The Economist’s cover image—alleged by the professional minority whiners at Colorlines to be a slur against Hispanics.
My VDARE.com colleague James Fulford has alerted readers to the “Special Report on Latinos” in the current (March 14th) issue of The Economist. Well, I’ve read the whole thing, so you don’t have to.
As with all these pieces in the “challenges and opportunities” subgenre of globalist propaganda, the “opportunities” are all for (a) foreigners and (b) transnationalist billionaires, while the “challenges” are open to the improvements I suggested in We Are Doomed:
If challenges are so good for us, why not create a few more? I suggest flooding some low-lying cities; causing landslides on inhabited hillsides with well-placed explosive charges; letting loose a few dangerous pathogens ... Or why not set off a nuclear weapon or two in populated areas to see how well we meet the challenge of swamped hospitals and mass evacuation?The Special Report has a leader and eleven sections.
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Leader: From minor to majorWe meet former congresslatino John Salazar (D., Colorado), whose ancestors have been here for ever!
One of his ancestors, Juan de Oñate y Salazar, co-founded the city of Santa Fe in New Mexico. That was in 1598, some 250 years before it became American territory (and the best part of a decade before English merchant-adventurers splashed ashore at Jamestown, Virginia).Oddly, Mr. Salazar, who voted amnesty for illegals before leaving Congress in 2011, seemed not keen on skilled Chinese workers being imported legally to work on oil rigs in his state.
We get the first bit of shoddy research in the very second paragraph.
In 1953, when Mr. Salazar was born, America’s Hispanic population numbered perhaps 3m. It surged after changes in immigration law under President Lyndon Johnson.Wrong by a decade.
The alliance of agricultural growers, Southern and Western ‘committee barons,’ and immigration officials … remained remarkably stable until the mid-1950s, when immigration for settlement from Mexico and Latin America began to grow rapidly.Then we get a quick Economist canter round all the immigration-boosterist clichés.[The Politics of Immigration in France, Britain, and the United States, by Martin A. Schain, p.223.]
In 2004 the historian Samuel Huntington published a bleak and at times nasty book about Mexican immigrants to America …“Nasty”? Oh, right: code for racist (shriek, clutch pearls, sink back on fainting couch).
… fretting about their numbers, their Catholic values, their fertility and the threat they posed to the English language. “There is no Americano Dream,” he declared. “There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English.”No need to worry about that. Did you know that “19th-century Nashville supported German-language newspapers for years”? And that Mexicans and Central Americans are just like Germans? And that 2015 is just like 1915? (See previous section, first bullet point.)
Grace Flores-Hughes, a federal administrator from south Texas, is uniquely responsible for the spread of the term “Hispanic”…More than any other official, Mrs. Flores-Hughes (now retired…) prodded President Gerald Ford’s administration to adopt the label in the mid-1970s…Mrs. Flores-Hughes concedes that Hispanic is an ungainly hybrid…but it is better than being called a “dirty little Mexican”—the jeer thrown at her in her rural girlhood.By how many people? A lot? A few? One? Little Princess Grace got insulted, and this is her revenge—an entire new, maximally-defined, Designated Victim Group, loaded up with job quotas, college admissions preferences, dumbed-down civil service tests, contract set-asides, anti-white discrimination, federal grants…?
Did Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and the rest even want to be called Hispanics? Apparently not:
Hispanic-Americans are not universally keen on the label either. When asked how they usually describe themselves, they tend to cite their country of origin or call themselves American. Only one in four prefers a pan-ethnic tag such as Hispanic or Latino.“Hispanic”—It’s a white thing, you wouldn’t understand.
California Conservatives demonstrated their anger and alarm at the changing face of their state and duly discovered that it is hard to win elections in a state that you seem to dislike.Er, no. What they discovered was that
Latino voters have told Republicans that immigration is a threshold issue. The polls are unambiguous. When candidates sound heartless about deportation or endorse what sounds like racial profiling, Hispanic voters are less willing to listen to what Republicans have to say about jobs, taxes or even abortion.Actually, the polls are far from “unambiguous.” But look at what the Hispanics are (allegedly) saying: They want more Hispanics. They want the U.S.A. to look like California, but without those mean conservatives complaining about it. Shut up, Gringo!
More than one presidential election was arguably swung by America’s 2m-strong community of Cubans, who are more conservative than other Hispanics and mostly live in the swing state of Florida.Our globalist elites are working on a fix for that.
There are 11 million people left in Cuba, more than three times the population of Puerto Rico. How has open immigration from Puerto Rico worked out for the U.S.?[Wet Foot, Dry Foot: Cuba and Immigration by Steve Sailer; December 18, 2014.]
