Month: August 2006

by David Weigel

Two great posts at the Cato Institute’s wonkblog, Cato Unbound. First, Stephen J. Trejo weighs in on Mexicans’ ability to assimilate.

What do we know about the socioeconomic achievement of the children, grandchildren, and more distant descendants of Mexican immigrants? In light of the reasons for pessimism listed above, U.S.-born Mexican Americans have done surprisingly well, though certainly areas of serious concern remain. Like Europeans in the past, Mexicans enjoy ample intergenerational progress between first-generation immigrants and their second-generation children. Relative to their parents, the U.S.-born second generation experiences dramatic increases in English proficiency, educational attainment, and earnings. From this generational perspective, the lightning-rod issue of language—in terms of both English acquisition and Spanish preservation—loses all its spark. By the time they are teens, second-generation Mexican Americans overwhelming prefer to speak English rather than Spanish, and by the third generation most Mexican Americans no longer speak Spanish at all.

And Doug Massey presents the findings of the Mexican Migration Project, coming up with analysis that – surprise! – confounds the neo-Brimelowean hype. (It confounds me a little, too.)

Mexican immigration is not a tidal wave. The rate of undocumented migration has not increased in over two decades. Neither is Mexico a demographic time bomb; its fertility rate is only slightly above replacement. Although a variety of trans-border population movements have increased, this is to be expected in a North American economy that is increasingly integrated under the terms of a mutually-ratified trade agreement. Undocumented migration stems from the unwillingness of the United States to include labor within the broader framework governing trade and investment. Rates of migration between Mexico and the United States are entirely normal for two countries so closely integrated economically.

by David Weigel

National Journal’s Technology Daily has the traffic numbers for political blogs. They ain’t good.

RedState traffic is down 28 percent but page views are up 12 percent over the past three months. RedState underwent a redesign and management overhaul this summer. Right Wing News dropped 20 percent over the same time, Blogs for Bush was down 13 percent, and Townhall, which also was recently redesigned after an acquisition, dropped 14 percent.

By contrast to the big drops for RedState and Right Wing News, readership at the liberal Huffington Post is down 14 percent, and the drop is 12 percent at Daily Kos, the most trafficked blog… As for the Republican National Committee versus the Democratic National Committee, both saw traffic declines. The DNC was down 24 percent, and the RNC dropped twice as much at 48 percent.

Considering the rate at which the RNC churns out web videos, that’s pretty surprising. The original liberal blog MyDD is actually up, as is the liberal Virginia blog Raising Kaine. That’s important – the big shot political bloggers have speculated for a while that local blogs were the wave of the future. The bloggers who finally establish liberal and conservative sites in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada are going to find themselves incredibly popular come late 2007.

This is as good a time as any to plug two Reason stories – my review of the big two bloggers’ books, and Matt Welch’s farewell to warblogging.

(Cross-posted at Hit and Run.)

by David Weigel

It was fronted on Drudge, so you’ve already seen it, but Tom Cruise’s career nosedive is worth just a little more attention.

Paramount Pictures and actor Tom Cruise called an end to their 14-year production deal on Wednesday as the chairman of the studio’s parent company took a parting shot at the movie star’s off-screen behavior.

"As much as we like him personally, we thought it was wrong to renew his deal," Viacom Inc. Chairman Sumner Redstone told the Wall Street Journal in an interview posted online. "His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount."

That’s a hell of a statement – studios always come up with a cover story for things like this. They don’t just come out and say "that honky’s crazy."

And what’s happening with South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who fought a pitched battle with cruise over their Scientology episode? Oh, they signed a deal with Paramount. Tom’s Xenu-powered revenge has been limited to The Simpsons beating South Park in an Emmy upset.

by David Weigel

About that Pat Buchanan post:

"Can anyone point me to the border towns where democracy has collapsed, supplanted by Latin American-style caudillos?"

While I don’t agree with Buchanan‚Äôs xenophobic views, the short answer to your question is, well, yes. I can point to manifestations in American towns where this "Mexification" process is well under way. I’m sorry, but there is a very real undercurrent to the present political Chicano advocacy groups that believe (and are teaching their progeny) the notion that since the American southwest was stolen from Mexico, they have a right to the land including repatriating at a future date. Many of them understand the slow political process required to leverage our democracy to accomplish it. But make no mistake: repopulating the southwest and registering voters for this eventuality is the first step.

There are places in California where if you don’t speak Spanish, you’re SOL as far as communication goes. I have lived in SoCal for thirty years and this wasn’t the case in these places 20 years ago. Take the LA suburb of Maywood, CA, (hardly a "border town"). According to the March 29, 2006 CBS Evening News, more than 50% of the city’s population are illegal aliens, and the mayor has declared that the city will refuse to cooperate with any enforcement of U.S. immigration law, declaring the city a "haven for Illegals. This mayor and his city council were swept into office during last November’s election. My God, they even demanded that all city proceedings be held in Spanish when they were debating this declaration last April!

…

There is also a trend for towns to demand its city employees learn Spanish. This too, is part of the problem. I began to notice back in the eighties, the ATMs only offered Spanish as an alternative. Why? Are businesses saying Mexicans are too stupid to learn English, as opposed to Finns, Chinese, et al, who have the mental capacity to learn it and utilize public and private systems easily? I think we know this is not the case. It was pandering at its worse and sent a powerful subliminal message to a large segment of American society: you don’t have to fully become apart of this country. We essentially told them to treat the country like a rental car. Drive it hard (work the system, get as much free stuff as you can, and then when you done, go back to Mexico and live on that large patch of land you saved up for and bought for the last twenty years) and put it up wet.

