Immigration and conservatism

Posted by Fred Scrooby on December 20, 2004, 03:08 AM | #

All one can say in reaction to this log entry is there is so much wrongness in it—not a single paragraph in it is palatable—that it’s impossible to set straight in a reader’s comment of any ordinary length.  The other thing is, we now know that anyone who’s got his head screwed on frontwards in regard to nationhood as that relates to race, ethnicity, immigration, and excessive incompatible immigration can henceforth skip this particular blogger’s log entries on those subjects completely.  I’ll continue to look forward to his excellent writing on the general subject of leftism, however.

Posted by Mark Richardson on December 20, 2004, 04:42 AM | #

Ethnic mixing was never “greeted with great popular approval” in Australia. Opinion polls in the 1980s and 1990s regularly showed between two thirds and three quarters against the existing immigration levels. A prime minister of the time, Bob Hawke, famously boasted that the immigration policy would never have been accepted by the general public and was only successfully implemented because of a bipartisan arrangement between the major parties.

The rank and file opposition to ethnic mixing in this period stubbornly continued despite a massive propaganda effort from the authorities. There were songs played endlessly on the TV ("We are one, but we are many"), constant tributes to the new multiculture in the press, denunciations of old Australia as racist, in fact there was a kind of obsession with identifying and denouncing “racism”, by which was usually meant any identification by the mainstream with their own ethnicity.

Students, for instance, were asked to write “sonnets against racism” in their English classes and there were special education weeks devoted to celebrating multiculturalism.

You had to be very brave to openly resist this. When Pauline Hanson made a stand she was kicked out of the Liberal Party, won a seat in Parliament as an independent, set up her own party and won over a million votes - despite being inept in a number of ways as a political leader and despite the most intense campaign of hatred and vilification that has ever been launched against a single person in Australia’s history. (Twice in “civilised” Melbourne people were bashed trying to come along to hear her speak.)

The problem, therefore, is not that ethnic loyalties did not exist as part of human nature, but that the liberal political class was willing to declare such loyalties to be politically illegitimate and to actively attempt to root them out of existence.

Posted by Guessedworker on December 20, 2004, 08:50 AM | #

John,

There are certainly some areas of this post that can be questioned.

Tribalism in advanced societies is not absent but sleeping.  That state has been induced by a degredation of the Western soul, chiefly through the agencies of popular culture and social liberalism.

Meanwhile, the racial particularisms and interests of immigrants to European societies are perfectly healthy and, in fact, run together as a block opposing the interests of the indigenes.  They, meanwhile, will either be slaughtered in their sleep or will wake up.

In place of competition for food there is competition for wealth, living space, dominance and, most significantly, control of the future.

The Jews, religious or otherwise, do not assimilate.  They are prevented from doing so by their ethno-centrism, as you say.  They live as we do, look much like us, take our names.  But this is not assimilation.  It is an attempt to be unnoticeable.

Furthermore, you allow for persecution of the Jew without allowing for the causative of his behaviour.  An expert on the left such as yourself should understand that well.  A lightweight and very partial account of anti-gentile behaviour in modern America is described by a Jewish writer here:-

http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=41978

Immigration to gentile societies is a Jewish goal, since Jews do not wish to be the only outsiders.  There are those who harden this position to one of the submergence of European Man in his own homeland.

In general, we should avoid the trap of “Jewish persecution”.  We are not Nazis.  It is we who are the powerless, since our ethnic interests are delegitimised and cast out of “decent”, ie progressive, politics.

It is important to rely upon our interests in judging our condition.  To fail to recognise tribalism amongst us is, by default, to hand the political baton to other ethnies.  And this is precisely what has happened.

I think you are repeating the error, John, of those you most despise.

Posted by Guessedworker on December 20, 2004, 09:15 AM | #

I should add that I doubt if a tenth of a per-cent of the Mexicans and other Central and South Americans flooding into the South-West are Hispanic.

Posted by John Ray on December 20, 2004, 09:42 AM | #

Mark’s mistaking of my meaning is understandable given the very abbreviated way I expressed myself but I think I am in fact one of the few People to have voted for Pauline Hanson three times—because of her opposition to affirmative action.

The policy that has been greeted with acclaim is of course the policy of locking up and otherwise discouraging illegal immigrants

Posted by John Ray on December 20, 2004, 09:52 AM | #

I don’t agree with Guessedworker’s view of Jews.  I don’t think they are saints—see http://jonjayray.netfirms.com/semitism.html—but to suggest that they have any sort of collective mind is absurd. I think that by and large the religious ones go to Israel and the irreligious ones go to New York if they can and that is about all you can say.  But like everyone else they try to exert what influence they can and, being clever, do often have some influence.  But since some are Leftist and some Rightist, I suspect that they do largely cancel one another out as far as overall political influence is concerned.  Do you really think that Mark Steyn and Noam Chomsky are on the same team?

