This afternoon, the American Enterprise Institute held a panel [video and audio will be up later] on Mark Krikorian’s latest book The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal. Krikorian gave his speech, and comments were made by Fred Siegel of the Progressive Policy Institute and Jason Richwine of AEI and was moderated by David Frum.

I arrived twenty minutes late and missed most of Krikorian’s opening remarks where he outlined the basic arguments in his book. This is just as well, as I plan on reviewing the book (which is quite good) at length in the future, and what was really interesting was the Jason Richwine’s response.

Richwine praised Krikorian’s book, but said he disagreed with its opening lines “It’s not the immigrants, it’s us. What’s different about immigration today as opposed to a century ago is not the characteristics of the newcomers, but the characteristics of our society.”

He agreed that our society changed, but made the blunt point that a major difference between today’s immigrants and yesterday’s is that today’s are almost all non-white while the earlier groups were almost all white. He went on to say this is important because whether we like it or not, people are naturally tribal and—to the gasps of many of the audience members—there are serious racial differences in IQ and that having groups with vastly different achievement levels will create more racial strife.

He said that the fact that saying that all European immigrants once thought unassimilable were eventually included into the Melting Pot in no way means that non-white immigrants will also be assimilated.

He pointed to Native Americans, African Americans, and earlier Mexican immigrants as examples of groups that have not assimilated after hundreds of years. He echoed Peter Brimelow by suggesting that Krikorian  is triangulating between the Open Borders crowd and himself.

He ended by making a thought experiment: What if the earlier waves of immigrants had been Pakistanis and Australian Aborigines instead of Italians, Germans, and Irish? Would they have assimilated? In the Q&A, I brought up Pat Buchanan’s comments about Englishmen assimilating more easily than Zulus and asked a corollary question: If our immigrants were coming from Europe, would we have the problems we are having today with Third World immigrants?

Siegel’s response to Richwine was that Ayaan Hirsi Ali said she did poorly on IQ tests, and she is so brilliant, that we cannot take the concept seriously.

Krikorian made a decent response, which is that the real racial gap in this country has been historically “ black vs. non black” than “white vs. non-whites.” Therefore, he argued that immigrants essentially assimilated by being “non-black” at the expense of African Americans. He responded to my point by saying that while there would not be as many problems with British immigrants, in today’s society they would still set up ethnic grievance lobbies.

Richwine responded that even if the British set up their own lobbies, they would still assimilate because they would reach social and economic parity with the native-borns, which the Zulus wouldn’t. He didn’t express it that way, but it could be said that racial grievances hold little weight when there aren’t racial disparities. There would be these disparities with the Zulus, but there wouldn’t be with the British.

When one questioner called it “offensive” to hold an ethnic based immigration policy, both Krikorian and Richwine said that they did not endorse a policy, but Krikorian said that his immigration policy would have disparate impacts on different races.

He then said he opposes making ethnic based immigration systems on both political and moral grounds. Does this mean that all our immigration laws were immoral until 1965?

I had never heard of Richwine before this speech. It turns out that he is currently finishing his dissertation at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government on the topic of immigration and IQ. He will then stay on as a research fellow at AEI focusing on “applying the science of mental ability to better inform public policy on a variety of issues, including immigration, race relations, education, and welfare.” Definitely someone we want to keep our eye on.

You know that we aren’t dealing with just a few isolated cases of political correctness when you can find completely unrelated cases of multicultural anarcho-tyrrany within the very narrow subset of immigrant hairstyles twice in three days.

On June 16, the London Daily Mail ran a piece about how the West Midlands’ police spent £100,000 trying to find proper protective head gear for a Sikh constable who wanted to join their counter-terrorism unit, but refused to take off his turban.

The department allowed finding proper headgear to be his special project. After paying him for eighteen months with no result, they transferred him back to his old position. He promptly took long term sick leave claiming “stress.”

According to their spokesperson:

West Midlands Police is a diverse organisation, which both serves and recruits from a diverse community. No Sikh officer has applied and been turned down from joining the Operational Support Unit because of faith issues. However, it has been identified that for some members of the Sikh faith, the removal of the turban to wear a helmet and the wearing of a respirator could be problematic. As an employer committed to equality and diversity, we are working to try and find a solution to what is a national issue. This worthwhile work continues.”

