Fear of a Descended From Spanish-Speakers Planet

Jonah Goldberg and Peter Beinart debate debate whether "we" should "fear a Hispanic-majority United States". I have to say that while I don't normally feel particularly Hispanic this sort of exclusion-by-premise from the conversation has a way of getting underneath my skin.

Beinart says almost everything I'd want to say about this, but it's worth noting that it's kind of hard to see what this scenario even means. I mean, do I -- with a paternal grandfather who grew up in a Spanish-dominant Cuban immigrant community in Florida plus three "Anglo" (i.e., Ashkenazi Jewish) grandparents -- count toward this looming Hispanic menace? And since we're talking about a future scenario, would my kids. Their kids? It doesn't seem to make sense. It always seems to me that this is part of the reason that the public seems to underestimate the extent of Hispanic assimilation. People descended, in whole or in part, from immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries don't wear little yellow stars marking us out from the rest of the group. If you're English-dominant and your skin tone gets either too light or too dark, you don't "count" as Hispanic at all. But English-dominance and intermarriage are key markers of integration. So you wind up only noticing the Hispanic presence in the United States via its less assimilated members.

Comments

Let's wait and hear what Steve Sailer has to say...

Posted by alwsdad | July 10, 2007 3:06 PM

And since we're talking about a future scenario, would my kids. Their kids? It doesn't seem to make sense.

Right. I mean, no doubt in, say, 2080 the % of the population that traces its roots to the Spanishphere will greatly exceed today's number. But so what? Exactly how "Hispanic" will some Latino-American feel in 2080 when his/her ancestors arrived as defense workers in 1943? To answer that question I'd suggest today making the same type of query to some Irish/Jewish/German/Scottish American whose ancestors arrived in 1870.

Also, isn't the % of the country's population that is Hispanic somewhere around 15%? Is a Hispanic majority even in the cards? I personally rather doubt it, given demographic trends in Latin America.

Posted by Jasper | July 10, 2007 3:12 PM

I agree with most everything you have to say. I would say, however, that no matter what social value we might see in assimilation, this country was quite explicitly founded on the belief that members of a free society should not be required to assimilate. The Pilgrims, to employ the most cliched American trope ever, came so that they would not have to assimilate to Anglican or Catholic culture. Your Jewish ancestors were protected by the First Amendment from assimilating to the dominant Christian religion, just as Mormons in Utah are. And my neighbor who has covered his lawn in brightly colored statues of cartoon animals has not been forced to assimilate to the plain vanilla conformity of the rest of the neighborhood.

Now, do I think that there is social value in assimilating somewhat? Sure. As Bill Maher says, when you come to the melting pot, it's polite to melt a little. If I moved to French and refused to make a good faith effort to learn French, I'd be an asshole. But I don't think that courtesy should be enshrined by law in this country. And the truth is, many people who talk about assimilation talk about it selectively. They care more about assimilation when it concerns Hispanic immigrants.

Posted by Freddie | July 10, 2007 3:14 PM

If I moved to French... smooth.

If I moved to FRANCE

Posted by Freddie | July 10, 2007 3:16 PM

This is just so ridiculous.

My wife is Chilean. Her ancestors were German and Basque immigrants to Chile in previous centuries. Most of her extended family in Chile is as blonde and WASPy looking as you'd find in say, Nantucket. She speaks unaccented, fluent English. Is she Hispanic? By most definitions, yes.

Our kids are mostly blonde and are Spanish-English Bilingual. We live in Texas and 99.99% of Texans would pick them out as Anglo (as they would with my wife too). Are they Hispanic? Should I check Anglo or Hispanic on the school admissions box?

When people have these discussions of "hispanics" what they are really doing is speaking in code for lower class Mexican & Central American immigrants and to a lesser extent Cubans and Puerto Ricans.

Posted by Kent | July 10, 2007 3:18 PM

Given that I can trace my family back to Spain in 1492 (and in fact can trace the end of the Spanish period in my family history to 1492, when dearly beloved ancestors caught the last boat to Italy), I take this personally.

What? That doesn't count? Don't like the Livornese bits either? How about the Moroccan, Dutch, English and Lithuanian bits?

To duck into a different claim of ethnicity, Jonah is what my folks would call a schande -- and then shut up, for fear that the kids might be listening.

Posted by Tom | July 10, 2007 3:29 PM

My wife is Guatemalan. She speaks English well, but not perfectly. We have four boys that speak perfect English and varying degrees of Spanish.

Quite often friends or associates (who know that my wife is Central American and that my children are second generation immigrants) will whine and moan about how Hispanic immigrants today are refusing to assimilate. I shake my head in wonder. As Matt says, they appear to be confused about what exactly a "Hispanic immigrant" is.

Posted by LaurenceB | July 10, 2007 3:30 PM

When I was in high school, my two best friends were puerto rican -- and I truthfully never thought much about it until they came to visit me at college and several people commented on it. They were not mixed in the sense that both their parents came from puerto rican neighborhoods in NYC, but they were third generation NYers, and typical suburban kids to the core. Neither had any ability to speak spanish (my friend Ramon was getting Cs and Ds in spanish in high school). I can't think of any way in which they differed culturally from me, a third generation NY (per the shortest branch) with Italian and Irish ancestors. We went to the same church, watched the same movies, and were huge baseball and football fans.

Posted by pj | July 10, 2007 3:33 PM

If you're English-dominant and your skin tone gets either too light or too dark, you don't "count" as Hispanic at all.

It works the other way as well. Some of my second cousins are half Baghdadi Jewish and half Ashkenazic. One of my second cousins married a Hispanic man and took her husband's last name. So to most people she, a dark skinned person with a Spanish last name, is Hispanic, even though she is not at all by descent Hispanic.

