, the Founders came from a “dominant” culture that Prida finds inconvenient, if not incomprehensible.

Email Prida.

Daniel Seligman, who died last week at age 84, was my role model as a quantitative journalist. From the 1970s into the 1990s, he wrote a blog-like column of multiple short items in Fortune, distinguished by his quantitative bent. Like me and unlike most journalists, he loved to count things. (By the way, it’s probably not a coincidence that my favorite Sesame Street character is The Count.)

Here’s a particularly relevant selection from Seligman’s Keeping Up columns:

December 4, 1989
MORTGAGE MUMBO JUMBO

Based on a reference to him in the Almanac of American Politics, we had always assumed that U.S. Senator Alan Dixon was relatively harmless. (”Among the least known of all Senators” was how the Almanac referred to the Illinois Democrat.) Based on his conduct in the current hearings on mortgage discrimination, we must rate him at least average as a menace.

[By the way, Dixon's successors in that Senate seat have been Carol Mosley Brown, Peter Fitzgerald, Barack Obama, and Roland Burris.]

The hearings, chaired by Dixon in his role as head of the Senate banking subcommittee on consumer affairs, have been something of a scream. The purpose of the hearings has been quite straightforward: to enable club members to garner headlines by posturing as antidiscrimination stalwarts and yelling at the various federal agencies that monitor all those laws banning bias in mortgage lending. So the agencies — the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., and the Office of Thrift Supervision — were roundly reproved for not detecting the avalanche of mortgage-based bias postulated to be discernible by anybody walking around the block.

Is mortgage bias really a problem? A curious feature of the federal regulatory scene is that long after Congress passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and the Community Reinvestment Act (which bars redlining of urban minority population centers), the federal government seems not to generate many complaints of such bias. The regulators’ reports indicate that they receive few complaints. And while the U.S. Justice Department has launched hundreds of housing-related antidiscrimination suits during the past 20 years, only a small fraction of them have involved lending practices.

Dixon and the other solons nevertheless took it for granted that bankers have to be prodded on minority mortgage lending. Joining the long line of politicians who claim to know better than businessmen what’s good for business, Dixon returned repeatedly to the thought that such prodding always results in higher profits. “It’s good business,” he burbled at the end of one session. “Everybody makes money.”

It is true that federal data show black loan applicants being rejected roughly twice as often as white applicants. But this does not mean blacks are subject to a tougher standard. The higher rate of black rejections might mean that weak black applicants are responding to bank “outreach” programs (as the Office of Thrift Supervision noted). It might mean that black applicants’ buildings are on average less attractive as security — a thought no witness was foolish enough to mention aloud.

A Fed governor did bravely mention a fact of possible relevance: that market forces work against discrimination. John LaWare argued that bankers are in business to make loans and that “the institutional commitment to doing business where it makes economic sense will win out over prejudice.” Dixon did not pick up on this thought, plainly not what he came to hear.

But he did get his picture in the Washington Post. Fame beckons.

This is a big question raised by Denis Dutton’s book The Art Instinct, so I’m going to focus just on one small field where I actually kind of know what I’m talking about: golf course architecture. Specifically, are golf courses naturally attractive to a sizable fraction of the male population around the globe? Since they are hugely expensive to build, their sheer existence testifies to that proposition.

The answer is: time will tell. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if the look of golf courses proved universally popular by the end of this century. Golf courses, which originated in Scotland, first became popular in the Anglosphere about a century ago. They have since become wildly popular in East Asia (the LPGA tour is now dominated by South Koreans, and you frequently read about Chinese peasants protesting that corrupt local officials have stolen their land to build golf courses), and almost as popular in Western Europe. The oil sheikdoms have built golf courses in the Persian Gulf.

On the other hand, golf has yet to prove terribly popular in Russia, South Asia, black Africa (north of South Africa), or Latin America. I see that mostly as a matter of time and money, but I could be wrong.

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Driving to work the other day, I heard a remarkable ad on the radio for Cabot cheese (click on “Cheddars Are The Same“)

The interviewer poses a series of questions: “All women are the same.” “All nationalities are the same.” And so on. The interviewees respond that of course, not all these things are the same. And neither, says the interviewer, is our delicious cheddar cheese, which is clearly better than the other brands!

Advertising has always fascinated me, and I suspect that sometimes ad men sometimes sneak a little subervision into their pitches. Yes, most advertising today is solidly politically correct, with improbably racially mixed groupings, the clueless white man who needs to be straightened out by the cool black woman, and so on. But other stuff, like the GEICO cavemen, is hilarious.

And this exception, from an apprently Ben-and-Jerry’s like cheese concern, was deliciously sharp. Is someone on Madison Avenue starting to question “equality”?

The highest paid baseball player, Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees, is in the doghouse because his failure to pass a steroid test in 2003 was leaked to the press recently. The Yankees recently gave Rodriguez a huge long-term contract extension because he’s on track to eventually surpass Barry Bonds as the all time home run leader, and they figured all the hoopla over a “clean” athlete breaking Bonds’s tainted record would provide them with a financial windfall. Some smart strategic thinking there …

In contrast, Mickey Rourke is the sentimental favorite to win the Best Actor Oscar for his comeback in “The Wrestler,” which I review in the upcoming issue of The American Conservative. Rourke, who is either 52 or 56 (sources differ) and stands about six feet tall, upped his weight from 190 to 240 over six months for his role as a pro wrestler. Rourke, who is not the kind of guy to stick to the talking points created by his publicist, has not denied using muscle-building drugs to add mass for the part. And in the past, he has explained that he has an Andrew Sullivan-like prescription from his doctor for testosterone supplementation.

By the way, here’s the YouTube of Rourke’s star-making three-minute supporting turn as a professional arsonist in 1981’s Body Heat with William Hurt. (Language NSFW). And here’s the trailer from “The Wrestler” 27 years later.

In contrast, 44-year-old Marisa Tomei looks the same in The Wrestler as in 1992’s My Cousin Vinny, just with less clothes on in the new movie.

… how come my teenage son keeps getting a couple of offers of preapproved new credit cards each week?

Philosopher Dennis Dutton, who runs the universally admired Arts & Letters Daily website that highlights three worthy highbrow articles each day, has an excellent new book out called The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution.

Dr. Dutton and I have similar tastes in art (although his are broader and better) — the picture on the cover of his book, Frederick Edwin Church’s landscape Heart of the Andes, is hanging (in reproduction, of course) on my living room wall — and rather similar backgrounds. He pointed out to me that I used to shop at his parents’ bookstore in North Hollywood when I was a teenager.

I am pleased to see how much my 2005 American Conservative article on golf course architecture (which Dr. Dutton highlighted on his website back then) influenced his new book’s first chapter “Landscape and Longing,” which you can read here. In an endnote for his first chapter in The Art Instinct, he was kind enough to call my golf course design article “wonderful.”