Posted by gc on December 20, 2004, 10:40 AM | #

just to go point by point....

1) Whole societies—such as the USA, Australia and Canada— are the product of some very vigorous ethnic mixing.

ethnic mixing is not racial mixing, and this is something of a bait and switch. a better example would be macau.

2) There are so many Hispanic voters in the USA that any party that was perceived as hostile to Hispanics would lose office.

not true, hispanics are only a small fraction of the electorate as their literacy levels are quite low: Sailer

Note: that made the white vote more than 15 times larger than the much-ballyhooed Hispanic fraction.

Thus, if Bush’s Hispandering on immigration costs the GOP one percentage point among whites, he will have to boost the Republican share of the Hispanic vote by an impossible fifteen percentage points just to break even.

also, almost 50% of Hispanics are in favor of immigration reform, as they don’t want more low-skill competition - see PAN results

She said that even she was surprised by the number of Hispanics who voted in favor of the initiative—or, more accurately, the number of Hispanics who supported the initiative (47%) but did not necessarily support President Bush (45%).

Sailer from above link: 

Nonsense, of course. In the first place, most Hispanics have sensibly ambivalent feelings about immigration, especially illegal immigration. In a Pew Foundation poll of Latino registered voters, only 7% said there were “too few” immigrants in the U.S.

Among Hispanics, it’s generally only the professional ethnics—the politicians, identity politics activists, campaign consultants, Spanish-language broadcasters, marketers, etc.—who want lots more immigration in order to further feather their own nests.

3) I cannot be very pessimistic about the progeny of such people. 

IQ stats:

Here’s the best estimate I’ve yet seen: A 2001 meta-analysis of 39 studies covering a total 5,696,519 individuals in America (aged 14 and above) came up with an overall difference of 0.72 standard deviations in g (the “general factor” in cognitive ability) between “Anglo” whites and Hispanics. The 95% confidence range of the studies ran from .60 to .88 standard deviations, so there’s not a huge amount of disagreement among the studies.

One standard deviation equals 15 IQ points, so that’s a gap of 10.8 IQ points, or an IQ of 89 on the Lynn-Vanhanen scale where white Americans equal 100. That would imply the average Hispanic would fall at the 24th percentile of the white IQ distribution. This inequality gets worse at higher IQs Assuming a normal distribution, 4.8% of whites would fall above 125 IQ versus only 0.9% of Hispanics, which explains why Hispanics are given ethnic preferences in prestige college admissions and in the most difficult jobs.

In contrast, 105 studies of 6,246,729 individuals found an overall white-black gap of 1.10 standard deviations. So, the white-Hispanic gap appears to be about 65% as large as the notoriously depressing white-black gap. (Warning: this 65% number does not come from a perfect apples to apples comparison because more studies are used in calculating the white-black difference than the white-Hispanic difference.)

I think it’s better to go with numbers than to try to read history as a set of data points. If and when Amerindians in South & Central American start building technologically advanced societies, I would agree with you, but as it is the wealthiest societies down there are - without exception - the ones with higher fractions of Europeans.

Posted by gc on December 20, 2004, 10:45 AM | #

The Jews, religious or otherwise, do not assimilate.  They are prevented from doing so by their ethno-centrism, as you say.  They live as we do, look much like us, take our names.  But this is not assimilation.  It is an attempt to be unnoticeable.

Failure to assimilate may have been the case 100 years back, but not today:

In Reexamining Intermarriage: Trends, Textures, Strategies, the most comprehensive study to date of intermarried couples, sociologist Bruce Phillips found that only 14% of intermarried couples could be classified as “Judaic,” in the sense that the balance of religious observance in the home is Jewish. And even in such homes, 60% had x-mas trees. Close to 90% of the children of intermarriages will themselves marry non-Jews.

Due to the pervasiveness of intermarriage, American Jewry is too emotionally compromised to even oppose it. A 2001 study by the American Jewish Committee found that only 12% of Jewish parents strongly oppose their children intermarrying (a figure only slightly higher than the percentage of Orthodox Jews). Well over half responded that they would not be troubled at all by their children intermarrying.

The explanation of these grim numbers is not hard to find. Of those polled with at least one married child, a full two-thirds already had an intermarried child. For these parents, to oppose intermarriage would be to risk severing relations with a child and losing contact with grandchildren.

