Diversity Is Strength! It`s Also…Problematic (Legal) Immigration From The Land Of Defunct Empires
The F.B.I.
announced charges last week against 73 Armenian
gangsters, almost
half of them in the
Los Angeles area, for running the largest Medicare fraud
in history.
Or—to be
strictly accurate—the largest the FBI yet knows about.
The indictment alleged that most of the
defendants were "were
Armenian nationals or immigrants and many maintained
substantial ties to Armenia" and criminal gangs
there. They laundered their ill-gotten gains in
Las Vegas casinos and/or couriered them back to Armenia.
Michael J. Gaeta, head of the New York
F.B.I. office`s
Russian Organized Crime Squad, explained:
“New York and the
U.S., to them it`s a big pot of gold, and they`re coming
after it. And with the
world getting smaller, it`s much easier for them to do
it.”[Real
Patients, Real Doctors, Fake Everything Else, By
Michael Wilson And William K. Rashbaum, New York Times,
October 13, 2010]
Among the arrested: Armen Kazarian of the
pleasant LA suburb of
Glendale, who drives a
$350,000 Rolls Royce Phantom. Kazarian is only the
second “vor” (the ex-Soviet equivalent of a godfather) yet charged in the
U.S. [Fraud
suspect appears in court – Glendale News Press, By
Veronica Rocha, October 16, 2010]
I`d never previously heard the term
“vor” but I have
to say it has a ring to it—like
capo di tutti capo or
Keyser
Söze.
Why was Kazarian in this country in the
first place? He was granted
asylum in the U.S. in 1996. But (as is not unusual for
the
beneficiaries of U.S. asylum and refugee programs) he
subsequently returned frequently to Armenia to oversee his
transcontinental criminal doings.
Naturally, this got me thinking about TV crime dramas.
Law &
Order
has been the most successful drama in American television
history. Counting its
countless spinoffs, about 900 hour-long
episodes have aired. L&O`s two-decade old formula has
been to take a
scandal from the news, add a murder, and then show that
the
richest,
whitest, and most
conservative character dunnit.
This
year, however, NBC shut down the New York-based flagship
show and substituted
Law
& Order: Los Angeles.
LA has been America`s
City of the Future for my whole life. (I`m a native
Angeleno). But Americans seem to have been slowly getting
bored with their future. Thus, in the three episodes aired
so far, the ripped-from-the-headlines stories have not
exactly been representative of modern LA.
Granted, we had one loosely modeled on the
travails of
Lindsay Lohan, which are tedious but at least
contemporary. But then we`ve had an episode about a vicious
gang of
rich surfers, and another
another modeled on the Manson Family.
The Manson Family? What can we look
forward to next in the rewritten annals of LA crime lore? A
famous white football star who decapitates his black
wife?
Actually, it`s going to be even more
self-parodic than that. The Wednesday, October 20 episode
“Sylmar”
will explore the national security threat posed by…blue-eyed,
blonde Americans who espouse extremist Islam:
Deputy District Attorney: “An All-American
jihadi terrorist
cell …”
Assistant District Attorney: “With enough explosives to take
down the
Staples Center!”
See—you
can`t make this stuff up. (Or at least I can`t.)
As I`ve pointed out
before, Dick Wolf`s genius is to make
Law & Order an
irony-free version of
Tom
Wolfe`s 1987 Bonfire
of the Vanities, his novel about the hunt for the
Great White Defendant. In Wolfe`s telling, the
prosecutors feel so bored and depressed about that fact that
they spend their days putting
black and Hispanic screw-ups behind bars that they
leap at the chance to charge snobby bond trader Sherman
McCoy with homicide.
In the
Law & Order
universe, however, the Sherman McCoy-types aren`t the
exceptions that prove the rule. They
are the rule.
This makes perfect TV sense because
disorganized crime is usually just plain depressing. In
contrast, organized crime comes with enough rules and
rituals to make it compelling viewing.
Let me
illustrate this distinction using two real life examples.
Twice
this year while driving down Riverside Drive in the
southeast San Fernando Valley, I`ve been stopped because the
street has been blocked off by homicide investigators.
The first Riverside Drive traffic jam I
ran into was when
four Armenians were gunned down by an
Armenian AK-47 dealer at a private party at an
Armenian-owned restaurant. (My father told me that the one
time he had lunch there, he was the only customer, yet there
was a constant flow of deliverymen in and out of the
restaurant. I like to imagine the joint was some kind of
front operation.)
This slaughter was likely just as idiotic
as the typical street crime. But a screenwriter could easily
invest it with a certain
Godfatherish glamour, with the killer vanishing in a
white BMW with a squeal of low profile tires.
In VDARE.com back on
February 7, 2010, before this restaurant bloodbath, I
counted up all the Los Angeles County 15 to 29-year-old male
homicide victims since 2006. There were a total of 47
whites, out of which 14 were
West Asians, and nine of those were Armenians. Those
aren`t huge numbers, but they are certainly disproportionate
to their share of the white population in LA County.
Armenians, a West Asian Christian nation,
had been one of the success stories of immigration policy,
with
pre-1924 immigrants assimilating nicely into
California`s middle class.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union,
however, the results have been more mixed.
The new arrivals from
Armenia have generally continued to prosper. Not being
eligible for
affirmative
action, their political leanings have been moderate. Yet
growing up in the Soviet gangster state seems to have
inculcated
gangster values in some of them.
In contrast, the second Riverside Drive
killing I ran into was more typical of
urban
crime and thus—at least superficially—untelegenic.