This happens on epic proportions. You can look up the stats on that, but trust me, it is quite common. Try this experimen: Drive through an East LA suburb and count the number of Western Union signs (in Spanish, of course). Why is that? Could it be that "this great economic force" is actually spending very little here in the states, utilizing massive quantities of government largess, and wiring the money home? As my brother-in-law, a raisin farmer in Fresno, always tells these migrant workers the last two years: "You guys blew a good thing. You should have left your families down south, and then headed home with your money once the season was over."

This is pretty representative of the responses I got.

by David Weigel

New York’s Democratic party is one of the most fractious, with urban African-Americans, liberal Jews, ethnic suburbans and upstate union workers making up a coalition that nominated candidates as diverse as Daniel Moynihan, Chuck Schumer, and Hillary Clinton in the space of six years. So it’s a little bit surprising that a healthy plurality of New York Democrats – 48 percent – support full gay marriage rights. Only 32 percent oppose them. Pace University’s poll doesn’t go on to ask what Democrats think of civil unions, but we can extrapolate that the number is even higher.

Since it’s a foregone conclusion that Eliot Spitzer is going to win the governor’s mansion, not much attention is being paid to the sea change that could bring to gay rights. Spitzer supports gay marriage, and has said he’d sign a gay marriage bill that got to his desk. When he does so, he’ll have an ascendent NY Democratic party backing him up. What will that portend for marriage rights nationally?

by Michael J. Totten

SHOMRAT, ISRAEL — I drove up to Kibbutz Shomrat, just north of Akko (Acre) near the border with Lebanon, and met two middle-aged members of Peace Now who stayed in the line of Katyusha fire throughout the war. I expected to meet two marginalized members of the old left who were stuck on the sidelines as history roared past. Instead, they insisted the rest of Israeli society is coming around to their point of view.

Amichai Geva warmly welcomed me into his home and fed me pitas, hummus, cucumbers, tomatoes, and watermelon. Yehuda Beinin joined us in the living room.

Both men and their families stayed on the kibbutz during Hezbollah’s attack.

“Lots of rockets hit near the kibbutz,” Amichai said. “One fell right here in the orchard next to the houses. But none of the houses were hit. Most people without children in the house stayed. It’s hard to keep children in a bomb shelter for almost five weeks.”

“How much time did you have after you heard the siren before the rockets actually hit?” I said.

“Thirty seconds sometimes,” Yehuda said. “Sometimes five seconds. Sometimes minus five seconds…the sirens didn’t always come on until after the rockets exploded. We’re right near the border here.”

I didn’t want to meet these guys to talk about rockets, though. I wanted to get an idea of how the peace movement is faring after Israel was attacked from a country they pushed to withdraw from.

read the rest over at michaeltotten.com »

A classic piece of camp from "Can’t Stop The Music": the Village People’s unforgettable Milk Shake number.

by Michael J. Totten

TEL AVIV — August 22 was Tuesday, not Doomsday.

by David Weigel

A Drudge plug, a few controversial passages, and boom – Pat Buchanan’s newest book (with his oldest cover) hits #1 on Amazon. Josh Marshall calls it a "xenophobic hairball," but really it’s not too different from what Buchanan has been shouting into the dark for years, or what Peter Brimelow made a splash saying a decade ago (before boarding himself up into the VDARE.com sanitarium).

America faces an existential crisis. If we do not get control of our borders, by 2050 Americans of European descent will be a minority in the nation their ancestors created and built. No nation has ever undergone so radical a demographic transformation and survived.

This really is no different than the old Brimelow spiel, although PB always personalized it by noting he didn’t want his young son to grow up in this scary, swarthy future Mexamerica.

I’m sympathetic to Buchanan’s arguments. It makes no sense to ignore, as our midterm-fearing Congress would like to, the bad law and worse economics that have created the border crisis with Mexico. It makes even less sense to introduce de jure bilingualism in communities surfeited with Mexican immigrants. But this idea that Mexican immigration will topple the nationhood and traditions of European-Americans is nine parts alarmism and one part B.S.

Can anyone point me to the border towns where democracy has collapsed, supplanted by Latin American-style caudillos? Have Arizona, California, and the rest of the Southwest become less American or less loyal? Restrictionists are too quick to compare America’s immigration with that of Europe or of collapsed empires of the past. But it’s a false comparison between, say, Muslim immigrants who settle in Rotterdam and refuse to integrate with Dutch society, and Mexican immigrants who go to Catholic mass and long to become American citizens. The former pose a real challenge to a society’s stability, but the latter can be sucessfully assimiliated if policymakers want to assimilate them. (Yes, controlling the immigration flow would be the keystone of any successful assimilation.) Reason’s August/September 2006 issue is a good springboard for any discussion on the topic.

I sense some cognitive dissonance at the Wall Street Journal op-ed desk about this, though. Liberal and conservative politics can apparently be transmitted genetically. But culture can’t. Anyone able to crack that logic?

(Cross-posted at Hit and Run.)

by Ana Marie Cox

With the arrival of Oliver Stone’s "World Trade Center," many critics — especially on the right — have taken it upon themselves to ask America if we really remember 9/11. You know, do we think about it enough? Have we kept the terror fresh in our minds as a way to replenish our will to fight the war on terror? Or has the liberal media white washed it, turned that horrible day into a mere memory, a caricature of itself easily compartmentalized and laid aside? Well, yes, they have.

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From Slate’s "The Worst Horrible Day Ever, a 9/11 Coloring Book for Kids of Ages."