Forty per cent of the young “leaders” of the Reform movement are themselves intermarried. No wonder, as the Forward reports, it is almost impossible for a Reform rabbi who says he or she will not perform intermarriages to secure a job.

Jack Wertheimer reports in “Surrendering to Intermarriage” (Commentary, March 2001) that in religious schools run by synagogues, “teachers can no longer utter a word in favor of endogamy, or prevent Jewish youngsters from being exposed to the to the jumbled religious views of their dual-faith classmates who often …have trouble telling who is J. and who is Moses.” Reform historian Michael Meyers warns of Reform becoming so syncretized with Christian elements as to make conversion of non-Jewish spouses beside the point.

To oppose intermarriage today, points out historian Jonathan Sarna, means going against the entire modern American ethos by placing group identity over social integration, individualism, and liberal values. Allan Smith, director of the Youth Division of the American Hebrew Congregations (Reform), deems it “unrealistic to expect our young people to reject the environment in which they’ve grown up – one that places such a high value on inclusiveness and tolerance.”

Half of those polled in the American Jewish Committee study go so far as to term opposition to intermarriage “racist.”

Thus in the space of little more than a generation, intermarriage has gone from being viewed as a tragedy by most American Jews to something verging on the positive – a sign of Jewish acceptance by the general population. The attitude of German Reform leader Leo Baeck, who once said that if there had been a Jew in every German family the Holocaust would never have taken place, has become that of the American Jewish establishment.

That establishment has thrown in the towel with respect to intermarriage. Thus Charles Bronfman, chairman of the United Jewish Communites and one of the major supporters of Project Birthright, once told a young leadership group of the Indianapolis Jewish Federation about a wedding he had attended the previous week between a Jewish man and a non-Jewish man, with a Reform clergyman and a Catholic priest co-officiating. It was, he said, “one of the most beautiful weddings I ever attended.”

He could have been describing the marriage of his nephew Edgar Bronfman Jr., whose wedding to Catholic woman, with a priest officiating, was reported in detail in the New York Times. (Even that was less depressing that a Times photo of a male Reform “rabbi” marrying a female Protestant minister, in front of a large assemblage of priests, ministers, and “rabbis,” all standing under a chuppah.)

Jewish singles have heard the message of their elders loud and clear. In a 1998 Los Angeles Times poll, only 21% of Jewish singles said they would marry only a Jew, and 57% said the religion of a prospective spouse would be irrelevant. Even among recently bar or bat-mitzvahed Conservative youth – i.e., among those most actively engaged in Jewish life – a full two-thirds responded that it is o.k. for Jews to marry people of other religions.

Posted by gc on December 20, 2004, 10:54 AM | #

But since some are Leftist and some Rightist, I suspect that they do largely cancel one another out as far as overall political influence is concerned. 

one last link for the road:

donations:

Jews, on the other hand, are drifting toward the GOP. In 2002, the American Jewish Committee estimated that Jews are 2.1 percent of the U.S. population and 3.9 percent of Florida, also a swing state. A poll by Steven Cohen of Hebrew University found that almost half the Jews who chose Gore over Bush are uncertain they would vote the same way today. Perhaps even more crucial, prominent Democratic donors have crossed party lines. Jack Rosen, president of the American Jewish Congress and a supporter of Democrats, wrote a $100,000 check last year to the Republican National Committee. “It would be a mistake for the Jewish community not to show our appreciation to the president,” Rosen said.

Arab Americans, however, are not a major source of campaign funds. Jews provided at least half the money donated to the DNC in the 1998 and 2000 election cycles. At the RNC, Lew Eisenberg, who is Jewish, was finance chairman until he became finance chairman of the host committee for the Republican National Convention recently. At Bush-Cheney fundraisers in Washington, California, New York and Florida, rabbis gave the invocations.

Democratic fundraisers estimate that at least half of the money donated by individuals—but excluding labor unions and political action committees—to the national committees comes from Jewish donors.

According to research by University of Akron political scientist John Green and several colleagues, ”Jews accounted for 21 percent of donors to the Democratic presidential primaries in 2000,” or at least $13 million out of $62 million raised by Gore and former senator Bill Bradley (N.J.). By contrast, they said, ”Jews made up 2.5 percent of all GOP presidential primary donors and contributed $3.75 million out of $150 millions raised.” Their surveys found similar patterns at the congressional level.

