It’s not his (her?) main point, but VDARE.com letter-writer Long Live Liberty mentions (A California Asian-American Reader Says Jared Taylor Needs A Broader View) a “Chinese for Ron Paul website (Mandarin only) that attempts to educate limited-English speaking voters so that they can make informed decisions when casting their ballot.”

But why should people who can’t understand English well enough to follow American political debates be voting in the first place? And, thus, why should they be citizens?

My objection isn’t easily dismissible. As Jim Boulet, head of English First, has written

Translation requires a remarkable amount of trust in the translator, unless everyone involved is fluent in both languages. A translator with an agenda can be a dangerous person if no one else notices what he is actually doing. [The Peril of Perfidious Translators, October 8, 2003]:

(Of course, if everyone were fluent in two languages–English and Spanish, say–then no translators would be needed! And, in fact, one of the languages would be superfluous, a point that doesn’t seem to have occurred to those who argue that native-English-speaking Americans should all become comfortable in Spanish.)

While outright perfidy may not have been involved, VDARE.com’s Mexican correspondent Allan Wall has written that 2002 Texas gubernatorial candidate Tony Sanchez (who ultimately lost to Rick Perry) campaigned on very different themes before English-speaking audiences and Spanish-speaking audiences. And given what Allan tells us (trusting this translator!), those who were limited to English might have been highly unenthusiastic about what Sanchez was saying to audiences who understood Spanish.

Reader Long Live Liberty’s remark was only about electioneering materials, and we don’t know his (her?) views on multi-lingual ballots, but perhaps the distinction isn’t so important. Consider a bit of 1995 Congressional testimony by then-president of Boston University John Silber. Silber remarked that such ballots “impose an unacceptable cost by degrading the very concept of the citizen to that of someone lost in a country whose public discourse is incomprehensible to him.”

The Silber quote comes from a 1996 article (English Is Broken Here) by John J. Miller in the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review. Miller added his relevant two cents:

Not everyone need speak English all of the time, but it must be the lingua franca of civic life. Since the voting booth is one of the vital places in which citizens directly participate in democracy, it must be the official language of the election process.

While it would, indeed, be un-American to forbid electioneering in languages other than English, the points made by Boulet, Silber, and Miller all suggest that we should discourage it.

And we should encourage ordering cheesesteaks in English.

Saul Alinsky, famed radical community organizer in mid-20th-Century Chicago, figures prominently in Steve Sailer’s current article on Barack Obama at VDARE.com’s main page.

My impression, as a Chicago native and a grad student at the University of Chicago (also Alinsky’s alma mater) in the 1970s, was that Alinsky, though a committed leftist, was a man without illusions about humanity. Pertinent to the immigration-sanity movement, there’s a well-known Alinsky quote that strikes me as a great antidote to the bleatings of the ethnic-grievance brigades within the Treason Lobby:

The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn’t necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or compassion.

You can find that quote all over the Web, here for example. I haven’t stumbled upon a source that actually gives the time and place where Alinsky said it. But I’ve been aware of the quote for at least 30 years, and I’ve no doubt that he did say it. It’s also consistent with other things I heard attributed to him back when I was in Hyde Park (the University of Chicago’s neighborhood).

My own formulation of Alinsky’s idea in the quote above is this: The people you’re trying to help aren’t any better than the people you’re working against, and if you interchanged them, you’d wind up with the same struggle on your hands.

The Alinsky quote also brings to my mind a theme enunciated a number of times by David Horowitz, once a man of the left who is now a stalwart of the right:

There is a sense, of course, in which the left has always been defined by its destructive agendas. Its utopian vision was just that – utopian, a vision of nowhere. In practice, socialism didn’t work. But socialism could never have worked because it is based on false premises about human psychology and society, and gross ignorance of human economy. In the vast library of socialist theory (and in all of Marx’s compendious works), there is hardly a chapter devoted to the creation of wealth – to what will cause human beings to work and to innovate, and to what will make their efforts efficient. Socialism is a plan of morally sanctioned theft. It is about dividing up what others have created. Consequently, socialist economies don’t work; they create poverty instead of wealth. This is unarguable historical fact now, but that has not prompted the left to have second thoughts.