Speaking of the term "Anglo", though: I had a prof. in college (whom I had previously thought to be Hispanic) who, in discussing issues of race, pointed out that at the time he was born, as a child of Southern Italian immigrants, he was not considered white. At some point he became "white" and then when he moved to So.Cal. he became an "Anglo".

I guess he feels the same way about fellow Latins calling him an "Anglo" as I would feel, e.g. if Amish would refer to me -- a fellow religious minority of Germanic extraction -- as "English".

Posted by DAS | July 10, 2007 3:35 PM

If the United States was so worried about whether it would be able to handle a large number of immigrants from Latin America, it probably would have been wise for the government not to share a long, continuous southern border with a huge Spanish-speaking country. The question is not whether we should "fear" it. The question is how we can manage this inevitability. The answer, judging from pj's experience, is that we can probably manage it pretty well.

Posted by Tyro | July 10, 2007 3:39 PM

I don't really know. If this happens as the result of natural population growth, this won't likely happen. If it happens as a result of immigration, with many immigrants bringing third-world values (tolerance towards oppression, blind obedience and fear of employers, religious conservatism) then it could become very troubling indeed. We could end up with a ban on abortion, severe oppression towards gay folks, and even more misogyny.

Posted by soullite | July 10, 2007 3:43 PM

Two Words: (Attorney General) Alberto Gonzales

1) As I recall, the Jews of Spain did not prosper when Alberto's predecessor , Torquemada, argued that executive ..er .. Papal privilege allowed for stressful interrogation techniques as long as major organs did not fail.

2) In fact, I seem to recall that the Jews of Spain fled to sanctuary in the Islamic world. Strange -- since leading Neocon intellectuals assure us that the inherent nature of Islam requires the faithful to exterminate the non-Muslim.

3) Actually, in my opinion, the problem with the massive influx of illegals from Mexico is not that they are Hispanic -- it is that they are Catholic.

The Pope today announced that other Christian faiths are not true churchs -- which I guess means we WASPs will burn in hell with the Jews and the Muslims. See http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070710/ap_on_re_eu/pope_other_christians_2 .

An excerpt:
"LORENZAGO DI CADORE, Italy - Pope Benedict XVI has reasserted the universal primacy of the Roman Catholic Church, approving a document released Tuesday that says Orthodox churches were defective and that other Christian denominations were not true churches. "

4) With Peak Oil, we are facing a massive die-off in human population -- as Jared Diamond discusses in "Collapse". The nations of the world should be trying to restrain population growth until we develop more sustainable technology -- and to limit the ongoing massive degradation of the environment.

5) But the Catholic Church insists upon its idiotic ban on contraception -- upon massive families and unrestrained overpopulation. As a result, there is massive poverty, starvation and despair whereever the Church holds sway -- in South America and in Africa. Whereever there is deep ignorance, the Church prospers. A Church whose leaders forbids the common priests from criticizing social injustice and the predatory viciousness of the wealthy.

6) It is only fair to note that the Church did offset the overpopulation in Africa by a rather deceitful campaigns against the value of condoms. Resulting in a massive pandemic of AIDS which has killed millions and has left millions of children orphans.

Posted by Don Williams | July 10, 2007 3:47 PM

"I don't really know. If this happens as the result of natural population growth, this won't likely happen. If it happens as a result of immigration, with many immigrants bringing third-world values (tolerance towards oppression, blind obedience and fear of employers, religious conservatism) then it could become very troubling indeed. We could end up with a ban on abortion, severe oppression towards gay folks, and even more misogyny."

But Bill O'Reilly told me that the "browning of America" was a DEMOCRATIC electoral strategy! Bummer!

The social conservatism of immigrant populations is like a mythical creature to me at this point. I keep hearing about how Hispanics are very religious and care about "family values" and are therefore natural GOP voters, but it never seems to manifest itself in a meaningful political way.

Posted by Jake H. | July 10, 2007 3:54 PM

The real question for me is, what do these people think about the Amish? Shouldn't they be public enemy number one, given how stringently they have avoided assimilation of any kind?

The Pope today announced that other Christian faiths are not true churchs -- which I guess means we WASPs will burn in hell with the Jews and the Muslims.

I feel compelled to point out that, whatever the Pope said here, official Church doctrine is that no one, not even an atheist, goes to hell for not being a Christian.

http://meaningoflife.tv/video.php?speaker=albacete&topic=death

Posted by Freddie | July 10, 2007 4:05 PM

Freddie-

No worries and no need to correct yourself.

I hear Franch is beautiful this time of year.

:)

Posted by nikkos | July 10, 2007 4:06 PM

keep hearing about how Hispanics are very religious and care about "family values" and are therefore natural GOP voters, but it never seems to manifest itself in a meaningful political way.

Because all the rest of the GOP sees them as some sort of sub-human parasite on the national body? That tends to turn people off...

Posted by Ed Marshall | July 10, 2007 4:07 PM

alwsdad: very funny.

Posted by otto | July 10, 2007 4:18 PM

Even though I'm a hardliner or sorts when it comes to illegal immigration, this particular scenario of dread holds no sway with me.

1. Even if ALL of Mexico moved here overnight, Spanish-speakers would only constitute 25% of the population and would be spread out, not isolated in some Quebec-like area.

2. Mexican immigration has probably peaked, as the demographics of Mexico are rapidly changing, with the birth rate plummeting to levels closer to that of developed nations.

3. Predictions of a Hispanic majority, or even the rapid growth of our Hispanic population, are based on "current trends." The thing about "current trends" is that they aren't current forever. It is unlikely the present influx of Hispanics will continue at its current pace, at least not without depopulating much of Latin America. If you'd based predictions on "current trends" around 1900, you'd have predicted that by 1950 a majority of Americans would be Italian and Polish Catholics and Eastern European Jews.

