The question under examination was whether race is a desirable criterion for excluding potential immigrants. We have now all had our say, and we have certainly put on quite a show for our readers, who can now go forth marvellously well-informed, and make up their own minds. If we poke about here and there on the floor amongst the broken teeth and gobbets of flesh we may even be able to recover some worthwhile and interesting points for further reflection, which I, at least, will ruminate upon — although after this joyless and marginally profitable pow-wow I will probably be blogging about animal husbandry or badminton for a while, as I can see it is going to take me some time to sweep up all the broken bottles around here, and to unclog the toilets.

Thank you all so very much for coming; please try to be quiet as you exit the building.

Let’s ask a real liberal what he thinks. Over to you, JS Mill.

“Where the sentiment of nationality exists in any force, there is a prima facie case for uniting all the members of the nationality under the same government, and a government to themselves apart. This is merely saying that the question of government ought to be decided by the governed. One hardly knows what any division of the human race should be free to do if not to determine with which of the various collective bodies of human beings they choose to associate themselves.

Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist. The influences which form opinions and decide political acts are different in the different sections of the country. An altogether different set of leaders have the confidence of one part of the country and of another. The same books, newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, do not reach them. One section does not know what opinions, or what instigations, are circulating in another. The same incidents, the same acts, the same system of government, affect them in different ways; and each fears more injury to itself from the other nationalities than from the common arbiter, the state. Their mutual antipathies are generally much stronger than jealousy of the government. That any one of them feels aggrieved by the policy of the common ruler is sufficient to determine another to support that policy. Even if all are aggrieved, none feel that they can rely on the others for fidelity in a joint resistance; the strength of none is sufficient to resist alone, and each may reasonably think that it consults its own advantage most by bidding for the favour of the government against the rest.”

“Representative Government”, 1861.

Now you faux liberals can go back to feeling smugly proud of yourselves as you repeat the illiberal words programmed into you by your illiberal masters.

“Niggas” want to kill “Whitey!”

Why didn’t you just say that in the first place?!

Look at yourself in the mirror and tell me with a honest face that this argument doesn’t apply *to you* also.

Piper, you’re flying off in so many directions, I’m not even sure how to respond. May be a surprise to you but there is that significant chance that you are not as smart as you think you are. So try to keep the words to a minimum. You still haven’t really answered the central question at issue here, which is, why in the world would you exclude people by race when clearly, the likelihood of a typical person’s ability to get along with another depends overwhelmingly on whether the two people share adherence to *universal* virtues? (I don’t even have to argue for adherence to the same culture.)

It is, or is supposed to be, a bedrock principle of our culture that the people of the world are not to be thought of as some undifferentiated mass but as members of nation states, and the laws of any given nation state apply to it’s own people and them alone. From this came the notion of “the self-determination of peoples” which was the foundation of Western liberalism from the French Revolution until the 1960’s, at which point such an idea began to be derided as “nationalistic” and “bigoted” or even as “fascist”. So I don’t think you are actually defending Western civilization here.

Even within the borders of states, the idea that all individuals must be treated alike by the state is a recent development. In fact the very concept of the “individual” is of recent origin. You cannot defend indiscrimate immigration by invoking our traditonal belief in individualism, because such a thing does not exist.

Malcolm again -”Such a policy would be, in the minds of almost all civilized people everywhere in the world and here at home, morally repugnant.”

That seems immensely unlikely, as every other country in the world has the sort of restrictive immigration policies which are being argued about here. Not even the British are as far down the road to national suicide as we are. On what basis could they criticize us, assuming we even cared?

Malcolm -”The culture I live in includes jazz, sushi, kung fu, falafel, and yoga, as well as the New York Philharmonic and King Lear.”

At the root of the problem here is the belief that Manhattan is or can be a useful role model for the rest of the world. For reasons already covered at Mangans, that just ain’t so.

“Unless you want to start excluding people because by no fault of their own they were born into a certain race. Such exclusion is what is usually called ‘racial injustice’ in this part of the world. Wake up and smell the coffee.”