The Daily Mail quotes Former West Midlands Police Chief Superintendent John Mellor of calling the situation “health and safety gone mad.” I can think of a few other things besides “health and safety.”

Two days later, the Daily Mail featured Sarah Desrosiers, a London hairstylist who owned a salon called The Wedge. Last March, a nineteen year old Muslim girl named Bushra Noah came to an interview wearing a headscarf. According to Desrosiers, there were a number of reasons why Noah was not fit for the job, but one of them was that she was wearing a headscarf that covered her entire hairline down to her eyebrows. Desrosiers asked her if she would remove the scarf when she worked to which she replied in the negative.

After she was rejected from the job, Noah sued for both direct and indirect discrimination. Derosiers spent her entire savings defending herself. She eventually won on the charges of “direct discrimination”—in that she would have denied the job to anyone who refused to show their hair regardless of race or religion.

However, the case of “indirect discrimination”—what we would call disparate impact—the burden of proof lies on the defendant to prove that there were legitimate economic concerns based on the policy. It is common sense that clients at a hair salon want to see the hairstylists’ hair style. Yet the entire multicultural regime relies upon ignoring common sense, and Derosiers was required to pay £4,000 that she doesn’t have to Noah because of “injury to her feelings.”

When the England is no longer populated by Englishmen, so goes the Rights of Englishmen.

According to the Associated Press, The US Conference of Catholic Bishops is currently under state and federal investigation for using federal funds to provide an abortion for minors. Joanne Nattrass, executive director of Commonwealth Catholic Charities, recently admitted that four of her workers helped get a sixteen year old illegal alien from Guatemala get an abortion. They even signed the minor consent forms.[US Catholic charity is investigated for helping teen get abortion, June 20, 2008]

CCC is a subcontractor of the notoriously open borders U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops who “appear to have been aware of Commonwealth Catholic Charities’ action” according to David Siegel, head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ refugee resettlement.

When blogging about the Cato Institute’s book forum on Wall Street Journal editor Jason Riley’s Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders , James Fulford noted that the commentator was Michael Barone and the moderator was Dan Griswold, so we shouldn’t expect spirited debate.

I wouldn’t really call it “debate,” but Riley was so off the charts that he even gave Michael Barone pause.

Riley’s speech was supposed to demolish the various distorted arguments used by us restrictionists.[Watch or listen here.] I am not familiar with the statistics he used, but I’ll take them at face value for the sake of argument.

He began with crime. He said that within every ethnic group, the crime rate among immigrants is lower than native born. Of course this just shows that the children of immigrants are not assimilating—or assimilating downward. The important point is that the ethnic groups that are immigrating to this country—namely Hispanics–whether legal, illegal, or native born are committing more crimes than the (still) majority white population. Therefore, any increase in Hispanics increases crime.

Riley [Email him.] then goes to dismissing the welfare arguments. He says that since illegal immigration has skyrocketed in the mid 1990s, overall welfare rates have gone down. Of course this confuses correlation with causation. Welfare Reform probably had something to do with the drop. When you compare the rates of Hispanics and immigrants who are eligible for welfare, they both have much higher rates than the rest of the population. Moreover, the average immigrant household costs taxpayers $20,000 in benefits other than means tested aid. Then there was Michael Barone’s familiar comparison  of Hispanics to various European ethnic groups’ dysfunctions in the past. Presumably this proves that all objections to Hispanics are unfounded.

In the Q&A, I brought up the inconvenient fact that all the groups they talked about were European, while both Blacks and Native Americans have yet to assimilate. Both Barone and Riley responded by bringing up that African immigrants are doing much better than blacks. What they did not mention is that the population of Africans is still quite small and self selective,  and that like Hispanics the second generation is assimilating downwards.

By comparison to Riley, even Michael Barone seemed relatively sane. He acknowledged that it is hard to predict immigration flows, and that the crafters of the 1965 Act were wrong when they said that immigration levels would not affected by the new law. He expressed some sympathy for reforming prioritization for legal immigration away from family reunification and towards a skill based system.