4. Also, it seems to me that lumping all Spanish speakers together as "Hispanics" is ludicrous in the US context where, as Yglesias points out, color is much more important. Aside from the language and Catholic religion (for the most part), what do white Cubans, mestizo Mexicans, mulattos Dominicans and full-blooded Mayan Guatemalans have in common with each other? Would Bill Richardson still be "Hispanic" if he didn't look so Chicano? I doubt it.

One difference between today's Spanish-speaking immigrants and other ethnic groups in the past is that Spanish speakers constitute a huge percentage -- 75% or so -- of recent immigrants (if one includes illegal immigrants). Plus, while Germans and Italians and Lithuanians etc. all had their native-language papers (NY's Italian daily "Il Progresso" only folded 15 years or so ago), the bloc of Spanish speakers is far more visible to all through modern and ubiquitous Spanish-language media (Univision, etc.) and other familiar phenomena such as "press one for English, two for Spanish," and so on. This gives the impression of an "invasion." But my guess is that Univision, while it might be a good investment today, will be on the decline in the future as the younger generation of Spanish speaking immigrants (and their children) do what other immigrants have always done: adopt English as their first and eventually sole language.

Though my own opposition to large-scale immigration has to do with numbers, skills and the like, I understand some of the concerns of those who worry about immigrants changing the culture of the US, even if I disagree with most of it. I confess I'd be a lot more worried if the vast majority of our immigrants (again lumping legal and illegal together) were Muslims and not Latin Catholics and Pentecostals. It's too bad that nativists play to these fears. It's also too bad that too many on the Left are too eager to denounce anyone opposed to amnesty for illegals as nativist and racist. But such is the state of political dialogue in the US these days.

Posted by Traven | July 10, 2007 4:23 PM

Uh-oh, watch out MY ... Goldberg's next book project is said to be Hispanic Fascism: From Cortez to Matthew Yglesias.

Posted by Anderson | July 10, 2007 4:39 PM

People descended, in whole or in part, from immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries don't wear little yellow stars marking us out from the rest of the group.

Once again, MattY shows his ignorance (or perhaps something else). Even the edge examples described above would be designated as "Hispanic" and would thus be eligible for endless government benefits. And, racial power groups would reach out to them and use them as a power base, as would racial demagogues such as TonyVillar ("we clean your toilets", "we're here and we aren't going"; etc. with the last said in Spanish and refering to illegal aliens). And, of course, the endless newspaper articles demanding that politicians turn our immigration system over to Hispanics lest they not vote for them.

Really, can't MattY get someone who's at least familiar with this topic to guest post here so he doesn't embarass himself like this?

Posted by TLB | July 10, 2007 4:49 PM

Here's an example. A Rep. from TX (a Dem of course) wants the Feds to give millions per year to the NationalCouncilOf La Raza. From the bill:

to undertake community development and affordable housing projects and programs serving low- and moderate-income households, particularly through organizations particularly through organizations located in neighborhoods with substantial populations of income-disadvantaged households of Hispanic origin.

Posted by More on the bill | July 10, 2007 4:55 PM

Shorter Chris Kelly:" I just shat myself again in fear of the impending insurgencia."

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | July 10, 2007 4:58 PM

the bloc of Spanish speakers is far more visible to all through modern and ubiquitous Spanish-language media (Univision, etc.) and other familiar phenomena such as "press one for English, two for Spanish," and so on. - Travern

I guess it's a matter then actually that Hispanic immigrants are rather widely distributed then (so that nationally people are aware of having other buttons for Spanish and not for other languages)? Which should aid assimilation in the long term?

Because in certain areas you do get "Press One for English, Press Two for [X]" ... even if nationally you don't get such things (so people might not be aware of the 'lack of assimilation' of certain groups). As you point out, Il Progresso folded only recently. And even today, I can go to my fiancee's neighborhood and go to an ATM and make my transactions in Yiddish.

Posted by DAS | July 10, 2007 4:59 PM

I actually had a somewhat similar argument at (of all places) Baseball Primer or BTF.

My whole point then, as it is now, is that Latins can be both White AND Hispanic or Black AND Hispanic (or in the case of my fellow countrymen, Bruce Chen, Chinese, Panamanian AND Latin).

http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/files/newsstand/discussion/shysterball_calcaterra2/

Posted by JRVJ | July 10, 2007 5:04 PM

I actually had a somewhat similar argument at (of all places) Baseball Primer or BTF.

My whole point then, as it is now, is that Latins can be both White AND Hispanic or Black AND Hispanic (or in the case of my fellow countrymen, Bruce Chen, Chinese, Panamanian AND Latin).

http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/files/newsstand/discussion/shysterball_calcaterra2/

Posted by JRVJ | July 10, 2007 5:04 PM

This thread reminds me of a post I read on Craig's List after Ken Salazar was elected to the Senate, where some lefty gloated how this was a victory for oppressed Hispanics, etc. Ken Salazar? Whose family helped colonize the interior west 500 years ago?

Anyhow, Matt's totally right. Any fears that the dominant group of Spanish-speaking immigrants -- Mexicans with grade school educations -- will fail to assimilate as well as Matt's family has are unfounded. Just because the last seven generations of Mexican-Americans have done so poorly on average doesn't mean that the descendants of today's Mexican immigrants won't do a lot better. After all, our public school system is more effective at educating Hispanic students today than ever before. The future is bright; bring on the Mexican immigrants!

Posted by Fred | July 10, 2007 5:34 PM

Ken Salazar? Whose family helped colonize the interior west 500 years ago?

The same Ken Salazar who noted that Tommy Tancredo's family was a bunch of arrivistes. Still, we can always wonder how the descendents of those derided as bog-trotters would have done without the New Deal, not least because it brings up a rather satisfying image of Bill O'Reilly and Chris Kelly paving roads.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | July 10, 2007 5:40 PM

Just because the last seven generations of Mexican-Americans have done so poorly on average doesn't mean that the descendants of today's Mexican immigrants won't do a lot better.