Posted by Guessedworker on December 20, 2004, 11:09 AM | #

John,

I think it is extemely difficult for us, so disassociated from our own ethnic interests as we are, to appreciate the gravitational pull of enthnicity for others.  One must grant the possibility, I think, that any people that survives for three millenia, two of them in diaspora, have to feel the pull pretty intensely.

So religion or lack of religion isn’t the determining factor.  Neither is left or right politics.  For example, from the standpoint of our ethnic interests the second-wave libertarians who propose the salad bowl of race-blind individualism are not much different from the Frankfurt philosophers who invented culture war.

So the question, John, is whether the progenators of these ideas mentate in the consciousness of Jewish interests.  I don’t think it is necessary to put it any stronger than that.  All objections based on the ridiculousness of Protocol-style conspiracy or, indeed, “teams” to use your format are a straw man.

It is, incidentally, extremely rare to find any other ethnies as incapable of perceiving their own interests as us.  Jews are not alone in their tribal loyalty.  Even those born here to black/white pairings understand that their interests are served by as many other such pairings as possible.

It is important that you understand what I am trying to do here.  I am not interested in “exposing the disingenuous Jew”.  No defence of Jews on that basis is called for.  I am interested in reviving consciousness of our own ethnic interests, which is something you seem to deny exists due to the plentifulness of food.

Posted by jonjayray on December 20, 2004, 11:20 AM | #

The points made by Godless Capitalist about Hispanic IQ are of course well-known to me.  I have been defending the importance of IQ in the academic literature since 1972.  See http://jonjayray.netfirms.com/knowledg.html

The trouble is that I just don’t believe the results for the Hispanics.  International differences or intercultural differences are hard to assess.  The extraordinarily low results reported in Lynn & Vanhanen for some African countries just do not seem to be compatible with minimal adult function, for instance.  And the low IQ of Isrealis is clearly wrong —as is the low IQ of Afrikaners.  I think people have to have been going to school together for generations for meaningful intergroup differences to be detectable.

Posted by razib on December 20, 2004, 11:26 AM | #

is it “john jay gould” now???

Posted by gc on December 20, 2004, 01:17 PM | #

The trouble is that I just don’t believe the results for the Hispanics.  International differences or intercultural differences are hard to assess.

Well, given:

1) the SATs for 2nd (and 3rd, and 4th generation) Hispanics of primarily Amerindian descent

2) their outcome statistics (income, educational level, occupational distribution)

3) the meta-analysis of IQ test results on more than 5 *million* people

4) the .9 correlation between GDP-per-capita and percentage of European ancestry for South & Central America (as measured via Nationmaster’s stats on GDP-per-capita and Euro population percentages, respectively)

5) the failure to show any consistent upward trend in 2nd gen achievement over the last 40 years (1965 to 2005)

Given all these points, I think that the weight of the evidence is on the side of the skeptics. It is, after all, supposed to be the right who goes on evidence rather than gut feelings. If and when Hispanics start entering the professions and/or primarily Amerindian nations become Singapore/Bangalore like tech meccas, I’ll grant that I was wrong. As it is, the prudent bet is to stop important of economically/academically uncompetitive groups who qualify for racial preferences. Maybe they’ll improve over time and maybe not...but it’s unwise to bet the nation on it when all the evidence points in the opposite direction.

Posted by gc on December 20, 2004, 01:18 PM | #

the prudent bet is to stop important

Should read, “to stop importation”.

Posted by Guessedworker on December 20, 2004, 01:49 PM | #

Godless,

What effect on emigration of high IQ Indians do you anticipate from the freeing up and growth of the Indian economy?

Posted by gc on December 20, 2004, 03:40 PM | #

What effect on emigration of high IQ Indians do you anticipate from the freeing up and growth of the Indian economy? 

Well, if you look at Japan, they have almost no emigration anymore.

This is a key point, actually - when they were a developing country (right after the Meiji revolution), Japan sent people all over the world - particularly students - and many of them ended up settling. Many others came back and brought the info they had gained with them to start businesses and industrialize the place. Razib can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that a similar dynamic was operational in sending the discoveries of the Renaissance to Northern Europe (and later, the discoveries of Northwest Europe to the other parts).

More recently, the same thing happened/is happening in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. And it’s happening in China as well.

With respect to India specifically, a key question is the IQ distribution of India. If Lynn’s numbers are correct even after accounting for caste stratification, India may still be able to reach Malaysia-levels of GDP on the backs of the (nontrivial) numbers of high IQ Indians. At this point you will probably see significantly reduced emigration *BUT* higher transnationalism as international trading networks are established.