Often day laborers (or jornaleros) gather near home-improvement stores … Anti-immigration activists have picketed sites, demanding that residency laws be enforced. When more liberal cities either tolerate day labor or designate special sites for hiring such workers, they trigger talk of creating “magnets” for illegal incomers.Surely not! And note that sly “anti-immigration.” The speed limit in my sleepy, child-filled suburban street is 30 mph. I guess that’s “anti-car.”
Life in Santa Fe’s grey economy is strikingly businesslike. Several jornaleros called it “peaceful”. If migrants do not cause trouble, immigration agents and police leave them alone, says Alfredo Romero, a 29-year-old from Guatemala.There’s your problem right there.
Surveys suggest that at least one in six Hispanic adults in America is an evangelical Protestant … Republicans have long seen Protestant Latinos, notably those who speak English, as likelier allies than Hispanic Catholics, who are regarded as steeped in Latin American traditions of “social justice” and skeptical of free-market capitalism.Since we are also told that a further one in six Hispanics is irreligious, those anti-capitalist Social Justice Warriors must be the other four in six.
So we just have to somehow engineer a Reformation among 35 million souls. Do we have to do that before we Fix the Schools, or after?
Boy, these challenges!
The National Gang Intelligence Centre (NGIC) estimated the number of gangs in America in 2011 at 33,000, with a total of 1.4m members. It is thought that close to half of them are Hispanics …Why would any sane country do this to itself? For what? Twenty cents off the price of a lettuce?NGIC studies describe street and prison-based gangs forging close links with Mexican and Central American criminal organizations such as Los Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel, cutting out mid-level wholesalers. Drug-selling gangs are diversifying into prostitution, human trafficking and the smuggling of migrants. Gangs are “rife” in many public schools, the NGIC says. The Gangs to Grace ministry sees these trends in the [Chicago] neighborhood. Perhaps 80% of pupils in local high schools are in a gang, the volunteers suggest.
School buses in Bernalillo, New Mexico, carry baby seats, and the high school recently opened an in-house crèche … One in five Hispanic girls gives birth while still a teenager, compared with one in six black and one in 11 white girls…As a group, Hispanics suffer the most from childhood obesity. Almost one in four of them fails to graduate from high school on time…Can’t we at least give my challenges—landslides, pathogens, nukes—a try? It might work out cheaper and less disruptive in the long run.
A big reason why Ms. Miramontes [18-year-old single mother] is in no rush to marry is that her parents want her to go to college first.Wonder how that will work out.
“While the percentage of students surveyed state an intention to go to college, the percentage who actually apply, and subsequently attend college, is much lower.”?9. Media: Hearts and minds[Most Hispanic students value college but only half plan to go, study finds by Melissa Tussing; Medill Reports, December 1, 2009.]
Media folk wonder whether the children and grandchildren of immigrants now driving Latino population growth will assimilate to the point where they outgrow such specialist networks. Italian- and Greek-Americans have become integrated in that way, with some different holiday traditions and social clubs but no special TV networks or national media.What kind of comparison is that? Most Italian immigrants arrived in the pre-1920 Great Wave. TV didn’t show up until 30 years later. Greeks? Around 1.3 million Americans have Greek ancestry. Hispanics are forty times more numerous than that.
[Spanish-language TV variety show Sábado Gigante host] Don Francisco points to geography as a reason why Hispanics will hold on to their culture when earlier migrants did not. Italians are an ocean from their country of origin, he notes. Migrants from Latin America need only “cross a river” to maintain home ties.So the comparison is even more pointless than I thought.
“Los Tigres del Norte” are giants of music, having sold 37m albums in a four-decade career. They sing of border crossings and smugglers, romantic betrayals and the heartache of exile.There’s a real easy cure for that heartache.
The accordionist in “La Santa Cecilia”, a band from Los Angeles, benefited from Barack Obama’s temporary protection from deportation in 2012. The band used undocumented actors in the video to “El Hielo”, their biggest hit, about families divided by immigration raids …Which is to say, about parents facing deportation who choose to leave their anchor-baby kids with relatives or friends in the U.S. Ending birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens would end these cases of “families divided” at a stroke.
Their cover of the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” blends Mexican harps and accordions with a Caribbean beat. An accompanying video turns the song into a homage to migrant strawberry-pickers in California. It is both hard to define and rather lovely.It doesn’t sound hard to define at all. I’ll have a go at defining it: Propaganda against U.S. sovereignty.
America is lucky to have millions of energetic young people filling its schools with kids who will eventually pay taxes and fund pensions and health care for the old.This is The Economist? And they never heard of Ponzi schemes?
Hispanics often talk about how old-fashioned they feel in America, with their strong family ties, their churchgoing habits …Ah, those Hispanic family values! How do they square with those worse-than-blacks teen pregnancy rates in section 8 above?
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I await The Economist special report explaining why it was so intolerable for the United States to remain what its founders intended it to be: An English-speaking nation with a white-European supermajority under Anglo-Saxon laws.John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. ) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. His most recent book, published by VDARE.com com is FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle).His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.
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