Allan Wall has pointed VDARE blog readers to the Obama-cult video that must be seen to be believed.

In my view, the best way to think about the Obama phenomenon is to ask, “If this guy were white and had a comparable record, would he ever have attracted the slightest attention?” The question answers itself.

Mercifully, there’s a lampoon-Obama-mania video available, too. It has its moments, but what I really appreciated was the slogan on a poster that flashes by shortly after the 2-minute mark:

Lemmings for Obama

That’s good enough to remember and use!

We hear that claim a lot, that illegal aliens “just come here to work” and that “our economy would collapse without them.” But even overlooking the cohort among them who clearly come to enhance their own situations by wreaking mayhem on us (be sure your sound is on for that video), it’s not universally true.

Consider the experiences of a rancher near Naco, AZ, as recounted in a Reuters article about our fabled border fence [Despite fences, immigrants still broach U.S. border , by Tim Gaynor, March 3, 2008:

Local rancher John Ladd said some 300 to 400 illegal immigrants continue to clamber over the new steel barrier flanking the southern reach of his farm for some 10 miles (16 km) each day, as an effective combination of technologies and manpower remains elusive.

“It’s so easy to climb that I’ve seen two women that were pregnant, I’ve seen several women in their sixties and all kinds of kids between five and ten years old climb over it,” Ladd said, as he leaned on a section of the steel mesh fence that stretches like a rusted veil westward toward the rugged Huachuca Mountains.

Yep, it’s those uneducated women in their sixties, uneducated pregnant women, and ten-year-old kids who grace us with their (probably non-English-speaking) presence that make the U.S. the economic powerhouse that it is.

An article in Monday’s San Jose, CA Mercury-News [Illegal emigres defy the image: Fastest growing source? It's India, by Mike Swift, February 18, 2008] offers some startling numbers regarding illegal aliens from India. For example, the ubiquitous Jeffrey Passel of the Pew Hispanic Trust estimates that the number of “illegal Indians” in the U.S. is about 400,000.

Of course, Indian immigrants and illegal aliens cluster heavily in technical professions and are among the most abundant holders of H-1B visas. So we’ll leave it to VDARE’s Rob Sanchez (see Rob’s blog entries here) to comment on that aspect of this apparently burgeoning phenomenon.

What leapt off the page at me was a passage near the end of the article describing the dynamics of “illegal Indians” who aren’t on H-1Bs:

Another source is relatives from India who arrive for a visit on a tourist visa and never go home.

“America is a very attractive country; everybody who comes here wants to stay,” said Shah Peerally, a Silicon Valley immigration lawyer. “I can tell you right now, there are nearly 1 billion people in India, of which maybe 800 million want to come here.”

Of course, once 100 million (say) have come, the remaining 700 million may decide things don’t look so attractive over here any more.

The Bradenton (FL) Herald had a routine article the other day [Group to educate on immigration, by Maura Possley, February 12, 2008] about a couple of local activists who are out to obfuscate the difference between immigrants and illegal aliens.

(You might want to complain to the reporter about her shoddy reporting in parroting the activists’ agenda. She, too, conflates legal and illegal immigration, even where she isn’t directly quoting the two bleaters. Her email address is given in the article.)

More interesting is one of the online comments associated with the article. It’s comment 6536.27, posted by “TC12″ at 9:38 p.m. on February 12. TC12 writes, in part:

My son needed surgery. I called Manatee Memorial and it was going to cost $11,000 for a 45 minute surgery. I called Manatee Surgery Center & the same procedure cost $2500. You know why? Because the surgery center doesn’t have to take everyone that walks in the door, insurance or not (mostly not!)

This is interesting, because the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (the EMTALA law of 1986, 42 U.S.C. § 1395dd) is the unfunded mandate that is — via uncompensated care provided in their emergency rooms — beggaring hospitals nationwide, especially under the demands of illegal aliens. As Wikipedia describes it,

[EMTALA] requires hospitals and ambulance services to provide care to anyone needing emergency treatment regardless of citizenship, legal status or ability to pay. There are no reimbursement provisions. As a result of the act, patients needing emergency treatment can be discharged only under their own informed consent or when their condition requires transfer to a hospital better equipped to administer the treatment.