From
NBC News in LA on October 13, 2010:
“Omar
Armando Loera, 34, was turned over to Los Angeles police
Tuesday night, hours after being arrested in the border town
of Mexicali by
Mexican authorities working with members of the U.S.
Marshals Service Fugitive Task Force.
“Loera was charged
Sept. 15 with the July 24
[home invasion]
slaying of
Cheree Osmanhodzic, 34, who had returned to her home in
the 11500 block of Riverside Drive after shopping for a
wedding dress with her mother and fiancé.”
Obviously, the wedding dress shopping trip
is a poignant touch. But from the point of view of a
hard-working Law &
Order writer, the problem with ripping this story from
the headlines is that
the home invader was named Omar.
That`s the kind of name you actually hear
every night here on the police blotter news. Omar could be
Latino criminal, a
black gunman, or a Muslim
terrorist. It`s practically a dog-bites-man story:
Omar-kills-woman.
L&O
isn`t going to make it into an episode.
Another problem for Hollywood: although
organized crime
plays better onscreen than disorganized crime, the
Italian mafia, which has been anyway fading in strength
since the 1980s, has been done to death in
movies and
television.
However, this Medicare scandal offers an
example of a demographic trend in Southern California crime
that could prove the germ of entertaining television—if
L&O: LA only had
the wit to notice it: Increasingly, the more interesting
sort of criminals in LA are from places once ruled by the
Ottoman, Soviet, or
Persian empires. But
this trend would involve noticing immigrants, which isn`t in
good taste. So my
guess is that L&O: LA won`t have the wit (or integrity) to notice it.
As it happens, there is a hint of this
little noticed 21st Century LA demographic trend in the name
of Omar`s victim:
Cheree Cameron-Ozmanhodzic.
What
kind of name is Ozmanhodzic—which, because the victim`s
father`s surname is Cameron, I presume was that of a first
husband?
Sultan
Osman I was the founder of the Ottoman Empire, so the
surname
Osman is found throughout the Muslim world.
Hodžić appears to be a
Bosnian Muslim surname from the Balkans. Combining the
two names into one surname is relatively rare, but the best
known Osmanhodzic is likely
Adnan Osmanhodzic, a Bosnian soccer player formerly with
FK
Sarajevo.
That`s a
lot of detail. But my larger point is that, until quite
recently, a name like Osmanhodzic was very exotic in
Southern California.
However, over the last couple of decades,
because of post 1965 federal immigration policy, there been
a sizable amount of immigration into the Los Angeles area
from this huge region once ruled by the Ottoman, Soviet, or
Persian empires—a vast yet contiguous expanse for which we
don`t have a name. You could call it the Caucasian East,
because it`s centered around the Caucasus Mountains. The
kind of people I see at stores near where these homicides
took place look like a mix of the people I`ve seen on trips
to
Istanbul and
Moscow.
I`ll call it the Land of the Defunct Empires: Ottoman,
Persian, and Soviet.
This
influx has largely gone unremarked because the immigrants
are technically Caucasian so they don`t show up in the main
diversity statistics. Moreover,
the newcomers are seldom terribly poor. And they are
generally not illegal immigrants, most using the
family
reunification or
refugee loopholes.
Nevertheless, they illustrate some of the
long-term cultural issues raised by immigration—even
legal immigration.
Among the immigrants from the Land of the
Defunct Empires, Armenians make up an increasingly small
fraction. Yet they remain the most prototypical—perhaps
because they come from a
small nation uneasily perched amidst the Turks,
Russians, and Iranians. Moreover, other peoples from this
region tend to assume—even if they traditionally don`t like
Armenians—that Armenians are clever and worth emulating.
(The growth of the number of
Turks in Armenian neighborhoods of LA is rather like how
in the 1970s when Persian Gulf Arabs suddenly got rich from
rising oil prices, sheiks immediately
bought houses in Beverly Hills next door to
Jewish movie moguls.)
The Defunct Empires immigrants aren`t from
any single religious background. Some are Muslim, but
generally from the more secular sectors of Islamic cultures.
(I`ve only seen one woman in full burka in LA.) This new
class of immigrant is generally not sprung from peasant
stock in the old country. Instead, they tend to hale from
middleman minorities, differentiated from the
masses by religion, ethnicity, or class.
The main
cultural common denominator found among the immigrants from
the Land of Defunct Empires: a pervasive cynicism about whom
you can trust outside your own extended family. These are
not cultures of strong civic engagement and broad
volunteerism.
In the Little Armenia section of the San
Fernando Valley, for example, homeowners compete to erect in
their front yards the most frightening looking security
fences, complete with
ostentatiously lethal finials to impale anybody trying
to climb over. To an average American used to open front
lawns, this looks
unneighborly. But to somebody recently arrived
from the ex-Soviet Union, it looks cool.
When the
first immigrants from the Land of (not yet) Defunct Empires
arrived in California over a century ago, American
self-confidence encouraged them to assimilate toward
America`s high trust civic norms.
But
today, as illustrated by
Law & Order, the
American ruling class lacks the cultural confidence to
demand
assimilation from immigrants.
This
presents us with a paradox. Maybe Americans do indeed now
have more to learn from immigrants from the Land of Defunct
Empires about the necessities for self-preservation. They`ve
been around a lot longer than us.
They
believe in
prudence and skepticism about other peoples.
If we don`t learn a little prudence and
skepticism from them, about them and immigrants in general,
they may well
outlast us too.
[Steve Sailer (email
him) is
movie critic for
The American Conservative.
His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com
features his daily blog. His new book,
AMERICA`S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: BARACK OBAMA`S
"STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE", is
available
here.]