While that's true, it also leads me to ask why do people keep bringing up the supposed huge achievement gap between Mexican-Americans and Americans in general. Seriously. If there are five people in a room whose average income is $400k p.a., and two very poor people enter said room, the average income of the people in the room will now be a lot lower as a result. But the original five persons won't be any worse off. Maybe it's true that Mexican Americans aren't rising up the ladder as fast as Armenian-Americans or Korean-Americans. But why does it follow that the policy response to this phenomenon is to be to keep the Mexicans from coming in? They still contribute something to the economy, after all. Lord knows hotel rooms and new houses and landscaping services and restaurant meals would all become more expensive, and Social Security a lot less solvent. Sorry, I don't give a rat's ass about your stupid, racist, irrational fears, and fully intend to keep voting with my wallet. And that means supporting a national welcome mat for my new neighbors. Mind you, I'd much prefer to see the government bring some order to the process by making it legal, and regulated (you know, by increasing legal immigraiton) but Lou Dobbs says we can't have that, so, as far as I'm concerned, illegal Mexicans are better than none at all, especially since it'll cost zillions of bucks to arrive at "none at all." And especially because they'll give birth to people who will have enough sense to vote your cracker asses out of office.

Posted by 88 | July 10, 2007 6:26 PM

pseudonymous

The New Deal was nice, but us Harps would have been okay as long as the patronage system was in place.

Irish assimilation went something like this:
peat bog, ditch, railroad track, tunnel

Posted by McFinn | July 10, 2007 6:29 PM

There were a couple of things Beinart didn't say that he should have said:

1. Goldberg's argument seemed to be all about legitimizing the conservative position, not showing it had merit. He just wanted to say "look, it's not racist to be concerned about American culture". That may be true, but the problem is, a lot of the grass roots opposition to hispanic immigration IS explicitly racist. The right couldn't have defeated immigration reform without the racists who are upset because they might have to press 1 for English instead of Spanish, and who talk in broad, stereotypical terms about hispanics who allegedly come here, breed like mad, use our social services, pay no taxes, and ultimately plan to reconquer the Southwest for Mexico.

If the right wing wants liberals to assume that they are raising cultural concerns in good faith, they need to show some good faith themselves, by denouncing the racists who believe the above-noted crap.

2. I was cracking up when Goldberg was asserting that Mexicans assimilate less than previous immigrants because they continue to maintain connections to Mexico whereas previous immigrants made a clean break. Come on! Is Goldberg not aware of the Irish-Americans who funded the IRA? Is Goldberg not aware of the huge numbers of Jewish Americans who continue to maintain an affinity towards, and financially support, Israel?

He's holding Mexicans to a standard that no other group was ever held to.

Posted by Dilan Esper | July 10, 2007 6:31 PM

Fred, if that's the case, then the solution is to get Mexico to improve the education of its citizens and for the US to figure out who to educate students whose parents come here with a grade-school education.

As I said, if having the USA is so severely threatened by poor Mexican immigrants, then the government shouldn't have located the country right next to Mexico! Given that moving the country isn't an option, I suggest we figure out how to make do with what we have.

Posted by Tyro | July 10, 2007 6:41 PM

Just because the last seven generations of Mexican-Americans have done so poorly on average doesn't mean that the descendants of today's Mexican immigrants won't do a lot better.

The last seven generations?! Is anyone even keeping statistics on how seventh-generation Mexican-Americans are doing? People whose families crossed the border during the Buchanan Administration? How would you even be able to identify who they were?

Posted by JP | July 10, 2007 7:04 PM

As a hemi-semi Cuban-American like Matt (my father was born in Havana but moved to the US early in life and is completely and utterly assimilated into "white America"), I find the opening sentence of the TNR article incredibly outrageous; I'm surprised it can really be uttered in an elite publication these days, it sounds so transparently nativist.

It's obvious that the rhetoric surrounding the words "Hispanic", "Latino" and so on is incredibly muddled, with various pegs and scaffolds laboring to support the artifice that the Hispanic (or some such) population is constitutively different from "us".

I've always been unsure why "Hispanic" became a separate census pseudo-racial category. Matt and myself and half of the posts in this thread belie the contention that Latin Americans, or those with ancestry from Spain and Portugal, are phenotypically distinct. Recent immigrants from Latin America, of course, hold certain broad cultural traits in common, such as speaking Spanish, being Catholic, and so on (of course there are exceptions there too), but overall it's not a very good heuristic for anything demographically substantive. Huge variations are masked by crude demographic statements like "Hispanic immigrants are poorer and less educated than the American average". I grew up in Miami, and there is no "average" Hispanic there -- everyone there is Hispanic, both the Dartmouth-bound prep school kids and the GED folks learning carpentry from their father; those who speak English in their household and those who have yet to learn English are both subsumed in this category, as are a hundred different skin tones all equally represented. The definition of Hispanics as a separate and inherently distinct group is a clumsy, and I think pretty offensive trick by our closet nativists to draw a circle around the largest group of recent immigrants, wrapping them up in a broad cultural package that "we" can then deride.

Of course, like many have said above, it's the same thing that happened to the Italians and the E. Europeans in the first half of the 20th century and the Scandinavians and Irish in the 19th. The newcomers are always some third race, neither black nor "Anglo" (or whatever term is chosen), a race with vagueley defined cultural and/or phenotypic boundaries; and this race is somehow, in some empirically-elusive way, un-assimilable. We all know better.

Posted by CG | July 10, 2007 7:17 PM

Well, considering the lunkheads in the Republican party, it looks like you've been chasing any self-respecting Hispanic over to the Democrats....

And a lot of the yowls about "them nasty furriners" have been said equivalently about people from Ireland, Italy, China, Catholics, etc., etc. and so forth.