(Wikipedia also quotes a Kaiser Family Foundation study to the effect that illegal aliens are disproportionately low users of hospital emergency rooms. My skepticism over such claims is informed by reportage such as this by VDARE’s own Joe Guzzardi. Joe was actually writing about people here legally, but why would the dynamics be different for illegal aliens?)

Anyway, I urge any medically knowledgeable VDARE readers who can educate us on distinctions among types of medical facilites with respect to the EMTALA law — such as made by commenter TC12, quoted above — to do so.

The other comments associated with that Bradenton Herald article are overwhelmingly heartening, with a few of the usual mindless exceptions mixed in.

A book review (Tales Out of School; not yet online, and requires a subscription, anyway) by Sandra Tsing Loh in the just-arrived Atlantic Monthly for March is less a review–nominally of Jonathan Kozol’s new Letters to a Young Teacher –than navel-gazing on Loh’s part about her own thoughts on public education. (See this article by Sol Stern in City Journal for all you need to know about Kozol.)

Loh lives in Los Angeles, specifically the Van Nuys neighborhood of the San Fernando Valley, and has a couple of young daughters in public schools. She writes, cluelessly,

[A] First World family’s entry into Los Angeles’s 21st-century urban public schools can be daunting. Yes, one’s uniquely American expectations of giving one’s children a better life than one had growing up can be challenged. On simple demographics alone, the landscape startles.

In other words, though she’s apparently a life-long Southern Californian — “of German-Chinese extraction”–she’s startled that Van Nuys is about 80% Hispanic! (This doesn’t speak well for the powers of observation among us physicists–Loh has a BS in physics from Caltech.)

But what does this have to do with assimilation? Well, near the end of her meandering review, Loh writes:

That so many of L.A.’s English-speaking families are fearful of letting their children come into contact with great numbers of English learners is ironic. The terror is that, like rockets losing heat tiles, Dylan and Taylor will drop a vocabulary word here or an SAT point there, and thus be doomed to Pitzer instead of Brown. Meanwhile, the far more vast and gloomy possibility is that most immigrant children will plunge off the college map entirely. In their isolated, maxed-out schools, they won’t master the higher-level English they need if they are to succeed. Such language acquisition could be greatly speeded via meaningful contact with native speakers, but, as the authors of Learning A New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society point out, few immigrant youngsters have “even one native English-speaking friend.”

The last line in that passage strikes me as a graphic–even startling — refutation of the usual soothing assurances that today’s immigration will work out fine, just like in the 1880 - 1920 Great Wave. It’s not that we National Question patriots think it’ll all work out fine, but the line Loh quotes puts the fact that it won’t quite memorably.

Put another way, even if they want to assimilate, they can’t. (But they probably don’t want to. Also see this.)

Despite that show-stopper, Loh remains adamantly, liberally optimistic, presumably not surprising for someone who’s a regular on public radio:

We will (…) speak English at them until they turn blue. We must invest in the poor urban school, not because of any moral authority a la Jonathan Kozol exhorts us to, but because that school is our school. And in return, we get to be infused with the energy of hopeful immigrants ready to try anything, in a brave new land that, to them (…), itself represents optimism, resources, and a better and better future.

Hoover Institution economist Thomas Sowell nearly always gets to the heart of the matter. This includes, over the years, immigration. (See, for example, this 1997 essay from Forbes, reprinted in The Social Contract.)

Today Bill Steigerwald interviews Sowell at FrontPageMagazine about Sowell’s new book, Economic Facts and Fallacies.

Apparently, there’s nothing about immigration in the book, but Steigerwald and Sowell get onto our subject, anyway. I’ll just point you to highlight quotes from Sowell:

I’m amazed when they talk about the guest-worker program in Europe. No one even asks, “What has happened with guest-worker programs in Europe?” What has happened is that they’ve brought in people who hate their guts. This is why you have terrorism in London and Madrid and riots in Paris and other French cities by people who have absolutely no desire to assimilate and who in fact hate the very ideas of the country in which they live.

