The economy lost 457,000 jobs last month, and the unemployment rate edged up to 9.5 percent–the highest in 26 years. More depressing still: the upbeat trend of last month, when job losses moderated, is decisively over. June’s decline killed off 120,000 more positions than May’s.

The V-shaped recovery that some economists thought was likely a month ago now looks more like a W–or even, heaven forbid, an L. With the stock market and consumer confidence down, and the stimulus thus far failing to stimulate, June may be remembered as the month that the Obama Administration was forced to take “ownership” of the Great Recession.

But the political implications of the “other” employment survey–of households rather than businesses–are somewhat less ominous for the Administration. Household employment declined by 374,000 positions, or nearly 100,000 less than the business survey figure. More importantly, the fastest growing ethnic group enjoyed a gain:

• - Total employment in June: -374,000 (-0.27 percent)
• - Non-Hispanic employment: -402,000 (-0.33 percent)
• - Hispanic employment: +28,000 (+0.14 percent)

White workers bore the brunt of June’s decline, as seen by disparity among unemployment rate changes:

• - White unemployment: 8.7 percent (+0.1 point in June)
• - Black unemployment: 14.7 percent (-0.2 point)
• - Hispanic unemployment: 12.2 percent (-0.5 point)

People on our side of the immigration debate warned that the Obama stimulus would benefit occupations disproportionately manned by immigrants. June’s figures do nothing to discredit their “paranoia.”

Over the long run, of course, the notion that immigrants displace native born workers is amply supported by hard evidence. From January 2001 to June 2009 Hispanic employment increased by 3,505,000 positions, or by 22.0 percent. Non-Hispanic employment fell by 1,085,000 positions, or by 0.9 percent, over the same period.

The ratio of Hispanic to non-Hispanic job growth since the January 2001, expressed as an index that we call VDAWDI (the VDARE.com American Worker Displacement Index), rose by 0.5 percent in June. Since peaking in September 2008, VDAWDI has declined by 1.4 percent:

So far the Great Recession has cut Hispanic job growth, both in absolute terms and relative to non-Hispanic job growth. This is clearly seen in the graphic:

The black line tracks Hispanic job growth; pink non-Hispanic job growth; and yellow the ratio of Hispanic to non-Hispanic job growth indices,–i.e., American Worker Displacement. (All lines start at 100.0 in January 2001.)

Every American wants the black and pink lines to line to turn up. One worries whether the yellow line–measuring the displacement of American workers by immigrants–will roar back also.

Houston Mayor Bill White stubbornly refuses to end his city’s sanctuary policy even though it has directly contributed to the deaths of officers (including Rodney Johnson, pictured) and citizens (like carjacked mom Tina Davila).

Houston’s largest police union, citing the death of six officers during Mayor Bill White’s tenure, called on the mayor and City Council this week to hire more officers, restore $14 million in overtime pay and overturn the long-standing policy of not questioning residents about their immigration status.

In a letter to White, Gary Blankinship, president of the Houston Police Officers Union, called last week’s slaying of veteran officer Henry Canales a “trifeca failure” of federal, state and city government to protect citizens and police officers from criminal illegal immigrants.

White responded with a news conference Thursday to make clear there would be no change in the department’s policy on illegal immigrants.
[Officers, mayor square off over immigration policy, Houston Chronicle, July 2, 2009]

Another Houston Chronicle article revealed the feelings of average cops about having to work with one arm tied behind their backs.

“It’s a strong issue,” Blankinship said. “My guys get tired of dealing with the criminal aliens out here, and it seems like the severity of the crimes is escalating and that’s frustrating to the rank and file.”

He stressed that calls for a change in the policy are not aimed at a wholesale roundup of illegal immigrants in Houston, a population the Greater Houston Partnership estimated last year at 420,000 in the 10-county Houston metropolitan area. It would help officers to weed out dangerous criminals in the undocumented community, he said.

The good news here is that the Houston Police Union is openly condemning the city’s sanctuary policy as dangerous to public safety and to officers on the job.

Politically correct mayors tend to forget that immigration status can be an important factor in suspect behavior: illegal aliens may react violently when they believe they are threatened with deportation. For example, Houston Officer Rodney Johnson was murdered by an illegal he had stopped for speeding. Actress and mother Adrienne Shelly was killed by an illegal alien who feared his deportation if she reported him to the authorities. She had discovered Diego Pilco stealing from her purse in her office, and he strangled her to death to hide his status.

You can contact Mayor White at mayor@cityofhouston.net with your thoughtful comments.

The Iranian election protests have apparently sputtered out, significantly faster than the Mexican election protests of 2006 that excited far less interest in the American press. Obviously, there are a lot of specific reasons for this disparity, but I think there’s a general pattern emerging.

As English has become the world’s dominant language, it has become easier for Americans to be influenced by foreigners who are fluent in English. For example, Americans follow political controversies in Iran by reading blogs by Iranians — Iranians who like to write in English, of course, which is hardly a representative sample of Iranian opinion.

