Steve Sailer’s blog on the joke that is the Border Fence linked to a Washington Post story In ‘Virtual Fence,’ Continuity With Border Effort by Bush By Spencer S. Hsu Saturday, May 9, 2009 which quotes

James Jay Carafano, a homeland security analyst at the Heritage Foundation

What the Obama administration is trying to do is sending this political message, ‘We’re doing enforcement,’ “Carafano said. However, he said, betting on unproven technology raises the risk that it will end up “overpromising and under-delivering.”

The story notes that

DHS has paid $600 million to its prime contractor, Boeing

(which is strangely silent on its web site about this interesting and historic piece of business).

Boeing is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Hmm.

Clearly what has happened here is that with a distinct lack of commitment on the part to the project of both the Bush and Obama administration, the project has been captured by a crew of Pyramid-building tech-crazed geeks and pork-hunting defense Contractors, with no interest in the actual results. Just like the Pentagon procurement process at its worst.

The nation is being badly served.

Steve’s own posting attracted a valuable comment:

The first virtual fence was a joke. Illegal aliens always carry drugs with them and are always accompanied by a few heavily armed drug cartel enforcers.

Some of the towers were partially made of wood, so the smugglers just burned them down. Others were low enough that illegals threw rocks and destroyed them. And of course, a few rounds from an AK47 through the equipment causes what the government called “problems”.

No virtual fence will work unless US troops are there to protect the equipment. But then, if you are going to have troops there indefinitely…

An effective fence, armed Border Patrol, and troops on land and the Coast Guard and Navy at sea will be required. Once this is done, eliminating free schooling, welfare, free health care, and illegal hiring will solve the problem. And, this could all be done with a fraction of what we wasted on any number of banks.

If history is allowed a century from now, the inability of the country to protect itself with a suitable fence will cause utter mystification.

The Washington Post announces that the Obama Administration is close to being ready to virtually resume the Bush Administration’s ploy of fabricating a largely invisible and more or less nonexistent border “fence:”

In announcing the resumption of a “virtual fence” on the U.S.-Mexican border yesterday, the Obama administration sent a powerful message of continuity with President George W. Bush, who included a pledge to secure the border as part of a 2006 effort to persuade Congress to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws.

Much as Bush aides did three years ago, administration officials in the Department of Homeland Security described a five-year, multibillion-dollar plan yesterday to link a chain of tower-mounted sensors and other surveillance equipment over most of the 2,000-mile southern frontier. …

On Monday, U.S. officials began erecting 17 camera and radio towers on a 23-mile stretch near Tucson, and they expect this summer to add 36 others over 30 miles near Ajo, Ariz. If testing goes well and DHS approves, plans call for covering the 320-mile Arizona border by 2012 and the full border with Mexico — except for a 200-mile stretch in southwestern Texas where it is difficult to cross and expensive to monitor — by 2014.

The emperor has no fence.

The Harlem Miracle May 7, 2009
The fight against poverty produces great programs but disappointing results. You go visit an inner-city school, job-training program or community youth center and you meet incredible people doing wonderful things. Then you look at the results from the serious evaluations and you find that these inspiring places are only producing incremental gains.

That’s why I was startled when I received an e-mail message from Roland Fryer, a meticulous Harvard economist. It included this sentence: “The attached study has changed my life as a scientist.”

Fryer and his colleague Will Dobbie have just finished a rigorous assessment of the charter schools operated by the Harlem Children’s Zone. They compared students in these schools to students in New York City as a whole and to comparable students who entered the lottery to get into the Harlem Children’s Zone schools, but weren’t selected.

They found that the Harlem Children’s Zone schools produced “enormous” gains. The typical student entered the charter middle school, Promise Academy, in sixth grade and scored in the 39th percentile among New York City students in math. By the eighth grade, the typical student in the school was in the 74th percentile. The typical student entered the school scoring in the 39th percentile in English Language Arts (verbal ability). By eighth grade, the typical student was in the 53rd percentile.

Forgive some academic jargon, but the most common education reform ideas — reducing class size, raising teacher pay, enrolling kids in Head Start — produce gains of about 0.1 or 0.2 or 0.3 standard deviations. If you study policy, those are the sorts of improvements you live with every day. Promise Academy produced gains of 1.3 and 1.4 standard deviations. That’s off the charts. In math, Promise Academy eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students.

Let me repeat that. It eliminated the black-white achievement gap. “The results changed my life as a researcher because I am no longer interested in marginal changes,” Fryer wrote in a subsequent e-mail. What Geoffrey Canada, Harlem Children’s Zone’s founder and president, has done is “the equivalent of curing cancer for these kids. It’s amazing. It should be celebrated. But it almost doesn’t matter if we stop there. We don’t have a way to replicate his cure, and we need one since so many of our kids are dying — literally and figuratively.”