"No Irish Need Apply"--was pretty standard on job ads not all that long ago.

Which is why it is particularly amusing to watch Bill O'Reilly et al pop their brains over this.

Posted by grumpy realist | July 10, 2007 7:26 PM

I should add that I've marked Hispanic on censuses and applications of all sorts all my life and have yet to receive the fabled "endless government benefits".

Posted by CG | July 10, 2007 7:28 PM

My MIL proudly showed me her Italian grandmother's WWII "enemy alien" registration card, while ten minutes later announcing her support for the border wall. This is a woman who's own family were all 'illegal' immigrants, and whose husband operated a number of S. Texas farms which never had a single employee who actually had a green card. I only wish I had the courage to ask her to give back all the money her husband made off of illegal immigrants to start a school in Mexico or something.

Seriously, this is the latest iteration of "icky brown people are taking over." It's bigotry dressed up in pseudoscience.

Posted by Karen | July 10, 2007 7:57 PM

Latino, Hispanic, what are you?
as 'splained by Johnny Diaz, dba "Beantown Cuban"

(recommend following his link to his Boston Globe article.)

Posted by artappraiser | July 10, 2007 8:55 PM

I realize that those who repeat ("make" is too strong a word for mindlessness) arguments similar to Karen's (of which there are at least three above) probably won't be able to figure this out, but let me provide the shorter version of what they're actually saying:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hitler was a vegetarian! Eat beef!

(This message was not sponsored by the National Eat Beef Council, despite it coming from a NEBC IP address and those checks from the NEBC piled up on the table.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Posted by TLB | July 10, 2007 9:04 PM

Re: In fact, I seem to recall that the Jews of Spain fled to sanctuary in the Islamic world.

Actually, no. Most of them fled to Italy, the Netherlands, and even eastern Europe: Poland was a notably tolerant nation in the 1500s, and even Russia, though xenophobic, had not yet discovered pogroms. Those who fled into Dar es Islam went mostly to Istanbul where the Sultan welcomed them; but even back then Jews were none too welcome in the Arab world.

Re: Strange -- since leading Neocon intellectuals assure us that the inherent nature of Islam requires the faithful to exterminate the non-Muslim.

The Necons are idiots about this, but the "Tolerant islam" meme is vastly overstated. You can find some times and places when Islam was tolerant (ditto for Christendom) and other places and eras when it was as brutal as Torquemada.

Re: Actually, in my opinion, the problem with the massive influx of illegals from Mexico is not that they are Hispanic -- it is that they are Catholic.

Oh good grief, not all catholics are rigid fanatics! In fact Latin America is becoming remarkably liberal on many social issues while no one seems to be looking.

Re: With Peak Oil, we are facing a massive die-off in human population

Very doubtful. Population growth is already slowing almost everwyhere and insomep laces (Europe and Japan) it is below ZPG. The Peak Oil thing is something else that's vastly overdone, a secular doomsday cult belief for misanthropes disappointed that nuclear war didnlt happen, and Global Warming is taking too long to wipe out all that pesky rabble.

Re: But the Catholic Church insists upon its idiotic ban on contraception ...

A ban mostly honored in the breach. Again, you may wish to study contemporary Latin America a bit more closely. Mexico's birth rate for example is at or just below replacement.

Re: A Church whose leaders forbids the common priests from criticizing social injustice and the predatory viciousness of the wealthy.

Since when? Catholic clergy, with a few unpleasant exceptions (like Fr Neuhaus of the First Things St. George the W cult), have been remarkably outspoken on the social justice thing. Even the previous pope had some none too kind words for social injustice, and this pope is already older than the catacombs, unlikely to last as long as his predecessor.

Posted by JonF | July 10, 2007 9:49 PM

88,

You are voting with your emotions, not your head or your wallet. If you were, you'd know that unskilled Mexican immigrants consume more in government services than they pay in taxes -- and that drain on government resources will only increase if illegals get legalized, since they will be eligible for more benefits (e.g., Social Security). You are onto something with your last line about newly legalized Mexican Americans voting "your cracker asses" out. It is reasonable to expect a large underclass of mestizo citizens to be racially conscious in their voting -- and to support the redistribution of wealth from more successful groups. Extreme examples of this are happening now in Bolivia and Venezuela.

Tyro:

"Fred, if that's the case, then the solution is to get Mexico to improve the education of its citizens and for the US to figure out who to educate students whose parents come here with a grade-school education."

Simple as that, huh? Well that's certainly a more workable solution than just not importing more unskilled immigrants with grade school educations.

JP:

"The last seven generations?! Is anyone even keeping statistics on how seventh-generation Mexican-Americans are doing?"

You could use the average stats of a state with a large, old Mexican-American population such as New Mexico as a rough proxy. Do you need to look up the stats or do you already guess that New Mexico is going to be near the bottom on educational and other stats versus other states? If that's too rough a proxy for you, we do have stats on 4th generation Mexican Americans. Four generations was more than sufficient for the storied Ellis Island immigrants to advance to the middle class. You can see stats on 4th generation Mexican Americans here (look for the sidebar helpfully titled "failure to assimilate").

Posted by Fred | July 10, 2007 10:11 PM

CG,

I think you are being deliberately obtuse. The clumsy terms "Hispanic" and "Latino" are preferred because it's considered impolite in the U.S. to notice racial differences, however obvious -- racial differences between, say, the mestizos and pure Indians who form the peasant class in Mexico, Central America, and parts of the Andes; the whites such as yourself who comprise the elites in those countries (and dominate Miami); mullatos of Puerto Rico, etc.

Posted by Juan | July 10, 2007 10:19 PM

So, again-- the people who claim to value assimilation into society must just be utterly enraged by the Amish and Orthodox Jews in enclaves, right?