On the other hand, If Lynn’s numbers are wrong, and if the median Indian *can* in fact be brought to the European median IQ - even if the variance is higher due to caste differences - that will make for a very interesting 21st century.

While I wouldn’t bet the farm on this eventuality (I actually consider it rather unlikely), it is interesting to note this quote from Lynn:

The last entries in Table 1 are for the IQs of Indians derived from the Indian sub-continent, South Africa and Britain. The mean of 86 in India is derived from a review by Sinha (1968) of the results of 17 studies of children aged between 9 and 15 years and totalling in excess of 5,000. Mean IQs lie in the range of 81 to 94, with an overall mean of approximately 86. But ethic Indians in Britain obtain a mean of 96 which is within the range of other Caucasoid populations. Their verbal IQ of 89 is depressed, but this is probably because their families are recent immigrants and have not yet mastered the language. The British results suggest that when Indians is are reared in an economically developed environment their intelligence level is about the same as that of European Caucasoids.

Also see here for more on Indian IQ. Anyway, if India did become a first world country, I think you’d probably see Japan-esque attitudes towards emigration.

I know that saying “India” and “first world” in the same breath sounds kind of ludicrous, but saying “Bangalore” and “tech powerhouse” in the same breath would have been crazy 30 years ago.

Posted by Matt on December 21, 2004, 01:09 AM | #

There are so many Hispanic voters in the USA that any party that was perceived as hostile to Hispanics would lose office.

One reason among many why survival dictates a reexamination of universal suffrage, in addition to immigration and the myth of the infinite-capacity melting pot.

Posted by John Ray on December 21, 2004, 02:02 AM | #

My doubts about the mean Hispanic IQ are based on genetics and history.  As we know, Amerindians are Asians racially.  They HAVE been separated from other Asians for a long time but the idea that selective pressures were less in the Americas than in Asia seems unlikely to me.  There was clearly plenty of competition between rival Amerindian nations.  So the remarkable achievements of the Meso-American civilizations were just what I would expect of their genetics.  And those are still the genetics in them today.

So I think that the depressed actual achievements are cultural.  Don’t forget that only two thirds of the variance in IQ is genetic.  The remaining third can make a lot of difference.

I hereby forgive Razib for calling me John Jay Gould.  I told him once that he was going soft so he deserves to have his revenge!

Posted by Guessedworker on December 21, 2004, 08:50 AM | #

Is it not possible, John, that a civilisation of 3,000 years continuous development, starting with the Olmecs in 1500BC, had stratified considerably by the time the Spanish arrived - not only socially but in IQ distribution.

The Spanish were extraordinarily efficient in their genocide. They wiped out every Aztec city population and caught up with every noble who escaped. Subsistence peasantry was all that survived.  This we know from the Spaniards’ own accounts.

Can you be certain that this surviving section of the Aztec population was genetically typical of the whole?  I don’t think so.  So, since there is no psychometric or other evidence to gainsay the IQ results you don’t like, should we not accept the only evidence we have?

Posted by Svigor on December 22, 2004, 04:34 AM | #

“But since some are Leftist and some Rightist, I suspect that they do largely cancel one another out as far as overall political influence is concerned.”
Eh?  How do 85% leftists and 15% rightists “cancel one another out?”

Posted by Svigor on December 22, 2004, 04:39 AM | #

“And even in such homes, 60% had x-mas trees.”
Heh, “x-mas.” Anything to avoid writing or speaking or hearing the word, “Christ” (except as a curse of course, that’s okay).

Posted by Svigor on December 22, 2004, 05:01 AM | #

The extraordinarily low results reported in Lynn & Vanhanen for some African countries just do not seem to be compatible with minimal adult function, for instance.

http://www.vdare.com/misc/rushton_iq_conundrum.htm

I think Rushton makes a lot of sense there.

As we know, Amerindians are Asians racially.

Not necessarily they aren’t.  In some classifications Amerinds are a separate race.

They HAVE been separated from other Asians for a long time but the idea that selective pressures were less in the Americas than in Asia seems unlikely to me.

The idea that selective pressures are identical on any two continents seems unlikely to me.

By your logic:
Whites HAVE been separated fom Blacks for a long time, but the idea that selective pressures were less in Africa than in Europe seems unlikely to me.

Posted by Svigor on December 22, 2004, 05:05 AM | #

prevent Jewish youngsters from being exposed to the to the jumbled religious views of their dual-faith classmates who often …have trouble telling who is J. and who is Moses.

LOL!  Abbreviate “Jesus” and replace “Christ” with “x.”

That’s creepy; it’s borderline pathological.