These results are powerful evidence in a long-running debate.

Not really.

If you stop and think, you’ll notice that this experiment says less than David Brooks implies it says about the “black-white achievement gap” because there’s no control group of white students in this study. Nobody bothered to check to see how much white students’ scores would go up if a huge amount of money was given to a well-known superstar educator (in this case, Geoffrey Canada — here’s a more skeptical analysis of Canada’s accomplishment in Slate in 2008). (more…)

Once again in Slate, William Saletan has an article about the Emmanuel Goldstein of 21st Century America:

Inequality Control: A conversation about race, genes, bias, and fairness.

Over the last week and a half, I’ve been having—and if you’re reading along and commenting, you’ve been indirectly having—a conversation about race with John McWhorter and Steve Sailer. This wasn’t an agreed-upon discussion. It just started up, and people joined in, as often happens on the Internet. Yesterday, Noah Millman of The American Scene weighed in. I’m calling this a conversation even though not everyone involved is enamored of, or even talking directly to, everyone else. And there’s a good chance we’ll drift back into silence at this point, as each of us moves on to other things. But it’s worth summarizing a few points we’ve covered so far. …

1. Sailer, the person in this conversation who most vigorously defends categorizing people by race in the course of assessing their worth to society, has offered to give up that practice. In exchange, he wants proponents of affirmative action to give up the converse practice of categorizing people by race in the course of trying to equalize opportunity or outcome. I’m inclined to take this deal. My impression so far is that McWhorter, despite his criticisms of affirmative action, wouldn’t. But I’ll leave that question to him.

By the way, this one post by Noah is unrepresentative of the usual high quality of his writing. So, don’t hold this one against him.

I’ll try to straighten out Mr. Saletan’s confusions in VDARE.com on Sunday evening. I realize that these are difficult, subtle topics, and that people who haven’t put anywhere near as much time into studying these subjects as I have can’t really be expected to summarize my views accurately — even if they intend to be fair, they simply lack the depth of understanding to do a competent job — but these mischaracterizations of my positions in Slate and, especially, in The New Republic, are getting silly.

In the meantime, if you want to know what I’ve actually said about race and IQ, I put together handy Frequently Asked Question lists back in 2007 (after Saletan got in so much trouble with his friends for doubting the wisdom of Watsoning Dr. Watson):

The IQ FAQ

Race FAQ

Remember the chatty church squatter who hid among Chicago pews to escape La Migra? After much noisy drama, convicted felon Elvira Arelleno was finally repatriated to her nation of actual citizenship in 2007. But that’s not the last chapter of the story — far from it.

In fact, Elvira should be an inspiration to all illegal aliens that deportation is not the end of opportunity for a better life, but is merely a change in circumstance. Look how well Elvira is doing: she has parlayed her endless complaints about American immigration laws (always a favorite topic in victimhood-obsessed Mexico) into a run for the national legislature. She has name recognition, issues and copious press coverage — heck, she is practically elected. [Elvira Arellano Runs for Mexican Congress, New America Media, May , 2009]

Among the better known candidates running for Congress is Elvira Arellano, the deported activist from the United States who came to symbolize the face of the new immigrant movement. Taking refuge in a Chicago church in August 2006, Arellano defied a deportation order and US immigration authorities for one year in an unsuccessful attempt to remain with her young son. In August 2007, she was arrested and sent back to Mexico after appearing at an immigrant rights rally in Los Angeles.

Almost two years later, Arellano is on the campaign trail in Tijuana, Baja California, where she is the candidate for Congressional District #4 on the ticket of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).

Keeping true to her word to keep the migrant issue alive in the public eye, the energetic activist is stressing immigrant rights issues in Mexico’s 2009 political campaign. In comments last weekend, Arellano said she is especially concerned about the fate of women migrants who pass through Mexico on their way to the US, a journey that is often fraught with sexual assaults and other abuses.

“I am going to seek laws in Congress that protect women, and also that protect undocumented Central Americans who are treated like criminals in Mexico,” Arellano said.

You go, Elvira! Mexican women need better protection from piggyman  Mexican males: how about more women-only buses that are free of groping. There’s a lot that needs fixing in Mexico, and Elvira’s innate intransigence could be an asset.

How wonderful for Elvira that her beloved homeland has offered her so much hope. The Mexican Dream is alive and well, as shown by Elvira Arellano.