Posted by Freddie | July 10, 2007 10:41 PM

Simple as that, huh? Well that's certainly a more workable solution than just not importing more unskilled immigrants with grade school educations.

Actually, by dint of our nation's geography, it is a more workable solution. Are you not aware that we share a large land border with Mexico, a friendly nation? Neither they nor the rest of the Latin Americans are leaving the hemisphere any time soon. We might as well get used to it and learn how to deal rather than trying to build the Maginot Line for immigration.

As I said, if the country didn't want to have anything to do with hundreds of millions of Latin Americans, it shouldn't have located itself right next to Mexico.

Posted by Tyro | July 10, 2007 10:51 PM

Fred:

You are voting with your emotions, not your head or your wallet. If you were, you'd know that unskilled Mexican immigrants consume more in government services than they pay in taxes...

Please. "Unskilled" Mexican immigrants for the most part consume neither education dollars (nearly all of them are past the K-12 age) nor retirement dollars. They do create a burden for some local governments. They almost certainly represent a financial boon for the federal government. And even if the net effect on government coffers were modestly negative (I think Heritage's numbers are garbage, FWIW, but I digress), so what? It's obvious that total GDP increases as a result of their presence. It's obvious that lots of goods and services millions of Americans value are priced more cheaply as a result of their presence. It's obvious that downward pressure on wages is negligible. It's obvious that sharply decreasing Mexican migration with police power would be exceedingly expensive (besides, Mexican migration is already headed downward, largely thanks to our southern neighbor's collapsing birthrate). Please explain why you think it's a sensible idea to ponder the desirability of a group's presence based on its impact on public sector finances (instead of on overall economic impact) and then get back to us why it's I who am arguing based on emotion.

Posted by 88 | July 10, 2007 11:18 PM

let me provide the shorter version of what they're actually saying:

"[sound of ladder being repeatedly tugged]"

Perhaps Chris Kelly can YouTube his daily life as a nth-gen Irish who can't walk two paces in his chosen home of Los Angeles without shitting himself at the sight of a potential swarthy insurgent?

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | July 10, 2007 11:19 PM

“You could use the average stats of a state with a large, old Mexican-American population such as New Mexico as a rough proxy. Do you need to look up the stats or do you already guess that New Mexico is going to be near the bottom on educational and other stats versus other states?”

New Mexico is a poor state because it's always been a poor state. West Virginia is poor for the same reasons. If there are cultural influences, they are cultural influences related to regional differences and not ethnic differences. California and Texas and Florida all have very large Hispanic populations that go back many, many generations and they are not poor states.

By the way, the Hispanic in New Mexico who have been here since before New Mexico became a territory have also been here since before Mexico became independent from Spain. As the colony of Spain that was the most distant and isolated from Mexico City, New Mexicans sympathized with Spain and have never considered themselves Mexicans. New Mexico Hispanics that are not immigrants (during the US era) are not and never have been "Mexican-Americans". This is also why it is acceptable here, even among Latino Activists, to use the term "Hispanic" while, additionally, a large portion of this population actually prefers "Spanish", which is offensive to many Hispanics elsewhere.

New Mexico is the closest thing to the a US version of Quebec. Its Hispanic population has until recently been the majority of the population and is likely to return to the majority soon. The culture here is less anglicized than it is anywhere else in the US, excepting territories like Puerto Rico. The native Anglo population of Northern and Central New Mexico such as myself and my family (who are three generations of native New Mexican Anglos) have partly assimilated into Hispanic culture and we like it this way. All this, and there is probably a greater sense of American identity here among New Mexican Hispanics than there is in Southern California and Texas. You know why? Because in those and other heavily Hispanic areas of the US, they are nevertheless the outsiders. The New Mexicans here welcomed Kearney's US Army when he marched into Santa Fe (mostly from fear of Texan occupation) and they've been mostly happy being American ever since. The only sore spot is the US taking of land that had been in families as part of Spanish Land Grants. That's still a contentious issue.

If the US would welcome the Hispanic immigrants with open arms, they would happily become fully American. They're probably going to do so, anyway, just as so many already have and so many other immigrants from past immigrant waves have. They've often become the most patriotic of Americans. The only way that US natives could sabotage this process is to continue on this course of nativism and demonization of Hispanics that encourages a cultural separatism. New Mexico is a brown version of the US, and it's a nice place to live. In my opinion, it's much better for it.

Posted by Keith M Ellis | July 10, 2007 11:33 PM

Juan: You're right, it is impolite to talk about race and that is at the heart of what I was saying. "Hispanic" and "Latino" are appellations made regardless of phenotype, which is why I think they are terms devised ultimately to create an artificial immigrant-native dichotomy.

Posted by CG | July 11, 2007 12:39 AM

JohnF: Actually, the vast majority of Iberian Jews DID flee the inquisition to the territories of the Otttoman Empire (Sultan Beyazit II: "Ye call Ferdinand a wise king he who makes his land poor and ours rich!"), far more than fled to the rest of Europe. I'm not sure where you got those statistics from and perhaps you were assuming that the always more numerous Ashkenazim had something to do with the Sephardic exodus.

The largest single community of exiled Sephardim ended up not in Istanbul but in Salonika, where they were in the MAJORITY and comprised by far the largest single concentration of Jews anywhere in the world until World War II -- mind you, the city was under Ottoman, not Greek rule until the 1920s. Its nickname was "Mother of Israel". Ladino Spanish was the lingua franca of Thessaloniki until most Jews fell victim to Hitler or left to Palestine or elsewhere.

A funny quote by some 17th or 18th century Ottoman diplomat, which unfortunately I can't find verbatim: "in the land of Spain, they speak the Jewish language, although they are not Jews."

Posted by AB | July 11, 2007 12:42 AM

"And since we're talking about a future scenario, would my kids. Their kids?"