This means that the American press will tend to be biased toward political movements who represent the better educated, wealthier, more cosmopolitan, Internet-savvy, and more elitist elements in a foreign country (i.e., those likely to speak English well), while the American media will be less sympathetic toward parties comprised of the less educated, poorer, more xenophobic, offline, and more populist elements. (more…)

Right about four centuries ago, the London Government, desperate to maintain control of the upwind (critical in the days of sail) and populous island of Ireland, kicked out much of the hostile Roman Catholic population of the northern province of Ulster and invited immigrants from (mainly) the Border Country between England and Scotland to replace them.

This community, known very accurately to American (but not British) historiography as the Scotch-Irish, is generally agreed by all who have subsequently had to deal with them to be the most violent and irascibly aggressive of any Anglophone population – including the native Irish.

A very few generations after going to Ireland, many of their descendents moved on to the southern United States. This process is beautifully documented in Albion’s Seed–imperative reading in my opinion for anyone who wants to understand America. My copy, alas, is not to hand, but I recollect Professor Fischer noting that, fortuitously, the most violent settlers of the East Coast met the most violent Indians–whom they promptly destroyed.

Shortly after that they supplied much of the fighting spirit of the Confederacy – along with the tunes for many of its songs and of course the Battle Flag.

Meanwhile, their cousins left in Ireland have defeated every effort to eradicate them – in recent decades shamefully connived at by Administrations in London.

And this continues. Hat Tip The Irish Savant – (the other sort of Irishman, I believe) –

Diversity Delight in Norn Iron

They’re getting their collective knickers in a twist in Northern Ireland over the spate of ‘racist’ attacks on… ‘gypsies’ ….As has been widely reported, people up there got a bit fed up with the activities of such gypsies and in the traditions of that very special place, violently ran them out. All but two of the 110 are now winging their way, at the expense of the NI taxpayers (actually the UK taxpayers, who keep NI afloat) back to their countries of origin.

“in the traditions of that very special place” - Ah, it takes an Irish way with words.

Gypsies of course are a European curse, unleashed by political correctness.

For all of them to leave the persuasion must have been…persuasive.

The question is, what is it that these Ulstermen have, that, perhaps unique in the WASP world, equips them to survive in this wretched era?

As Justice Alito’s concurring opinion in Ricci documented in amusing detail, Frank Ricci and colleagues were the victims of blatant racial discrimination by a black power broker and his allied white mayor in New Haven.

Stanford Law Professor Richard Thompson Ford says, that, well, equal protection of the laws isn’t the point of civil rights legislation. Sure, the laws include a lot of colorblind rhetoric, but the whole point is to benefit blacks at the expense of whites, so it’s a dirty trick for the Supreme Court to read the laws and the Constitution literally and apply them evenhandedly. He writes in Slate:

The plaintiffs in Ricci were undoubtedly sympathetic: hardworking public servants—17 of them white, one Hispanic—who expected that the exam they studied for and did well on would determine their eligibility for moving up the ranks. But their legal argument is the latest in a long-standing campaign to turn civil rights laws against themselves. There’s a striking progression in the attacks on civil rights. In the early 1970s, affirmative action was widely considered to be a logical extension of civil rights principles: Even President Nixon—a man not known for his enlightened racial attitudes—supported it. But by the end of the decade, affirmative action was under attack as reverse discrimination. And now we see the next step in the march against civil rights with the part of federal civil rights law—Title VII—called “disparate impact” that prohibits employers from using promotional or hiring procedures that screen out minorities unless they can prove that the procedure is closely job-related.

In a new Comment, Barry Ritholtz, blogger (The Big Picture) and author of Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy, replies to a sampling of my articles on how “Diversity was a major factor in the mortgage meltdown:”

I think we are approaching this from two entirely different universes.

I am looking for cause and effect; I want to see data that supports or detracts from the proposition at hand. PROVE TO ME that X caused Y (including actual statistics).

Your proposal of Diversity causing the housing crash reads to me as a soft philosophical argument that is by definition unprovable — and undisprovable.

At the very least, I see no proof in your writings. They are cogent arguments that leap from A to B to C — but they lack the rigorous statistical evidence to demonstrate something convincingly to people who insist on hard data.

In my belief system, I use as few assumptions as possible. I try to avoid things that are unquantifiable. Statistical back testing is just on way to do that.

But even softer analyses such as war-gaming and alternative scenarios have to have some reasonable basis for proceeding. It cant be all assumptions, beliefs guesses and hunches.

This shows heartening progress in just a few days. Before he was exposed to my work, Mr. Ritholtz was denouncing and demonizing anybody who shared my views.

Here’s a sample of what he wrote at the beginning of this week:

I’ve run out of patience with tired memes and discredited claims by fools and partisan.

(more…)