JW, my friend, you’ve made the classic mistake: getting so excited you shoot yourself in the foot. The “social arrangements” you just asked for are ones you likely think oppressive and perhaps even racist, such as paying married men more because “they support their families,” stigmatizing illegitimacy, basing college admissions and awarding government jobs on merit rather than race,* letting employers hire whoever they find most useful rather than by racial quotas,** and limiting immigration by national origin (proxy for race)!

Also, you should note that your notion of how to regulate immigration is quite at odds with Mr. Pollack’s. Pollack and I agree that immigration is not a matter of right (for immigrants) but grace. The USA is under no obligation to accept any immigrants.*** By definition, any foreigner in his own country is “home” already and the USA does him no injury by failing to invite him to migrate. It follows that the USA need not find or identify any reason to exclude anybody. Indeed, the “base case” is that no foreginer is automatically entitled to immigrate to the USA.

An application for an immigrant visa is a request that the USA go to some trouble to ascertain that a particular immigrant ought to be admitted, for the benefit of the USA, not the immigrant. Pollack would admit “desirable” people, and so would I– but Pollack and I do not entirely agree on the definition of desirable. We would both start by choosing immigrants we think likely to personally enhance the people of the USA. From that set, though, I would narrow the choice further to people whose descendants would likely benefit the USA.

Since the only way to evaluate the worth of unseen descendants is by statistical inference, I would not admit immigrants from low-performing populations regardless of their personal qualities.**** Before 1965 we filtered immigrants by national origin, which was a good proxy for race (I’m not sure that would work quite as well now, when prospective immigrants from, say, France might well be French Arabs).

You may demonize such a policy as “racial injustice” but that’s merely name-calling unworthy of scholarly debate. When I say I want immigrants whose children and grandchildren will, for each 10,000 of them, produce maybe 8,200 high-school graduates, 1,600 college graduates with serious majors, and 230 workers at the MD/PhD/top MBA level, rather than immigrants whose offspring will, for each 10,000 of them, produce maybe 6,500 high-school graduates, 200 college graduates with serious majors, and perhaps 3-5 workers at the MD/PhD/top MBA level– well, that’s not racism– not so long as it’s based on actual experience with people already in the USA.

*Of course you know that colleges admit non-Asian minorities on the basis of skin color rather than academic qualifications like SAT score. However, you may not realize that the Federal “civil service exam” was abolished during the Carter Administration because of the incorrigible fact that there was no way to make it both predict job performance and give high scores to black and hispanic applicants in proportion to their fraction of the population rather than their average mental abilities. State and local civil service and promotional exams have gone the same way– Google for “firefighters exam DOJ” to see some examples. (Please don’t twit us about athletes’ or veterans’ preferences–such are hardly comparable to racial preferences.)

**Since the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the DOJ (and Congress, and the courts) have made racial quotas mandatory in hiring and promotion. Non-white immigrants are eligible to fill American racial quotas upon arrival! These and related programs probably cost the USA at least a trillion dollars annually. The more non-Asian minorities in the country, the more harm racial quotas cause. Why would any American wish to increase the number of people with claims to race-based preference in employment and contracting?

****There may be some prospective immigrants so very special that we would wish to admit them regardless of their origins. Very, very special. Draper Prize special. However, such an exception hardly invalidates the proposed rule. Most “special but not astonishing” people we might wish to visit the USA to lecture or perform, or to collaborate in scientific work, etc. would be quite satisfied, as well as accommodated, with non-immigrant visas.

I’m going to resort to bringing up the Nazis again. Suppose we had asked the children in Germany in the early 1940s whether they wanted Jews to live in their country. Don’t you suppose they would have parroted what they had been propagandized into believing in their schools and in the media they read? That Jews were evil and awful?

Why in the world should we expect white children who have been submersed to the eyebrows in multicultural propaganda for their entire lives to do anything other than parrot that back? Your smug suggestion that we ask the children what they want would prove nothing more than that they had been brainwashed a certain way their entire young lives.

Since when does a healthy society leave it up to children to decide where the society will go?

And would you fling this same smug crap at any other people on earth who were being threatened by an incursion of alien peoples? If a Native American said they didn’t want their traditional ways or their people to be swamped by whites and white culture, would you say to them “What are you so scared of? Clearly you will die soon in terms of that history.” Would you think that appropriate? Of course not. You wouldn’t dream of it. But you direct that kind of contempt almost with glee at white Americans who don’t want our people and our way of life to be swamped and disappear.