Whenever I write about the California-centric origins of our economic crash, I get comments saying to the effect of, “Hey, what about Spain? They had a huge Housing Bubble in Spain, too. Spain is totally different from California, yet the same thing happened there.”

I was at a charity event held at Cal Tech yesterday and I got talking to a Spaniard from Andalusia in sunny southern Spain. I asked him about the Housing Bubble and Bust in Spain. He said that immigrant retirees from Northern Europe with big pensions bought up all the good land near the coast, so the locals started buying up houses on the bad land in the inland deserts on the logic that, hey, it was Spain, Spain is a Mediterranean country, so anywhere in Spain must have a Mediterranean climate, so the price of houses must go up forever everywhere in Spain, no matter how hot and dusty.

I said, that sounds a lot like the Bubble and Bust in California’s Inland Empire.

He said, Yes, very much so.

He went on to say that Spaniards can deal with hard times better than Americans can. So much of the economy is off the books in Spain in good times or bad that you can always get by by moving in with your relatives and doing unreported odd jobs for your uncle or cousin-in-law, even if you are officially broke. American nuclear families aren’t as resilient, he (more…)

Maybe it is gloom inculcated by previous generations spent on rain-swept Northern Atlantic coasts rather than sun-drenched Mediterranean shores, but I can’t share Joe Guzzardi’s radiant optimism expressed on Friday about the present situation. Although I admit he made great calls on Amnesty defeats in the past.

It is true that not getting Amnesty/Immigration Acceleration is important. As Stephen Steinlight correctly said recently

“If comprehensive immigration reform were ever to pass, Heaven help us, it would have the most enduring and palpable impact on this country of any piece of legislation since the Emancipation proclamation.
“The heart of that legislation is not amnesty. That’s a weapon of mass distraction. The heart of that is doubling legal immigration. Given the way the system works, the engine of extended family reunification, chain immigration, it will mean 60 million to 100 million more Mexicans here in 20 years.

But the trouble is that, with the Birthright Citizenship loophole unaddressed and Immigration law enforcement lacking, every year with nothing done moves this country perceptibly closer to becoming an Hispanic slum.

And non-Enforcement is what is happening. Federale has an excellent analysis up: The Real Meaning Behind The New Immigration Enforcement Regulations Thursday, May 7, 2009

Much has been made about the new immigration workplace enforcement policies and even pro-enforcement watchdogs have been fooled… Even Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, usually a very solid figure on the illegal alien issue was taken in by the new written policies…

…the secret to not enforcing the law was hidden in the new regulations. The new regulations require that before any immigration raid, ICE obtain obtain indictments, criminal arrest or search warrants, or a commitment from a U.S. Attorney’s Office to prosecute the employer before arresting employees for civil immigration violations.

And that will be a long time coming. U.S. Attorneys are first and foremost political hacks… They will have what is euphemistically called in the federal law enforcement community, “other priorities.”… I can assure you that few AUSAs will be obtaining search warrants, arrest warrants or providing indictments for ICE… The only way of denting this gaming of the system is mandatory use of E-Verify, which Janet Reno Napalitano and Baraka Hussein Obama oppose.

QED, the enforcement of immigration laws against illegal aliens is deader than someone with Swine Flu.

So it looks like we are back to the early Bush years.

24Ahead.com (which I have bookmarked as LoneWacko – has there been a name change?) notes
Obama budget ends SCAAP, just like Bush did (reimburses states for illegal alien incarceration)

Clearly that discourages apprehensions.

All in all, I have to concur with a FAIR email I got last night

Obama Administration Implements Non-Enforcement Policy

“…unmistakable signals” have been translated into unmistakable deeds, all leading to the inescapable conclusion that not only won’t the administration vigorously enforce laws against illegal immigration, but their intent is to dismantle immigration enforcement programs altogether… DHS released 27 of the 28 illegal aliens nabbed in the Bellingham enforcement action and issued them work permits and the right to remain in the country for an indefinite period.

Napolitano indicated that the administration will focus its enforcement efforts on businesses and executives responsible for employing illegal aliens. How the government will be able to prosecute businesses and executives for employing illegal aliens without conducting worksite enforcement is not clear…

What distinguishes the actions of the Obama administration from those of its predecessors is that the president is affirmatively dismantling existing immigration enforcement programs and infrastructure. While Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush did little to enforce immigration laws when they assumed power, their inaction was merely a perpetuation of the status quo.

The status quo inherited by President Obama, on the other hand, was one in which ICE was successfully carrying out enforcement actions… In the case of the current president, not enforcing worksite immigration laws required a deliberate and calculated change in direction.

This Obama crowd is a bad lot.

It is raining here tonight as well.