Your kids, and your sons' sons, and your sons' sons' sons will qualify for affirmative action preferences for having a Spanish surname.

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 11, 2007 12:58 AM

Your kids, and your sons' sons, and your sons' sons' sons will qualify for affirmative action preferences for having a Spanish surname.

What a dark and dangerous future that will be. It's clearly the duty of all right thinking Spanishly surnamed American men to marry non-Spanish-surnamed women and then have their kids use mom's last name instead of dad's. (Which would of course imply that the wife isn't taking the husband's last name, which is the old school Spanish way of doing things anyway.)

Actually, Matt's kids, Spanish surnames or not, will be qualifying for affirmative action for as long as

(1) affirmative action rules remain the same, which isn't a given
(2) Matt's descendants choose to identify as Hispanic, which Matt himself appears not to. It's not like the name itself magically confers extra benefits. My last name is a Spanish name, but 90% of the time I self-ID as white* if I identify myself as anything at all. Plus of course all the self-IDed hispanic people w/out Spanish names (close family friends, Mexican on one side for about four generations, Danish family name). I presume you actually have to nominate yourself as Hispanic/Latino to get lumped into the category.

* My last name actually *comes* from my Portuguese heritage, but it's the same name in Spanish, and about equally common between the two languages. When I applied to college, for most of the schools - and I still do this sometimes - I wrote in "Puerto Rican and Portuguese"; for the most competitive schools I applied to [and to which I wasn't admitted] I wrote merely that I was Puerto Rican, and felt that if this led them to form a false impression of my background that was their problem, since I was completely deserving of admission. I personally don't care much for the Hispanic/Latino terms, for reasons similar to CG's above, but since they work for so many other people who choose to call themselves that, I've stopped arguing against them.

Posted by Quarterican | July 11, 2007 1:36 AM

Tyro:

"Actually, by dint of our nation's geography, it is a more workable solution."

Mexico and the United States are both sovereign countries. We have no authority over how Mexico educates its citizens, but we do have the authority to enforce our own immigration laws. Even if we could dictate how Mexico educated its people though, how would that help us? Forty one percent of fourth generation Mexican Americans don't graduate high school. We obviously don't have a lot of tips for the government of Mexico on how to educate Mexicans or Mexican Americans. In any case, as long as the government of Mexico can export its poor citizens to the United States, it has little incentive to invest in them.

It's far more workable to drastically reduce unskilled immigration from Mexico, by a combination of border fences and real workplace enforcement. If Mexico wants to erase the border between us, let it apply to become the 51st state.

88,

"Please. "Unskilled" Mexican immigrants... almost certainly represent a financial boon for the federal government."

From The Center for Immigration Studies:

Because of their much lower average incomes and resulting lower tax payments, coupled with their heavy use of means-tested programs, Mexican immigrants have a significant negative effect on public coffers. Based on estimates developed by the National Academy of Sciences for immigrants by age and education level at arrival, the estimated life-time net fiscal drain (taxes paid minus services used) for the average adult Mexican immigrant is negative $55,200.

"It's obvious that lots of goods and services millions of Americans value are priced more cheaply as a result of their presence."

Again, from the CIS:

Although Mexican immigration is likely to have a significant impact on the wages of unskilled natives, its overall impact on prices in the United States is very modest because unskilled labor accounts for a very small share of economic output. By lowering the wages of unskilled workers, Mexican immigration in the 1990s reduced prices by between 0.08 and 0.2 percent. As a result, immigration from Mexico is almost certainly not an effective tool for holding inflation in check during periods of economic expansion.

"Please explain why you think it's a sensible idea to ponder the desirability of a group's presence based on its impact on public sector finances (instead of on overall economic impact)"

Because the overall economic impact is far outweighed by the negative impact on public sector finances. If that weren't enough of a reason to oppose further unskilled immigration from Mexico, there's also this:

The lower educational attainment of Mexican immigrants appears to persist across generations. The high school dropout rates of native-born Mexican-Americans (both second and third generation) are two and a half times that of other natives. As a result, native-born Mexican Americans lag far behind other natives in income, welfare use, and other measures of socio-economic well being.

Posted by Fred | July 11, 2007 2:21 AM

Re: The largest single community of exiled Sephardim ended up not in Istanbul but in Salonika

Which is and always has been a Greek city since the day it was founded and named for Alexander the Great's half-sister, albeit under the rule of the Ottomans at the time.

Re: I'm not sure where you got those statistics from and perhaps you were assuming that the always more numerous Ashkenazim had something to do with the Sephardic exodus.

Many (probably most) of the Dutch Jews were Iberian exiles. See Spinoza and his family as an example. (They came from Portugal, which also expelled its Jews in the 16th century)

Posted by JonF | July 11, 2007 6:18 AM

10 July 1857

Jonah Goldberg and Peter Beinart debate debate whether "we should fear an Irish-majority United States."

19 November 1493

Chris Columbus meets Native Americans in what would become Puerto Rico. Subsequent immigrants to the New World fear the Native American majority.

Posted by Robert S. | July 11, 2007 10:42 AM

Fred, it should be obvious that we have the authority to control our border, but not the ability. Maybe if we had a mountainous border with Mexico crossable by only one or two treacherous mountain passes, it would be easier, but that's not the case. It's becoming pretty clear to me that anyone uncomfortable with the flow of Spanish and Portuguese-speaking immigrants from Latin America should have thought twice before choosing to live in the western hemisphere. Stop with the "magical pony plans" where you can pretend that you can stop the flow of human population over a long, unfortified border and instead start thinking about what to do in the wake of the reality of it.

Posted by Tyro | July 11, 2007 11:14 AM

Again, from the CIS...

Fred: why waste your time googling up statistics from an anti-immigration think tank? Surely you don't deny the CIS's ideological bent -- are you claiming it's an objective source of information? I just found a wealth of counterarguments from the Wall Street Journal and sundry other source. If you'd like the links, let me know and I'll post them.

