Immigration - A Question of Quality

It is quite common in the US for the debate on immigration to be split into polar opposites. On the pro-immigrant side is an utterly insane Open Borders group that seems to more or less argue for unfettered immigration into the US. The overwhelming majority of the US business class supports this for the sole reason of cheap and easily intimidated labor.

On the liberal side of the spectrum, many liberals simply feel it is cruel to keep anyone out of the US who wants to come here. Many others have swallowed the pro-diversity propaganda whole. There is a whole industry out there that is promoting diversity and multiculturalism.

These things are human norms, and human societies have been diverse and multicultural since the beginning of time, so it is insane to argue that these things are unnatural, which is a typical White nationalist argument.

The problem is that diversity, while normal, is not necessarily such a great thing per se. For one thing, various immigrant groups can be poor quality and create many problems for a society. Hispanic immigrants and their offspring are vastly more criminal and problematic that other immigrant groups, or than, say, White Americans.

Long-term resident Hispanics often cause few problems, but the recent immigrants and their children have been a total nightmare. New evidence shows that diversity reduces trust at the neighborhood level. It is common sense that high-diversity societies are often more unstable that monocultural societies.

I am not saying any of this to be a xenophobe. I am just pointing out that it makes little sense to shill for diversity as if it were automatically a good thing in and of itself.

We also have minority groups, in particular Hispanics, who are now pro-immigrant simply out of ethnocentrism and for no other reason. On this, the Left is utterly bonkers. Black and Hispanic ethnocentrism is cheered on wildly, while Whites are forbidden to be ethnocentric themselves.

This Identity Politics has been the curse of the Left since the 1960's. It is now backfiring as a new White nationalist movement comes into being. This movement is nothing but the logical result of Whites creating their own Identity Politics movement after the Left fertilized society with this nonsense cult.

Also, now that the Open Borders crowd has, in the past 15 years, cleverly conned society into thinking that anti-immigrant sentiment (even anti-illegal immigrant sentiment!) is de facto racist, you have many guilt-ridden folks, especially liberals and Centrists, who support even illegal immigration out of fear of being called a racist.

Nearly the entire US environmental movement has gone over to Open Borders, including Earth First and the Center for Biological Diversity. Sierra Club lost its anti-immigrant battle long ago. Since CBD is focussed on endangered species, their position seems particularly insane.

Habitat loss by overpopulation is obviously one of the major causes of environmental damage and the extinction crisis. Anyone who cannot see this is blind. The environmental movement has come out for Open Borders simply out of terror of being labeled racist and for no other reason.

On the opposite side, we have a lot of sensible folks, especially those who want to limit illegal immigration. Even 14 years ago, the debate was much more sensible. In 1994, 40% of California Hispanics voted for Proposition 187 to limit social services to illegals. Now, things have gotten so polarized that I think many of those Hispanics are probably Open Borders folks.

We also have lots of nasty racists, especially White nationalists, on the anti-immigrant side. These people simply do not want any non-White immigration whatsoever, though they are not opposed to the immigration of European Whites (However arbitrarily they may define that group!).

Most of these folks actively dislike everyone who is not White; there are others who do not, but just want to "preserve the declining White race" as if it were an animal subspecies on the Endangered Species List.

There are also the xenophobes. Vdare is a good example of these folks. They just don't like any furriners period. Most people here are not White nationalists at all - they just oppose non-Americans coming to our land.

In general, most of the hardcore anti-immigrant crowd is on the political Right. The Left has granted this entire field to the Right, even on illegal immigration, which, incredibly, almost the entire liberal wing of the Democratic Party seems to support.

There may be less ulterior motives for this. Democrats need Hispanics votes to win, and the only way to get those these days is to support amnesty for 12 million illegals. More cynically, Democrats are supporting illegals as a way to get 12 million new Democratic voters into the US, since 80% of Mesoamerican immigrants are voting Democratic.

Hence it is nice to see someone step out of the box on immigration, like this progressive, Randall Burns, on Vdare actually coming out against illegal immigrants, but focusing his anger on the businesses who hire them. He also makes an argument similar to the one I have made - that mass illegal immigration has been a major factor in both the screwing of the US worker and in the wild inequality gap of the past 35 years .

We need some sense on the immigration debate. In particular, we on the Left and in the environmental movement need to open up some space for the progressives and environmentalists to take sane positions on immigration without fear of being called racists.

First of all, not all immigrants are bad news. It is hard to make a case that legal immigration has been a terrible problem for this country, though we need to drop the numbers way down. The "limit" is now something like 1.1 million legal immigrants.

There is not a lot of evidence that even this level of legal immigration has harmed wages, created crime waves, or done much of anything other than harmed the environment. It is dubious whether legal immigrants take jobs for less wages than US citizens. Most legal immigrants come here and want to work for US wages.

H-1B and the gamut of other "temporary worker" visas are often simply outrageous. Businesses do indeed bring in foreign workers for just about every position imaginable generally for the sole reason of cheap labor. These visas are "non-immigrant temporary worker" visas and last for up to six years!

The whole temporary worker visa BS game needs to be pretty much scrapped. There is little evidence of any labor shortage in any field anywhere in this nation. Most stories about such shortages are simply lies.

Illegal immigration is a catastrophe because the immigrants are unscreened.

With legal immigration, we have a very strict process that winnows out a large number of prospective candidates. The process is so long and drawn out that only those determined to assimilate make it through the program. Once in, they need to be on very good behavior and can be deported for the slightest thing. Legal immigrants in general are not a serious problem in our nation.

