Video from ALIPAC:

More details at Lawrence Auster’s View From The Right.

I recently received an unusual birthday card from a family member, a devout Catholic, that caught me off guard.

For years she and her husband, who is a Catholic deacon, have known of my involvement in the immigration restriction movement, and they have never commented on the many news stories I’ve sent them dealing with an immigration policy that is destroying this republic. During family gatherings, they’ve never once raised the issue.

So, about a year ago, I decided they were just too committed to doing God’s work that the Church says includes “welcoming the stranger,” i.e., illegal aliens, and I stopped sending them any immigration-related material. And I wondered recently whether they were wondering why I suddenly had fallen silent on our issue.

But back to the birthday card: It was like most greeting cards that say we’re “special” and that the senders are somehow “richer” for knowing us, etc.,etc., but this one was different because above the printed Hallmark message were these hand-written words:

“And thank you for your hard work for our country.”

Our country. Our country? Don’t get met wrong. I like this person, I like her a whole bunch. She’s a spirited individual who is highly educated and for years has worked with Alzheimer’s patients and their families. She cares, no question about it.

But does she care enough to join the rest of us in working hard for her country?

And why did she choose this particular year to thank me for my work on our issue? Could her living in North Carolina have something to do with what appears to be a sudden change of heart brought on by the realization that this country is incapable of ending world poverty and political persecution by taking in the millions of people who want to come here?

John Tierney blogs in the New York Times about a study of “speed-dating” Columbia University:

There’s also a clear gender divide, as the researchers note: “Women of all races exhibit strong same race preferences, while men of no race exhibit a statistically significant same race preference.”

That part about men having no preference sounds a bit like an artifact of doing the study at an Ivy League school where men have to be on their guard for ideological deviancy. Ivy League women, in contrast, would just slough off charges of racism with Ivy League feminist-quality logic: “I can’t be a racist because I’m a feminist!”

Here are the study’s results for women:

African-American women said yes about 30 percent less often to Hispanic men; about 45 percent less often to white men; about 65 percent less often to Asian men.

White women said yes about 30 percent less often to black or Hispanic men, and about 65 percent less often to Asian men.

Hispanic women said yes about 20 percent less often to black or white men, and 50 percent less often to Asian men.

Asian women didn’t discriminate much by race (except for showing a very slight preference for Asian men over black or Hispanic men).

And now you know why the Bitter Asian Men are so bitter.

This list of names says a lot about why East Coast elites don’t feel that massive Hispanic immigration provides any noticeable competition that might hinder their kids from getting ahead in their careers. Here are nine nice, respectable office jobs at the Pew Hispanic Center, and they could only find Spanish-surnamed people to fill two of them

That won’t come as any surprise to anybody with more than one kid, but the relationship to brain anatomy is interesting. Steve Connor reports:

Personality types are linked with structural differences in the brain - which could explain why one child grows up to be impulsive and outgoing while another becomes diligent and introspective.

Anatomical differences between the brains of 85 people have been measured and linked with the four main categories of personality types as defined by psychiatrists using a clinically recognised system of character evaluation….

Brain scans that measure differences in volume down to an accuracy of less than one cubic millimetre found, for instance, that people defined as novelty-seeking personalities had a structurally bigger area of the brain above the eye sockets, known as the inferior part of the frontal lobe.

If this holds up (and I’m singularly unable to judge — owing to my lack of 3-d processing power, I never been able to make head nor tail of any article referring to a region in the brain. No doubt my brain region that contributes to 3-d thinking is vanishingly small.)

I’ve long felt we are programmed by evolution to have kids with different personalities as a form of what financial economists like Edward M. Miller call “portfolio diversity:” you don’t want to put all your assets into one basket, such as mortgage backed securities. For example, Genghis Khan’s aggressive personality worked out fine from a Darwinian standpoint (his personal genetic signature appears in a huge number of people across a giant swath of Eurasia), but it probably got lots of other guys with similar personalities killed early. So, you wouldn’t want to have three sons each with Genghis Khan’s personality. They’d just end up skewering each other.

But my more scientist friends roll their eyes when I advocate portfolio diversity and say that’s “group selectionism,” which has been thoroughly exploded.

From the Pew Hispanic Center report on illegal immigrants, the five states with “Largest Share of Unauthorized Immigrants in the Labor Force, 2008:”

1. Nevada - 12.2%
2. California - 9.9%
3. Arizona - 9.8%
4. New Jersey - 9.2%
5. Florida - 8.2%

Hmmhmm … the four Sand States where 7/8ths or so of the mortgage money has been lost, and New Jersey. If I owned a lot of mortgages in New Jersey, I wouldn’t be feeling too good about collecting on them right now.

Kathy Shaidle made a highly successful speech on Canada’s Human Rights Commissions in London, Ontario. You can read it here. Check out this part on the “No Irish Need Apply” urban legend:

The original mandate of the HRCs was to deal with discrimination in employment and accommodation.

A really embarrassing female politician asked Mark Steyn about one famous example, when he recently testified at Queen’s Park about the HRCs and Section 13. She brought up the hoary old chestnut about signs in store windows that read NO IRISH NEED APPLY.

As Mark Steyn explained to this poor woman, because he’d read about it first on my blog, the real trouble with No Irish Need Apply signs is that they never existed.

Richard Jensen of the University of Illinois studied the issue and wrote:

The fact that Irish American vividly “remember” NINA signs is a curious historical puzzle. There are no contemporary or retrospective accounts of a specific sign at a specific location. No particular business enterprise is named as a culprit. No historian, archivist, or museum curator has ever located one; no photograph or drawing exists.

The complete absence of evidence suggests that probably zero such signs were seen at commercial establishments, shops, factories, stores, hotels, railroads, union halls, hiring halls, personnel offices, labor recruiters, anywhere in America, at any time.

(…) However, the professor continues:

Irish Americans all have heard about these signs—and remember elderly relatives insisting they existed. The late Tip O’Neill remembered the signs from his youth in Boston in 1920s; Senator Ted Kennedy reported the most recent sighting, telling the Senate during a civil rights debate that he saw the signs when growing up.

(And we all know how reliable Senator Kennedy’s accounts of his personal experiences can be.)

I’d be happy to speculate later about what this  says about Irish psychology, but for now, let’s concentrate on the fact that the politician who confronted Mark Steyn with that would-be zinger merely showed herself to be terribly concerned about a hundred year old case of job discrimination that was completely make believe.

Here’s the penultimate paragraph from the President’s speech on the economy:

There is no doubt that times are still tough. By no means are we out of the woods just yet. But from where we stand, for the very first time, we are beginning to see glimmers of hope. And beyond that, way off in the distance, we can see a vision of an America’s future that is far different than our troubled economic past. It’s an America teeming with new industry and commerce; humming with new energy and discoveries that light the world once more. A place where anyone from anywhere with a good idea or the will to work can live the dream they’ve heard so much about.

Read that last sentence again: “A place where anyone from anywhere with a good idea or the will to work can live the dream they’ve heard so much about.”

Obama is an ex-law school teacher, so when he’s verbally ambiguous, it’s with a purpose. You could read “anyone from anywhere” as meaning anyone with an ancestry from anywhere. But the more straightforward reading is pure Open Borders sentimentality: anyone of Obama’s teeming relatives, or any of the other six billion people, should be able to move to America whenever they feel like it as long as they have “the will to work.”

It’s a useful rule of thumb that any politician who refers to The American Dream is up to no good.

The President is a rich man with an income of several million dollars per year from his books. Why in hell shouldn’t he pay to send his illegal immigrant aunt home to Kenya?