He admitted that, as a whole, the influx of Hispanics is bad for the GOP, but said it was a fait accompli that the GOP must adapt to. Unlike Riley who called for completely open borders, Barone thought that we should make our decisions based on citizenship and assimilation rather than just having a willing employer.

Barone is still on the other side from us, but it actually seems like he has been thinking about this issue. The same cannot be said of Jason Riley, who seems incapable of doing anything besides regurgitating WSJ editorials.

During a conference with bloggers, Quin Hillyer of the Washington Examiner asked McCain to explain why “during the immigration debate, you referred to [amnesty] opponents to nativists and compared them to supporters of Jim Crow?”

McCain responded, “I’ve never said that. Please don’t allege that. I’m proud of the way I’ve conducted myself and treated opponents with respect, whatever their views. I have to stop you there. I’ve never used those two words before that I can recall.”

Well he didn’t specifically say “Jim Crow, ” but on the Senate floor he sarcastically asked amnesty opponents, “what next, are we going to say that work-authorized immigrants are going to have to ride in the back of the bus?”

According to the New York Observer, in a 2006 in front of a group of donors “[McCain] criticized elements in his own party as “nativist” before lambasting the punditry of Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs and Michael Savage for helping to “fuel the problem,”

If we can give McCain credit for something, it’s that he has yet to accuse Dobbs and Limbaugh of causing hate crimes like Barack Obama who told a group of donors a few weeks ago, “There’s a reason why hate crimes against Hispanic people doubled last year. If you have people like Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh ginning things up, it’s not surprising that would happen.”

Last year the Southern Poverty Law Center decided to write a little report on my “network” of racist connections. They didn’t mention a single thing I wrote or say, but they tried to link me to various “racists.” The best they could come up with is that I worked for “white nationalist” Pat Buchanan, that I was Facebook friends with then Washington Times editor Stacy McCain, and that I wrote for VDARE.com.

There is now a new extremist hate group that the Southern Poverty Law Center can “link” me to…The Southern Poverty Law Center.

The other day, I went to my mailbox and what should I find, but “A Certificate of Appreciation” from the Southern Poverty Law Center for my “important contribution in the ongoing fight against hatred and intolerance in America.” I also will have my name added to the “Wall of Tolerance.” Just to make sure it’s official, it is signed by Morris Dees. This is already framed and hanging in my office.

So the next time the SPLC attacks me, or any of the various people and institutions that I’m “linked” to, remember that they are just one degree of separation away.

VDARE doesn’t endorse candidates, but we have no problems giving a summary of where they stand on immigration.

A few weeks I expressed disappointment in Bob Barr’s near complete 180 from immigration reform patriot to open borders libertarian in VDARE. While I thought that his new found stance on immigration would hurt him in the general election, I acknowledged, that “I would be lying if I said that picking back up the standard of patriotic immigration reform would help Barr win the Libertarian Party nomination—anymore than it would it help him become president of La Raza.”

This was an understatement. Even Barr’s extremely watered down position on immigration still upsets many libertarians. For example, Susan Hogwarth of the Party’s Radical Caucus sent a widely circulated open letter to Barr, expressing concern that he proposed to “secure our borders from criminals, terrorists and those seeking to take advantage of the American taxpayer.”

Well it seems that my piece may have actually helped Barr. I attended an event last week where I learned that a number of pro-Barr libertarians circulated my article to prove that he wasn’t a restrictionist. Two people there told me that they voted for him after reading my piece.

VDARE likes to poke fun of Mark Krikorian and the Center for Immigration Studies for “triangulating” immigration policy somewhere between National Review Online and VDARE.

Their Eugene Katz Award For Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration have often been a bit heavy on the NRO side of the triangle and raised a few of our eyebrows. For example, In 2003 they gave the award to Joel Mowbray for his reporting in National Review on the Saudi visas. Mowbray was not there to accept the award, so National Review immigration John Miller accepted it with a note from Mowbray who indicated that he does “not agree on the key question of immigration levels.” Last year Ramesh Ponnuru gave a speech.