With illegal immigration, you are simply importing entire slices of foreign countries wholesale. It's madness. We have no idea who these folks are, and many of them are criminals and bad folks indeed. Their whole time they are in the US they are breaking the law every day in myriad ways. Their employer is breaking the law. They are using fake ID.

When you import an illegal, you've just imported a criminal.

Refugees are another problematic group of immigrants, also because they are unscreened.

I do love SE Asians, but we have had quite a few problems here in California with Vietnamese, Lao, Khmu, Khmer and Hmong gangs. These groups also have huge rates of welfare use, even many years on. It's clear that they are hardly paying for themselves. I think most of these folks will eventually work out.

Yet even where SE Asian gangs are a problem, SE Asians have a low crime rate. Fresno is near here, and the city's crime statistics are interesting.

In Fresno, Blacks have a wildly elevated crime rate, the Hispanic rate is about 3 X the White rate, and the "Asian" rate is much lower than the White rate. But most Asians in Fresno are SE Asians. This implies that even with their gangs, SE Asians have a much lower crime rate than Whites.

Nevertheless, there are reports of Liberian and Somali refugees in the US committing a lot of crime and using a lot of welfare. In Australia, Sudanese refugees have been a nightmare.

In one town where many were settled, their crime rate is eight times the normal rate. At a meeting called by a bunch of liberal do-gooders to whitewash the problem of the Sudanese, a Sudanese refugee stole the briefcase of one of the top liberal presenters!

It seems to me that African refugees can be adequately resettled in other African lands. I do not think that many of these people are going to fit in well with our modern society.

It is interesting that other than some Caribbean and Mesoamerican immigrants, Hispanic immigrants have caused few problems.

We have sizable numbers of Brazilians, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Panamanians, Costa Ricans, Hondurans, Colombians, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, Chileans, Argentines, Uruguayans and Bolivians in the US. Other than some Colombian drug dealers, most of these groups are causing few to no problems.

The reason is that they are not flooding in here as refugees or illegals. They are coming in as legal immigrants, and we are probably doing a good job of screening them.

On the other hand, Mexicans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans have been a nightmare. Vast numbers of all of these groups came here illegally, in the case of the Central Americans, as war refugees. So vast numbers of this group were simply unscreened immigrants. Unscreened means low quality, de facto.

Cubans are a problem in that this is an example of an ingrate immigrant. Since we outrageously automatically let them in as soon as they set foot on land since they are fleeing evil Communism, they have little motivation to assimilate.

Hence they have recreated 1958 Havana in Miami, complete with outrageous corruption, and insane gap between the rich and poor, a corrupt government serves only the rich and spits on everyone else, and a city where English is not necessary. One can go into nice stores and hotels in Miami and you will not find anyone who speaks English. The English language has for all intents and purposes disappeared from this vast city.

One gets the impression that almost no other country on Earth would put up with this sort of insane bullshit.

Unfortunately, Puerto Ricans and Samoans have been problem ethnic groups. This is because they are unscreened! Puerto Rico and American Samoa are colonies of the United States in a world that has decolonized. Because they are US colonies, just about any Puerto Rican and American Samoan gets to come to the US as easily as I can move to New York.

Both groups have a high crime rate and have fallen into Underclass gang culture. The solution is to completely decolonize the US. American Samoa and Puerto Rico need to be set free and cut off the welfare gravy train and Puerto Ricans and American Samoans need to get into the normal immigration line like everyone else.

After 1965, huge numbers of Dominicans from the Dominican Republic flooded into the US as legal immigrants. Now, I like Dominicans just fine and have known a couple of them, but the available information indicates that they have caused a lot of crime, ghettoization and an Underclass in Upper Manhattan - Washington Heights and Inwood - and in much of the Bronx, though legal immigrants.

This is a case where mass immigration of a national group, in this case Dominicans, has not worked out well. The only solution is to get a lot stricter about which Dominicans we allow to immigrate to the US.

It's also true that mass legal immigration of Mexicans to the US has not worked out well. The available data show that even in the 4th and 5th generation, Chicanos have very high rates of high school dropout and gang involvement. They have very low rates of college graduation. We obviously are not doing a very good job of selecting legal Mexican immigrants to the US and we need to be a lot more selective.

For Mexicans and Dominicans, studies should be undertaken to determine which ones are likely to work out well and which are likely to join the Underclass. Perhaps even IQ tests could be used to screen. This is a difficult area and I do not have all the answers.

Immigrants to your country are like visitors to your house. If an immigrant group is causing problems, it's time to evaluate our criteria for letting them in, the same way you deal with troublemakers in your home. By definition, legal immigrants should be a benefit to our nation. Groups are likely to create more problems than benefits are not good for America and need to be subject to a more selective immigration process.

There are some Jamaican gangs, but in general, we do not have a Jamaican Underclass seething in our cities. I do not know much about Haitian immigrants. I am not aware that a teeming Haitian Underclass is a threat to the republic.

White nationalist racists like to say that the problem with some immigrant groups is that they are a genetically low quality group. There is nothing to this. Perhaps if we let whole populations flood in unscreened, we could have this discussion.

East Indians, Filipinos and Black Africans are three groups that do not have extremely high IQ's. All of these places are steaming Third World wrecks. Yet Filipino, Black African and East Indian immigrants have been some of the most wildly successful immigrants of them all. The reason is simple - screening.

No ethnic group is "low quality" per se. Certainly, properly screened, one can find immigrant gold in any race or ethnic group. This ought to be a principle of a sane immigration policy.

On the other hand, letting Black Africans and East Indians flood in here unscreened would probably be a nightmare. They would simply tend to recreate Calcutta or Lagos in the US.

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