[snip]

There is the second-generation phenomenon. You have people who move in from some poor country — the Middle East, Mexico, whatever. Those people may be very glad to be in the United States or Britain or wherever they may be. But then they have children. And their children have never seen those other places; they’ve never lived that poorer life. All they know is that the population around them is a hell of a lot more prosperous than they are. And there are all sorts of ideologues and hustlers ready to tell them that it’s society’s fault that they don’t have what other people have. This then gives you the people who hate the country in which they live.

[snip]

[People] love to say things like, “They thought the Irish and the Jews were unassimilable but look at them now, etc.” Well, the circumstances of the Irish and the Jews were radically different from the circumstances of the people who are coming here from Central America.

First of all, the times were different. First of all, the Irish, the Jews and blacks as well, who were moving out of the South, had leaders and organizations that were doing their damnedest to get them assimilated to the norms and the society to which they were moving.

Today, you have just the direct opposite. You not only have groups within in these societies that are trying to keep them unassimilable and full of resentment. But you also have people from outside the group, including politicians but also ideologues and intellectuals, who say one culture is as good as another and why should we expect them to assimilate to our culture. Well, that’s wonderful. You should try to go to China and live without speaking Chinese.

Would you like a bit more from Sowell? Then please read his brief essay “Multicultural Education,” written in the early 1990s. The essay contains nothing specifically about immigration. But it is probably the most potent and condensed defense of Western civilization you will ever encounter.

According to the Birmingham News [Unlicensed driver laws on increase, by Kent Faulk, January 27, 2008], police in a number of Alabama cities may now impound the car when they make a traffic stop and discover the driver is unlicensed.

The times being what they are, this sensible policy naturally provokes bleating from … can you guess?

Critics contend such laws are aimed at intimidating illegal immigrants, who aren’t allowed to get driver’s licenses.

“It seems to be a good ploy, `We’re going to make life difficult for you in the United States,’” said Jose Guerrero, owner of a Spanish-language newspaper and radio station in north Alabama.

Of course such laws are colorblind; an unlicensed driver is an unlicensed driver–and shouldn’t be driving:

“Most people think we are picking on Hispanics and we are not,” said Russellville Police Chief Chris Hargett.

Instead, police said, they are trying to cut down on the number of unlicensed drivers - no matter who they are - to cut down on the number of traffic accidents.

“We did have a lot of complaints about people being involved in accidents with non-licensed and uninsured drivers,” said Athens Police Chief R.W. Harper. The law is “not aimed at anyone in particular.”

But the resulting statistics don’t surprise:

In the first five days after the law took effect, Russellville police impounded 11 cars from motorists they stopped who didn’t have driver’s licenses. Eight of the motorists were Hispanics.

Huntsville officers impounded about 450 cars in the four months since the law went into effect in mid-September. No breakdown of the drivers’ ethnicity was available.

“While we’re not targeting Hispanics, clearly in our statistical data, in the six months prior to this ordinance, we had over 1,400 Hispanics arraigned in municipal court,” said Rex Reynolds, public safety director for Huntsville. “A large percentage of that was due to no driver’s license,” he said.

So same old, same old, no? But it turns out that the aforementioned Jose Guerrero must moonlight as a political philosopher, or at least a constitutional lawyer:

Guerrero contends the laws violate the rights of children born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants. “Those children who are riding in that car are U.S. citizens,” Guerrero said.

Guerrero isn’t explicit about it, but apparently it’s a constitutional right for us citizens–anchor babies included, unfortunately–to ride in cars! Can entitlement to a new car every couple of years be far behind?

VDARE contributor Randall Burns has repeatedly suggested that the value of American citizenship to an immigrant is several hundred thousand dollars.

Nevada immigration lawyer James Kelly, speaking at a local bar association meeting last Thursday, has chimed in with a statement that certainly tends to support Burns’s estimate. Said Kelly to his colleagues: “Banishment is the worst punishment possible. People would rather go to jail than leave the country.” (Attorney: Small crimes turn big for aliens, by Scott Neuffer, The Record-Courier [Gardnerville, NV], January 13, 2008).