That’s a rather peculiar observation to make. It implies that you are either unaware of what non-whites think of whites, or else regard that information as inconsequental. You seem to think that only meaningful variable in the equation is what goes on in the minds of whites.

Non-whites in this country have been treated with extraordinary kindness by the once white majority. They have responded to that kindness with distrust, hostility, and ethnic solidarity. (They have been encouraged in this by white liberals themselves.) And the response of white liberalism? “If only we were nicer, they would love us. We must be doing something wrong.” The underlying theory itself must not and cannot be questioned. It’s a foundation stone of white liberalism.

http://www.amren.com/features/rap_lyrics/index.html

“Niggas in the church say: kill whitey all night long … the white man is the devil … the CRIPS and Bloods are soldiers I’m recruiting with no dispute; drive-by shooting on this white genetic mutant … let’s go and kill some rednecks … Menace Clan ain’t afraid … I got the .380; the homies think I’m crazy because I shot a white baby; I said; I said; I said: kill whitey all night long … a nigga dumping on your white ass; fuck this rap shit, nigga, I’m gonna blast … I beat a white boy to the motherfucking ground”;

“Kill Whitey”; Menace Clan, Da Hood, 1995, Rap-A-Lot Records, Noo Trybe Records, subsidiaries of what was called Thorn EMI and now is called The EMI Group, United Kingdom.

“Devils fear this brand new shit … I bleed them next time I see them … I pray on these devils … look what it has come to; who you gonna run to when we get to mobbing … filling his body up with lead, yah; cracker in my way; slitting, slit his throat; watch his body shake; watch his body shake; that’s how we do it in the motherfucking [San Francisco] Bay … sitting on the dock of the dirty with my AK”;

“Heat—featuring Jet and Spice 1”; Paris, Unleashed, 1998, Unleashed Records, Whirling Records.

“These devils make me sick; I love to fill them full of holes; kill them all in the daytime, broad motherfucking daylight; 12 o’clock, grab the Glock; why wait for night”

“Sweatin Bullets”; Brand Nubian, Everything Is Everything, 1994, Elektra Entertainment, Warner Communications, Time Warner, USA.

“A fight, a fight, a nigger and a white, if the nigger don’t win then we all jump in … smoking all [of] America’s white boys”;

“A Fight”; Apache, Apache Ain’t Shit, 1993, Tommy Boy Music, Time Warner, USA.

“I kill a devil right now … I say kill whitey all nightey long … I stabbed a fucking Jew with a steeple … I would kill a cracker for nothing, just for the fuck of it … Menace Clan kill a cracker; jack ‘em even quicker … catch that devil slipping; blow his fucking brains out”

“Fuck a Record Deal”; Menace Clan, Da Hood, 1995, Rap-A-Lot Records, Noo Trybe Records, subsidiaries of Thorn EMI; called The EMI Group since 1997, United Kingdom.

“Now I’m black but black people trip [become upset] ‘cause white people like me; white people like me but don’t like them … I don’t hate whites, I just gotta death wish for motherfuckers that ain’t right”

“Race War”; Ice-T, Home Invasion, 1993, Priority Records, Thorn EMI; now called The EMI Group, United Kingdom.

“To all my Universal Soldier’s: stay at attention while I strategize an invasion; the mission be ssassination, snipers hitting Caucasians with semi-automatic shots heard around the world; my plot is to control the globe and hold the world hostage … see, I got a war plan more deadlier than Hitler … lyrical specialist, underworld terrorist … keep the unity thick like mud … I pulling out gats [handguns], launching deadly attacks”

“Blood for Blood”; Killarmy, Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, 1997, Wu-Tang Records, Priority Records, The EMI Group, United Kingdom.

Which question was that?

“I do know a thing or two about methodology and what kind of evidence is required to substantiate empirical claims of various sorts.”

I’m very happy for you. Are you capable of observing the world around you as well? That was once considered a scientific thing to do, before reading peer-reviewed journals was substituted for it.

“I’ll look at Putnam’s work (not the Wiki article…)”

See, the Wiki article was simply to point you in the right direction. I could hardly cut and paste the entire book here.