I’m happy to say that there is absolutely nothing to criticize about this year’s awards. Both the speaker and the award recipient—William McGowan and Heather Mac Donald respectively—were excellent choices.

MacDonald has done more than anyone to expose the pathologies of the Hispanic underclass with her pieces in City Journal that expose the depth of immigrant gangs, the lack of “Hispanic family values,” as well as issues like Mexico’s meddling in America’s immigration policy and other topics that few conservatives would tread. She spent the majority of his speech going after Open Borders conservatives like Jason Riley and Linda Chavez who believed in the “Myth of the Redemptive Hispanics” who would save America through their Catholic family values. She found it particularly odd that many conservatives are willing to talk about social pathologies among the African Americans, but not Hispanics—a point that I’d like to address at length in a future column.

The opening remarks were made by William McGowan, the author of the invaluable Coloring the News. McGowan has not written much about immigration and I was pleasantly surprised at how hard-hitting some of his speech was. For example, he said that there was a ethnic conflict of interest with the large number of Hispanic journalists. He also made the exact same observation I made at the VDARE blog about the NY Times’ failure to note that virtually all the corrupt border patrol agents were Hispanic.

Most likely unaware of Peter Brimelow’s criticism of CIS’s triangulation, McGowan praised the early anti-immigration progressives for “triangulating” (his word) between the open borders libertarians of the day and the Nativists.

CIS will post the transcript next week on their website. Let’s hope that they continue to lean more towards Heather Mac Donald and further away from Ramesh Ponnuru.

Tuesday’s New York Times had a front page feature entitled “As Border Efforts Grow, Corruption is on the Rise.” [By Randal C. Archibold And Andrew Becker, May 27, 2008]

The implication is that border security is futile and often counterproductive. This was made even more clear in their silly video that accompanied the piece that opened with a man with his face blacked out (presumably a human smuggler) saying “You can keep trying, but usually the people who want to get across to the states, they will get across the states.” Then the narrator says “There is one guaranteed way to get across on your first try: a corrupt border official wiling to take a bribe.”

Here are the names of all the corrupt agents discussed in the piece: Raul Villarreal, Fidel Villarreal, Luis Alarid, Jose Olivas Jr., Jose Ramiro Arredondo, Miguel Angel Avina, Juan Luis Sanchez, Jose Magana, Luis Francisco Alarid, and Michael Gilliland.

As evidenced by the last-named, white officers are certainly capable of corruption, but Latin America has notoriously corrupt law enforcement and we seem to be importing their problems by putting the fox in charge of guarding the hen house.

Of course there are honest Hispanic Agents who do their jobs like Ramos and Compean, and look how they get thanked.

Yesterday, the Senate removed the H2B temporary worker increase off the Iraq Supplemental Bill , after they had already removed the AgJobs amnesty and increase in legal immigration earlier in the week.

This demonstrates that the grassroots movement against amnesty is still alive and well. This is not the “techno populist victory” where “bloggers picked apart the bill [and] talk-radio-show hosts broadcast its flaws” that Rich Lowry purported was responsible for stopping amnesty last year.

As I said previously, I didn’t hear more than a peep from most of the Conservative Press (Human Events a notable exception.) most of the non-immigration related conservative blogs, and talk radio show hosts. They were all too busy cheerleading John McCain. (To their credit, National Review had one blog post)

Instead, it was groups like Numbers USA whose members sent more faxes to congress than they did during the “comprehensive” amnesty. It is also satisfying that we were able to remove the increases in legal and temporary immigration that many of the “techno populists” aren’t concerned with.

Nonetheless, we shouldn’t get too comfortable. No one really expected the open borders politicians to stoop so low. A month ago, no one would have said “well it will be a victory if there is no amnesty before June.” Our opponents only need once, and this shows that they are not letting up. I’ve been told that part of the reason that the immigration measures were pulled had nothing to do with constituent outrage, but due to internal bickering over procedure. Next time, they’ll have their bases covered.

So enjoy your Memorial Day Weekend knowing we have once again averted disaster, but remember to stay eternally vigilant.