This is from City Journal:

The Latino Voting Trickle by Steven Malanga, City Journal Winter 2009
Steven Malanga
The Latino Voting Trickle
Hispanics didn’t elect Barack Obama.

The day after the 2004 presidential election, columnist Dick Morris proclaimed that George W. Bush owed his victory to Hispanics—a startling conclusion that Morris based on reports that 45 percent of Hispanics had voted for the president and that their vote constituted a whopping 12 percent of the electorate. Given that 1996 Republican nominee Bob Dole had won just 21 percent of the Hispanic vote, the more than doubling of support over eight years was sufficient, in Morris’s eyes, to appear decisive.

The only problem with this thesis was that few of its facts were correct.[More]

Read the whole thing.

This shows that the ICE is getting enthusiastic:

Immigration officials try to deport dead immigrant

Monday, March 16, 2009

(03-16) 08:48 PDT Los Angeles, CA (AP) –

Relatives say immigration officials are trying to deport a dead man.

They contend Nasin Mauricio Rivera died last August, but a deportation hearing against the native Salvadoran is still set for a hearing scheduled this summer.

His former wife, Blanca Ramirez, says Rivera is already in El Salvador — his body was shipped back home for burial.

Rivera’s attorney Alberto Lopez says he presented a copy of Rivera’s death certificate, but officials told him it was insufficient proof that Rivera was indeed dead.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice says a certified copy of the death certificate is usually enough, but the agency is responsible for ensuring “the integrity of the process.”

Seriously, considering the number of people who have tried to dodge creditors by buying their own rubber stamp saying “Deceased: Return to Sender,” I don’t blame the immigration authorities for wanting to make sure that someone who hasn’t shown up for his hearing is actually dead. Note that immigrants are having themselves buried in their native countries these days. See  New Immigrants Can’t Rest In Peace In America, by Sam Francis, July 7, 2003.

Congenial Times has a blog post and a long comment on Amish demographics. There are now somewhere approaching a quarter of a million Amish in the U.S., up from less than 10,000 a century ago. At the current growth rate of doubling every twenty years, there would be approaching eight million Amish by 2110. (Warning: Projections 100 years into the future not likely to turn out right.)

My impression is that the Amish are not a major drain on the taxpayers the way the polygamous Fundamentalist Mormons are, who put their junior wives on welfare and run a lot of scams to get federal and state funds for the their town on the Utah-Arizona border. Of course, an all-Amish country wouldn’t work due to the pacifism of the Amish.

Somebody might wish to create a model of the optimal sect for increase in share of the population. The components would consist of:

1. Fertility rates
2. Retention rates
3. Conversion rates
4. Death rates (which usually are pretty much the same these days, as long as the sect doesn’t oppose vaccination, or whatever).

The Amish, for example, have quite high fertility rates, high but not 100% retention rates, and very low conversion rates. There are probably trade-offs between the different components.

It seems plausible that the human race in 3000 A.D. will largely be descended from cultures that achieved optimal combinations of these trade-offs for population growth.

Animal cruelty is a part of many immigrant cultures, as Brenda Walker has ably explained. But you never hear that mentioned in the MSM. That is why it’s such a pleasure to see that Monday’s Boston Globe has a lead story on the growing problem of cockfighting rings in Connecticut – and they didn’t bury the immigration dimension either (well, not too much).   The story also contains video.

This is unusual for the Boston Globe, which usually puts out an immigrant sob-story every week, such as the recent “Immigrants with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Face Hurdles.”

I’m still waiting for PETA to make the link between immigration and animal cruelty. But this is a big (if temporary) step toward in immigration honesty for the Boston Globe. Congratulate Globe writer Kevin O’Brien (kobrien@globe.com).

I started writing for VDARE.com because I felt if VDARE.com was to really be a coalition, it had to represent the range of political opinion that opposes high immigration levels.

There have always been left leaning politicians and activists that have opposed high immigration levels. Barbara Jordan, Cesar Chavez and A. Philip Randolph are prominent examples. More recently, Peter Defazio has combined membership in the Progressive Caucus with a more restrictive than average voting record on immigration.

Recently, the web page of Progressives for Immigration Reform was brought to by attention. The founders of this organization aren’t strangers to VDARE.com readers. Vernon Briggs has a long history of activism in the area of immigration restriction. Frank Morris is a former director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation who has become active in Immigration Issues.

From the start, I have believed that effective restriction of immigration will be a bipartisan effort. The real supporters of immigration expansion have been the most wealthy Americans. Part of why I think immigration reform has made so little headway is that groups opposed to high levels of immigration are divided on many other points. For examples, I disagree strongly with Tom Tancredo’s idea that restriction of immigration needs to go hand in hand with elimination of income support programs–and removing taxes from the most very wealthy Americans.

I don’t think reform of immigration is a left vs. right issue though. The election of figures like George Bush shows that the center of American politics has become incredibly corrupt. I think we need to face a future in which many mainstream political figures are utterly discredited and those of us that remain will have to learn to work with each other.

(more…)

Jason Richwine writes in Forbes:

Indian Americans: The New Model Minority
But education and culture can take people only so far. To be a great speller–or, more importantly, a great doctor or IT manager–you have to be smart. Just how smart are Indian Americans? We don’t know with much certainty. Most data sets with information on ethnic groups do not include IQ scores, and the few that do rarely include enough cases to provide interpretable results for such a small portion of the population.

The only direct evidence we have comes from the 2003 New Immigrant Survey, in which a basic cognitive test called “digit span” was administered to a sample of newly arrived immigrant children. It is an excellent test for comparing people with disparate language and educational backgrounds, since the test taker need only repeat lengthening sequences of digits read by the examiner. Repeating the digits forward is simply a test of short-term memory, but repeating them backward is much more mentally taxing, hence a rough measure of intelligence.

When statistical adjustments are used to convert the backward digit span results to full-scale IQ scores, Indian Americans place at about 112 on a bell-shaped IQ distribution, with white Americans at 100. 112 is the 79th percentile of the white distribution. For more context, consider that Ashkenazi Jews are a famously intelligent ethnic group, and their mean IQ is somewhere around 110.

Given the small sample size, the rough IQ measure and the lack of corroborating data sets, this finding of lofty Indian-American intelligence must be taken cautiously. Nevertheless, it is entirely consistent with their observed achievement.

The New Immigrant Survey is being run out of Princeton. It’s one of those massive projects like the 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth. It only applies to legal immigrants. The first round of data was collected in 2003, and papers have been coming out for a couple of years. Parts of the Woodcock Johnson IQ test were given to immigrants, as well as the digit span test. The data is available to registered users.

If you know more about this research, such as what other legal immigrant groups scored, please let me know.

I’m guessing that Richwine crunched the numbers himself, because I can’t find anything published on them, and he is writing his Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard on IQ and immigration nexus. (Here’s Marcus Epstein’s VDARE blog post on Richwine’s forthright statements at an AEI conference.) The SPLC is already on Richwine’s case for uttering hatefacts.