Maybe if we had a mountainous border with Mexico crossable by only one or two treacherous mountain passes, it would be easier, but that's not the case.

I think nuking ourselves a sea channel between us and them -- and filling it with Australian salt water crocodiles -- would present a much more formidable barrier.

Posted by 88 | July 11, 2007 12:17 PM

Fred, it should be obvious that we have the authority to control our border, but not the ability. Maybe if we had a mountainous border with Mexico crossable by only one or two treacherous mountain passes, it would be easier, but that's not the case.

Like MattY and many of those here, you have no idea what you're talking about in general or in this specific case. I have a lot of HotWeatherHiking experience, and I've almost gotten into serious trouble a few times, and those were just over 2-6 hours. Trying to cross into the U.S. involves less ElevationGain than I was doing (except perhaps in spots), but takes place over a far longer period. We have tremendous natural defenses and, if not for corrupt businesses, politicians, and "liberals" they'd only be used to keep out DrugRunners, terrrrorists, and the like.

Posted by TLB | July 11, 2007 12:55 PM

88,

"Fred: why waste your time googling up statistics from an anti-immigration think tank?"

The data in that study about the economic impact of unskilled immigrants comes from The National Academy of Sciences. Is the NAS too biased for your tastes?

The truth is that there is little dispute that unskilled immigrants are a fiscal drain on this country. Even the WSJ editors don't dispute this; instead they are prone to obfuscating the distinction between unskilled and skilled immigrants, or holding out hope that some future generation will turn the fiscal tide, or claiming that we shouldn't worry about the impact on public finances.

The data are against you on this issue, which is why you haven't bothered to offer any.

Posted by Fred | July 11, 2007 1:25 PM

Re "Fred, it should be obvious that we have the authority to control our border, but not the ability. Maybe if we had a mountainous border with Mexico crossable by only one or two treacherous mountain passes, it would be easier, but that's not the case."
---------
This is utter bullshit. Try breaking into the National Security Agency.

We spend over $1 TRILLION/YEAR on national defense. To say that we can't defend our southern border is nonsense.

You put up a 15 foot fence at the border and a 15 foot fence about 1 mile back from the border. Then you install microwave sensors plus seismic sensors. Next, you chop about 20 Apache Helicopters over to Northern Command and order Northern Command to eradicate anything that moves into the area between those two fences. If you need to, add one or two Spectre gunships.

One of the more eerie similarities between urban intellectuals and the right-wing evangelists is that both groups take a puzzling pride in their ignorance. Evangelicals are proud that they don't know shit about Science -- and urban intellectuals are proud that they don't know shit about Military Science.

Neither group feels the need to remedy their ignorance via research/study.

Saying that we can't control our southern border is the same as saying the Earth and all its inhabitants were created in 6 days.

Posted by Don Williams | July 11, 2007 3:28 PM

Don Williams, you are right that it is totally possible and extremely desirable to stop illegal immigration overthe southern border, but gunning people down on sight is not needed and it is not morally right.

Posted by pjgoober | July 11, 2007 4:35 PM

You put up a 15 foot fence at the border and a 15 foot fence about 1 mile back from the border. Then you install microwave sensors plus seismic sensors. Next, you chop about 20 Apache Helicopters over to Northern Command and order Northern Command to eradicate anything that moves into the area between those two fences. If you need to, add one or two Spectre gunships.

And then the half of illegal immigrants get in by flying in and overstaying tourism visas keep doing so, and the other half starts doing the same. Or they enter by car on legal tourist visas and never go back. Or they enter by boat...

Posted by Freddie | July 11, 2007 4:44 PM

JohnF: Thessaloniki has always had a Greek name, to be sure, and was only founded once, by Phillip of Macedon (and don't open the can of worms about whether the Macedonians before Alexander were Greek; contemporaneous Athenians and Thebans would certainly disagree), BUT, look at any 19th or 18th-century census report and you'll see that a minority of the population were Greek-speaking, the majority (or near-majority) were Ladino-speaking Jews, with large additional minorities of both Muslim and Orthodox Slavs and Turkish-speaking Muslims. Macedonia during those centuries was one of the world's most cosmopolitan places, and it was the Ottoman millet system that permitted it to be so. The city's political leadership, the vilayet of Selanik, was directly appointed by the Ottoman state and manned mainly by Turks; each confessional community was led by their own religious leadership.

Yes, it is true that many, and maybe most Dutch Jews, the Spinozas and Touros, were Portuguese Sephardim. Still, more of them went East.

Sorry, I like to talk about Ottoman-era ethnic heterogeneity, it's one of my academic focuses. I know it's off topic.

Posted by AB | July 11, 2007 5:08 PM

"And then the half of illegal immigrants get in by flying in and overstaying tourism visas keep doing so, and the other half starts doing the same. Or they enter by car on legal tourist visas and never go back. Or they enter by boat..."

That's where workplace enforcement comes in, and it's not rocket science. Simply require all employers to demand to see a tamper-proof, government-issued ID and keep a copy of it on file. This nonsense about employers not being able to verify legal status is nonsense. White collar employers do it all the time. There's just a double standard where government looks the other way for employers of unskilled immigrants.

For those prospective employees who have neither tamper-proof drivers' licenses, nor passports, military IDs or other government issued IDs, it wouldn't be hard to create another federal or state-issued ID and let them apply for it.

Posted by Fred | July 11, 2007 5:32 PM

Of course if we just followed the advice Fred gives in his last post, then the wall and the trillion dollar microwave fields and apache helicopters wouldn't be need.

Once the employment issue is resolved, the numbers crossing illegally will drop to a level that will placate all but the most diehard racists (and Fred).

Posted by Ricky | July 12, 2007 11:19 AM