In fact, I wrote a long article called “America: Multiethnic, not Multicultural,” in Academic Questions, the quarterly of the National Association of Scholars, in 1991. It was the only article ever published in that neoconservative magazine that discussed the ethnocultural, namely Anglo-Saxon, basis of the common American culture.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/g57l884042q78333/

Unfortunately, due to an appalling decision made by the leaders of NAS when it was formed in the late 1980s, the entire content of AQ is controlled by a publisher that keeps the content off-line. It costs an absurd amount ($34) to access an article. I should scan my article from the hard copy and put it online.

As for Mr. Hodges’s notion that there is a difference between moderate multicultural and radical multiculturalism, this is a mistake similar to believing that moderate Islam is the solution to radical Islam. The non-existence of a “good,” “moderate” multiculturalism is a main topic of my 1991 article.

While I don’t claim any expertise as an empirical investigator, I do know a thing or two about methodology and what kind of evidence is required to substantiate empirical claims of various sorts. If you can be bothered to look at what I’ve actually said, you’ll note that my comments are uniformly about methodological/evidential matters — at no point have I taken a position on the question which so exercises you. So please, calm down, and aim carefully when you throw mud.

Pax

Mongolian, of course!

Somebody is not up to speed with what’s going on. The rates for intermarriage between whites and non-whites are dropping, not increasng. The rates for intermarriage among Hispanics is going up, as is that for Asians.

From the Wikipedia entry on Robert Putnam.

————————————————————————————–

“Robert David Putnam (born 1941 in Port Clinton, Ohio) is a political scientist and professor at Harvard University. He is also Visiting Professor and Director of the Manchester Graduate Summer Programme in Social Change, University of Manchester (UK). Putnam developed the influential two-level game theory that assumes international agreements will only be successfully brokered if they also result in domestic benefits. His most famous (and controversial) work, Bowling Alone, argues that the United States has undergone an unprecedented collapse in civic, social, associational, and political life (social capital) since the 1960s, with serious negative consequences.

—

In recent years, Putnam has been engaged in a comprehensive study of the relationship between trust within communities and their ethnic diversity. His conclusion based on over 40 cases and 30 000 people within the United States is that, other things being equal, more diversity in a community has a correlation [expressed as a beta equal to 0.04 in a multiple regression analysis (see Putnam, 2007)], to less trust both between and within ethnic groups. Although only a single study and limited to American data, it claims to put into question both contact theory and conflict theory in inter-ethnic relations. According to conflict theory, distrust between the ethnic groups will rise with diversity, but not within a group. According to contact theory, distrust will decline as members of different ethnic groups get to know and interact with each other. Putnam describes people of all races, sex and ages as “hunkering down” and going into their shells like a turtle. For example, he did not find any significant difference between 90 year olds and 30 year olds.

Low trust with high diversity not only affects ethnic groups, but is also associated with:

Lower confidence in local government, local leaders and the local news media.
Lower political efficacy – that is, confidence in one’s own influence.
Lower frequency of registering to vote, but more interest and knowledge about politics and more participation in protest marches and social reform groups.
Less expectation that others will cooperate to solve dilemmas of collective action (e.g., voluntary conservation to ease a water or energy shortage).
Less likelihood of working on a community project.
Less likelihood of giving to charity or volunteering.
Fewer close friends and confidants.
Less happiness and lower perceived quality of life.
More time spent watching television and more agreement that “television is my most important form of entertainment”.

————————————————————-

End of cite. So only the ignorant can claim that there is no “boring empirical spadework” demonstrating that no, we can’t all just get along.

I post this in the full knowledge that bob will contrive some excuse to dismiss it.

So then *make* the social arrangements affect the absolute performance so that we each have the fairest chance as possible at life.

Unless you want to start excluding people because by no fault of their own they were born into a certain race. Such exclusion is what is usually called “racial injustice” in this part of the world. Wake up and smell the coffee.

Why doesn’t he do a little work himself? He could start by reading “The Path to National Suicide,” linked above (it’s only 90 pages long and can be read in a two or three hours), and my other articles that are linked in this discussion. Then he could check out my booklet, “Huddled Clichés,” at this link:

http://jtl.org/auster/Huddled/Huddled.html

Then he could check out other writings on the subject that are collected here:

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/011014.html